Marriott Points

How much is a Marriott Point worth? About 1.06 cents per point for a hotel stay, but substantially less if redeemed for airline miles or gift cards. Like most hotel rewards programs, you have to redeem smart. Marriott’s nice about listing the dollar value of a night’s stay along with the points required, so you’ll have to run the quick calculation of points required/dollars required to ensure that you come out ahead. But, in general, we think they’re worth about 1 cent each.

Redemption Options

• Hotels – Marriott Points are worth about 1.06 of a cent. We arrive at this conclusion by comparing various deals at Marriott’s website. For example, it costs 15,000 points to stay in a room that costs $179 a night (1.19 cents per point). 25,000 points for $209 a night (0.84 cents per  point), and 35,000 for $399 a night (1.14 cents per point). On average, this works out to around 1.06 cents (see our table below).
• Gift cards – When redeeming for gift cards, you get at most 0.52 cents per point when you redeem 190,000 Marriott Points for a $1000 Marriott gift card. This is a pretty rotten use of points considering the effective reward rate is 0.52%.  If you’re redeeming smaller amounts, you get an even worse deal. 20,000 points gets you a $50 gift card, a value of 0.25 cents per point.
• Airline Miles – For most airlines, you can convert Marriott points at a rate of 1/5 of an airline mile per point when you transfer 10,000 points. You get up to 2/5 of an airline mile per point when you transfer 125,000 points at a time. Clearly this is not a good deal. Furthermore, this process takes up to 6 weeks. See the Marriott Miles Conversion Table for more details.

Purchasing Points

• Purchase up to 50,000 Marriott Points per year at a rate of $12.50 per 1,000 points, or 1.25 cents per point. Don’t do it.

Expiration

• Marriott Points may expire if no new points are accrued over a 2 year period.

How we calculated Marriott Points’ value when redeemed for hotel stays:

Based on a single night’s stay from September 24th to 25th.