Well, yeah, maybe. You quote from the award stay language which may or may not pertain to travel packages. For example, the rule you quote also says that if you stay less days than the cert provides for, you can get points refunded. Think you can do that with a travel package certificate? I guess it would be good news if you could.

Just a guess:

Hotel manager might do this after you already have booked 2 week packages and one regular rate room for five nights - but only if they like you :) and if they have a way of modifying the reservations as you want without messing up their reimbursement.

Otherwise, you'll just have to throw away the 2 extra nights on the packages and pay for the third room.

I guess I will find that out in July as I requested two Travel Packages for two award rooms for 6 nights each. It would be great if I could get some points back from not staying that 7th night. But I'm not expecting any.

Marriott has some awards that are specifically designed for splitting nights (i.e. Hawaii and Europe sampler awards) where one gets 2 2-night awards and 1 3 night award. And as far as I have seen, a Travel package 7 night award is really nothing more than a 7 night award plus some airline miles. Yes, I realize they will penalize you if you try to return the room award, but that doesn't have anything to do with how a particular hotel would let you use the award. It is still just a standard award (unless you got the Stay Anytime version.) So I would think that they would have a Travel Package "Sampler" award if they were going to allow the use of multiple rooms.

With all that said, I'd love to be proven wrong. It would sure help me out if they would allow more flexibility in using the Travel Package room awards. :cool:

Marriott Reward Travel Package for family of 8
 

Hi Everyone,

I'm new to this board and have a question about how many points I need for a trip to Hawaii for my family of 8. USAir points to Hawaii for the week we want to go is 70,000/person. The hotel is a category 7.

7 nights category + 70K miles = 220,000 marriot points

Do I multiply this by 8?

Or is it since I already have enough USAir points for 4 of us do I only need use marriott points for the other 4

Any help is appreciated

I'm assuming that a USAir ticket to Hawaii is 35K per person and that you already have 140K (since you mentioned that you already have the points for 4 tickets.) Which also means you still need another 140K miles to get the other 4 tickets. You also need a minimum of 2 rooms since you have 8 people.

So with that you could order two Travel Packages each which include 70K miles. This would cost 440K Marriott points. Of course if you want/need more USAir points, you can up your two Travel Packages to include more points.

Well, you don't multiply by 8.
You multiply by the number of rooms you will need total. Each of the packages will come with the miles so if you order say 4 packages for 4 rooms you will also get 70K x 4 miles (or more if you pick a higher award). If you have no other air miles independent of these awards, that will leave you 4x 70k short. You might want to take the award with 120k miles (270k points) but that will also leave you short by 80k miles to get free tickets for all 8 so you might have to buy one. USAir may also have a way to buy miles to reach the award level required.

I guess the problem is US Air requires double the usual 35K miles. It seems to me that you might want to consider buying some of the tickets - especially for the people in the group who can use the earned miles on US or any Star Alliance carriers. Given the economy, you might find good fares on US or UA.

When you redeem a travel package award, you actually get two things (I was going to say two "pieces of paper", but they are literally pieces of paper). First, you get a hotel voucher (in this case, a 7 night stay at a cat 7). Second, you get airline miles deposited into your designated account. Accordingly, if you are planning to cram 8 people into one standard hotel room, you'll only need on hotel voucher.

Having said that, it reaches a point where you're better off doing the travel package because the incremental cost over just redeeming for miles is minimal. There is no requirement to use the hotel voucher at the same time as the miles, so you can just get extra hotel vouchers and use them in the future. I *think* they expire in one year but can be extended for another year for a minimal fee of $50.00 (If I'm wrong on that, someone will surely correct me).

The hotel voucher is electronic and either doesn't expire (according to Chris) or can be extended indefinitely for free.

As of October 2007 you have to have a hotel reservation to which you attach the 7-night hotel certificate, even if it is a dummy reservation just to hold the certificate. Chris told us a couple months ago that they intend on fixing this, so you won't have to have a reservation, but right now you do. If you cancel an award stay that has the Hotel portion of a Hotel+Air Travel Package attached, then the greatly reduced number of points for the Hotel portion of a Hotel+Air Travel Package will automatically be returned to your MR account. This is one of many bugs resulting from their October 2007 software downgrade.

7 nights + miles travel packages
 

This is probably a dumb question, but search is broken. If I redeem 250K points for a 7 nights cat 6 hotel package plus 120K UA miles, can I still use the 7 nights at a Cat 5 property if my wife changes her mind about where she wants to stay on a trip?

Yes you can

You can also use the award cert for a shorter number of nights. I rarely stay anywhere for 7 nights. I just redeemed a travel package for a 4 night stay, as use of the airline miles made it worthwhile for me.

If your not sure of the hotel you want to use the hotel cert for order the lowest possible category (i.e. Cat. 1-5). You can upgrade a cert by calling MR and paying the point difference between the category levels. So no penalty. But you can't call MR and get points back by reducing your cert's category level.

That is a TERRIFIC piece of advice. I wish that Marriott made this clear. Thanks so much!

Thanks a lot for all the good tips. You answered questions I hadn't even thought to ask yet.