Wedding at Marriott property and point earnings
 

Hi all,

I'm getting married at a Marriott property later this year and wanted to seek some clarification on points earning. I'm familiar with the general earning of points for merely having the event there, but wasn't clear on how the points work for the room block/room commitment. Our contract doesn't spell it out per se, but I noticed on the general Marriott Weddings site that I might be earning points for the actualized room nights for guests staying at the hotel under the wedding block, even though they are paying for the rooms.

Is this actually true? Meaning my guests will earn points if they add their Marriott # to their reservations, but then I also earn the same amount of points since it's under my wedding block? If so, do I also earn the usual 25% bonus points for being MR Gold?

And just to be clear, this sums up the points earning opportunities for having a wedding at a Marriott, right? Or am I missing anything?

- General points for having the event at hotel based on spend at the hotel (up to 50K points per event max)
- Triple points bonus (up to 150K) which was a Marriott offer when we booked the wedding last year (Vow to Get Away promotion)
- Points for paying for the Marriott event charges on my SPG Amex (2 SPG points/$ of Marriott spend, which equals 6 Marriott points/$ if I transfer to MR from SPG)
- Points for any rooms I pay for during the wedding + bonus if paid for with SPG Amex
- (open pending confirmation above) Points for the actualized room nights from guests staying at the hotel; standard earnings based upon room rate?

I had my wedding at a Marriott two years ago. I didn't receive any points for the rooms guests booked. I did receive points on my Marriott VISA on all the purchases since they all charged as Marriott purchases, in addition to bonus points (did not have the triple bonus available then).

In my case most of the guests were local and did not book nights, so maybe I didn't meet any minimum to earn credit for their stays.

The 50k points cap is pretty much set in stone, from my experience. It was one of two factors the RC Amelia Island refused to budge on.

Right, and the way I'm reading it is that the 50K cap is a cap for the actual wedding spend (ballrooms, catering, bar, etc). I'm aware of that but the triple points promo helps make up for that cap since the amount of "wedding spend" we're doing far exceeds the amount required for the 50K points max.

That said, on the website the points for room nights is a separate bullet point under the "earn" section http://www.marriott.com/meeting-event-hotels/rewards.mi
and that's what I'm most curious about since we expect to have 40+ committed rooms under the wedding block for 2-3 nights -- should be a decent amount of extra points if this is true!

I got married at RC Amelia Island last year. I structured my contract to make each event separate instead of the "wedding" as a single contract. I did the rehearsal dinner, wedding ceremony (including cocktail reception), wedding reception, and brunch as separate and distinct events.

I did not receive points on the 25 room block.

Nice work... Probably should have tried that. But they had us going back and forth for 3 weeks and I was pretty much done dealing with them. Beautiful property, though.

At the time I was new to Flyertalk and wasn't traveling much. I was able to negotiate two years of PLAT status as well. Not sure how that worked, but it hit my account within a few days of signing the contract.

Got back in touch with the coordinator at the hotel and he confirmed to me that it's a 50K max across all spend, including room blocks. He also confirmed they weren't able to change anything with the contract setup with regards to splitting events up. At least I know I have the triple points bonus coming my way plus the bonus points for putting the wedding charges on my SPG amex.

I may still try making a claim with corporate after the fact for the room block points since the website does make it appear the room block points are a separate category than the points for having the event.

All that said, big bummer for me and I wish I had known this or even thought about it when signing the contract. We were in such a rush to get everything closed out before end of 2016 and there was so much back and forth with negotiations on various pieces of the contract that it didn't even occur to me to look further into this. Looks like I might have left somewhere between 75K-100K additional points on the table from the room blocks (assuming it's the same 5pts/dollar earn for room rate), plus the 25% gold bonus :mad:

We just had our daughter's wedding at a Marriott. We received 50K bonus points for the event + triple points on a second event (morning brunch for the guests). The brunch points were awarded for the per person event price (not for tax/gratuities). However, we paid for the event with a Marriott Rewards Visa card, so we received 5X points on the entire cost from the credit card. We received bonus points for the rooms we used, but not for any additional guest rooms.

Everything in this world is negotiable.

The way around the 50K (plus bonus) cap is separate contracts.

I did this in 2012 the last time they were running a triple points promo. I walked out with about a million points before counting credit card bonuses.

Room block - one agreement
Room block (suites) for wedding party - another agreement.
Wedding catering - another agreement
Cocktail hour - 4th agreement
Brunch the next day - 5th agreement

You get the point.

I also negotiated an extra 250,000 points with my catering manager based on our overall spend at the property.