Marriott recently made headlines over the major devaluation to some of the most highly sought-after hotel awards. However, Loyalty Lobby picked up on a separate customer-unfriendly move: Marriott has eliminated the ability to mix paid nights and award nights in a single booking. This was previously a useful tool for mixing the use of award certificates, points, and paid cash nights and it’s certainly a bummer to see this eliminated.
Marriott eliminates “Customize Payments” button
Marriott used to offer the ability to “customize payments” during the booking process whereby you could choose to book some nights with cash and others with points/free night certificates. For full details about how it used to work, see the post Combining Marriott awards, certificates, and paid nights in a single booking.
In search results, it showed up as a link that you had to expand, but then you could choose to pay cash for some nights and use points for others.
This was useful when there was a cheap paid night in the middle of your stay, but later nights were more expensive. The above example isn’t the best example of when this would be useful though.
To illustrate when this was useful, here’s a look at a 6-night award stay at Bellagio in Las Vegas over Superbowl Sunday.
Since Marriott offers “stay 5, pay for 4”, the cheapest night of this 6-night stay is “free”. One would need 238,500 points to cover the stay (the resort fee and resort fee taxes are due on either an award or paid stay).
Here’s a look at the cash rates for the same 6 nights:
If you wanted to get a “free” night but pay for one night in cash, you might prefer to pay cash for the cheapest night. The rate for Monday is $189. If you paid cash for Monday night, you would still get one night for free since you would still have 5 award nights. The cheapest remaining award night would be Friday night at 36,500 points. Your total cost would be $189 + 202,000 plus the resort fee plus taxes on the resort fee.
- Friday, Feb 07, 2025:
36,500 pointsFREE - Saturday, Feb 08, 2025: 64,000 points
- Sunday, Feb 09, 2025: 38,000 points
- Monday, Feb 10, 2025: $189
- Tuesday, Feb 11, 2025: 50,000 points
- Wednesday, Feb 12, 2025: 50,000 points
With that redemption, you’d pay a little over $200 in cash (the $189 nightly rate + tax on that night) in order to save 36,500 points, which certainly might be worth it (though note that this property is a poor use of points overall against those cash rates, it’s just an example for the post).
Alternatively, if you had a 35K free night certificate, you may have wanted to apply the free night certificate for that same night but still get Friday night for free, paying 202,000 points + 1 free night certificate.
The good news is that it’s still possible to make this sort of booking, but you’ll have to call and do it over the phone. Loyalty Lobby reports this text as having appeared on the Marriott site, though that page is no longer active:
On January 16, 2025, the functionality to book a Cash + Points Reservation (allows Guest to customize their Points and Cash use by Night) on the Marriott website was ended.
If you wish to book this way, you will have to call in and speak with reservations over the phone.
That relies on finding an agent who knows how to set up this type of reservation. I don’t know whether or not that will be easy, though I wouldn’t bet on it and I’d want to triple confirm the final cost to make sure they’ve set it up correctly.
It’s really annoying that Marriott has made this change because it makes it more difficult to determine when this makes sense since you have to manually do the math instead of toggling a switch. That’s a bummer.
On the other hand, many people probably either didn’t know this option existed or rarely ran into a situation where it was necessary. If you aren’t in a situation like a “Stay 5, Pay for 4” stay or a stay where the length of stay influences the price, you could just book the nights separately. It’s usually easy enough to link the reservations at the front desk so you can keep the same room for your entire stay, so I wouldn’t worry much about this in situations where I’m booking a stay of two or three nights.
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This sucks
FNT Delta Diamond hit the nail on the head in a comment to a different article. To paraphrase, anyone who is just starting out doesn’t stand a chance. I’d say that seasoned hobbyists will even be even hard pressed. There’s been way too many negatives too quickly.
Has Marriott done anything pro-customer since launching Bonvoy?
Pro-customer as in butts-in-beds customer or Corporate Owner customer?
Marriott Bonvoy: redefining ‘reward’ by making sure it feels like a punishment.
Alternative headline: Bummer, Bonvoy burns blended bookings