I am throwing my daughter a big wedding at a JW Marriott in March. The wedding will cost a substantial amount of money. I want to try to determine how best to take advantage of rewards points associated with the wedding expenses. Any thoughts or guidance on this would be extremely appreciated.

how much you talking about....can u sign up for multiple cards now..can use it to cover the min spending...

the amex gold bus has a 10k min for 50k points...

also can just score of of those 2% cashback cards...I believe capitol one has 2% one now..

http://www.capitalone.com/smallbusin...-cash-premier/

You need to give us a lot more information. Do you prefer hotel points or airline miles? Or cash back? What programs? How much do you fly & how often do you use hotel rooms?

Probably will put well over $50,000 on the CC. Wife and i love to travel and airline or hotel would both be useful. I believe you can get 5x points for $ spent at Marriott on some cards.

Yes, 5 points/$ on the Marriott Premier Visa. At least 50k signup bonus, annual fee waived, as well. If you find the right offer, it might be 70k instead and/or include a Cat 1-4 cert the first year.

Between the signup bonus and this spend, you can easily redeem for a Travel Package. That would make your points worth at least 1 cent each. You're looking at a minimum 5% effective rebate on the wedding.

Do you have any cc with a 50k spend limit?
The one bad thing about applying for a new card is that you cannot request a CL increase for a few months after it is open (at least for amex and citi for sure) so you may be stuck with a 5-10K limit but a 50k bill and have to split the bill between multiple cc.

BA Visa Signature will get you the two-for-one cert at $30k spend.

Are you limiting yourself to one card?

How many miles do you have in your AAdvantage account? Since you're Miami-based, you may want to consider getting all three Citi AA cards and meet the spending minimums ($1500 + $4000 + $1500) to receive 232K miles, which will also count towards your million mile status through December 1st, when this finally ends.

I would then sign up for the Marriott card to take advantage of the 5 point per dollar on the remaining $43,000 you have to spend (if Chase will give you a limit that high). In the end, you would have a combined 500,000+ air and hotel points.

Most weddings have a payment schedule for making additional payments as the day comes closer. So it's not $50k at once. All you have to do is call them and run the card for $10k or whatever they can within the CL then go online make a payment and then charge again a few days later.

Inquire whether you can pay all (or at least substantial part of the bill) using Marriott gift cards - there are special offers (I believe some of them are active at the moment) that allow you to buy these GC at 10+% discount.

This discount will be on the top of any credit card miles/points you will receive for purchasing these credit cards.

If you're, say, buying out the hotel's restaurant for the night, see whether they will put the charge directly on your room folio (with or without a prepayment). Then you'll get the 10 points/dollar for the eligible spend, plus any elite bonus, plus the bonus for using the Marriott CC.

Kinda wish you had more daughters, don't you!

Everyone has given good ideas. For my daughter's wedding, I had about 9 month lead time and called every month and told them how much to charge out to me so I got to use the cards and the charges never ran up against any credit limit. Truly win-win-win!

But no matter what you do, don't let her use the points for her honeymoon! You deserve it.

Some pretty good ideas out there.

My thoughts -
I personally like the idea of putting the entire bill on to your room so that you get the 10 pts/$ for the entire event. If that's not possible, or the hotel wont do it, I'd look at starting to stock up on Marriott Gift Cards for a rebate of 10-24% effective discount.

If you are looking at the gift card route, make sure you purchase them through one of the cashback sites so that you get upto a 4% rebate on the purchase. I personally use ShopAtHome.com and have found them to be pretty reliable (as in the purchase actually posts automatically) versus BigCrumbs where I have to always open a ticket and have someone track down the cashback.

PM me if you want additional details.

If the contract hasn't been signed already, negotiate bonus points for hosting the wedding at that property! A friend was able to negotiate a bonus of 300k Hyatt GP points in addition to getting a bonus for each block of 10 rooms reserved. Granted, this was a 500 guest wedding with over 60 rooms reserved by guests. I think the final bill was over $150k and the parents netted over 1.5MM points which is enough for 70 nights at any Park Hyatt! Not a bad deal at all...the hotel initially balked and said the most they could earn was 100k and they were going to walk.

Agreed. Also check out the Marriott Rewards threads. There's a bonus out there for events. Definitely check that out and then call the event coordinator at the hotel. I imagine that they'd rather give you points galore versus negotiating cheaper rates, and I'd definitely take them up on that.

I also really support the MR Visa in your case - you'll be Silver automatically, which gives an additional 10% bonus.