Marriott Rewards are one of the top hotel programs to join mainly because they have so many hotels across the globe. Marriott Rewards members earn 10 points per $1 spent at Marriott hotels and many other participating hotels, and points can also be earned through various partners including Hertz, Identity Points, Cruises Only, Shop My Way Mall and participating airline rewards programs. The standard point redemption for hotels for a category 1 only requires 7,500 points for 1 free night. If you plan to stay somewhere such as a Las Vegas Cosmopolitan or a Ritz Carlton that is a category 8 hotel that would require 40,000 points for a free night.
If you redeem rewards points for 4 free hotel nights, you’ll get a 5th bonus night for free. Marriott Rewards also allows you to redeem your points for PointSavers Hotel Rewards to get free hotel nights for even less points such as the airlines do with Mile Savers. PointSavers redemption’s start as low as 6,000 points for a category 1 hotel, and you can also get your 5th night free
hen you redeem 4 free PointSavers nights.
The fastest way of course to get Marriott rewards points is to apply for their consumer and business cards to get free hotel rooms, points, and upgrades. All of the Marriott Rewards credit cards offer bonus credits towards Elite Marriott Rewards membership status, and you’ll receive additional hotel savings and benefits as a credit member.
Marriott Rewards members who apply for credit cards will earn both the 10 points as a program member and the 3-5 points as a credit card member, so you can earn a total of up to 15 points per $1 spent at Marriott hotels.
Introduction to Marriott
Established in 1957, Marriott Hotel’s headquarters lies in Washington D.C, with over 4,000 hotels and resorts across the world. After they acquired the Starwood Hotels Group in November 2015, this number increased to over 6,000 hotels in 122 countries all over the world. This is the hotel breakdown:
Marriott and Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG) allow you to transfer points and match status in-between the two. But as of 2018, Starwood hotels only credit to SPG and Marriott hotels only credit to Marriott, and there is no way to credit elite nights or stays from one hotel into the other program. Ritz Carlton follows its own program called Ritz-Carlton Rewards, but you can still credit RC stays to Marriott Rewards and earn points from those stays.
Marriott Rewards
Marriott Rewards is a loyalty program which provides award points based on your hotel price. Generally speaking, you can earn 10 Marriott points for every dollar spent at a Marriott hotel. The two exceptions are Residence Inn and TownePlace Suites, where you only earn 5 points per dollar. Lastly, Marriott Executive Apartment and ExecuStay earn 2.5 reward points per dollar, but those aren’t normal hotel stays.
You can also elect to earn 2 air miles per dollar spent instead of earning Marriott points. That effectively makes the conversion rate at 5 points to 1 air mile, and Marriott has dozens of transfer partners.
Apart from points, another important status factor is Eligible/Qualifying Nights. You earn a qualifying night for every night spent in a Marriott hotel. There is no concept of “stays” in the Marriott Rewards program, so it doesn’t matter if you stay 10 nights in one stay or over 10 different stays. The program just cares about nights, and we’ll go into requirements for different tiers in section four.
Remember that you must reserve hotels from Marriott.com or using their app, which is a key for you to obtain eligible/qualifying nights and points. Of course, you can also reserve hotels from a credit card concierge like Aspire from Citi Prestige or from Amex Platinum‘s Fine Hotels & Resorts (FHR). If you reserve hotels from the third party, such as Priceline.com, Booking.com, Hotels.com, or Hotel Tonight you cannot obtain eligible/qualifying nights and points through your reservation and accommodation.
Point Redemption
- Cash+Points usually doesn’t make sense unless you’re point strapped
- Most people value Marriott points at 0.7-0.8 cpp.
- You can transfer Marriott to SPG at a 3:1 ratio, so you can always move points between the programs depending on which property has good redemption rates.
Elite Member Status
In order to award frequent guests, Marriott Group provides three status tiers: Silver, Gold, and Platinum. It requires 10 nights to become Silver, 50 to become Gold, and 75 to become Platinum.
You must meet these night requirements in a calendar year. Once you achieve a tier, you’ll have that status for the remainder of this year, next year, and two months into the year after. So if I become Marriott Gold in July 2018, I’ll have the status for 2018, 2019, and through February 2020. Award nights are included in the qualifying night figure.
In general Platinum members get better upgrades than Gold, but both get access to lounges and free breakfast. One great perk of Platinum is that you can also get United Silver Status through RewardsPlus and benefits with Delta and Emirates airlines.
Fast-Track to Elite Membership?
- Living in Hotels?
- Status Challenge – the preferred way and they offer these all the time when you call in to the SPG or Marriott call center.
- Co-branded Credit Cards such as the SPG from Amex or Marriott’s cards from Chase. They have business versions of both of these personal cards to double-up on your points.
- United Airlines and Delta Skymiles memberships
- SPG Status Match
- Compare Marriott credit cards
SPG Status Match
Since Marriott acquired SPG, you can connect your Marriott and SPG accounts and match statuses between them. So SPG Gold will become Marriott Gold, and vice versa. This is great because the Amex Platinum automatically gives you SPG Gold status, so you also become Marriott Gold through the card.
If you are earning nights by staying in hotels, then SPG is also an easier program to get top tier status in. Platinum just requires 50 nights, and you can get the Personal SPG Amex and Business SPG Amex to get five elite qualifying nights from each card. So with 40 paid nights a year you can become SPG Platinum, and thus Marriott Platinum. SPG also often runs promos where you get “double elite nights” for stays in a three month period, so in as few as 20 actual nights you can get Platinum status in both programs (and UA Silver as a byproduct)!
This may go away in 2019 as the programs merge and requirements align, so now is a great time to do this. In general, Marriott Gold is a great status for Marriott hotels due to upgrades/breakfast/lounge, but Platinum is the real “good” status for SPG for upgrades/breakfast/lounge. It shows too since Marriott Gold is 50 nights as is SPG Platinum.
Status Challenge
If you are a elite member of a Frequent Traveler Programs in certain airlines or hotels, you can try to ask other programs to match you at the same level. This is called Status Match, a common method to obtain membership level in many Frequent Traveler Programs quickly.
However, Status Match seems not to be very useful in Marriott. Instead, Marriott often provides a Status Challenge, the common requirements of which are as following:
- Silver: three stays in 90 days;
- Gold: six stays in 90 days;
- Platinum: nine stays in 90 days.
You can often match to Gold from other programs or statuses, but for Platinum they require a stay challenge. It’s strange because Marriott doesn’t use stays for their elite program, but do require nine stays for the status challenge. You can do nine 1-night stays to meet the requirement if you wish.
Remember that consecutive nights in the same hotel will count as one stay even if made under different bookings. So you have to rotate around hotels. Remember that you can only do this once in a 12-month period.
It is easy for you to apply for such a challenge. You can send an email to elite.member@marriott.com or phone 801-468-4000 (8:15am-9pm ET，Mon-Fri) to tell them you want to apply for a Taste of Silver/Gold/Platinum and then the corresponding challenge. It should be noted that customer service will decide whether or not you can receive your challenge offer with certain conditions. Many applicants have been refused without any stays if they decide not to run the promotion at the time. You can always redial later or try one of the methods below.
If you can manage to complete your challenge, your membership period and requirements remains the same until the end of February in the next year.
A great alternative is the SPG Platinum Challenge, which requires 18 nights in 90 days. That may or may not be easier for you depending on where you are night/stay wise.
Best Rate Guarantee
Now major hotels are trying their best to make guest reserve on their official websites or Apps on the phone. Apart from eligible nights that you can obtain only through such reservation ways above, major hotels generally attract guests through Best Rate Guarantee.
Simply speaking, BRG means if you find out a lower open price on a third website, you can ask the hotel to match you that price even after you have reserved one room on the official website. Actually hotels provide you extra benefits after you successfully enjoy BRG in order to encourage you to make reservations on the official website. After enjoying BRG successfully, Marriott will provide a 25 percent for the price after Match or 5,000 Marriott points. For example, I reserved a one-night stay of 120 dollars, then I searched for a 100-dollar price provided by them on Priceline.com. I just need to pay 75 dollars before tax after enjoying BRG. You can get more detailed information by clicking Online BRG Claim Form.
There is a key in BRG that you must have a lower open price of the third party. For example, non-public prices of Priceline Express Deal or Priceline Bid cannot be valid. Besides, membership price obtained through expense and offered by those third party websites cannot be matched, too. Marriott gives detailed regulations on the page of Terms & Condition below about what can’t be claimed. Besides, you must make reservations on the official website of Marriott before you apply for File BRG Claim. Certainly, the hotel, room type and date must be totally consistent as you make BRG.
As of February 2018, you can also get 5,000 Marriott points instead of the 25% off. Valuing Marriott points at 0.7-0.8 cents a piece means that if your hotel rate is <$150/night, then you should go for the points instead of the cash back. Of course this depends on how many Marriott points you have and what you want to accumulate.
SPG Point Transfer
You can also transfer points from Marriott to SPG at a 3:1 ratio or vice versa. So 1,000 Starwood points become 3,000 Marriott points and the reverse is also true.
Many believe SPG is going to go away in 2019 and everything will become Marriott Rewards. Until then, it’s worth it to accrue SPG points and try to maximize SPG redemptions. Of course nobody knows what is going to happen next year, and it’s possible the programs will continue in isolation the way the Marriott and Ritz-Carlton Rewards programs are linked but separate.
Earn Marriott Rewards Points on Social Media
Although these points will not extend the life of your other Marriott points this is a great promotion for us big social media users who are on Instagram and Twitter. You basically earn points for interacting with Marriott on social media including a quick 25 points by linking your Twitter and Instagram with just a few clicks. If your earning preference is set to miles you will not earn in this promotion. You can also earn 25 Marriott points for each social media activity you complete, for up 125 Marriott points per day. Find out more at Mr-Points.com.
Improved Marriott Rewards Program Changes:
You now have more options when redeeming points.
1. Cash & points stays
2. Redemption stay credit
3. Points sharing
4. Points advance
We welcome these additions to the Marriott program which make it a little more flexible and comparable to other top loyalty chains. It puts Marriott in tighter competition with leading hotel rewards chains Hyatt and SPG.
Click here for current Marriott Deals and Offers for 2018!
Past Marriott Rewards Review:
With the Marriott Rewards Visa card you can spend 30% less to get
to your dream vacation faster. This hotel rewards credit card from Chase is a great card to use for the first year at least until your annual fee comes up. There are a few things that make this card stand out from most hotel rewards credit cards. Marriott Rewards Visa comes with all the newly advertised Visa Signature benefits. You will also get an upgrade to Silver Elite membership which can get you upgraded rooms and rooms with the benefits of concierge lounges. This is definitely one rewards card you should have in your wallet because Marriott hotels are everywhere. The Marriott rewards program is our favorite hotel rewards program because they treat you like a celebrity when you book at hotels such as the Renaissance if you are an elite member.
If you already have the above Marriott branded credit card you could upgrade to the one below that offers Smart Chip technology and up to 7 Free Nights to start:
Personally, I tried both of these cards. The first card I had for a year for my 30,000 bonus points when it came due to pay the $30 annual fee I then applied again here for the Marriott Rewards Premier version of the card. The Premier version of the card no longer has an annual fee for the first year so I charged up a few things on it and I automatically get up to seven free nights as a bonus.
The Marriott Rewards program has been one of the most popular frequent stay programs for years. If you are a member of such forums as Flyertalk you will see that the interest in earning hotel stays and elite status in the Marriott program comes easily and above most. Marriott International has over 2,600 lodging properties in 69 different Countries.
How many stays does it take to reach Elite Status with Marriott Rewards? It only takes ten nights stay at any Marriott hotel or signing up for their Visa Card you automatically get Elite Status for a year. Keep in mind with this Silver elite status you get an extra 20% rewards credits for your stays at Marriott hotels and resorts.
How many stays does it take to reach Gold Status? 50 to 74 Nights.
