(EXPIRED) Get up to 30% bonus miles when transferring hotel points to United (120k Marriott = 72k United)

United launched a new promotion today which is giving up to 30% bonus miles when transferring hotel points to your MileagePlus account. In the vast majority of cases that’ll still be very poor value for your hotel points, but one exception is Marriott.

The Deal

• Convert hotel points to United MileagePlus miles & earn the following bonus:
  • Transfer fewer than 20,000 miles – 20% bonus miles
  • Transfer 20,000-40,000 miles – 25% bonus miles
  • Transfer more than 40,000 miles – 30% bonus miles
• Direct link to registration.

Key Terms

• To qualify for this offer, members must register for the promotion between October 1, 2024 and 11:59pm EST on October 31, 2024 (“Promotional Period”).
• A member must earn award miles as a result of one or more points to miles conversion transactions from any combination of MileagePlus hotel partner programs that offer a points to miles transfer program that are conducted during the Promotional Period (“Qualifying Activity”) in order to qualify for MileagePlus Hotel Points-to-Miles bonus miles (“Bonus Miles”). Qualifying Activity must be completed by 11:59pm EST on October 31, 2024.
• At the conclusion of the promotion, all miles earned by each member from Qualifying Activity will be multiplied by 30% to determine the eligible bonus up to a maximum of 25,000 bonus miles. Bonus miles will be credited into the member’s account on or before January 31, 2025. The maximum bonus miles that can be earned by a member under this promotion is 25,000. MileagePlus will not be responsible for technical problems with partner miles postings, or failures or delays in miles postings by hotel partners, that would render any points to miles converted as ineligible under this promotion.

Quick Thoughts

Converting hotel points to airline miles (or vice versa) usually offers terrible value and should be avoided. One exception is Marriott Bonvoy due to the not-completely-awful transfer ratios, as well as the bonus miles they add on when transferring in increments of 60,000 Bonvoy points.

This promotion on the United side of things could make that opportunity more appealing for some. As a reminder, for every 60,000 Marriott points you transfer to most airlines you get 5,000 bonus miles, but with United you get 10,000 bonus miles. That means 60,000 Marriott points ordinarily convert to 30,000 United miles.

If you were to convert 120,000 Marriott points, that would therefore equate to 60,000 United miles based on the Marriott bonus. However, that gets even better with this additional United offer. There are three bonus tiers, with the highest 30% bonus being offered when receiving more than 40,000 miles from a hotel program. Those 60,000 miles by transferring 120,000 Marriott points would therefore be boosted to a total of 78,000 72,000 miles. That has the potential to be a decent conversion depending on what kind of value you’d otherwise get from your Marriott points and what you’d be redeeming the United miles for. Update: Based on comments below, the 30% bonus is applied before the bonus miles that Marriott adds which means that 120,000 Marriott Bonvoy points only becomes 72,000 miles rather than 78,000 miles.

One small snag with this offer though is that United states that the bonus miles will be added on or before January 31, 2025. That could mean that you’re waiting up to four months to receive those bonus miles. It might be that United is simply heavily caveating the offer terms and that you’ll receive the bonus miles much sooner, but I wouldn’t want to count on that.

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