Using reward points
 

I have just joined the Marriott Reward Programme with the purchase of a timeshare in Marbella, as part of the deal I now have around 700,000 reward points. I was just wondering how to value them or consider using them, what are they worth?

Welcome SlackBladder! There are a myriad of threads, on this forum, about the value of points. Use the "Search" function and you find many opinions.

Basically use your points only to redeem travel packages with the maximum possible amount of miles. Second best is use points for hotel stays less than a week long. Forget about the rest of the catalogue. Marriott sells points at $12.5 per 1,000 for your reference. That's a conservative figure as you can make them yield much more.

Welcome to FT SlackBladder. As JTG mentions a search can be very helpful. I searched the Marriott forum with "value of points" as the search string and here are some good threads I found:

Devaluation - Did Marriott changes Category levels at 500+ hotels on 3/2?
When to Use Points/Value of Points
Value of Points
Vacation Clubs-Great use of Points!

There are more, but the above are some good ones to start with.

Probably the best value is the air/hotel packages. For 235K points you get 120K miles in a host of different airline programs and a 7 night stay in a cat 1-5 hotel. You don't have to use both at the same time/trip.

you can use the miles anyway you want: free flight, upgrades, etc.

The hotel portion can be "upgraded" later to a cat 6 or 7 if you decide to stay at one of thoese (15K more points for cat 6 and 35K more points for Cat 7).

The hotel certificate is good for a year, can be transferred to someone else (makes a great wedding gift) and can be extended for a year (or more).

You can even redeposit the hotel portion, although you only get 45K miles for it. Better than nothing if you don't use.

This is the only award I ever request, and I've been through 10 million point so far (of course, I used a lot of those points on even better awards that were available in the past...)

Using the points this way - I value marriott reward points at least 1.5 cents per point and sometimes 2 cents or more.

Billy

Ditto to both of the above. Travel packages are the way to go. And I value my points at around 1.5 to 2.0 cents each.

Excellent threads thanks for the info!

According to MarriottConcierge, the hotel portion of a travel package can be extended indefinitely (a year at a time). I have one I've extended twice already.