I have read some reports of people being able to redeposit some of the points from a 7 night award but it was only a few points per hundred.

I think the redeposit amount was based on what the airline miles/points would have cost if they had originally started off as a airline/travel reward transfer (not very good rates).

Also you can book the travel package but not name the hotel or set dates. This allows you to use the airline miles/points for a current vacation and save the hotel stay for a future vacation.

Thanks so much Nissan! What you are saying is that I need to be committed to a 7 night award stay within two years or forfeit a lot of my points. I appreciate the helpful info!

Just remember, when you extend the certificate, they tack one year on from the point of your request-not add a year to the original expiration date.

I was told today that one can reinstate the certificate even after it expires. Also, one can turn it back into points (ranging from 45k to 70k) and then turn it back into a 7 day certificate at any later point in time. Just telling you what I was told. I had the guy repeat everything just so there was no misunderstandings. Next, I am going to email them so I can have the information in writing.

Where Should I stay with my 7 nights at a Cat 1-5?
 

So I'm planning on doing the RC card for me and my wife to get up to 270k points. With Marriott's hotel and air pack that should get us 120k sw points and 7 nights in cat 1-5. Mainly doing this for the SW companion status since we fly domestically a lot.

Now I don't want those 7 nights to go to waste though. I am usually able to use the 1 night free cat 1-4,-5 at courtyards and marriotts like that for weddings but I have no idea what to do with 7 nights in a row at a cat 5 marriott haha. Where the heck should I go?

And If I redeem marriott points for the package in early jan, how long do i have to redeem those 7 nights?

If you had 30K extra points to get CAT 6 there would be a whole lot more options, not sure I would want to spend a week here but its one of the better options:

Renaissance Tuscany Il Ciocco Resort & Spa

http://www.marriott.com/hotel-search/category5.hotels/

Yea I've been doing some research and it looks like I can buy the cat 5 package and then pay the difference later to upgrade. So this is totally doable. 7 days is just such a long time in the same place haha! Thanks for the helpful link :)

I could probably scrounge up another 100k after redeeming for the cat 1-5 and 120k sw points (270k) package so looks like I could do up to a cat 8 maybe if it's a good deal/worth it

To maximize this it would be best to do it in January. I'm guessing that's what your planning.

First of all, do you plan on doing the 7 nights domestically or internationally as you indicate that you fly SW. If you plan to use SW for the 7 night travel package, that will cut down most of the international suggestions that you may receive, such as the one above.

Could be the OP already knows that they need not use the miles in conjunction with using the pts. So they want an Intl Hotel stay and yet use their SW pts for dom trips at another time

A good point & not one that everyone knows, so thanks for the heads up and/or reminder to others.

Cheers.

I've never yet done a 7-day single-location stay anywhere in my life, but thinking about the times I've come close, it would have to be a central enough location for day side-trips. London comes up as one possiblity, because you can do easy day side-trips to places like Bath (by train), and (at least with a tour group) Stonehenge, plus lots to see in the city itself. But I'm not sure how many other cities there are with that much great stuff to see in easy day trips in different directions (and where one hotel location works for both seeing the city you're in and doing side trips*).

*In London, because of city driving fees, you probably don't want a car if you're staying in the city proper, and you probably don't want to stay on the outskirts if you want visit the city proper a lot. But London has above average train connections to a lot of places near enough for day trips.

In general, European cities might work better, because of lots of train connections to other nearby cities. (While staying in Brussels you could day trip by train to Brugges and Ghent and maybe even Amsterdam or Paris on Thalys [high-speed rail]. I can't think of any equivalent to that in the US!)

Yup, Jan. 1 or maybe the second :)

Yea it looks like I may have to book a hotel at the time but then I can cancel and re-book and get a 1 (maybe even 2) year extension on the 7 hotel nights. I have close to a mil points scattered around UR, MR, AA, etc so int'l is def an option.

Haha neither have I! 7 days is a long freaking time. I def like your idea of picking somewhere central. We just went to Rome as part of our honeymoon but somewhere like that would be a great place to use it. I would probably even be ok with going somewhere for 3-4 days, overnighting somewhere else and losing 1-2 nights in the middle or something like that.

I know that would have worked well for Rome since we had to fly out of Rome to go to Santorini. It would be cool to do something like 4 nights in Rome, 2 nights in florence (and just let the room sit vacant) and then come back to rome late on the 7th night since most flights leave relatively early.

While Rome doesn't sound too bad, it doesn't sound like the optimum place simply because most stuff around it (at least easily accessible by local transport) is mostly in two directions, north along the coast or south along the coast. And south is a stretch, because it's about 2 hours train ride to Naples, and then more beyond that to Pompeii, and even more beyond that to Sorrento and then the Amalfi Coat (where it's buses not trains), and even further beyond that to the wonderful Greek temple ruins at Peastum. If anything, Naples might be a more central base for that (but even then it'd be a lot of traveling each day in almost the same direction).

So I think London and Bressels are two cities which work out better for a central location with more to do without ever having to stay somewhere else, because there's trains in all directions from each of them to places worth visiting, and to the further away cities there are high speed trains (which there aren't from Rome IIRC).

Zurich might be another one. There are some high speed trains from there, so you could visit Luzern and Bern and all sorts of other places on day trips in different directions.

In Madrid you could sidetrip to Toledo, sidetrip to Segovia (with its own aqueducts), and with a car (but not with public tranport) also sidetrip to the "Don Quiquote" windmills in a region a couple hours drive south of Madrid. But the trick would be finding a Marriott hotel which is convenient to the freeways getting out of town while also conveient to public transportation for the days you want to spend in Madrid itself. (I stayed at the Hilton Madrid Airport hotel, which suited both purposes ok, but I don't know if there's a Marriott family hotel which is equally well located for both driving and local public transport. The only Marriott family hotel I stayed at on that trip was at an AC in the city proper before I rented the car and moved out to the airport.)

So I'm having trouble thinking of a third place that works as well as London or Brussels, because those two cities are in the midst of many other closeby cities worth visiting, in a way that not every major European base city is.

Vienna comes to mind, dont know about any fast trains, but besides what to do and see in VIE, can do a train trip to the Alps,Salzburg, Batislava is an hour away, Budapest is a 3hr train ride or 2 1/2 by car, could tack it on after VIE and fly back home from BUD instead of VIE