Among hotel loyalty programs, one thing that makes Marriott Bonvoy® points unique is the ability to (fairly) efficiently convert them into airline miles. While most major hotel loyalty programs allow some sort of opportunity to convert hotel points into airline miles, it typically represents a very bad value.
Continue reading: Are Marriott Bonvoy Airline Mileage Transfers Worth It?
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Is the section "What about converting Marriott Bonvoy points into airline miles" mistitled? The content of that section is really about converting airline miles into Marriott points.
Personally, I convert Marriott points to airline miles from time to time (typically to programs which I can't, or couldn't (e.g. Alaska's Mileage Plan before it becomes a transfer partner of Bilt Rewards), transfer from other transferrable currencies into. I agree that Marriott points are much more difficult to accumulate, but I do have a very healthy balance, and don't I find enough hotel redemption opportunities that make financial sense based on my own valuation methodology.
I had some orphaned points at Singapore that were about to expire and saved them via a transfer to Marriott. As for Marriott to airlines, if you're targeting a 6cpp Emirates redemption, the math works out to 2.5 cents per Marriott point. Hard to get that kind of value with a Marriott redemption.
An underrated feature of the Marriott transfer-to-miles benefit is that you can transfer a precise amount of miles versus transferring in 1,000 increments (though your transfer has to start at 3,000 Marriott points I believe).
Exactly! I had some SQ points expiring and needed a few (2500?) more for a useful redemption. All the other sources I could transfer from demand multiples of 2000 or 1000, so I'd be wasting a large proportion of my transfer.
I transferred exactly the number of Marriott points needed and exactly zeroed out my SQ balance when I redeemed.
The real story here is that Marriott took a market leading program perk from Starwood and has let it die on the vine. This was really innovative at one time but has been made obsolete by the banks improving their transfer programs iteratively. The fact that they’ve removed the bonus for their most popular partners tells you everything you need to know. This is Yahoo Mail/MySpace levels of falling asleep at the wheel.
The problem with your post here is that you assume Marriott didn't devalue these transfers intentionally - which they obviously did. These transfers were from a time before Chase/Amex/CapitalOne/etc allowed for 1x1 transfers to a wide variety of airlines. From a Marriott perspective, they would surely rather people redeem these points at their hotels as they can also generate additional spend, keep owners happy (depending on the redemption payout), etc. So no "falling asleep at the wheel" here...
I have some Frontier miles I need to keep alive and use e-rewards, but Marriott transfer is my back up.
"From a Marriott perspective, they would surely rather people redeem these points at their hotels"
Bingo. It's an incentive thing, not incompetence.
Many banks are getting better at that, though. BILT and WF Autograph let you do smaller increments... pretty sure CapOne does too. Really it's just Amex and Chase insisting on 1000s.
Bingo. It's an incentive thing, not incompetence.
@Redacted: it was incompetence, pure and simple, with no incentive whatsoever if one understood what was going. Thus, both @stvr's and your comments are totally wrong and @Anthony's is closer to the truth: Marriott devalued the transfers to miles intentionally because those transfers under SPG were a boneheaded concept that contributed to the demise of Starwood.
There was not a single upside to the transfers that SPG had made so favorable that the starpoint became more popular as a currency for redeeming for airline award seats than for hotel award rooms. The transfers incentivized people to earn tons of starpoints on the SPG AMEX without ever setting foot in Starwood hotels, and then transferred those points to airline miles for redeeming for award tickets. The end result was that Starwood hotels were completely taken out of the loop, either for earning starpoints on revenue stays or redeeming them for award rooms! Thus, a program that was supposed to be Starwood's "cash cow" became an "albatross" that contributed the chain's financial difficulties that led to its demise. That the transfers were a boneheaded idea was not hard to figure out at all because I'd written about them as I just did able long before Marriott decided to cripple them. In fact, that is why one of Marriott's very first acts after acquiring Starwood was to severely cripple the points transfers.
It is customary for former SPG loyalists to write glowingly of the program, but the truth of the matter is that SPG was a weak, subpar program that self-anointed "travel gurus" inexplicably place on a pedestal that it never deserved, as its demise ultimately made clear.