The Inn at Bay Harbor is an excellent Marriott Autograph Collection resort in northern Michigan. Even during normal times (i.e. before the current domestic travel boom) it was nearly impossible to book summertime award stays here, but I’ve managed to do so every year by searching early and often. I booked this year’s 5 night stay 11 months in advance. Since then I’ve looked often for additional summer award openings, but with no luck. Usually my approach is to book several stays far in advance and then to cancel most of them once my summer plans firm up. This year, we were fortunate that our one booked stay would actually work for us. In this post I’ll detail my nearly disastrous adventure in trying to convert the point stay into a free night certificate stay…
Deciding on certs despite losing the 5th night free
The Inn at Bay Harbor usually costs 40,000 per night in peak season (that will change in 2023 when Marriott takes the lid off of their dynamic pricing), and that’s what I paid. But since I booked a 5 night stay with points, I was able to take advantage of Marriott’s version of 5th night free awards (Stay for 5, Pay for 4) and paid only 160,000 points for 5 nights. That’s an average of 32,000 points per night, and a great deal on a stay that would normally cost around $600 or $700 per night after taxes and fees.
Marriott’s Stay for 5, Pay for 4 benefit is a great reason to pay for a 5 night stay with points rather than with free night certificates. A stay needs 5 nights paid entirely with points to qualify for 1 night free. So, why would I consider paying with free night certs?
I had quite few 35K free night certs in my Marriott account and two were set to expire June 30th. I reviewed my travel plans and confirmed that there was zero chance that I’d use them in time. I figured that by applying those certs to this stay I’d get at least a little value from them rather than none at all. And once I decided to use any certs for this stay, there was no reason not to pay for every night of the stay with certs. Yes, for the two soon-to-expire certs, I could have called Marriott to try to get them to extend their expiration dates (as they’ve done for me in the past), but I thought it was a bit of a long shot since these have been extended multiple times in the past. Plus, I have a 50K cert expiring soon that I’m more anxious to extend. When expiry gets closer for that 50K cert, I’ll call and try my luck.
I have to admit that having switched to certs, I’m now second guessing the decision. In order to use the 35K certs on this 40K per night stay, I had to add 5K points to all 5 nights. So, I used five 35K certs (175K total value) + 25,000 points for a stay that would have otherwise cost only 160,000 points. That doesn’t sound like a good deal, does it? But, I did get back 135,000 points by doing this and so it’s fair to say that I traded 5 certs for 135,000 points. That averages to 27,000 points value per certificate. That’s not horrible, but with the new ability to add up to 15,000 points to each certificate I think it likely that I would have been able to use three of the certs (the ones not expiring June 30th) at full value in the future. Another way to look at it is that for the trip overall, I lost 40,000 points of potential value, but I also got some use from 2 certs that would have otherwise expired unused, and I erased the mental cost of having to deal with the other certs before they expired in the future.
Switching to certs when awards are unavailable
Now to the adventure…
Normally it’s easy to change how you want to pay for an award stay. Log into your Marriott account, find the trip, click “VIEW/MODIFY”, then click “EDIT ROOM”.
Unfortunately, this didn’t work for me. Instead, I got these error messages:
There were no awards available for my dates of stay and, apparently, the ability to edit the room booking is contingent upon award availability.
I should have called to see if a Marriott rep could change the booking for me. In the past I haven’t had luck with this sort of thing, but sometimes it’s possible to get an agent who knows how to get things like this done.
Instead of calling Marriott, though, I cancelled the award stay.
Whaaaaat?!!!
I knew from past experience that Marriott awards go quickly back into inventory when you cancel an award booking. And indeed, that’s what happened. The same award stay was again bookable immediately after I cancelled. It was reckless because it was possible (unlikely, but possible) that the hotel may have reclassified which rooms were considered base rooms (rooms available for awards) between the time I originally booked and now. If so, I’d be out of luck. It was also possible that someone would snag up all or part of the now available dates before I could do so. I was determined to rebook quickly. Marriott.com was determined to thwart me.
I hurried to rebook the stay, but hit a snag. When I tried to book the stay entirely with certificates, Marriott.com selected three 35 certs and two 50K certs. I didn’t want to use any of my 50K certs. I wanted to pay entirely with 35K certs and I had enough of them in my account. The system let me uncheck the 50K certs but then I had to pay in points for those nights. There didn’t seem to be any way to force Marriott.com to pass by my 50K certs and pick only 35K certs.
I worked around the above issue by tying up the 50K certs in another reservation. I booked a random hotel in Chicago with those 50K certs. After that was done, I went back to try to book the Inn at Bay Harbor entirely with 35K free night certificates. Luckily the award stay was still available and I was now able to select 35K certs for the entire stay. Whew. But when I tried to check out, I got a system error. Ack! I tried again from another browser and the same thing happened: system error. Double Ack! I then tried to book it through the Marriott App on my phone. Now, the award was gone.
I logged out and back into my Marriott account and looked at My Trips. I fervently hoped that one of the errored out bookings actually worked and that I was the one who had booked up the award space. No dice.
I tried again and again. The award was no longer available. I called the hotel directly and was told that the room itself was available and I was put on hold while the hotel employee double-check. While on hold, I tried one more time online. Success! I finally succeeded in rebooking my stay with 35K certs instead of points! I then cancelled the Chicago reservation in order to get back my 50K certs to be used later.
Summary
When a Marriott hotel has no award rooms available, it seems to be impossible to change your stay online to book with certs instead of points (or vice versa). Instead, I made the dangerous choice of cancelling and rebooking. That approach ultimately worked, but not without a scare. For future refence, I’m hoping that a reader will chime in with the secret of how to do this online without cancelling the award stay. What secret did I miss? Otherwise, next time I’ll call Marriott to try to get it done. If they don’t succeed, that will be the perfect time to ask them to extend the expiration dates of my certificates.
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Was able to do this successfully over the phone! The agent had to speak to the technical department to get it done. Thanks!
Also I noticed that to not go into the checkout process unless you are SURE you want to book, otherwise it holds the inventory if you leave the tab/browser/app for ~15 minutes minimum. I looked at the total cash / taxes price of a room that was bookable on points, went back in my browser, then tried to book that room on points, then it was gone. It returned about 15 minutes after I started, but was a scare.
That’s quite a yarn
Not just a Marriott thing, Hilton has absolutely no way to switch from cert to points or vice versa and I have tried everybody. Oh, and don’t try to make changes to a cert booking online, even though now it appears that it can be done. Your certs will come back to you and the points will disappear (so I guess that would be a way to switch from certs to points, just no way back to certs)
Marriott has been having some major issues when using Certs. Read this thread to understand just how bad it could be. Greg, you got off easy. 🙂
https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/marriott-marriott-bonvoy/2078978-charged-437-purchasing-35k-points-when-trying-use-35k-cert-website.html
I booked the room when here it was 35k points, but since, Marriott had classified it as peak (40k). I wanted to attach my 35k certificate since i had only paid 35,000 points. Of course, adding a certificate re-prices the room. An agent helped me do it but he effectively gave me 5,000 points to get to 40k, used those 40k to book the room, and then took away my free night certificate.
This was before the ability to add points to your certificate, though.
That’s good to know. Definitely worth calling next time!
Greg: Have you ever had problems with cancelling a reservation that was booked with certificates and not having those certificates returned to your account? I’ve got a 50K cert that never goes back to my account if I cancel a reservation. I always have to call in to get it back.
I’ve had that happen before. https://frequentmiler.com/almost-bonvoyed-a-cautionary-tale-on-free-night-certs/
Interesting experience and certainly good information. Out of curiosity, do you consider it morally wrong to book a bunch of reservations that you’re not going to use, blocking award space from other people? I’m more torn than judging but if that becomes a common practice, we’re all hosed. You tend to show a strong sense of personal and professional ethics so I’d be very interested in hearing your take.
Lot of ways you can look at it. One of the things I enjoy in this game is when (good) surprises happen. Like award space opening up close in. Takes all kind of award space to make it fun.
No I don’t have any ethical qualms about it. All of the reservations I make are ones that I might actually use. I don’t see that as different from booking paid and cancelable reservations during a sale, just in case I could use them.
The one time I was able to have a Marriott phone rep convert a points stay to a certificate stay was after a couple of failed attempts; I asked the helpful agent how she was able to do it and she said it’s relatively easy and just involves changing some codes on the reservation, but only agents in “Elite Services” have access to (or perhaps knowledge of) these codes. She went on to say that I should request Elite Services if I ever needed to do this again in the future. That was a couple of years ago and I haven’t had a subsequent opportunity to try it nor have I ever requested to talk to Elite Services directly so I don’t know if that would actually work. And chances are that Marriott has eliminated or re-named the group or otherwise made it more difficult. But it might be worth a shot for people who are stuck.
That’s great info. Appreciate you sharing!
This happens to me often with paid rates as well. If you go as far as the room being taken out of inventory, it doesn’t go right back if you don’t complete the booking. Presumably, it follows the countdown timer you see when you get to the booking page (I think it’s 15 minutes), but it’s often longer and I’ve had instances where the rate I wanted just never came back. I’m now very careful about avoiding that stage of the booking process if I’m shopping for rates and not going there until I’m 100% ready to book (or proceeding with the booking and canceling later). I know that wouldn’t help in the case of a system error, but just giving further evidence that their booking engine just behaves unpredictably, so proceed carefully with hold/release assumptions.
Thanks Darin
Nothing so time sensitive, but I’ve had problems booking with free night certs on my laptop w/Chrome browser, I get a system error every time. When I want to use certs, I’ve had to book using the app on my phone. Points bookings work ok on my laptop. I emailed Marriott but of course they’ve done nothing to fix this.
I’ve had the same problem. But the app works fine.
Great post—I had a similar experience booking the Inn at Bay Harbor a few weeks ago. One award night would appear and disappear as if at random. I had to piecemeal the booking in several different reservations. I wonder if there’s more going on with their systems at that property to make it particularly glitchy.
Interesting. Sure, it’s possible that this has something to do with this property but you should never underestimate marriott.com’s glitchiness powers.
This place definitely has minimum stay requirements built into points booking searches. Nothing for 1 night currently, but going to 2 or 3 nights created some openings.
i just had the experience where several different room types were available to be booked at this location (even with points), and then when arriving later in the afternoon, there was 0 rooms available to be booked (even with cash), so they claimed there was no way to get a better room (ie: lake view). Weird that all of the rooms just disappeared in the matter of a few hours.
Great post Greg. I’ve dealt with similar situations and at least I’m not alone.
My current problem is that I cannot change from a 6 night award stay to a 5 night award stay at the St. Regis Bora Bora. After multiple calls, they literally can not just cut off a single night. If they do, it will reprice at the new rates, assuming that the award availability immediately goes back into the system. I guess I should not be surprised anymore.. I can’t afford to lose the nights so I’m just going to assume that the points for that last night are lost. I’ll campaign to get it back at the property and see if I get lucky.
Thanks. Yeah, in your case the cancel and rebook approach obviously isn’t an option because it would then reprice at the new rate. The only reason it was an option for me is that I booked this one at the top rate allowed this year at this property. I’d do the same as you and assume that the extra points are lost but hope they could help at the property itself. Good luck!