I have over 425,000 Marriott points, which allows be a 20 nights, 4 airline ticket award.

My questions:

Do the airline and hotel have to be used together? A previous thread discussed some of this--has anyone figured the way to maximize the redemption? It appears American Airlines just converts your airline award into Advantage miles, giving me felxibility as to how I want to use the award. It appears the maximum AA award is 60,000 to where Marriott has hotels and AA flies, so could I have 240,000 (4 tickets) deposited into my AA account and use them however and whenever I want?

If so, how does the hotel certificates (2-10 night certificates) work--do you have to use ten nights at one time, or can they be split from various hotels and different times (ie. 2 nights in April, 3 nights in May, etc.)?

Any input is appreciated.

I believe AA miles are just deposited in your AAdvantage AAccount (thats what they did on mine for Delta). The certificates do not need to be used in conjunction with the hotel stay. The certificates are good for a 10 night stay, no splitting or refunds.

Yep, AA is miles. So is CO, DL and UA.
http://www.flex.com/~dmk/marriott

I am planning on converting some of my points to AA miles, those of you who have done this before, could you tell me how long it takes to get the miles posted to your account? I am trying to get enough miles to go to Hawaii this summer, but would like to wait as long as I can, as I am only a couple thousand points from having enough points to convert to 10,000 miles and I hate to use 20,000 points for 5,000 miles.
Thanks
Cindi

The turnaround is pretty quick, usually within a week. They will actually deposit the required miles to Hawaii, or anywhere in the world you want to go. For example if you tell them you are going to Europe in the summer they will deposit 60,000 miles per person into your Advantage account.

mine were credited to AA within 5 days