Marriott Rewards Value

I think we can say with some degree of certainty, that Marriott Rewards is currently the 2^nd best hotel loyalty program, after Starwood Preferred Guest. Much like Hilton Honors and IGH Rewards Club, Marriott offers a very reliable redemption experience. Also like the aforementioned, we’re reducing our usual reduction factor of 25% to 10. However, unlike it’s hotel peers, Marriott offers some nice upside, and one is not stuck with $0.005/point awards. After this month’s reckoning was completed, we assigned an ACRV of $0.0073 to each Marriott Rewards point.

This month, we only had one hypothetical stay in which we found no availability. We feel the same about this as we do about any other blacked-out date. We hate it. Though it only represents a single data point in our matrix, the fact that a hotel chain would say they’re off-limits to their most loyal customers really annoys us.

The chart above tells us that you’re quite likely to redeem your Marriott Reward points for $0.0086/each, give or take a quarter of a cent. Our standard deviation is $0.0035, this means that, theoretically, 68% of award redemptions should occur between $0.0046 and $0.0117.

The chart above looks decent, for a hotel chain. If it were an airline, it would be terrible. Our best for the month came from a week-long stay at the London Marriott Hotel Park Lane. This was offered for $3,183.90 or 225,000 points, providing a redemption value of $0.0142

Unlike Hilton and IHG, Marriott provides a potentially legitimate opportunity to transfer a credit card point for some solid value. However, we would still recommend keeping Ultimate Rewards right where one earned them, at Chase. There are simply much higher values to be found by transferring to airline partners instead.

For more information about how we value airline/hotel and other award currencies, please visit our valuation method and changelog pages.