Is It Worth Buying Marriott Points?

If you’ve started collecting Marriott Points through hotel stays, credit card spend or various other means you’ve probably come across the option to buy Marriott Points in one form or another and wondered Is It Worth Buying Marriott Points? Let’s look at a few scenarios below…

Is It Worth Buying Marriott Points?

Before you begin answering this question you need to know what your valuation of Marriott points is. As we value Avios at 1p with a 1:1 exchange rate from American Express we value Marriott points at 0.66p due to the 2:3 exchange rate. This is because if we didn’t convert to Marriott points we’d use them on Avios where we can get 1p+ value per point. You can read our thoughts on how to value Marriott Points here – https://pointsuncovered.com/marriott/marriott-points-value-in-2021/

Be careful though, just because you value a point at a certain amount… it doesn’t mean you will get that value for it! These are minimum ‘values’ that we will let our points go for.

What’s the cost of buying Marriott Points?

If you buy from Marriott without a sale or special offer the price is $12.50 per 1,000 Marriott points (around £9.15.) which means you are paying roughly 0.915p a point. You can purchase them here – https://storefront.points.com/marriott/en-US/buy – occasionally Marriott will run offers on purchasing points which will decrease the cost slightly. As you can see generally you are paying 0.915p a Marriott Point. Almost 50% above our valuation! Even with an offer, I would avoid buying Marriott Points except in two circumstances.

1. If I knew I could get outsized value from my purchase e.g. I was getting more value than what I paid. One such example is The St. Regis New York. The price for this hotel is 100,000 points a night & a random week in October 22 prices up at around £1232 a night which means at 100,000 points you are getting 1.232p worth of value, well over our 0.66p valuation. (whether you think a hotel is worth that sort of money is obviously subjective to you 🙂 )
   
   How do you work out the value? Look at the dates/hotel you want to book, divide the cash price by the cost in points. For example, if the hotel costs £150 or 50,000 points you’d divide 150 by 50,000 which equals 0.003, that’s 0.3p worth of value… not so great in this example.
   
   
2. I needed a small number of points for a redemption I wanted to make.
   

In both cases, I would need to be travelling or booking in the near future to consider doing this. Why? It’s possible a redemptions value goes down if the cash price drops, there could be a devaluation of Marriott points or you may not be able to get redemption availability at the hotel you want.

How else can I earn Marriott Points?

Other than Hotel stays the main way of earning Marriott Points is via credit card spend. Unfortunately in the UK the Marriott Credit Card from Creation has been closed for new applicants for a while but there is a Marriott Bonvoy American Express card that earns 2 points per £1 spent on general purchases. You can also indirectly earn them from any membership reward American Express. Two membership reward points convert into 3 Marriott points and some of the cards come with generous sign-up bonuses. For more details/referral link see here – https://pointsuncovered.com/amex-referral-link-uk/ – for example, the Amex Gold Card’s welcome bonus (20,000 membership reward points for spending 3K in 3 months) converts into 30,000 Marriott points.

Have you considered buying Marriott points in the past? What do you think… Is It Worth Buying Marriott Points?