The Ultimate Strategy for US Marriott Bonvoy Credit Cards

Between American Express US and Chase, there’s an impressive line-up of US-issued Marriott Bonvoy credit cards available.

Forget the earning rates on everyday spending – what makes these cards interesting is the fast track to Marriott Bonvoy Elite status and free stays year after year. With these perks, it’s easy to justify paying higher annual fees, given all that you can gain from simply holding these cards.

Let’s take a deeper look at the best ways to maximize the Bonvoy credit cards, between status shortcuts, free nights, annual rebates, and welcome bonuses.

Summary of Marriott Bonvoy Credit Cards

American Express US has two personal Bonvoy cards you can apply for. There’s the top-tier Marriott Bonvoy Brilliant American Express Card, and the Marriott Bonvoy Bevy American Express Card.

There’s also a third personal card, the basic Marriott Bonvoy American Express Card. You can only get this card by downgrading from one of the other two personal cards.

Finally, there’s the Marriott Bonvoy Business American Express Card, the only Bonvoy co-branded business card available for new applications in the US.

Chase offers three personal Visa cards you can apply for. From premium to no-fee, they’re branded Bountiful, Boundless, and Bold.

There’s also a fourth Ritz-Carlton Card, which can only be obtained by upgrading one of the other three.

You’ll notice that the Amex Bevy and the Chase Bountiful are identical. Meanwhile, there are some other wrinkles across the line-up that we’ll need to parse in order to tease out the best way forward.

How to Achieve Elite Status with Credit Cards

If you’re pursuing Marriott Bonvoy Elite Status, the tiers you’ll want to target are Platinum and Titanium. That’s where the meaningful benefits kick in, like free breakfast, suite upgrades, and access to Executive Lounges.

To earn Platinum status, you normally need to earn 50 elite qualifying nights (EQNs) in a year. Without any shortcuts or promotions, this translates to staying 50 nights in Bonvoy-affiliated hotels.

However, one of the benefits of the Marriott Bonvoy Brilliant American Express Card is that it grants the cardholder automatic Platinum status. If you’re only looking to maintain Platinum status, it couldn’t be simpler – just get and keep the Amex Brilliant!

However, with automatic Platinum status, you’ll be missing out on a couple of benefits.

It’s important to remember that while elite qualifying nights give you status, status doesn’t give you elite qualifying nights. If you earn 50 nights, you’ll get Platinum status; however, having Platinum status doesn’t get you 50 nights.

That means you won’t get the Annual Choice Benefit, which is earned when you reach 50 nights.

More importantly, if you’re pushing for 75 nights for Titanium Elite status, having Platinum status via the Amex Brilliant won’t give you a leg up. If you’d earned Platinum organically through nights stayed, you’d only be 25 nights away, but with the Amex Brilliant, you’ll still be quite far off.

Fortunately, the Amex Brilliant gives you 25 elite qualifying nights every year, in addition to automatic Platinum status. That’d put you 25 nights away from your 50-night Annual Choice Benefit, and 50 away from Titanium status (or 45 if you select five elite qualifying nights as your 50-night Annual Choice Benefit).

If the Amex Brilliant’s annual fee is too high for your liking, or if you don’t need 25 bonus nights to reach your status goals, any other Bonvoy personal card gives 15 elite qualifying nights per year. Note that you can’t combine nights if you have multiple personal cards, so the most you can earn from your personal credit cards is 25 per year with Amex Brilliant, or 15 with anything else.

If you’re using credit cards to rack up elite qualifying nights, the Amex US Bonvoy Business Card is a must-have. That’s because you can combine the 15 elite qualifying nights on a Amex US Bonvoy Business Card with the nights earned from holding a US Bonvoy personal card.

If you have the Amex Brilliant and the Amex US Bonvoy Business cards, that’s a total of 40 elite qualifying nights per year, for a combined annual fee of $775. You’d be only 10 nights away from the Annual Choice Benefit after you hit 50 nights, and 30–35 nights away from Titanium Elite status.

Holding these two cards would be an extremely strong play if you’re gunning for Titanium status.

In fact, one of my favourite perks of achieving Titanium is the Annual Choice Benefit earned when you reach 75 EQNs, which can be used to select a Free Night Award worth up to 40,000 points, valid for up to two years.

On the other hand, any other personal US Bonvoy card plus the Amex US Bonvoy Business card would get you a total of 30 EQNs per year. Without the Amex Brilliant, you wouldn’t get automatic Platinum status, but you’d only be 20 nights away, or 40–45 to Titanium.

This would be a good strategy if you prefer to keep annual fees down, and can hit your status goals with organic stays.

Finally, the Chase Marriott Bonvoy Boundless Visa uniquely offers 1 EQN per $5,000 spent. This might be useful for a top-up if you’re a few nights short, but I wouldn’t rely on it to spend your way to status from scratch, as the opportunity cost of that spending is quite high.

Earning Bonvoy Free Night Awards with Credit Cards

Even without considering the shortcuts to status, all of the Bonvoy cards deliver more value each year than the cost of their annual fees. This is another great reason to hold your Bonvoy cards for the long-term.

In particular, all Bonvoy cards (except the Chase Bold Visa, which has no annual fee) offer an annual Free Night Award, starting in your second year with the card. We value Bonvoy points at 0.6 cents per point, and we can use the same rate to appraise these free night certificates.

The Amex Brilliant offers an 85,000-point Free Night Award on your cardholder anniversary, which, at a value of $510, comes close to offsetting the annual fee of $650. Tack on the $25 monthly dining credit, and you can easily close the gap, and even come out ahead by quite a bit.

The Chase Ritz-Carlton Card also offers an 85,000-point Free Night Award certificate each year, plus an annual $300 credit for airline incidentals, all against an annual fee of $450. If you’re able to obtain this card, you’ll certainly come out ahead with ease.

Either (or both) of these premium Bonvoy cards would be the best choice for luxury hotels.

For the two mid-tier cards, the Amex Bevy and the Chase Bountiful, there’s no automatic Free Night Award dispensed upon your cardholder anniversary. Instead, you’ll earn a 50,000-point certificate upon spending $15,000 each calendar year.

At $300, the value of the Free Night Award exceeds the cost of the annual fee of $250, but the spending requirement is a major deterrent. In fact, I wouldn’t recommend holding the mid-tier Bonvoy cards long-term, simply because they don’t automatically award a Free Night Award each year.

As an exception, it may be worth it if you tend to redeem the Free Night Award at a higher valuation than our target rate of 0.6 cents per point. The break-even point with the annual fee would be a bit over 1 cent per point.

Also, you may consider the Amex Bevy or Chase Bountiful for your long-term strategy if you have no interest in properties bookable with the 35,000-point certificates earned with the lower-tier cards.

Recall that you can top up a Free Night Award with 15,000 Bonvoy points, making the 50,000-point certificates valid for properties up to 65,000 points per night with a top-up.

As for the basic Amex Bonvoy and Chase Boundless cards, you’ll earn a 35,000-point annual Free Night Award with no spending requirement.

At a value of $210 against an annual fee of $95, these cards are the best choice if you’re happy with 15 EQNs towards status at a low cost, and any net gain on the annual fee/certificate trade-off.

What About the Ritz-Carlton Card?

While you can’t simply apply for the Ritz-Carlton Card, you can upgrade to it from another Chase Bonvoy Visa by calling Chase after holding another eligible card for at least one year.

As part of a finely tuned long-term strategy, the Ritz-Carlton Card is definitely worth pursuing. As we’ve discussed above, the 85,000-point Free Night Award and the $300 airline incidental credit significantly offset the $450 annual fee.

Also, the Ritz-Carlton Card comes with the best Priority Pass membership across all credit cards in the US and Canada. Not only does the card offer access to Priority Pass airport lounges, but also unlimited free guest access.

Even if you aren’t flying with your friends or family members, there’s still a way to use your Ritz-Carlton Card to give them lounge access. You can add authorized users for no additional cost, with each one eligible to sign up for their own Priority Pass membership (and bring in their own unlimited number of guests).

The potential here is really mind-blowing, and there’s no other card quite like this!

Welcome Bonus Restrictions

While the main advantage of the Bonvoy credit cards is their keeper value, points will fuel your aspirational stays. It’ll be to your benefit to nab as many lucrative welcome bonuses as you can, all while navigating the maze of terms and conditions specifically designed for these cards.

Marriott Bonvoy credit cards are unique, in that they have welcome bonus restrictions shared across both American Express and Chase. You may be ineligible for a welcome bonus on one card if:

• You currently have or have had another card in the past 30 days
• You’ve opened another card in the past 90 days
• You’ve received a signup or upgrade bonus on another card in the past 24 months

Basically, it’s hard to play both Amex and Chase if you want to receive welcome bonuses, unless you’re willing to wait a really long time.

The welcome bonuses on all Amex and all Chase cards available to new applicants are mutually exclusive between the two issuers. If you earn a welcome or upgrade bonus from either issuer, you can’t earn one from the other issuer, on any card, for 24 months.

With Chase you can earn two bonuses – Bountiful and Boundless – every 24 months. Chase effectively only has two cards, as you can’t receive a bonus on Boundless and Bold within 24 months of each other.

However, you’re also subjected to the Chase 5/24 Rule, meaning you won’t be approved for any Chase cards if you’ve opened five personal cards from any US bank in the past 24 months. I’d say this hard rule is a bigger hurdle than the nebulous Amex pop-up.

Besides, I’m not even convinced that Chase welcome bonuses are the best way to earn Bonvoy points quickly or sustainably.

With Amex you can earn three bonuses – Brilliant, Bevy, and Business – as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

However, Amex recently imposed “family language” on the Bevy, which means that you may not be eligible for a welcome bonus if you’ve ever held the Brilliant.

Therefore, your best bet is to apply for the Bevy first, ideally at a time when the card offers an excellent welcome bonus, and then apply for the Brilliant to keep as a long-term card.

If you’d like, you can downgrade the Bevy to the lower-fee Marriott Bonvoy American Express Card.

Another advantage with Amex is the extra 15 EQNs from the business card, which stack with the 15–25 nights from a personal card. You may want to stick with Amex for your personal Bonvoy cards, to align your status strategy with your points strategy.

For Canadians, the choice is clear: focus on Amex. If you’re just getting started with US credit cards, you’ll have to put Chase on the backburner anyway, as Amex US is the natural entry point for US credit cards.

If you’re interested in accumulating Bonvoy points, there are still a lot of solid options on the Canadian side. American Express Canada offers its own co-branded Bonvoy cards, complete with their own signup bonuses.

Also, Membership Rewards points are easy to earn with cards like the Amex Cobalt, and can be transferred to Marriott Bonvoy at a favourable rate.

On the other hand, if you don’t need 25 EQNs, or if you’re willing to forego a couple of welcome bonuses with Amex US, you might want to make a move on Chase as soon as you can, to get the wheels in motion for the Ritz-Carlton Card. This card arguably has a superior package of premium perks than the Amex Brilliant, all for a lower annual fee.

Whatever you do, if you’re interested in the Amex Brilliant or Bevy, just make sure you get them before the Chase Ritz-Carlton Card. The latter is squarely a keeper, and holding it will disqualify you from a welcome bonus on the former two.

Conclusion

Marriott Bonvoy credit cards in the US are no simple matter, with a plethora of one-time bonuses, ongoing perks, and restrictions to make sense of.

Broadly speaking, most cardholders will benefit from prioritizing the Amex cards, while staying under 5/24 to work in Chase on the side with a long-term eye on the elusive Ritz-Carlton Card. This can be a sound strategy no matter your goals, whether you’re pursuing Marriott Bonvoy Elite Status, Free Night Awards, or large swaths of points.

Ultimately, the best value on Bonvoy cards comes year after year. Slot in at the level of annual fees that you’re happy to pay, for the level of benefits that you’re seeking to enjoy. Rest assured that even with a minor misstep in such a complex puzzle, you’re guaranteed to come out ahead.