How good is the new offer on the Marriott Bonvoy Business® American Express® Card?

Other links to products and travel providers on this website will earn Traveling For Miles a commission that helps contribute to the running of the site. Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone and have not been reviewed, endorsed, or approved by any of these entities. Terms apply to all credit card welcome offers, earning rates and benefits and some credit card benefits will require enrollment. For more details please see the disclosures found at the bottom of every page.

Chase has now updated and upgraded the welcome offer associated with the Marriott Bonvoy Business® American Express® Card, but is this an offer that you should be jumping on or is this an offer that’s not worth the effort?

Before we continue …

Here’s a quick reminder of what the Marriott Bonvoy Business® American Express® Card costs and what it offers.

• Annual fee = $125
• Cost of authorized user cards = $0 for up to five additional cards
• Earnings (terms apply)
  • 6 points/dollar at Marriott Bonvoy properties worldwide
  • 4 points/dollar on spending at restaurants worldwide
  • 4 points/dollar on spending at U.S. gas stations
  • 4 points/dollar on spending on wireless telephone services purchased directly from U.S. service providers
  • 4 points/dollar on spending on U.S. purchases for shipping
  • 2 points/dollar on eligible spending in all other categories
• Key benefits (terms apply and enrollment may be required):
  • Annual free night certificate valid at properties costing up to 35,000 points/night.
  • 15 elite night credits towards elite status every year (will stack with elite night credits offered by a consumer Bonvoy card*).
  • Get a 7% discount off standard rates for standard room reservations at all Marriott Bonvoy properties.
  • Marriott Bonvoy Gold Elite status
  • No foreign transaction fees

*This is a key reason this card is as popular as it is.

The new welcome offer

Through 16 October 2024, this is what the card’s welcome offer look like:

Earn 5 Free Night Awards after you make $8,000 in eligible purchases on your new card within the first 6 months of Card Membership. Each Free Night Award has a redemption level up to 50,000 Marriott Bonvoy points at hotels participating in Marriott Bonvoy.

Ok, let’s get one key thing out of the way before we continue. If anyone tells you that this offer is effectively the same as 250,000 points (5 x 50,000 points of certificates), ignore them, walk away, close your browser, or do whatever you have to do to stop reading or listening, because that’s nonsense.

Points in the hand are a lot more useful (and therefore valuable) than free night certificates for three key reasons.

1. These free night certificates will expire one year after they’re issued (you either use them or lose them) and there’s no official route by which you can get their expiration date extended. Marriott Bonvoy points will only expire after 24 months of continuous inactivity and that 24 month clock can be reset by crediting (or transferring) points to an account or by using some points for an award.
2. With 50,000 points you can book a property costing fewer points and you’ll get change. With one of these certificates, you don’t get anything back if you book a property costing fewer than 50,000 points.
3. You can’t use certificates to trigger Marriott’s ‘5th night free’ deal on award bookings. For reasons that remain unclear to us, you can use points to book a 5 night stay and you’ll get the cheapest night free, but as soon as you add a certificate into the booking, this no longer happens (per Marriott: Stay for 5, Pay for 4 Award does not apply to Cash + Points Awards, Upgrade Awards, Nightly Upgrade Awards, and Promotional Awards (e.g. issued through Co-brand Credit Card, Annual Choice Benefit, etc.)

To sum up, certificates are a lot less flexible than points, so that’s why their maximum value cannot be equated to the same number of points.

Given the choice of 250,000 points or 5 free night certificates worth up to 50,000 points each, you would have to be mad to choose the latter.

All that being said, however, these certificates are far from useless and if you’re prepared to do some research, they can save you a decent sum of money.

Getting value from the certificates

The truth is that since Marriott moved over to a dynamic pricing system for Bonvoy redemptions, it has become increasingly hard to book good/great/fantastic properties for 50,000 points or less, but they’re still there, and if you’re prepared to top-up your certificates with up to 15,000 points per certificate*, then things can really start to get interesting.

If I take things to an extreme, I can show how a single certificate would book you a night at the Le Méridien Maldives that would otherwise cost you $946 (including taxes and fees)

I can even show that if you’re prepared to go outside of peak season, you could use all 5 of the certificates from the new welcome offer for a 5-night stay at the Le Méridien Maldives.

Here, for example, are the night rates at the Le Méridien Maldives for May and June 2025:

On most dates in May and on all but two dates in June, the nightly points cost is under 50,000 points.

If you want to go at a better time of year (January through March), you could add 15,000 points to each certificate and book the same property on most nights.

The problem with this example, however, is that it will cost a fortune to get to the Maldives, it will cost small fortune to get from Male to any of the major resorts, and it will cost you a further fortune to eat and drink during your stay.

Who’s going to pay out that much cash just to get ‘good value’ out of some free night certificates?

A little closer to home and not as expensive to get to, we have Europe where at quieter times of the year, one of these certificates will be able to book you a night in cities like Berlin, Prague, and Madrid.

And if you’re prepared to top up your certificates with a few points, you’ll be able to book some very nice properties in cities like London, Paris, and Rome.

If you don’t want to travel outside of the United States at all, you’ll find that at the right time of year, you’ll be able to book some nice properties like Miami, Dallas and Los Angeles without having to touch your points balance.

If you’re prepared to top up the certificates, you’ll find dozens of nice hotels that you’ll able to book.

The fact is that the key to getting the most out of there certificates is to be flexible with when you want to travel and to be prepared to top them up with up some points if a particularly attractive property costs more than 50,000 points and less than 66,000 points.

No, you’re not going to be able to use these certificates to book A St. Regis in the Maldives, a Ritz-Carlton in the Caribbean, or an EDITION in Europe, so if that’s what you’re hoping to do, the certificates from this welcome offer won’t be of much use to you.

If, however, you’re happy to be flexible with your dates and don’t feel the need to book an ‘aspirational’ property, these certificates can save you quite a bit of cash.

Personally, I wouldn’t apply for this card and trigger the welcome bonus if I wasn’t already planning a trip on which these certificates would come in useful, but I can see how for some, these certificates may make a previously unaffordable trip considerably more affordable so YMMV.

*The maximum Marriott will allow them to top them up by.