I'm booking an award stay and the following language is near the rates:

180,000 points for stay
eCertificate plus 1 upgrade certificate required per night

I click on it and the next page says nothing about "1 upgrade certificate required per night."

I don't have any upgrade certificates and I'm not sure how to acquire them.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Which property so we can look at what it says/see types of rooms?

Cheers.

La Concha Renaissance in Puerto Rico.

It looks like I can choose points upgrade or cash upgrade. Points upgrade is 20,000 more points than points + cash upgrade. Maybe that 20,000 points is equivalent to the $25 cash upgrade per night.

Upgrade certs are 5000 per night.

Great! Thank you so much! That makes sense but I started to get worried that there was some additional item I was going to need at check in.

I have the same question except a different property (well, any one of three properties, actually).

I'm looking at the Marriott Vacation Club Properties around SeaWorld in Orlando, FL (Cypress Harbour, Grande Vista, or Harbour Lake).

All three allow me to upgrade to a 1BR Villa for "1 upgrade certificate" or a 2BR Villa for "2 upgrade certificates" per night. However, the reservation doesn't explain what those will cost. Is the standard rate 5,000 points per cert per night?

Yes, 5000 per cert per night. Generally one cert per bedroom at Vacation Clubs. Well worth it in my opinion.

I agree it is a fantastic deal, but it leads to two dumb questions about Marriott's IT system:

1. Why not tell me how much an "upgrade certificate" costs during the booking process (or at least as far as I got before hitting cancel)?

2. Even more basic...why not just say up front that 3 nights will cost 135,000 points instead of 105,000 and not mess with the whole upgrade certificate terminology at all?

Answers:

1. Marriott IT sucks.

2. Marriott IT sucks.

I do believe it is to allow each hotel (or MVCI property) to have the flexibility of not listing certain room types or to allow for multiple upgrade instruments (i.e. 5K awards or cash).

Note that I do believe that normally, the online reservation system will show the "total" number of points required for a particular room. For example, I just searched for an MVCI property that has studios, 1, 2 and 3 bedroom units. A studio unit lists for 120K points for 4 nights. A 3 bedroom unit shows up as 180K points. (And the Rate details shows that the costs is 120K for a base room plus 3 upgrade certs per night or 60K for upgrades which means a total cost of 180K.)

Also know that a number of hotels may not put all their "upgradeable" rooms in the online inventory. Thus one would have to call the hotel to see if they would offer those room types for awards and if so, how many upgrade certs 'per night' it would cost.

Ok...maybe I'm just going crazy (entirely possible these days), but every time I have looked at the three specific MVCI properties around SeaWorld, Orlando...they've only shown the base points plus "upgrade certificates". At any rate, thanks for the replies and I now know what I'm calculating.

Searching around for how an MVCI property lists the different 'upgrade' options, I chose the St. Kitts MVCI property to look at. I noticed that a 3 bedroom Oceanside (which is the closest and best views of the beach in the whole property) for 5 nights is only 195K points. Those things are almost 2100 sqft. and up to 10 people can stay in one of those units.

Darn, I may have to look at going out there with some friends for a nice vacation.

Very good place to use points since they charge 18 percent mandatory resort fee.

One of the highest I have ever seen.

Wow - that does sound like a good deal!

Cheers.