This allows you to
make award bookings well in advance, when availability is very good, and change or cancel later without additional cost.
You may select one of the three major airline alliances, which is especially useful if you plan
on making an award booking, or want to purchase a paid ticket and credit the miles to a partner airline.
If a
traveler makes an award booking and then fails to cancel the ticket before the flight departs a fee of $ 125 will be levied if the traveler wants the miles restored to his / her account.
Marriott is one of the hotel brands that offers members of its loyalty program a «5th night free» when
making award bookings so this can potentially affect your valuation.
Having decided to adopt and implement their insanely complicated award chart, and having invested in
making their award booking engine work passably well, they found all that effort was wasted and they were instead facing longer and longer hold times at their call centers.
If you are Marriott Rewards member with points to use or have free night certificates, you might want to take a look at the pdf and
consider making an award booking on or before March 18 if any hotels you plan to stay at will be going up a category.
The last three or four times I've gone to
make award bookings using Avios for American flights has me about ready to throw in the towel.
Even if you don't know anything about navigating transfer partner award charts and
making award bookings, the difference in sign - up bonus alone is more than enough to make up the difference in annual fees.
To
make award bookings you need the PIN number, but you can call the Miles & More service center and request to have you PIN emailed to you so you don't have to wait.
You can transfer the points to hotel and airline partners to
make award bookings.
I recommend using ITA Flight Matrix to approximate your fuel surcharges and taxes prior to
making an award booking.
Even if you don't know anything about navigating transfer partner award charts and
making award bookings, the difference in sign - up bonus alone is more than enough to make up the difference in annual fees.
For other hotels, you may be better off getting the 1.25 fixed value by booking through Chase's portal rather than transferring points to the hotel and
making an award booking.
A major flaw of the 10 % rebate is: say
you make an award booking in 2016 for a flight in 2017 and then make any change to the ticket in 2017 that requires the ticket to be reissued, you then forfeit the 10 % refund that you got in 2016 even if you had other award tickets in 2016 that the 10 % could of been applied to had it not applied to this booking...