Marriott launched a new sale on its points today, offering a bonus of up to 50% which means you can buy points from 0.83cpp. In addition to that, they’ve rolled out a new feature on their own website that allows you to buy points during the booking process if you don’t have enough for an award stay.
While I’m dubious about buying Marriott points right now due to their upcoming devaluation and move to dynamic pricing, this new feature is a positive development for a couple of reasons, although there is a downside.
For starters, if you find yourself just short of points when trying to book an award stay, you can simply buy the points as part of making the reservation, rather than having to visit Points.com separately in order to do that.
The second benefit is that buying points while making a reservation has a separate limit to buying directly from Points.com. With this recent sale, you’re limited to buying 100,000 Marriott Bonvoy points (before the bonus) from Points.com. You can therefore now buy an additional 100,000 points (plus bonus) from Marriott during the booking process, allowing you to buy up to 200,000 points before the bonuses if you need to stock up on a ton of points.
The downside is that buying points from Marriott means that you’d be forgoing the cashback you can earn by clicking through to Points.com from a shopping portal. You’re therefore giving up 1-2% cashback for the convenience of buying points with fewer clicks.
Topping Up Award Certificates Isn’t Available (Yet)
Marriott announced a few months ago that they’ll be introducing the ability to top up free night certificates with points in order to book a more expensive property. We’d wondered if this new functionality of being able to buy points during the booking process meant that it was now possible to top up award certificates, but Greg tested it out and confirmed that it wasn’t possible – yet.
He has a 50,000 point certificate which can be used to book a stay at the Ritz-Carlton Dove Mountain in Tucson during non-peak dates. The certificate is useable when nights are 50,000 points, but when trying to apply it to peak nights costing 60,000 points, that wasn’t an option and he wasn’t provided with the ability to buy the 10,000 points needed to do that.
Points Purchases Not Processed By Marriott
When buying Marriott points ordinarily, payments are processed by Points.com which doesn’t code as a travel purchase. Seeing as this new feature lets you buy points during the booking process on Marriott’s website, I was hopeful that payments would be processed by Marriott rather than Points.com.
That would be beneficial for several reasons. You could pay with a Marriott credit card or another card that has hotels/travel as a bonus category to earn even more points. It could also mean that Marriott Amex Offers would be triggered by a points purchase. There’d also be the possibility that shopping portals would track the purchase as a reservation, thereby meaning you’d earn cashback on the stay too.
Alas, this is all moot.
I figured I’d test it out on my wife’s account seeing as my own Marriott account has a healthy points balance at the moment. I tried booking her a night at a hotel costing more than the number of points she had in her account. When getting to the booking screen, it offered a prompt to buy the 22,000 points needed to complete the reservation.
Clicking on the ‘Buy Points’ link seen above brought up a popup allowing me to buy points starting from 22,000 points, but with the ability to buy up to the 100,000 maximum if desired. As you can see in the screenshot below, the current points sale pricing is available on Marriott’s website too, so you’ll pay the same amount whether buying them during the booking process or by going to the Points.com website.
Despite offering the sale pricing, it didn’t take into account the fact that I could in theory buy fewer base points seeing as buying only 16,000 points would provide more than the 22,000 points needed once taking into account the 45% bonus points.
That popup screen sadly had a logo stating the points purchase is powered by Points.com. I therefore didn’t proceed with the purchase as it’s very unlikely that payment will be processed by Marriott rather than Points.com.
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Wonder when you’ll be able to add points to the certs? Probably not until after deval.
I would say as a world traveler that the purchase points from hilton and marriot chains simply does not worth it any more! The cost of booking a room with them via points is sharply higher in the last 12 months..
Purchasing points speculatively is a losing proposition, but it can still be worth it for specific use cases. I wanted/needed a specific hotel for 5 nights and the cash price would have been $1,600. I had pretty much emptied my points account in anticipation of the upcoming devaluation, so I bought $900 worth of points and booked it as an award stay. So for my case, I saved $700 buy buying points.
is booking with “points and cash” on Marritt.com another way to buy points? Not sure if they refund you in points instead of cash when you cancel. I noticed they priced those points at 0.5 cents per point.
I am not seeing that. Could you give any examples?