A few weeks ago, I wrote about how Marriott Bonvoy used one of my 85,000-point Free Night Awards for a hotel stay even though I had specifically selected lower-value certificates.
Marriott eventually admitted that the 85K certificate had been substituted without my authorization, but getting anything close to a resolution took weeks of emails and follow-up.
In the comments on that post, a reader suggested a workaround I hadn’t considered:
A good way to beat this is to have a placeholder reservation to “occupy” the 85K cert, and even another placeholder one to “occupy” 50k certs as well. This will make them all unavailable and leave only the 35k ones in the account to be pulled. Then once you’re done with the trip, cancel those reservations to release the certs back.
I thought that was brilliant.
I also thought it was slightly ridiculous that anyone should have to do this just to keep Marriott from using the wrong certificate.
Then, much sooner than I expected, I needed the trick myself.
Marriott Wanted Me To Use My 85K Certificate
I currently have two Marriott Free Night Awards in my account.
One is a 35,000-point certificate from my Marriott Bonvoy Business American Express Card. The other is an 85,000-point certificate from my Marriott Bonvoy Brilliant American Express Card.
We were looking at a one-night stay at a Courtyard by Marriott that cost 37,000 Bonvoy points.
That seemed like a perfectly reasonable use of the 35K certificate. Marriott allows you to add up to 25,000 points to a Free Night Award, so I should have been able to use the 35K certificate plus 2,000 points.
Except Marriott wouldn’t let me.
When I reached the redemption screen, I was given two choices:
- Use my 85K Free Night Award
- Pay 37,000 Bonvoy points
The 35K certificate wasn’t offered at all.
Using an 85K certificate for a 37,000-point room would be an enormous waste. Marriott doesn’t refund the unused value of a Free Night Award, so I’d essentially be throwing away as much as 48,000 points of potential value.
And considering what happened the last time Marriott got its hands on my 85K certificate, I wasn’t particularly interested in giving the system another opportunity.
Then I Remembered The Placeholder Trick
That’s when I remembered the Marriott hack from the post.
I searched for a hotel several months in the future with a flexible cancellation policy and made a reservation using the 85K certificate.
The flexible cancellation part is important. The purpose was to temporarily attach the certificate to another booking so Marriott’s system would consider it unavailable.
Once the reservation was confirmed, I went back to the Courtyard booking.
And there it was.
Marriott now gave me the option I should have had in the first place: use my 35K Free Night Award plus 2,000 Bonvoy points.
Problem solved.
I’m Actually Going To Leave The Placeholder Reservation There
Technically, I could cancel the placeholder reservation right now and put the 85K certificate back into my account. But I’m not going to.
The reservation is several months away, and after Marriott previously substituted my 85K certificate without my permission, keeping it attached to a reservation is one of the simplest ways I can think of to prevent that from happening again.
After this trip is complete, I’ll cancel the placeholder booking. If I need to use the 85K Free Night Award before then, I’ll cancel the placeholder, wait for the award to be returned to my account, and immediately attach it to the reservation I actually want.
Should We Really Have To Do This?
I admit I feel a little strange making a hotel reservation I don’t intend to use.
But I’ve done similar things with airlines.
There were times when I’d book a fully refundable backup flight when I was worried my original flight might be canceled. Once I was at the airport and knew my original flight was operating, I’d cancel the backup.
Ideally, none of this would be necessary.
I’d prefer to simply leave an 85K Marriott certificate sitting in my account and trust that Marriott will only use it when I specifically tell the system to do so.
My previous experience showed me that’s apparently not something I can take for granted.
And this latest booking showed another problem: even when the 35K certificate was the obvious award to use, Marriott’s website wouldn’t let me select it while the 85K certificate was available.
Putting the 85K certificate on a placeholder reservation forced the booking system to offer the certificate I actually wanted.
Final Thoughts
When I first saw the comment about a placeholder reservation on my previous Marriott post, I thought it was clever. I didn’t expect I’d be testing it myself a few weeks later.
But it worked exactly as advertised.
If you have several Marriott Free Night Awards of different values and the website insists on offering a more valuable certificate than the one you want to use, temporarily attaching that certificate to a cancellable reservation may make the lower-value award available.
And after Marriott already used my 85K certificate once without my permission, I’m taking the idea one step further and leaving mine safely attached to a future reservation until I’m ready to use it.
It’s an unnecessarily convoluted solution to a problem that really shouldn’t exist.
But if Marriott’s system can’t reliably protect my certificate, apparently I have to do it myself.
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