Frequent Miler on the Air - Marriott Bonvoy pros and cons | Coffee Break Ep114 | 7-14-26

Episode Date: July 14, 2026

Bonvoy is the program we love... to hate. Having said that, we'd be lying if we said there were no redeeming features of this program. In this episode, we'll talk about the pros and cons of the Marriott Bonvoy program.(00:58) - Pros(06:53) - Cons(11:50) - See our resource (or "matrix") for determining which Marriott card you may be eligible for hereSubscribe and FollowVisit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media.Music Credit – “Ocean Deep” by Annie YoderMentioned in this episode:Visit FrequentMiler.com Did you know that Frequent Miller is also a website? At frequentMiller.com, you'll find all the latest deals, news about points, miles, and rewarding credit cards, the single best, Best Credit Cards page on the web, guides to all popular rewards programs, and many other terrific resources. If you'd like to get our posts sent to your email, go to frequentMiller.com/subscribe and sign up for free. https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/Check out all of our other travel podcasts from around the worldThis podcast is part of Voyascape, a podcast network that brings together the world's best travel podcasts. You can find all of our podcasts from around the world at Voyascape.com. If you are interested in advertising or sponsored content on any of our shows you can find out more at the link below.Voyascape Podcast Network

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world atvoyescape.com. Today's coffee break, Marriette Bonvoy, pros and cons. Welcome to Frequent Milers Coffee Break, where we focus on a single topic related to miles and points. Each coffee break is limited to 20 minutes or less or your money back. Bonvoy is a program we love to hate. And it's not just the name. There are all kinds of of things that just really ticks us off about Marriott Bonvoy. That said, there's actually quite a lot to like. So on today's coffee break, we're going to talk about the pros and cons of the Bonvoy program. And wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to like this. Give it a thumbs up, subscribe, enable notifications. We want you to know when we release new content

like this. And don't forget, you can always find some more information in the show notes. So just expand the description box. If you're looking to jump ahead, if you're more of a glass half empty type of a person and you want to hear me rant about the cons, then you can jump ahead to that probably in the show notes. So anyway, so I mean, you said there's a lot to be happy about when it comes to Marriott Bonfoy. And I'm really curious, what is there to like? First and foremost, I think they have an amazing catalog of hotels. So Marriott hotels can be found everywhere. And a lot of them are like truly great properties. You know, the way I look at finding places to stay where I want to go is, you know, there's certain things that

important to me, whether there's location, type of property, you know, type of benefits at the property, things like that. And it's really actually rare for there not to be a Marriott in the mix after I've looked at reviews and location and all those things. And so there's a lot of good options with the Bonvoy program. And so that itself is a great thing about the Bonvoy program. Another thing I like, there's a number of credit cards where they offer you an annual free night automatically just for paying the annual fee. And they can be really good value as Saktra cards. And what I mean by that is like they're not necessarily good value to put any of your spending on. But if you just use the annual free night every year, you could easily come out way ahead of the annual fees for these.

cards. And so between my wife and I, we have a bunch of these cards and have a bunch of annual free nights we can use every year. Another thing I like about the Bonvoy program, they allow topping off free night certificates with up to 25,000 points. So for example, if you have a 35,000 point free night certificate and the hotel you want to stay at costs 40,000 nights, you can add 5,000 points and stay at that property and use your certificate. They also offer free point transfers to others. So you can send up to 100,000 points to another person. And if multiple people are sending you points,

you can receive up to 500,000 points per year. It doesn't cost anything to do that. So that's always good. Sharing is caring. Marriott has their version of Fifth Night Free Awards. They call them stay for five, pay for four. And the way it works is when you're booking with points, entirely with points, the whichever nine

is the cheapest, they take off the cost of that stay. So your stay can be up to, what, 20% cheaper because of that. And another thing I like, see, this is a pretty big list, right? Yeah, you're still going. You're still going. Yeah, I'm still going. Yeah, I'm only like, a little more than halfway through. They have an easy to get meaningful elite status. So platinum status is where you could get free breakfast, access to lounges. and some other perks like 4 p.m. late checkout. And it's pretty easy to get. For example, you could simply get the Amex Bonvoy Brilliant card and you have platinum status. Or if you want to get your status by having 50 nights each year, another easy way to do that is by getting both a personal

bonvoy card and a business bonvoy card. Each of those gives you a certain number of automatic nights towards status each year. And because one is personal and one is business, they combine. Like multiple personal ones don't combine, but a business and personal one will combine. And that could get you to 30 nights automatically or even 40 nights automatically, depending on which cards you have. And then you just need, you know, 20 nights or 10 nights to get to the 50 nights required for platinum status. And that's a very low bar for such a major chain to have, meaningful status attainment. It also has relatively easy to get lifetime platinum status. Now, for people just starting, it won't sound easy, but compared to many other chains, it's very accessible. You need 600 nights, but that includes nights earned from your just having credit cards. So a lot of

those nights can be getable that way, and you do need to have had 10 years of platinum status or higher to get there. But again, that's very achievable. Both Nick and I have achieved that. And transfers to airline miles are available at not awful value. So, I mean, I wouldn't go out and purposely transfer my Marriott points to airline programs. But if you need to top off your airline miles and you don't have transfer old points that transfer one to one, you could transfer from Marriott to many, many different programs, three to one, sometimes slightly. better depending on exactly how you go about it. Finally, if you can achieve titanium status, which is the 75-night level, you automatically, you can get free United Airlines Silver

status and Air Canada Aeroplane 25K status. Both of those have their own associated benefits when flying those airlines. So there's a lot of extra perks there for getting to that 75-night threshold, which is very nice. Yeah, so, I mean, there are a lot of things to like. Greg mentioned both of us have lifetime platinum status. And, you know, that's something that I've found relatively easy to get, like he said, because of the elite nights that count from just holding the credit cards every year. I haven't actually spent anywhere near 600 nights at Marriott Properties over the last 10 years.

And I just earned Lifetime Platinum last year. So I just finally, or maybe early this year, I guess early 2026. So it's relatively new for me. So, yeah, I mean, there are a lot of things to love. But not everything is lovable. And we'll be right back with Bonvoy's cons after this. We hope you're enjoying the Frequent Miler on the air podcast. Did you know that Frequent Miler is also a website?

At frequentmiler.com, you'll find all the latest deals, news about points, miles, and rewarding credit cards, the single best best credit cards page on the web guides to all popular rewards programs and many other terrific resources. If you'd like to get our post sent to your email, email, go to frequentmiler.com forward slash subscribe and sign up for free. And we're back. As I started off the show, I mentioned that we love to hate Bonvoy, and it's not just the name that we hate. And then I went on to list all these great things about it.

So we are now back with the flip side of the coin. What possibly could we dislike about Marriott Bonvoy, Nick? Well, that's a good question. You know, you said it's not just the name that we like to hate. And it's funny because I think at this point, the Miles and Points community, right, the Bonvoy name was hated when it was launched. But gosh, it's been got to be getting close to 10 years now since they launched that. Right. I mean, it's got to be six or seven or eight anyway since they launched it. So I guess if you're relatively new to the hobby, you might not harbor the same hate of the name that many of us do. But, but we do love to hate some of the things about it. Maybe we don't love to. There are things that we hate. So let's talk about some of the cons. First.

of all, the biggest one for me, I think, is that there's no enforcement of the elite benefits. So as a platinum member, for instance, you're entitled to complimentary breakfast at a lot of Marriott brands, most Marriott brands. It's kind of hard to know. First of all, you've got to consult a chart to know what benefits apply to you where. I guess that's the thing I hate the most. But the second most is that even when you're entitled to those benefits, some hotel owners just try to get out of it by saying, oh, well, the restaurants own separate. so we can't provide breakfast there or, oh, we can't, you know, honor your late checkout because of whatever. And the problem is that Marriott doesn't do anything about that. They tend to just let that slide and let that go because, as has been pointed out many times before, Marriott's customers are not the guests. Their customers are the hotel owners. And so they want to keep the hotel owners happy. Those are the people paying Marriott to be affiliated with the brand. So as a customer, it often feels like you don't matter much to the program

because the program's not going to go to bat for you. Right. And some people in the know might mention, but wait a minute, Marriott has this elite benefit guarantee where if they don't provide the benefits, you're due like lots of points or cash or both. The problem there is they don't enforce that. They make you go to the hotel yourself to demand these benefits. And if the hotel says no, you're out of luck.

And so it's not going to do it. anything about it. It's just frustrating. Yeah, it is. That's really frustrating because it, it, it, I don't know, it degrades the program. It takes away a lot of the, the meaningful nature of the benefits. If you don't know, you'll get them. And now we say that, and there are plenty of good hotels out there that do honor the benefits as intended. The problem is just that that doesn't matter when you're saying at one that doesn't. And those are the times when you need the program to back you up. And unfortunately, Marriott just doesn't. So that's a big con. Next up, Marriott charges resort fees.

on award stays. I hate this. Hilton, Hyatt, and Wyndham do not charge resort fees when you use your points to book an awards day. But with Marriott, your free night award is not necessarily free. And in fact, very frequently is not free these days because there's either a resort fee or what they call it destination fee now because, you know, they want to be able to charge that in New York where there aren't resorts or wherever else may be the case. So I hate that about Marriott. And I do love the other programs not charging resort fees on your award stays with those programs that don't anyway. So that's that's certainly a con. Next, they have dynamic-ish award pricing. And we say dynamic-ish because there is like a range for each hotel, not one that they publish publicly,

but you can kind of figure it out as to what the range is. So it goes up and down as the cash price goes up and down, which means that points are typically worth about three-quarters of a cent each. That's the median figure for redemptions. There are certainly times when you can get outsized value out of your Marriott points. And there are also times where you can get awful value out of your Marriott points. But about three quarters of a cent per point is what you can usually expect. And there's not as much opportunity for far outsized value because of the dynamic nature of award pricing. That dynamic nature of award pricing can also be really annoying because Greg mentioned earlier that you can top off your free night certificates with

up to 25,000 points, but just the other day I ran into a property that was like 26 or 27,000 points more than the value of my free night certificate. And that's really annoying when that happens and then you can't use your free night certificate. So that's another con. There's no great way to earn points with Marriott other than paid stays. So I mean, if you're traveling a lot for business and somebody else is paying for it, then great. You can collect a bunch of Marriott points on your stays, but if that's not your situation, it's difficult to earn a lot of Marriott points. There's a limited number of welcome offers out there. There are a lot of cards, but there are also a lot of rules in terms of which card you're eligible for based on which card or cards you either have

or have had in the past. It gets pretty complex. Again, we have to have like a matrix for this to help you determine which cards you might be eligible for. And unlike any other program out there that I can think of anyway. Marriac cards are issued by two different entities, both Chase and Amex, and the rules apply across the two banks. So that's really an oddity there that makes it more complicated. Credit card spend in general is just suboptimal. Most of the cards are in 2x everywhere, which is not a good return on your spend when you consider that the median point value is about three quarters of a cent. That means you'd be earning about one and a half percent back by putting an ordinary purchase on a card, and that's at median redemption value, and it's in Marriott

funny money. So it's not like actual cash. You'd do better off with just a 2% cash back card in general if you're looking to put regular spend on a card. And you do much better, of course, yet if you were earning two transferable points per dollar. I mean, you could be using a Mananax Blue Business Plus for two points per dollar and up to $50,000 in purchases per year, then one X after that with no annual fee. Just as one example, there are plenty of other two X cards out there on the market. And like I said, you could use a cash back card and then buy Marriott points when they go on sale because they go on sale for less than a penny a point regularly enough. You know, we see it around nine-tenths of a cent per point. So if you're using a two percent cash back card

for all your purchases and you bought Marriott points on sale, you could buy two points for every dollar that you've spent and still have a little bit of cash leftovers. So, you would do much better with a 2% cashback card and buying Marriott points periodically. And the upgrade certs that you get as a milestone benefit. So at 50 nights, you can choose five nightly upgrade awards, they call them now. They're not ideal. These are what should kind of be sweet upgrades, what would be sweet upgrades in another program probably. But Marriott changed the name to nightly upgrade awards a few years back so that hotels could offer a broader range of upgrade opportunities,

which in some cases might be nice, I suppose. The problem is that they're not confirmed until at most five days before arrival. And depending on the brand, maybe only three days prior to arrival. And of course, they're not eligible to be used at all at some hotels. And so it gets really annoying

trying to use those upgrade starts. They frequently don't clear. And they don't clear automatically based on availability. So even though the suite you want might be available five days ahead of arrival or four days or three days or two, or even up to the day before, it doesn't mean you're going to get it. An algorithm decides whether or not they should give that to you

or try to sell it to somebody else. And so you have no insight and no guarantee, no idea whether that's going to clear until the day before arrival, potentially, unless it clears sooner, which has happened to me before, but very frequently it doesn't clear at all. So those upgrade awards are of limited use at best. So there are plenty of things to hate about Marriott as well. So, I mean, how do you feel about the program overall, Greg?

Are you more like, you know, on the bright side here and saying it's a positive thing? Or did I convince you with the negatives to take a darker look at Marriott? I agree with all the negatives. And there's probably a bunch more that some listeners are saying, you forgot about, you know, X, Y, and Z that's annoying about the program. That said, so for all my kind of annoyance with all those things with Bonvoy, in real life, I find that, as I said at the outset, I often find Marriott hotels are where I want to be. And even though their award chart is kind of semi-dynamic and word prices keep going up,

I do in real life keep finding real opportunities where I'm getting good value from my Mariette points or free night certificates and everything. So it's one of these programs that, like, I really dislike. Like, what comes to my mind more often than not are the things I dislike. But in actual practice, I turn to the program pretty often and get good value from it. So it's a bit of a love-hate relationship from my end. How about you? Yeah, you know, I mean, I'm less on the love end of the love-hate relationship.

I am more on the hate end of that. But like you said, I do stumble into opportunities a number of times per year. Not as often as you probably, but a number of times per year where there just happens to be a marriott where I want to be. And the point value happens to be decent or maybe just the point value is really good, even if it's not necessarily the ideal hotel. So there are enough times when that happens for me. Now, that's just a function of where I travel probably, though, because depending on where you

And when you go there, I could easily see that not being the case for a lot of folks. So I do enjoy having a stash of Marriott points. I'm glad that I do have a decent stash still because they become valuable in the right scenarios. I'm very happy to continue collecting my free night certificates because I have lifetime platinum. I'm not worried at all about how many nights I spend at Marriott anymore. And I know I can get those platinum benefits when I use those free night certificates. so I'm happy enough with the program that I'll continue staying at Marriott properties with those free night certificates and getting good value out of the cards that offer the free night certificates. But I'm not investing a lot of time and effort in earning more Marriott points or, and I don't feel a particular affinity for Marriott in the way that I might have towards some other programs in the past.

So it's very similar feelings, I suppose. This episode was produced and edited by Carrie Yoder. music by Annie Yoder. If you've enjoyed what you've heard today and you'd like to get more of this in your email inbox each day or each week, go to Frequentmyler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media. Join our Frequent Myler Insiders Facebook group. And wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to like this or give it a thumbs up.

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