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Add 15k points to your Marriott Free Night Certificates
Marriott now allows you to add 15k points to your free night certificates. While this is a great new perk, IHG allows you to do the same thing to their 40k free night certificates without any cap ( meaning you could use a 40k cert and throw 60k on top of it to stay at the Six Senses Maldives like I did for my honeymoon ).
Marriott currently has 3 Free Night Certificates it regularly offers
- 35k found on the Boundless and Bonvoy Business
- 40k Annual Choice when you hit 75 elite nights
- 50k issued on the Amex Bonvoy Brilliant
- This is also issued as a promotional welcome offer periodically ( we did this 2 years ago on the Boundless for 5, 50k nights )
- 85k issued typically as promotional welcome offers on cards
They will populate your account and look like this:
I recently stayed at the New York Edition for 50k points
Unfortunately, when I stayed we couldn’t use our free night certificate since it was static at 35k and you couldn’t add points to it. With that said, it’s a gorgeous property and I’d definitely stay again with the new top up feature.
Now when I go to book I’m given the following option after hitting View Rates and selecting a room. 
This certainly makes the free night certificates more valuable after the recent dynamic award pricing model Marriott implemented which saw a ton of properties skyrocket in cost.
Overall
Marriott made their points a lot less valuable when they went fully dynamic and stripped their award chart completely. Unfortunately this is the direction we’re seeing all programs take, but this improves the value of the free night certificates. I’d like to see them follow in the footsteps of IHG and make the amount you can add unlimited, but it’s at least something. With Dynamic pricing you’ll often times see properties price just above the 35k, 50k, or 85k levels meaning the cert is unusable without the ability to top-up.
Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, endorsed or approved by any of these entities.
Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card
Welcome Offer
Earn 60,000 bonus points after you spend $4,000 on purchases in the first 3 months from account opening.
Annual Fee
$95
Points Earned
Transferrable Chase Ultimate Rewards
- 5x on all travel purchased through Chase Travel℠
- 3x on dining, including eligible delivery services for takeout & dining out
- 3x on select streaming services
- 3x on online grocery purchases
- (excluding Target, Walmart and wholesale clubs)
- $50 Annual Chase Travel Hotel Credit via Chase Travel℠
- The begins immediately for new cardmembers and after your account anniversary for existing cardmembers
- 2x on all other travel
- 10% Anniversary Bonus
- Every year you keep the card, your total spend will yield a 10% points bonus. If you spend $10k in a year, you’ll get 1k bonus points
- Chase Sapphire Preferred continues to redeem at 1.25c in the Chase Travel℠ and the slew of other benefits remain in tact including Auto Rental Collision Damage Waiver ( primary ), purchase protections, etc.
- Points are transferrable to 14 Ultimate Rewards partners
- Redeem in Chase Travel℠ for 1.25 cents per point
- No foreign transaction fees
- Suite of Travel and Purchase Coverage
- Auto Rental Collision Damage Waiver is my favorite
- Get complimentary access to DashPass which unlocks $0 delivery fees and lower service fees for a minimum of one year when you activate by December 31, 2027.
- $95 Annual Fee
We keep an up to date spreadsheet that lists the best ever offers: You can find that spreadsheet here.
Historically 80k is a very, very good offer and hit in both 2022 and 2023. In 2021, we saw the offer hit an all time high of 100k. Who knows if that will ever come back.
Main Cast:
Cards that earn flexible points and should be used on the bulk of your purchases.
Supporting Cast:
Cards that earn fixed points in the currency of the airline/hotel and can not be transferred at attractive rates. These cards yield benefits that make it worth keeping, but not necessarily worth putting a lot of your everyday spend on.
The Chase Sapphire Preferred® is exceptional starter card and offers transferrable Ultimate Rewards, and pairs well with other Chase cards.
If you carry this card alongside Chase’s cashback cards like the Chase Freedom Flex® and Chase Freedom Unlimited® or the business versions: Ink Business Cash® , Ink Business Unlimited® you can combine the points into Preferred account and transfer into hotel and airline partners
Annual fee is quite low at $95 a year + you get a 10% anniversary bonus on points + $50 hotel credit in Chase travel.
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