Wakefield Class of 1960
October 2010 Reunion Hotel

Here's what the Fairfax Marriott at Fair Oaks looks like.

Click on a Thumbnail you want to enlarge. The Marriott site has various other pictures.

How do I go about getting started on reserving a room?

Probably the first thing everybody should do is join the Marriott Rewards program. It doesn't cost anything, and at the very least you'll earn some points toward a free room someday. You earn 10 points per dollar you spend at a Marriott hotel. So if your reunion stay at the Fairfax Marriott at Fair Oaks is going to be 2 days, your expenditure will have been $74 x 2 = $148 (excluding taxes), and so you will have 1480 points.

In the preceding months, if you've spent a lot of nights at Marriott, you'll be looking for a place to redeem your points. The points needed to spend a night at a Marriott hotel, is different at different locations. In a Marriott level 3 hotel (e.g., Fair Oaks - nice hotel, but it's not in the islands), one night equates to 15,000 points. So after staying 20.3 days at the Fairfax Marriott at Fair Oaks, you'll get a free night there.

Rewards programs often offer promotional periods when you can earn points at above normal rate, in which case maybe your quest for a free room wouldn't take quite as long. If by some chance it should turn out that you do a lot of traveling in the coming 11 months, and wind up staying in Marriott hotels much of the time; and if there are lots of double-points periods, or whatever, conceivably you could earn enough to pay for your 50th Reunion room via points.

Okay, so how do I go about getting started on reserving a room?

The link at the end of this paragraph is especially for us relative to our Reunion weekend. Coming into their site via this link will designate you as a member of the Wakefield 1960 group coming their way on the Columbus day weekend of 2010. The reservation will automatically show our group code (WCRWCRA), and automatically give you the $74 rate negotiated by your Reunion Committee. (Actual cost will be $74 plus $6.66 in government taxes, so the actual cost of the room will be $80.66 total.

You can only make a reservation with one discount. If you reserve under the aegis of our group code (WCRWCRA), that automatically invokes the negotiated rate, which precludes any discounts you may be accustomed to using (e.g., AAA, AARP, etc). Now if some of you are super good at figuring out ways to get a great room rate, while at the same time retaining the ability to apply a discount on top of it, then you may be better off on your own. However, if a last minute reservation is part of your strategy, just keep in mind that the Fairfax Marriott at Fair Oaks is not a super large hotel (301 guest rooms), so holding out until the last minute could be risky.

In filling out the on-line reservation form, if you are a Marriott Rewards member, the reservation form will automatically transfer your address, etc, over for you. The only thing you do have to be careful about is that the form automatically initially assigns a stay date of 3 days (7th thru 10th of October), and will attempt to maintain 3 days if you change the start date to the 8th by extending your stay until the 11th. There is nothing nefarious about this - their computer is just trying not to cut you short a day because it knows that our weekend will encompass three days. The agreement with Marriott does not have a requirement that rooms must be booked for a 3-day minimum. After you correct the 11th back to the 10th, the 2-day stay will stick, and that's the end of that. You will have to provide credit card information, but you can cancel in advance. You will be presented a confirmation page, which you can print out, and that's all there is to it.

Okay, what are the links I need to know about?

Here is our class's special link into the heart of the Marriott reservation computer.

Wakefield Class of 1960 50th Reunion Reservation Link

To just go to the Fairfax Marriott web pages and look around, click on the link below.

www.fairfaxmarriott.com

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