In August Marriott & SPG will have a unified rewards program. One thing that still isn’t clear is what will happen to those who have booked hotel + air travel packages. With these packages purchases receive airline miles and hotel certificates that are good at differing award categories. At the moment there is no clarity regarding this at all and it seems that Marriott isn’t even sure what’s going to happen with a PR rep on Flyertalk stating (thanks to ASOT550 for making us aware):
Any outstanding awards for certificates with a pre-defined category (like Chase or MegaBonus promotional certificates) will be converted to a commensurate value with the new award schedule. Other floater certificates will be cancelled and converted to equivalent points, credited to the member’s account for future redemption.
If you are asking for an exact conversion amount, all we can tell you is we are currently reviewing how to handle existing travel package awards already in members’ accounts that remain unattached. Members should make every effort to book and attach these certificates prior to our programs becoming one to maximize their usage as this conversion information may or may not be forthcoming before the programs merge.
Best regards,
William R. Sanders
Social Media Specialist
Starwood Hotels & Resorts LLC
The problem is that Marriott is completely changing the award chart as seen below:
Let’s say you have a hotel + air package that gives you seven nights at a category 6 property for example. Under the old program that would be usable on properties that cost 30,000 points per night. If you did a direct conversion to category 6 under the new program it would be usable on properties that cost 50,000 points per night. That’s obviously not going to happen, but there’s no way to do a direct conversion to properties up to 30,000 points per night as there is no award category at 30,000 points anymore. You’d either need to devalue the certificate and make it usable on category 4 or improve the certificate and make it usable on category 5.
Points refunds aren’t really an option either as that means people have been able to purchase the miles component of the certificate for cheap. For example a category six seven night package with 120,000 miles would cost 300,000 miles. If you refunded the points equivalent of the seven nights that would be 210,000 points meaning somebody had redeemed 90,000 Marriott points for 120,000 miles (an incredible deal).
My guess is that Marriott actually does know what they are doing and they plan for it to be more generous than they’d ideally like and they don’t want to release the details to prevent people cashing in on the value. If they go the other direction the backlash is going to overshadow what has otherwise been mostly positive press. The alternative is they do something crazy like keeping an list of properties that are currently eligible for that certificate level and using that until these certificates are either used up or expire. What do you think will happen? Are you redeeming Marriott points for a travel package in the hopes it’s a positive change?
