My experience using a Marriott eGift card abroad

I recently wrapped up a 5-night stay at the St. Regis Bora Bora, in French Polynesia. I had redeemed Capital One Shopping rewards for a $1,100 Marriott gift card in advance of the trip, intending to use the gift card to use toward food and drinks during our stay. Readers sometimes question whether gift cards work at all properties and/or whether you’ll get a bad deal on the exchange rate when using them toward a foreign currency, so I wanted to get out a quick post sharing my experience using a Marriott eGift card.

Marriott gift cards are a frequent area of frustration, whether you’re trying to buy them (many properties do not sell them) or you’re trying to redeem them (few front desk employees seem to know how to redeem them — I always stop by the desk long before checkout because I have rarely ever found the redemption process to be simple). Still, between frequent Amex Offers, the ability to redeem Capital One Shopping rewards for Marriott gift cards, and the ability of some of us with old Capital One accounts to redeem at 1.4c per mile for $900 Marriott gift cards, many of us end up with a gift card now and then.

About a month ago, I tried using one at checkout at a Marriott in Springfield, Massachusetts. The front desk staff couldn’t figure out how to redeem them and insisted that their process is to make a photocopy of the cards and for accounting to process them a few days later, refunding the correct amount to one’s credit card. That is not how it ought to work.

I am pleased to report that I found the process much simpler at the St. Regis Bora Bora. In fact, the night before checkout, I received a standard checkout email (part of the standard process at this property) that included my final folio and invited me to stop by the front desk the night before if I intended to use gift cards to pay toward my stay. I tried that, but it was late at night and the desk agent asked that I try in the morning when a manager would be there.

First thing in the morning on checkout day, I stopped by the desk and explained that I wanted to redeem an eGift card. I emailed a copy of the card to the front desk email and, within a few minutes, the desk agent had applied the gift card to my folio. While the entire process probably took about 10 minutes, it was far easier than I’ve found at many other properties.

One question that frequently comes up about redeeming Marriott gift cards abroad is whether you’ll get ripped off with a poor currency conversion rate. I think this might depend on the property itself and how they handle billing and gift card redemption. However, I am happy to report that I got better than the expected conversion.

I redeemed a gift card worth $1,100. According to Google, at the moment when I was standing in line redeeming the gift card, that should have been worth 112,843.28 XPF (Pacific Francs).

On my final folio, the gift card payment shows up as 112,957 XPF. That’s about $1.11 better than the exchange rate Google published!

No, I’m not actually excited about coming out $1.11 ahead (particularly when you consider the cost of food for 5 nights), but I am glad that I can speak to the fact that, at least at the St. Regis Bora Bora, paying with a gift card denominated in US Dollars did indeed get a more than fair exchange rate into Pacific Francs.

I’m sure there will be situations where individual properties will handle things somehow differently, but if they do, it does not appear to be a Marriott problem but rather a property issue.

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