There is a header on the booking screen which says "Select the reward you want to use:". Underneath will be two radio buttons. One is for Point Advance. The other will either let you deduct all the points now, or if you don't quite have enough, it may give you the option to buy the remaining points and then apply them.

If you don't have near enough points you'll get an orange banner explaining how the Point Advance reservation works.

What are the criteria for making this option appear?

https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...57693c45eb.jpg

EDIT: Trial and error tells me it needs to be 1 month out, at least for what I tried. 1/21-22 didn't give me the option, 1/22-1/23 did.

You need to have the points by 14 days out, so I assume they limit to a month because the "advance" period would be very short otherwise. I've personally never done a point advance booking for anything other than far out bookings so I never noticed.

Points Reservation Changed Overnight to Higher Category and Points Deducted
 

When I woke up this morning, I saw that I had a few reservations I had for an upcoming vacation send a confirmation email to me. While I did not think much of it and when I went to check my account to see if my credit card points had posted. To my surprise, my account balance was down about 100,000 points from the day previous when I was expecting it to be up.

When I went to check the details, apparently a reservation I had received an e-mail for had been changed and now charged at a higher tier. I booked a hotel that was going from a category 7 to a category 8 at the category 7 rate. Because of the change I now have been charged 25000 points a night extra for the stay I made no changes to and these points have already been deducted from my account.

I went to check my other reservations and noticed that another one changed from a category 3 to a category 4 and was no longer a confirmed reservation. The system wanted me to reconfirm the reservation at a higher rate and deduct an additional 75000 points from my account. I have more than enough points for this stay and booking now and paying later has never even been an option for me when booking a hotel on points. I happen to find this when looking at all of my points reservation and never received an email confirmation this morning for this stay.

I do not know what happened in these two specific instances, but the rest of my points reservations look to be correct. I have 2 reservations for 2 rooms at the place that went from a category 3 to a category 4 and one reservation is fully confirmed at the category 3 rate. (For those wanting to know specific properties, this is at the W Hong Kong and the Renaissance Shanghai Yu Garden.) I also received confirmation emails for other properties that I am staying at on vacation but those reservations were unchanged.

Word to the wise, double check your points reservations as something seems to have happened last night in the glorious Bonvoy IT world. Hopefully, my ambassador is able to fix the mess.

Unless they have hit your account for more points, chances are nothing will happen. Many times when a rate changes, a property only updates the rate code that automatically gets reflected in previous reservations. This is way it is important to keep the original email confirmation so you have something to show what should be charged. Once you book a room, that's the rate unless told subject to change at a later date. Also, the fifth-night free must be part of the same reservation, so you can't mix/match reservations to make 5 nights.

She can always just give you 70k and call it good... (30k + 40k value of cert). I’ve seen bigger courtesy adjustments and that is hopefully what is going to happen since the reservation has been touched too many times in my opinion.

Beware! Award booking deducted at new points values instead of values when booked
 

I just had MR deduct 340,000 points for a 5 night award reservation from my account that was a huge mistake since the reservation was made under the old points requirement for the hotel. Luckily I had my confirmation email that showed the points cost for the 5 night reservation was 180,000 under the old category instead of the 340,000 it is under the new hotel category. Hotel in question was the Domes of Elounda and when I called the Elite Line they tried to at first tell me that this was correct but then after putting me on hold she tried to charge me 60,000 per night (or 240,000) for the reservation until I told her that my paperwork confirmed the cost of 45,000 per night. Buyer beware and check the number of points they deduct for reservations made at the old points level.

CS offered no apology or anything! I don't understand how stuff like this can still be going on almost a year after the merger. CS could give a crap about it and she made it sound like I should be responsible for checking everything and that it is ok for them to just deduct whatever they feel like deducting.