【2022.4 update】The Free Night Award + points option is now live, but unfortunately you can only top off by up to 15,000 points. For example, a 35,000-point certificate can only be used for awards up to 50,000 points, and a 50,000-point certificate can only go up to 65,000 points. Even with dynamic pricing, it basically just lets you redeem about one CAT higher.

I randomly picked a hotel in Hawaii to test it out. It works now, but the search results do not show anything about free night certificates; they only show the number of points required.

At checkout, you can see that I have a 50,000-point certificate in my account, so I can add 4,000 points to redeem this stay.

Overall, I feel this feature was designed to work alongside dynamic pricing, so people can actually use their free night certificates instead of having them become difficult to redeem.

About these changes

Marriott posted a number of loyalty-program-related changes on Twitter today. The main points are below, and we’ll go through them one by one:

  • Elite status, points, Suite Night Awards, and Free Night Awards: expiration dates are being extended again!
  • Dynamic award pricing (replacing Off-Peak, Peak, and Standard) will begin in March 2022
  • Free Night Award + points redemptions will launch in early 2022

Overall, this is in line with the broader direction of loyalty programs today: things keep getting easier for beginners, while the upside for advanced users keeps getting lower.

Extensions across the board

In the previous round of Marriott extensions, things like Free Night Awards were extended to January 3, 2021 (news). This time Marriott is extending them again, so the new policy should pick up right where the old one left off. That means everyone can keep holding onto their certificates a bit longer—great news.

  • Elite status extension: elite status earned in 2019 and 2020 will be extended through February 2023
  • Points expiration extension: points expiration will be paused through December 31, 2022 (previously, points would expire after 24 months of inactivity)
  • Suite Night Awards extension: all Suite Night Awards will be extended through June 30, 2022
  • Free Night Award extension: certificates expiring between January 3, 2022 and June 29, 2022 will be extended through June 30, 2022

In addition, the spending requirement for Marriott Ambassador status in 2021 was reduced from $20k to $14k, and it will return in January 2022.

Dynamic award pricing

Marriott is also joining the move toward dynamic award pricing, which means hotels and room types will no longer have a fixed award chart. Instead, the number of points required per night will adjust dynamically based on market conditions. Based on Marriott’s video, the number of points required for a hotel will fluctuate within a certain range, and it appears the spread between the upper and lower ends could be as much as 9,000 points. My guess is that pricing will ultimately move within a range, but Marriott will not publish a specific chart. This dynamic pricing system will take effect in March 2022.

Starting March 2022, hotel categories (1-8) and redemption rates classified as Off-Peak, Peak, or Standard will be replaced with flexible point redemption rates. That means the amount of points needed to redeem a stay will be more flexible and will more closely align with hotel rates — based on availability, seasonality, etc. If you’re traveling somewhere with a lot of availability, you can expect to use fewer points. And if the destination you love is busier during your preferred dates, the redemption amount may increase.

Dynamic pricing is an old friend by now: UA, Delta, Hilton, IHG, and Hyatt have already adopted it or are about to. For experienced loyalty travelers, this is definitely bad news, because it becomes much harder to find sweet spots—situations where cash prices are high but award prices are low. Instead, people will increasingly redeem based on need: if you need that date, you book that date. You also lose the ability to tell whether the award price Marriott is showing for a given hotel is actually cheap or expensive. For beginners, though, there is some upside—at least the points are getting used.

There are really two kinds of dynamic pricing. One ties points directly to cash prices, quietly assigning a fixed value to points—for example, Marriott could set points at 1 c/p. In that case, a hotel costing $100 in cash would require 10,000 points, and one costing $250 would require 25,000 points. The other approach lets pricing float within a preset range. For example, if a hotel’s range is 20,000-30,000 points, then it would cost 30,000 when inventory is tight or cash rates are high, and 20,000 when demand is low. Marriott will probably use range-based pricing, since it can simply use the old hotel CAT-based point levels as the midpoint and set upper and lower bounds around that.

As for the value of Marriott points, I personally don’t think it will change that much overall. The ceiling on redemption value will drop quite a bit, but the floor probably won’t fall too low. And as long as Marriott points continue to transfer to airline miles, they should still hold up fairly well.

Marriott also has an official FAQ on this change, and we’ve already covered most of the key points above:

Free Night Award + points redemptions

Previously, Marriott free night certificates were strictly tied to the number of points required. A 35,000-point certificate could only be used for rooms costing up to 35,000 points, and a 50,000-point certificate could only be used up to 50,000 points. If you had multiple certificates to use, that could be awkward: you wouldn’t want to “waste” a 50,000-point certificate on a 35,000-point room, but you also might not want to combine a certificate with 50,000 points and be left holding a 35,000-point certificate. Marriott announced that in early 2022 it would launch a new redemption option called Free Night Award Top Off.

In early 2022, Members will have the opportunity to increase their Free Night Award by adding up to 15,000 additional points, expanding the value of the award and possible options across the portfolio.

In simple terms, this means you can add up to 15,000 points on top of the certificate’s face value when booking a stay. So a 35,000-point certificate can now be topped off to book a 50,000-point award, which is very good news. Combined with the extension of free night certificates mentioned above, this means that after 2022 you may be able to use several different certificates on a single trip, which is pretty nice. However, according to the FAQ, this option only applies to standard room redemptions (Standard and PointSavers™ redemptions); premium room types are not eligible.