Originally Posted by
hungarianhc
Honestly, you can always just grab a few gift cheques packages. If you travel a lot for work, you can just pay with them, get reimbursed like normal, and then take home the profit on it.
Here's a link to a post I did about them.
Very interesting post. Are the gift cheques still available? I don't see them on the Marriott site.
Whether this makes sense in any given case would seem to vary depending upon the room rate you get compared to the number of points you would have to use for it. And if you paid with a Marriott Visa card you would get more points, which doesn't apply to gift cheques (I assume, you didn't mention them). In any event, 135,000 points for $1000 is 0.74 cents per point. I'd be curious if anyone has calculated an effective rate for other uses of points. For example, a number of people have mentioned the travel packages as the best value and I wonder if there are examples to support that.