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Old Jan 27, 2020 | 9:12 pm
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sdsearch
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Originally Posted by YCCGUY
Hi, I’ve got 150k points on DL, 160k points on SW, 250k points at Marriott and 50k chase points. Anyone have ideas to combine all this value into a family cruise?
Not without losing value.

You need to understand why airline miles and hotel points have value. They're used for "excess capacity" type inventory, meaning when they think there's going to be an unsold seat or unbooked hotel room, they give to you cheap since they don't expect a paying customer.

But cruises don't work that way. They don't have an "excess capacity" system. They either sell you a ticket or they don't, that's it.

So the only way an airline or hotel program can get you a ticket on a cruise line is to actually buy the ticket, and then they have to charge you real money. So if you try to use miles or points, you'll get no better value for this than you would if you were redeeming for gift cards, which are notoriously considered bad value, compared to actually using miles for airline seats and using hotel points for hotel rooms.

So while airline miles work well for airline seats, and hotel points work well for hotel rooms, neither works well for unrelated travel stuff like cruises, rental cars, etc, because in all of those cases the airline or hotel program has to pay cash for the service from another company in another sub-industry.
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