Frequent Miler's latest team challenge, Million Mile Madness, is almost done! The last two weeks Greg, Nick, and Stephen competed to earn 1 Million SAS miles by flying 15 airlines. But who completed the challenge with the most Speed, Affordability, and Style?
I predict that travel within the United States is going to explode in popularity in the summer of 2021. Just in time for summer travel, COVID-19 vaccines should be available to most American residents who want it. Many will put off international travel, though, until later. As a result, competition for hotels and resorts in the USA will be insane.
Meanwhile, a perfect storm is brewing on the Marriott front…
Many of us have Marriott free night certificates to burn. Marriott has extended free nights that were set to expire by July 31 2021 or earlier. Now, they all expire August 1, 2021. What this means is that a huge number of Marriott Bonvoy members have certificates that expire on the same date. And it’s not like you can book your trip by August 1 for a future date. No. You have to complete travel by then. And I’m confident of this prediction: many with these certificates will fail to use them before summer 2021. This coming summer, there will be a race to use those certificates before it’s too late. If you wait to book your stay, you’re going to have a very hard time finding quality hotels that are available for booking at all. And those that are available will often be Peak priced which could make those hotels unavailable for booking with your certificate.
The solution, of course, is to book your summer stays now. I found that many Marriott hotels are currently available at standard or off-peak prices for the summer of 2021. Book now and you can get great value for your certificates. If you wait, you won’t.
In this post I identified the Marriott hotels in the US that offer the best value compared to cash prices and are currently available to book with 35K free night certificates in July 2021.
35K Certificate Background
Marriott 35K free night certificates come from holding certain Marriott credit cards and/or from completing Marriott promotions that offer free nights as rewards. These certificates can be used for a free night at any Marriott hotel that is available to book with points for 35,000 points or less.
Marriott’s award chart is shown above. As you can see from the award chart, 35K free night certificates can be used to book the following categories of hotels:
- Category 1-4 hotels anytime, even Peak pricing
- Category 5 hotels at standard or off-peak pricing
- Category 6 hotels only at off-peak PointSaver pricing
You cannot book Cash + Points nights with a free night certificate.
Methodology
Using Marriott’s website, I searched for category 4, 5, and 6 Marriott hotels in the US that were bookable with free night certificates on the night of July 4th, 2021. I then selected only those with a pre-tax cash price of $300 or more.
Due to the way Marriott’s website works, it was necessary to pick a single date for my analysis to limit the task to a reasonable amount of work. I picked July 4th because I think that July 4th weekend will likely be the most competitive weekend for travel before our certificates expire on August 1st. This choice means that some or many high-value options are missing from my results because they were not available on that particular day (or because they require longer stays — which is sometimes true with certain resorts or Marriott Vacation Club properties).
In previous analyses, I found that 35K free night certificates are usually worth about $200 per night. I chose to select only the hotels charging $300 or more on July 4th because I wanted to identify the hotels where you can get outsized value for your certificates if you book now. It’s very important to understand that the hotels that met this criteria are not necessarily nice places to stay. They are simply hotels with very high cash prices. I’m sure that in some cases the hotels are fantastic. In other cases, not so much.
My analysis is limited mostly to premium and luxury brands. For expediency, I left out most low-end brands from this analysis (Four Points, Springhill Suites, Fairfield, etc.). It’s likely that some of these would have met my inclusion criteria. Two brands that were included despite not being premium or luxury brands are Courtyard and Residence Inn.
Summary Findings
- 93 properties made the list. This means that 93 Marriott hotels in the US were available for booking July 4th with a 35K free night certificate and cost $300 or more that night. That’s far more than I expected! In fact, if I had known going in that so many would have made the list, I would have set the price threshold higher.
- The areas with the most qualifying hotels were California (20), Washington DC (12), Colorado (9), and Florida (9). This does not mean that these areas have better Marriott hotels. More likely it is merely due to the fact that prices are higher in these areas.
- 11 hotels are priced at 25,000 points or less. If the hotels are worth anywhere near their advertised cash rate, then this means that these hotels offer fantastic value not just for your certificates, but for your points too.
- Many properties are regularly more expensive in July due to high summer demand, but I suspect that the most expensive hotels that made the list have artificially inflated their prices in July. Maybe they’ll lower the prices to reasonable levels as summer nears? Both of the following have reasonable prices before July but then crazy pricing from July onward:
- Hotel Duval, Autograph Collection (Tallahassee Florida) lists for $899 or only 30,000 points.
- The Sheraton Suites Galleria-Atlanta lists for $744 or only 25,000 points.
- I found a handful of category 6 properties that were priced 35K (off-peak PointSavers), but none met my $300 criteria.
- My impression for the research was that most Marriott hotels in the US are currently available to book in the summer of 2021 at standard or off-peak award pricing even when cash rates are very high. In past research this wasn’t the case. For example, I remember previously finding that nearly all hotels in Florida and California were Peak priced almost all of the time.
Best Value 35K Options
The following hotels were available to book with 35K free night certificates when I ran this analysis and they offer over $300 value on July 4th (compared to listed cash prices)…
Arizona
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Florida
Georgia
Illinois
Louisiana (New Orleans)
Michigan
Minnesota (Minneapolis)
Missouri (St Louis)
New Hampshire (Portsmouth)
New Jersey
New York
North Carolina (Raleigh)
Pennsylvania
South Carolina (Greenville)
Tennessee
Texas
Virginia
Washington (Seattle)
Washington DC Area
Conclusion
There are a nearly endless selection of Marriott hotels in the US with which it is possible to get great value from your 35K certificates. This is a rare opportunity to book hotels at standard and off-peak pricing even though cash rates are often sky high. But… it’s very important to do it soon. As summer nears, standard rooms at these properties will fill up and award pricing will change to Peak pricing for rooms that remain.
I’ll follow up soon with a similar analysis for those with 50K certificates but I’m pretty sure the conclusion will be the same: opportunities abound if you book soon.
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Love this post! Thanks!
Would you also do an international version too?
I plan to use all of mine in Europe next June but expect there to be much less of a rush for booking those so anticipate availability to be much better. Maybe I’ll make some domestic reservations now just in case my Europe travel can’t happen. I can always cancel and book the euro hotels in the spring.
I have 7 separate certs/nights with Marriott I get to use. 🙂
Sure we all know the flaws in the methodology but the core point and premise still hold.
Another confirmation that Marriott jacked award prices. I booked the NYC Renaissance Midtown with my 50K Brilliant free cert for next Labor Day weekend/US Open and had several good options at 50K. All of those options (mainly with lounges) were all 60K now including the Ren.
[…] separately posted a look at the best value Marriott hotels in the US bookable with 35K free night certificates. In this post, I turned my eyes specifically to resorts. Which Marriott resorts are bookable […]
With all due respect, Greg, your methodology is totally off.
As others have noted, the price requested is almost certainly out of whack for many hotels and is nothing more than the room price you see on the back of some hotel doors — it does not reflect reality, and certainly will not once they load in rates for those days and/or you come closer to the holiday.
Proof of this is that many of those hotels are right now also slated as being less than the points needed that the certificate yields.
Although some will no doubt will prove to be good finds, you have certainly left out many others that are not peak priced and yet are nowhere to be found on your recommended list — such as the many Chicago hotels that are Category 5 and are now bookable at standard rates but do not appear on your list.
I would actually withdraw this post as it has no bearing with actual realty.
Sadly I have to agree but not as harshly. I can see the sweat and work that went into this but unfortunately it’s totally divorced from any true sense of value. The California examples are particularly sorry.
Definitely not my intention to come across as harsh, Greg and Nick do an invaluable service and I applaud them for it. Only meant to imply that this post is a real miss and that it should be amended or withdrawn and re-written. Heck, I was looking at Chicago for July 4th weekend and came across Cat 5 hotels like the Blackstone, The Westin Magnificent Mile, the Sheraton Grand, and the JW Marriott that were available and were infinitely better choices than those presented above.
That is what you get when you only use price alone as your metric.
Add an extended 50k and two 35k certs from the current promo, and I’ve got 4 Marriott certs to burn (only 3 expiring mid year). I think I’m going to take my chances with international travel, that list looks very uninspiring.
I just used my 2 certs at Hotel Vin on Main St Grapevine, TX. Brand new boutique hotel (Autograph Collection), Cat 5.
Grapevine is the Christmas Capital of Texas, 10 minutes from DFW airport. An impressive new Food Hall is connected to the hotel but not yet opened, but the hotel restaurant, lobby bar, & rooftop bar are each fun & good. Also used 2 SNAs. A fantastic overall redemption!
I thought SNAs could only be used on paid stays? Do I have an incorrect understanding?
Can use on paid stays, award stays, and points+cash reservations.
Thanks for the write-up – good reminder. Unfortunately, the Courtyard in Traverse City is already up to 40K for July 4 and almost every night from mid-June through the end of July.
I was able to snag the Marriott Ft. Lauderdale Harbor Beach resort in Feb using a 35k cert. It was a sale price on the normal points and I was happy to grab it.
Not sure if you could have added this to the sort, but each hotel has a review rating. We have found those pretty accurate. Staying at a Courtyard in Marathon, FL over the holidays that had review rating of 4.8. They must be doing something right.
Yes, the guest rating numbers are helpful. I have another post coming out this afternoon that focusses on resorts. There I did sort by guest rating rather than price. For this post, you can at least see the guest rating numbers in the images (if your screen is big enough!).
It looks like things are changing fast. I checked out Virginia Beach for July 3rd and 4th. Everything I see that’s on the beach is now conveniently at 40K points, thus no 35K certificate use.
Wow, that’s nuts! They must have changed their prices overnight.
I booked a couple of nights at the Residence Inn at Canyon in Boulder, CO in July to visit my son. It took about an hour to research our options, discuss them with my husband, then call our son to check his availability. In that time several dates went from 35K to 40K, Our son’s and our schedules are flexible, so we chose the only two consecutive 35K nights during the whole month.
Thanks for the kick in the pants, Greg, to get our certificates booked.
We decided we’re going to drive and use our other two Marriott certificates and IHG certificates, if needed, on our route. It may not be the best redemption value, but it beats letting them expire unused.
I used a Marriott certificate to book a Residence Inn in Columbia, MO. It would have been 20,000 pts or $599 cash. Who would pay $600 to stay at a Residence Inn in Columbia, MO?!
Any chance that these certificates will be extended beyond August?
There’s always a chance, but I don’t think it’s likely