With Marriott boasting a vast array of properties and brands worldwide, there are a few premium brands that stand out, each offering luxury experiences in sought-after destinations. For my analysis, I looked at the following Marriott brands:

Ritz-Carlton
St. Regis
EDITION
JW Marriott
The Luxury Collection
W Hotels
Autograph Collection Hotels
Tribute Portfolio
Design Hotels

These brands make up Marriott’s most exclusive offerings. In exploring these high-end options, I looked into over 300 hotels across all of Asia and the Middle East to uncover the most expensive stays and identify which hotels offer the best value when redeeming Marriott Bonvoy points.

If you are curious about the same type of analysis for Hilton properties on a global scale, check out my recent article on that here.

My recent analysis of high-end Hilton hotels and their points value (Source: UnmatchedVoyages.com)

Countries that I looked at for this Marriott analysis:

China
Japan
South Korea
Singapore
Thailand
Vietnam
Malaysia
Indonesia
India
Sri Lanka
Kazakhstan
Azerbaijan
Maldives
Israel
Georgia
Kuwait
United Arab Emirates
Oman
Qatar
Jordan
Saudi Arabia

Premises of this analysis

Marriott’s hotel search (Source: Marriott)

Unlike Hilton, Marriott does not show an average cash rate for each property. Instead, I had to select specific dates.

For this comparison, I decided on 4 date segments to average out any outliers or spikes due to big exhibitions and events in town:

February 4 - 7, 2025
April 19 - 23, 2025
July 30 - August 2, 2025
September 13 - 16, 2025

I then factored in additional taxes or fees where applicable to provide accurate point-value calculations. Note that my research is based on a mix of 3-night and 4-night stays; even longer stays can yield lower nightly cash rates. Also, Marriott’s “stay 5 nights, get the 5th night free” award feature can make your points more valuable.

HOTEL THE MITSUI KYOTO (Source: Marriott)

And, of course, keep in mind that points redemptions can be a phenomenal deal when it comes to public holidays, big sport events or other reasons why the cash rates in a town could suddenly spike up! This is something I cannot reflect in this analysis, so always double-check the values for your exact dates!

This analysis reflects my findings as accurately as possible, though there may be small discrepancies. If you spot any errors or have feedback, please reach out—I’d love to hear your insights.

1. The most expensive properties

Given the brands we are looking into here, the most expensive properties are widely spread all across the region. Unsurprisingly, we can find properties in the Maldives, as well as a lot of Japanese properties:

The St. Regis Red Sea Resort (Source: Marriott)

Marriott’s **most expensive** properties by average cash rate per night (Source: UnmatchedVoyages.com)

Vana Belle, a Luxury Collection Resort, Koh Samui (Source: Marriott)

If we look at the cost per night in terms of Marriott Bonvoy points, we see only a slight shift in the ranked properties:

Marriott’s **most expensive** properties by points (Source: UnmatchedVoyages.com)

2. The Least expensive properties

The cheapest properties by cash can be mostly found in China and Malaysia:

The Sifang Hotel Nanjing, Autograph Collection (Source: Marriott)

Marriott’s **least expensive** properties by average cash rate per night (Source: UnmatchedVoyages.com)

In line with the cheapest properties by cash, the cheapest hotels by points is fairly similar, with the same focus on China, India, and Malaysia:

The LUMA Hotel, a Member of Design Hotels (Source: Marriott)

Marriott’s **least expensive** properties by points (Source: UnmatchedVoyages.com)

3. Where your points get you the most value

Now, we are coming to the most interesting part of this analysis! You have a stash of Marriott Bonvoy points or are considering purchasing some during one of Marriott’s regular 100% bonus point promotions, where you can buy points for around 0.8 US Cents each.

To make this analysis more precise, I added the following premise to the results:

If you are using a cash rate, I assumed you would get the base 12.5 Marriott Bonvoy points per $ spent back. For a stay of 1 night for $200 you would receive 2,500 Marriott Bonvoy points. I am assuming here that the average Marriott customer holds a Gold status, which is fairly easy to achieve and gives you 25% bonus points.

I valued these additional points at 1 cent/point each, which is a bit more conservative than my personal points redemption average over the last bunch of bookings.

TA’AKTANA, a Luxury Collection Resort & Spa (Source: Marriott)

To summarize, a $200 a night stay effective “costs” you $200 - 2,500 points * $0.01 = $175.

So let me get to the table and show you what on average are the worst and best redemptions of your Marriott Bonvoy points (please always check for your specific dates as both cash and award rates can vary).

3.1 The worst value of your Marriott Bonvoy points:

Generally, it seems that the cheaper a property is the worse your points redemption. We see the rather inexpensive Tribute Portfolio properties in Asia and the United Arab Emirates fairly high on the list. None of the properties go above $400 per night.

The Prince Kyoto Takaragaike, Autograph Collection (Source: Marriott)

If you set the cost of a point at 0.8 cents/point, you can see that none of these properties are on average an attractive deal for award nights. In fact, for each of them you’d be spending extra money on buying points and redeeming them instead of just booking the cash rate.

Marriott’s properties by **worst** points value (Source: UnmatchedVoyages.com)

3.2 The best value of your Marriott Bonvoy points:

Now we are getting to the real deal! As somewhat expected, the best value for your points are with properties that generally charge very high cash rates. This is due to Marriott’s limitations of how much they charge for standard award nights. Most property charge below 150,000 Marriott Bonvoy points per night which at a price of 0.8 US Cents/point result in a $1,200/night cost to you. While that sounds like a lot, some properties charge up to $3,000 per night for a base room!

The Park Chalet, Shahdag, Autograph Collection in Azerbaijan (Source: Marriott)

Especially the aspirational tropical island properties on the Maldives are on this list. Mind you that finding availabilities for some of these properties is extremely difficult. An analysis I saw on another site put the average award availability at under 10% of the dates within an entire year. You might have to book these stays very far out to get such a deal.

Marriott’s properties by **best** points value (Source: UnmatchedVoyages.com)

4. Where can I get Marriott Bonvoy points?

Besides staying at Marriott-owned properties, there are many other ways to get Marriott Bonvoy points. If you are located in the United States, you will likely have access to some fantastic credit cards with large sign-up bonuses that you can transfer to Marriott.

If you, like me, do not live in the United States and don’t have easy access to such credit cards, your best bet is to buy points.

Marriott does have regular promotions where they sell their points with bonus, effectively selling the points at around 0.8 US cents/point, depending on the specific promotion. For some of the above properties this is a no-brainer and you can simply buy the points right before you want to book your stay.

Marriott’s regular points promotion (Source: Marriott)

If you want to check if Marriott has a sales promotion at the moment, you can check it out through the link below (this link will bring you to Hilton’s points purchase site. Please note that this is an affiliate link which will earn this website a commission. This is at no extra cost to you, so we super appreciate your support!):

To the Marriott Points Purchase website

From the legendary Ritz-Carlton Maldives, Fari Island to the boutique hotels of the Autograph/Tribute/Luxury Collections brand, there are some fantastic redemptions possible. In fact, just in the last few months I have redeemed points for properties such as the Ritz-Carlton Kyoto, the Ritz-Carlton Nikko, the Ritz-Carlton Reserve on Hokkaido and the OSAKA STATION HOTEL and have through that managed to stay at these luxurious properties while only paying a fraction of the cost.

5. A deeper analysis

Given that I had all the data already in an Excel sheet, I thought it would be interesting to see if we can find a trend in it. Below you can find a scatterplot of all 300-ish properties I looked into.

Scatterplot chart of all analyzed properties (Source: UnmatchedVoyages.com)

First takeaway is that there are plenty of properties that lie below the 0.8 cents per point mark that I would classify as the border between getting a discount and making a loss. What is interesting is that the clear trend of higher-priced luxury properties netting you the most value per point, that we saw in the Hilton analysis, does not hold true as much for Marriott - at least, if we only look at Asian and Middle Eastern high-end properties.

JW Marriott Jeju Island Resort & Spa (Source: Marriott)

If you are looking to maximize your points and are trying to exceed a 1.0 cent per point redemption, you should be looking carefully at each property individually and specifically for your date. However, I hope that you can find some inspiration from this analysis.

There are also outliers, that are surprising. The Park Chalet, Shahdag, Autograph Collection in Azerbaijan certainly is the biggest outlier, with a valuation of around 2.66 cents per point. To be fair, however, despite taking data for a total of four date ranges for each property, this property specifically and some other niche properties did not show any values for the dates that are further out into next year, such as July or September 2025. Thus, these properties’ values are not averaged out as cleanly. Interestingly, this seems to be mainly an issue with properties in Azerbaijan, as you can only book them until Februrary 2025 as of today (Nov 25, 2024).

Lastly, let me emphasize again that all these values are average values. I have had fantastic redemptions at Marriott properties exceeding the 1.0 cents per point mark due to my bookings being during public holidays or big exhibitions in that area. Always compare the points and cash prices for your exact dates.

Conclusion

Whenever you are planning on staying at a property, it is always worth it to briefly compare the cash rate to the point rate. But most of the time, the rule of thumb should be that if the property costs less than $400 per night, you will likely be served better with paying by cash and saving the points for another stay.

If this article was helpful to you, please feel free to share it! Also consider using our affiliate link below if you are planning on buying Marriott Bonvoy points - this comes at no extra cost to you but helps support such analyses. Or buy me a coffee (coffee image on the bottom right) if you like :)

To the Marriott Points Purchase website