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Marriott has made a change to its Points Advance policy without giving any notice. It’s now only possible to make a Points Advance reservation if you don’t have a sufficient number of points.
In the past, Marriott gave you a choice when booking an award stay when you had enough points to cover the cost – either pay in full with those points, or make a Points Advance booking and ensure you have enough points to cover the reservation within 14 days of your travel date.
Now, you only have the option to pay with the points that you already have:
Points Advance is still available for members that don’t have enough points to cover the stay, although it’s only available for stays more than 30 days away.
If you don’t have enough points and want to book a stay that’s more than 7 days but less than 30 days away, Marriott won’t allow you to do that. Instead, it’ll advise that either your account is too new or you’ve purchased the maximum number of points already, even if neither of those scenarios are true.
If you don’t have enough points for a stay within 7 days, Marriott will allow you to purchase points instead. That’s unlikely to provide good value though, so it’s not ideal.
Ultimately, this change to Marriott’s Points Advance policy won’t have a huge impact on most people because the majority of people booking a stay for which they have enough points will choose to use those points for the stay rather than doing a Points Advance reservation.
There will be some people though for whom this is yet another example of them being Bonvoyed given that Marriott gave no notice that this change would be implemented.
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Hi Stephen, if booking a stay more than 30 days out, what is the advantage in trying to replace a Points Advance stay v an Earned Points stay with a cc cert? Seems to me points are points? Thanks
I don’t think it makes much of a difference. If you have two bookings – one with Points Advance and one with Points you’ve already earned – it would just depend on if you’re wanting to make other Points Advance reservations. If you cancelled the points stay and applied the credit card cert, it might mean you couldn’t book another Points Advance stay due to having sufficient points.
bonvoyed again
My question: If I have an existing reservation using advance points and I now have enough points for the reservation, will Marriott “Bonvoy” me by applying the points w/o contacting me? Or will the old policy still apply until/unless I try to make changes to the reservation or the cut off date for applying points arrives (the reservation is for Aug 2019)? I actually have accumulated a couple of certs I can apply, reducing my points needed by half (I’d rather use the certs than do the 5-days for 4-days of points option Greg discusses elsewhere).
In theory, they shouldn’t take the points until 14 days before your check-in date. In reality, this is Marriott and so there’s no way of knowing for sure if they’ll Bonvoy you or not.
[…] you could use this feature even if you already had enough points to cover the reservation but Jeff Setter notes that this is no longer the case and points advance doesn’t show as an option if you have the […]
Make a refundable booking (outside cancellation window) elsewhere to use your points. Then make reservation you want to… problem solved.
Not as though you’re earning “interest” by holding onto the points anyway, not sure what the motivator is for your work-around? Especially since there have been previous DPs with Marriott increasing points on reservations not locked in with earned points?
To use credit card certs you haven’t earned yet.
I have been unsuccessful with Marriott replacing existing point reservations with certs.
How do you replace the points reservations when you get the certs? Do you call in and just ask them to do that?