First of all, you're misunderstanding how the per diem works. Each area of the country has a government-calculated lodging and meals & incidentals (M&I) rate. For Binghamton, it happens to be $110/day.

As I work, effectively $110 of my income for that day is considered to be tax-free income to me, and I am expected to be using this to pay for my lodging, meals, and incidentals. The alternative is to keep a receipt for everything.

So, whether I sleep in my car and subsist on Ritz crackers or stay at the Ritz and dine on caviar doesn't matter; the perdiem doesn't change. Only by decreasing my expenses can my net income increase, just like everybody else.

It's not money that I get -- it's just the portion of my income that is considered to be tax-free because of away-from-home expenses.

As far as spending my points on free nights, the whole purpose of staying at a Marriott property is to get Marriott points, so I can spend them in places that, it turns out, will not be Fairfield Inns.

If a stack of folios covering 300+ nights at FIs over the last 2 years or so doesn't convince him that I'm a regular customer, just staying there for free won't help much, either.

Besides, I'd run out of points in a month or two, and then what do I do for the next six months or a year if he doesn't go for it?