We’ve enjoyed quite a few luxury stays using our Marriott points. Sometimes points makes awesome trips possible, but now it’s going to be a bit harder to take advantage.

Marriott had a decent rewards program that offered value at the upper end

I know the running joke with Marriott was that their Bonvoy program was a mess. There was some truth to it, especially when it came to how the program has failed to enforce consistency amongst its brands and benefits for guests. I’m actually surprised that the parody website bonvoyed.com is still in operation. It started as a website where people can share their stories of disappointment towards Marriott.

But that being said, I still respected the program. The program provided value despite its large size, especially with the value of their points towards the most expensive resorts. The lure of staying in truly remarkable hotels kept me going out of my way to stay at a Marriott hotel when there might have been a cheaper option available. Naturally, this changed recently when Marriott quietly revised its pricing for awards at their most expensive hotels.

How bad is it?

In 2018, the merger with Starwood placed an artificial 60,000 cap on the points cost. Thus, I thought it would be interesting to look up some of the Marriott hotels we’ve been to since 2019. I did notice some hotels that went up in price since we were last there.

• Suiran, a Luxury Hotel in Arashiyama (Kyoto): free nights are between 90,000-130,000/night in 2025
• St Regis Maldives: booked at 85,000 points/night in 2022, now 100k-198k/night
• The Ritz Carlton Maldives: now 106k-198k/night (we booked the St Regis but ended up at the Ritz Carlton)

Some hotels we’ve been to didn’t end up significantly changing price. These hotels seemed to skew towards being more expensive but not enough to need a price adjustment.

• The Westin Hapuna (Big Island, Hawaii): free nights are now between 61,000-82,000/night in 2025
• Courtyard Anaheim Theme Park Entrance: now between 63,000-98,000/night in 2025
• JW Marriott Parq Vancouver: now between 50,000-74,000/night in 2025
• JW Marriott Desert Springs: now between 40,000-80,000/night in 2025

We’re going to have to change our plans

Well, we’ve now been caught up with saving up for a trip that won’t happen. The JW Marriott Masai Mara was one that we were planning to go to as soon as we saved up the points. It was priced at around 124,000 points/night, but now it’s a painful 192,000 to 236,000 points/night. Ouch!

But let’s look at cash prices for this resort. When I look at cash rates available on Marriott’s website for 2025, I’m seeing rates that fluctuate between $1,554 and $2,695 per night. At the low end, that’s a redemption value of 0.8 cents/point. At the upper end, you’re getting 1.1 cents/point.

Quite frankly, I’d rather not consider a safari through Marriott. Instead I think we would pay cash and go with a quality safari operator (like Singita).

This completely changes the calculus for Marriott’s aspirational properties

First of all, I think it was generally well-understood that using points for aspirational properties was generally a better deal than using them for your typical hotel. Why? Well, I was always under the belief that dangling a carrot over your head to save up your points for that awesome adventure was a driving force of interacting with a company’s private currency. As much as we’d love to earn and burn, it takes time to earn enough to burn.

That 0.8-1.1 cents/point value referenced above isn’t much different from what I’ve noticed as a typical value for Marriott points at cheaper properties. Essentially what Marriott has done was remove any reason to hang onto your Marriott points for a big trip. Instead, you might better off simply redeeming your points any chance you get.

To be clear, this isn’t simply a consequence of having credit cards available with a big sign-up bonus. Marriott could have just raised the price of everything across the board. No, this is a signal in a change of strategy where someone looked at the value people were getting for their points and thought it was too much. This was a fear that guests would benefit too much from Marriott Bonvoy and that needed to be stopped.

Besides, Marriott already had a complicated system in place to determine who was eligible for a credit card bonus. So it wasn’t like they were giving out boatloads of points to anyone who wanted them. They already had some controls on the new points being generated.

Now you should never buy Marriott points

Marriott sells points normally for 1.25 cents each. It won’t take a rocket scientist to know that this price by itself is a bad deal given you get only 0.8-1.1 cents of value. There are times where Marriott sells points with a bonus multiplier. You might then buy points at a price of 0.89 cents/point at a 40% bonus. I’d still argue this isn’t worth it to save potentially 0.21 cents/point You’d need over 200,000 points/night–potentially more than you can purchase in a year. Would you trust Marriott to not devalue further as you accrue the points?

Personally, I’d rather just buy the night with cash than buy points. You do earn more Marriott points when booking with cash. Plus, booking with points doesn’t absolve you from having to pay resort fees with Marriott. Cash is king so don’t lock yourself into a currency that might change significantly overnight.

Marriott rubs salt in the wound by timing it with their global promotion

It’s not lost on me that Marriott has launched their latest promotion shortly after news got out about their devaluation. This is almost a compliment sandwich, except they forgot good news to start the cycle and instead just jumped into the bad. It seems incredibly intentional of them to hide the bad news because now all other blogs are just talking about how to earn your points from this promotion.

And really, we’re just talking about 1,000 bonus points per night and 1 extra elite night on paid stays. Sure, charge 100,000 more points per night at the higher end hotels but give an extra 1,000 points to make up the difference. It’s a bit frustrating.

By the way, if you’re like me and find you’re ineligible to sign up for a global promotion, I’ve found there are two things that seem to work. You can either wait to see if the system eventually lets you register online, or you can call customer service to be manually registered. Not sure why their technology can’t just get it right the first time?

How they could have saved this

Going back to the compliment sandwich, there’s actually something Marriott could have done to make this change easier to stomach, It actually would have been quite easy for them to do too. Right now, Marriott offers up to five different free night awards: 25k, 35k, 40k, 50k, and 85k. You can top off these awards with up to 15,000 Marriott points to add flexibility if there is a room just out of reach with these certificates.

Now that the award price cap has gone up at many luxury hotels, that limits the usefulness of those 85k certificates. Previously, you might have been able to stay in a room that cost 100,000 points by using one of those certificates plus 15,000 Marriott points. These hotels that cost over 100,000 points are now simply just out of reach. It would have been nice if Marriott removed the 15,000 cap on topping off these awards and just made them so you can add as many points as you want.

They could have spun it as though you could get a discount of 85,000 points if you had these certificates. These awards, by the way, only come by having their most expensive credit cards. But that would have boosted demand for those cards and probably would have earned them more revenue off annual fees as people looked for ways to avoid paying the full points rate. I’m not saying that it would have been a neutral change in total, but it certainly would have made the news easier to stomach.