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.
RIP Starpoints. My first rewards currency and the source of many great hotel stays.
Bottom line is this is roughly equivalent value for United assuming you value Bonvoy at 0.7 and United at 1.3 (as OMAAT does).
60k Bonvoy would be $420, convert that into 30k United and it's $390.
And there's also the yearly promo on United's end - this summer it got you another 25% on the base miles earned (so another 5k per 60k transferred). So if you convert 60k Bonvoy into 35k United that's $455, although the extra 5k took a few months to show up.
Certainly other ways of getting United miles / transferring to partners where you can book United flights. But, in general, I think the ability to get business class on points is infinitely more valuable than a nicer hotel room. Perfectly average hotel rooms still come with beds to sleep in. But your perspective may vary!
But your perspective may vary!
Well said!
We need people to make bad redemptions to balance the cost of good redemptions.
Just transferred 60K Marriott points to United - the 20K + 10K Bonus was INSTANT. After transferring, I immediately went to United site and the miles were already there.
Converting Bonvoy points to airline miles is a good deal when you have a lot of them and no longer stay at Marriotts because other hotel programs provide more value.
In terms of converting Marriott points to United miles, neither Marriott nor United should be seen as a “savings bank” for loyalty credits. I move some Marriott points to United miles (enough to get the special bonus) when (1) my supply of United miles is running “low” and I need same for flight(s) in the not too distant future and (2) one of the special bonuses is currently in effect. In general, over the last 30 years I've been accumulating airline miles (remember TWA?) and hotel points (remember SPG?), I've never seen the value of these miles and points increase over time!
Devaluations and additional charges (such as so-called “destination fees” or “resort fees”) as well as no real redemption chart for Marriott points hardly make those Marriott points any type of stable currency. For that matter, airline miles are not really any better.
😀 As an aside, the best airline loyalty redemption value I ever got was in 1985 when I redeemed 90,000 miles on TWA for a open-jaw, round trip for two, first class, from SFO to CAI, returning TLV to SFO.
If one looks at Bonvoy point redemption for award stays these days, unfortunately the average appears well below $.007 USD, maybe somewhere between $.004-$.006. Bonvoy-> Airline Transfers are increasingly becoming a more competitive redemption option. Not all FFPs are created equal, just like not all previously referenced Bonvoy transfer partners are equal. There are some good opportunities. Actually, Bonvoy points transferring to the airline FFP of my choice(s) are now my preferred way to use my Bonvoy points.
Generally I agree with this article. The points can be used with Marriott for better value but if you need to just top off for an airline redemption it may be worth doing. Buying Marriott points could be of good value when there is a 50% or 75% bonus offer.
ND’s point is the key one IMO. With Bonvoy award pricing all over the place, a lot of redemptions now come in well under 0.7 cents, so the miles route isn’t the last resort it used to be. United at 60K for 30K with that extra bonus is the standout. Randy’s instant datapoint is a nice surprise vs the usual 2 to 5 days. FWIW the flip side of keeping points for hotels is checking what cash would cost first. Google Hotels gives a quick baseline. The same Marriott can price diff depending on which country you search from as inventory and rates vary by market. A free tool like Arbitrica checks it from roughly 195 countries and finds the lowest price in the world. If that cash rate is low, moving the points to miles starts to look smart
Here in Germany, we don't have that many transferrable point currencies, and also the transfer partners are very limited. I used my Bonvoy points back in the days to transfer them to Korean Air and "rewarded" myself to a First Class award ticket from FRA to ICN for my 50th birthday. Well spent!
Appreciate this post. Transferred 60,000 Bonvoy points yesterday and today to United. 120K Bonvoy points became 60,000 United miles with their 10,000 bonus on each transfer. They appeared in my account almost instantly.
Used my increased UA balance to book an international flight in Polaris, currently pricing at $7000. A far better return on those Bonvoy miles than I ever would have received from any Marriott reservation.