AROUND THE WORLD ON REWARDS POINTS
Platinum Premier Elite Reward members Red and Wolf Coleman tell The Vinoy® Renaissance St. Petersburg Resort & Golf Club’s General Manager Barbara Readey (center) that they enjoyed their beautiful guest room. The world-traveling guests logged 38 stays at Marriotts exclusively in 12 countries and 43,000 miles in four months. Plans already are underway for the next trip around the world, many on reward points.
“We arrived at the Renaissance Paris La Defense Hotel in France after being on the road for a month and the General Manager Brigitte Lallemand asked us if we had any laundry. She had it washed for free.”
plan for us.” They met on a Delta flight from Sarasota to Atlanta and tried to elope 18 months later. But friends got wind of their plans and showed up New Year’s Eve in New York to witness an impromptu ceremony at the Marriott East Side on Lexington Avenue. Arriving the day before, Wolf asked the hotel General Manager Chris Hosmer if they could use the staircase to get married and by the following day the area was roped off, filled with bright poinsettias, and classical music was piped in. As O’Lyn Callahan, a.k.a. ‘Red,’ descended the stairs, the music changed to Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs’ Little Red Riding Hood, thus their nicknames and more to that story. Coleman traveled a lot for the Navy working for Aegis Ballistic
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Missile Defense System. In the early 1980s, he stayed at the Marriott Twin Bridges in Arlington, Virginia near the Pentagon. Now retired and enjoying a life of travel, he stays in Marriott brand hotels, acquiring more hotel nights and enough rewards points to earn the Platinum Premier Elite status. He’s kept a digital diary of photographs with the general managers of each hotel and notes about the great service, “In case Mr. Marriott ever wants a story on how the general managers took care of us beyond my already high expectations.” Named the best organist in the world in 1978 by Organist
Magazine, the new Mrs. Coleman who prefers to go by the name ‘Red,’ plays for personal enjoyment and some occasional performances in Sarasota. As a performer and teacher, she has prepared many arrangements for the Technics, Yamaha and Roland organs and has published numerous recordings of her music. Lately, Red is busy creating the couple’s wish list of places still
to visit, such as Botswana, New Zealand, and India. As soon as she mentions a place, Wolf checks in with Marriott Rewards and begins creating the itinerary for the next trip around the world.
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he was an international concert organist. He was a rocket scientist. As unlikely as you would expect these two to meet late in life, Byron ‘Wolf’ Coleman likes to say “God had a
“Though we only spent one night at the Renaissance Barcelona Hotel, General Manager Ken Millar heard that Red lost her personalized mug from our 2014 trip that included the JW Marriott in Bangkok and had two new mugs made with red interiors so they would be harder to lose.”
“As we toured Egypt, which should be on everyone’s bucket list,” says Red, “Cairo Marriott Hotel General Manager Hans Roehrbein hosted a cocktail hour for distinguished guests in the bedroom suite specifically designed for Napoleon’s wife, Eugenie.”
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