I don't have much luck with Marriott's Nightly Upgrade Awards, the upgrade certificates you get with elite status. Marriott renamed these from Suite Night Awards a while back, once they started allowing these to be used for premium rooms and not just actual suites. The usual advice is that the upgrades rarely work at US hotels, since there are more elite members floating around than there are premium rooms to hand out. A couple of mine have expired without ever doing anything. So I wasn't expecting much when I requested one for a one-night stay at the Lido House in Newport Beach a few weeks ago. It came through about three days before check-in and put me in one of the property's two-bedroom cottages.
What I paid
I booked the night on the free night award that comes with the Marriott Bonvoy Brilliant card from Amex. That certificate covers a room costing up to 85,000 points. The night I wanted was a little higher, so I added 13,000 of my own points to make up the gap, plus $55 in taxes and fees. Marriott raised the limit in March of this year, so you can now put up to 25,000 points toward one of these certificates instead of the old 15,000 cap.
So out of pocket I was in for 13,000 points and $55. The rest was the certificate, which I get once a year for holding a card I'd hold regardless.
For reference, here's what that 2-queen room costs if you just book it outright: 98,000 points, or $857 with taxes.
Those price screenshots are from a similar summer night, not my exact date, but I picked one where the standard room came out to 98,000 points, the same as mine, so it's a fair comparison. $857 for 98,000 points works out to a little under 0.9 cents per point. For Marriott that's a fine redemption, a bit better than their points usually go for, but not remarkable. On its own it would have been an ordinary award night. The cottage is what changed that.
The cottage
There are five of these tucked behind the main hotel, and each one is a full three-story house rather than a room. They were building more cottages next-door while we were there. You walk in on the ground floor to a living room, a dining table, and a real kitchen with a washer and dryer.
A staircase runs up the middle of the place and connects all three floors. Light wood steps, black metal railings, and open enough in the center that from the top floor you can look straight down to the ground floor.
Upstairs there are two bedrooms, one with a king and one with two queens.
And then one more flight takes you up to a private rooftop deck with a couch, a dining setup, and a built-in grill, looking out over the Lido peninsula. I had no idea the roof was even part of it until I got up there.
The cottage sits on the hotel grounds, not off on its own, so you still get the main pool and the rest of the resort. It's a good-sized pool in the courtyard the cottages back onto, loungers and cabanas around it and the hotel wrapped around the far end. Nothing over the top, but it's a nice spot to spend an afternoon, and staying in a cottage doesn't cost you access to any of it.
Was it worth it
That same cottage books at 308,000 points, or $2,148 a night on the cash package that throws in breakfast for two.
I'm not going to claim I got $2,148 of value out of 13,000 points, because that's definitely not true. The upgrade came from a status perk, not from the points I spent.
Those two prices also make a decent case against ever redeeming points for the cottage. At 308,000 points it comes out to about 0.7 cents each, versus 0.9 for the standard room, so you'd be paying three times the points for a room that isn't three times nicer. Paying points for the cottage was never the smart play at these prices. Booking the standard room and hoping the upgrade cleared was.
So the night really came together out of a few separate things. The certificate did most of the work, since a free night worth up to 85,000 points is the main reason to carry a $650 card, and this stay alone went a long way toward covering that fee before I'd even used the card's $300 in dining credits. My 13,000 points and $55 just closed the small gap that remained. The upgrade is what turned the standard room into the cottage, and that comes from the five upgrade awards you can pick as Titanium's annual choice benefit. That last piece is the one you can't count on. Mine cleared this time, plenty haven't before, and at a US hotel I go in assuming it won't.
None of this is a secret, for what it's worth. The certificate's printed on the card, the top-off for points above the certificate value is a button in the app, and the upgrade awards are something a lot of people are already carrying around. If you've got one sitting there, I'd throw it at a stay and not overthink it. Worst case is that it lands back in your account a few days before check-in, which is what usually happens to me anyway.
Working out whether a card's annual fee is pulling its weight, or what to do with a benefit you're already holding, is most of what PointBagel is for.
