One of the great perks of the Marriott co-brand credit cards is the free night certificate you get every year on your account anniversary. I have several Marriott Bonvoy Cards from Chase and American Express and get multiple free night certificates every year.
Herein lies the problem. All of my certificates are for different point levels.
Wait, there’s still a 25,000 point certificate available?
One of the certs in our account is for a free night good at any hotel costing 25,000 points or less. I had no idea which card this was from and then I remembered it was from our discontinued Chase Marriott Bonvoy Premier. This is the card Chase issued to replace the Marriott Rewards Premier.
I’ve used this certificate to stay at the Renaissance Newark Airport for a night and saved almost $300 on my room. More often, you’ll end up using this free night at a roadside Marriott Bonvoy property, like this one in Savannah, GA.
The Bonvoy Premier is an older card that was replaced by the refreshed Marriott Rewards Premier Plus. For those who signed up for that card when it came out or upgraded the Premier card to the Premier Plus, their cards were converted to the Chase Marriott Bonvoy Boundless, which gets a free night certificate good for a room up to 35,000 points.
But since I never upgraded, I’m stuck with a 25,000 certificate. Drats.
Then there are 35,000 point certificates.
Sharon and I both have a 35,000 point free night certificate in our accounts. One of them comes from the discontinued Marriott Bonvoy American Express card. This is the old SPG Personal card. The other one comes from the Marriott Bonvoy Premier Plus Business card, which has also been discontinued. Are you noticing the trend of us collecting discontinued credit cards?
You can get some great value out of these certificates for a hotel costing up to 35,000 points. I was able to redeem it for a night at the Le Méridien Frankfurt.
The biggest problem with using these is that we each have one so using them on the same reservation, while possible, would be a huge inconvenience and dramatically increase the chance of us getting #Bonvoved in the process.
We also had an 85,000 point certificate
Sharon was targeted for the 100,000 point offer to upgrade her SPG AMEX (Bonvoy AMEX) card to the Marriott Bonvoy Brilliant card. The one good thing was that I upgraded the card right around the card anniversary. So I had to pay the full annual fee but I also received the free night certificate at any hotel up to 50,000 points almost immediately.
When the Marriott Bonvoy Brilliant was refreshed, the free night certificate was upgraded to 85,000 points. Since we don’t often stay at hotels costing that many points, I canceled the card this year.
Final Thoughts
Because I didn’t think this through in advance, which is so unlike me, we were stuck with free night certificates at different point values. To maximize the value of those certificates, I’d like to use them for the highest value. To maximize the value of my marriage and having Sharon continue to let me plan our vacations, I’m guessing that I’m going to use them at whatever hotels are best for our plans and possibly lose out on some of the value.
It’s a bit easier to redeem the certificates now that Marriott allows you to add up to 15,000 points to free night certificates.
Since the annual fees for the cards with the lower two value certificates are under $100 each, I’m sure I can find a hotel where we at least break even and still manage to use them up before they expire.
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2 comments
There are 40k free night certificates you can choose as a 75 night choice benefit as well.
I also dumped the Brilliant card but it was mainly due to the restaurant credit per month replacing the very useful $300 Marriott credit. The $200 increase in the AF sure didn’t help.