It's no secret that hotel credit cards offer some incredible values and can be outstanding travel enablers. Or, maybe it was a secret, in which case, welcome to the blog!
Marriott is the largest hotel chain in the world, with no over 8,000 properties according to them, and the Bonvoy Brilliant is the top co-branded credit card with Marriott and their Bonvoy loyalty program, so this is bound to be a significant card in the points and miles world.
So what is the Bonvoy Brilliant card? What does it cost and what does it give you? What's the best way to use it? Why on earth would two people who live and travel together both have one? And how can it work into a team of other credit cards?
The Bonvoy Brilliant card is a C-tier (premium) credit card co-branded with Marriott, aimed at higher-end travelers (but you don't have to be one to make great use of this card). American Express issues the Bonvoy Brilliant card, in addition to the Bonvoy Business card. There are also two Bonvoy cards (the Bold and the Boundless) issued by Chase to provide options in the A- and B-tiers. The Brilliant is the only Marriott card featuring a metal design, and it's a pretty swanky design at that, with it's black background and silver patterns and accents. It's really a card that isn't out of place at a Ritz-Carlton.
The annual fee will set you back $450, typical for C-tier cards, and there are three main benefits offsetting or making up the difference. First, and simplest, there is a $300 Marriott credit, which will automatically trigger for the first $300 in purchases from Marriott in a cardmember year. NOTE: starting 9/22/22, this credit will change from an annual Marriott credit to a monthly $25 dining credit. The yearly value is the same $300, but the structure is different. Signing up before 9/22/22 can allow you to take advantage of both the old and new credits.
Like most hotel credit cards with annual fees, this card also comes with a free anniversary night. Given after each cardmember anniversary, you'll have a certificate for one free award night at any Marriott hotel worth up to 50,000 points. This is a higher points cap than the Business and Boundless cards; both of those have ~$100 annual fees and their anniversary night credits are only worth up to 35,000 points. The Bonvoy program now allows you to supplement anniversary nights with more points, if you have them. This makes the certificates much more valuable, in my opinion. You can be sure you're always using the full 50k points; if you're deciding between a room for 40,000 points that retails for $250, or a room for 60,000 points that retails for $350, you can use the certificate plus 10,000 Bonvoy points from your account.
Marriott has made tracking free nights very easy; they now appear in the Activity tab of your account, and show the expiration date too. Did I mention that? These free nights expire about a year after receiving them, so you'll have to use these every year. I recommend having a consistent weekend getaway to always use them on! For us, that's San Diego. We actually usually go multiple times per year, so there's always opportunity to use them, and by having this nearby consistent destination, we never forget to use our free nights. Hotel values are also consistently between $250-350 near downtown, so we get good value, too.
As an example, here's a great potential option. The Moxy San Diego retails for a bit over $300 over labor day weekend, or 40,000 points (we love the fun atmosphere of the Moxy brand). The free night certificate could get you one night here. If you used the Marriott credit for another night, having the Bonvoy Brilliant card could reduce the cost of this $660 hotel stay to less than $40, plus you'll get free cocktails when you check in because of your Gold Elite status. This is an easy trip to make an annual tradition, especially if you find a hotel and a destination you like.
The last main benefit of the Brilliant card is the automatic Gold Elite status with Bonvoy. This status isn't particularly high on the Bonvoy totem pole, but still provides late checkout, bonus points earning, and higher upgrade priority. You'll also get 15 Elite Night Credits to help reach higher status (NOTE: Elite Nights Credits are NOT free nights like anniversary nights. They are just credits counting towards elite status). If you actually already stay enough at Marriott hotels to have Gold Elite status, then these free nights are enough to get you most of the way to Platinum Elite status. Normally, Gold is earned at 25 nights, and Platinum is at 50 nights stayed, but by holding the Bonvoy Brilliant, you'll have Gold without any stays, and earn Platinum at just 35 nights.
Gold Elite benefits. image: marriott.com
If you add up the value of these benefits, you can see that the card makes sense just from the anniversary free night and the Marriott/Dining credit. The credit is $300, assuming you use all of it, and the anniversary night should easily be worth at least $200 (but they could be worth substantially more. In that case, you're coming out ahead $300+$200-$450=$50, and that's not counting any value of the elite status or points earnings.
Speaking of points earning, how does this card stack up? What should you spend on it, and what should you use it for? The base earning rate on the Bonvoy Brilliant card is 2 Bonvoy points per dollar. Remember, that's points, not % cash back. I tend to value Bonvoy points at about 0.75 points per dollar for easier math, but they can definitely be worth more than that. That gives a base earning rate of 2x0.75=1.5% back on all purchases. This certainly isn't the best base rate, but isn't embarrassing either.
If you're working towards a particular redemption, you might use a substantially higher value for these. For example, when we were preparing to travel to the Maldives and stay at the Ritz-Carlton, we already knew that the 400,000 total points we needed would be worth over 4 cents each when it was all said and done (over $16,000). For a limited time, then, we had a skewed perception of the base earning rate on this card actually being about 8%. This is very abnormal, however, and it's tough to value them that highly when we couldn't actually afford the cash rate of the hotel anyways!
For other categories, the Bonvoy Brilliant earns 3x points on flights and dining purchases, and 6x points on Marriott purchases. This Marriott earning rate is a bit low, in my opinion, when you compare it to other cards, and consider that this is the flagship card of Marriott's Bonvoy brand! The IHG Premier card earns 10 points per dollar on IHG purchases, and the Hilton Aspire earns 14 points per dollar on Hilton purchases. Even on Marriot purchases, the mighty Chase Sapphire Reserve earns 3 Ultimate Rewards points per dollar on all travel purchases, including hotels like Marriott. 3 is obviously less than 6 (that is today's math lesson), but Chase UR points are worth at least 2 cents each, in my opinion. That's effectively 3x2=6% back on Marriott from the Chase card, versus 6x0.75=4.5% back on Marriott's own card. As far as flights and dining, I'm just happy to earn 3 instead of 2 points when using the $300 dining credit, but this shouldn't be your primary flying or eating card if you have anything else, like a Chase Sapphire or Amex Gold.
At this point, you might be wondering why both Kristyn and I would have the same card. It's a good question, especially since we weren't doing this whole blogging thing when we got them. Reason number one is the signup bonuses. One of us had a 100,000 point signup bonus, and the other got a 75,000 point bonus. The first one with the card could also refer the second for another 15,000 points. Combined with the spending we had to put on the cards to earn the bonuses, that's about 200,000 points just from opening the cards, which got us halfway to the 400,000 we needed for our specific planned trip to the Maldives. But these bonuses only come once; why do we both still have it? Reason number two is that it's a positive value card, as long as you go to a Marriott once per year. If two people in a household have the card, then it's a positive value as long as you go to a Marriott twice per year. Since we travel at least a half dozen times per year, and I travel occasionally for work on top of that, we can easily ensure that two of those trips are at Marriott branded hotels.
If there is both a free night and a Marriott credit to use on each card, though, how do we only have to travel twice per year to use both free nights and both credits? Simple: You can pay use a free night certificate and pay for a night on the same trip, and call Marriott to combine the reservations! You can also combine nights from different people - if Kristyn books a Friday night at a hotel, and I book Saturday night at the same hotel, we can usually call after booking at have the reservations combined to ensure we'll just be in the same room both nights. If you wanted to get really crazy, you could combine both credits and both free nights into a single trip, but that's a lot of finagling.
Ok, finally, to answer the last question of how this card can work into a team: it's a higher-end specialist card. It will take a little more effort to maximize it, but is still a positive value if you use the two main benefits, which can be accomplished in a single weekend trip per year. It's a great option if you only want to deal with a single hotel chain, since Marriott is the largest chain and the card is pretty useful on it's own. Or it can be combined with other hotel credit cards if you're up for tracking a free night per year at a couple different chains. If it's your only hotel card, you don't need to spend very much on travel annually to make use of the Bonvoy Brilliant. So while it's not my absolute favorite hotel card (that honor goes to the Hilton Aspire), it's easy for me to recommend this card.
A pretty big disclaimer about the change in the annual credit: the required use of this card is different with a monthly dining credit instead of an annual Marriott credit. It makes it much more challenging to stick in a sock drawer if you need to use it once per month. That's not a bad thing, and the credit is the same value, so this can still be a great card! But it makes it harder to combine with other cards that you might normally put all of your dining expenses on, like a Chase Sapphire Reserve or Amex Gold. After 9/22/22, my recommendation changes to be more for people who don't have that many other cards to keep track of, or who don't mind remembering to use a card once per month on a certain type of expense.
UPDATE from October 2022: The Bonvoy Brilliant has been revamped with a higher annual fee and better benefits! The annual fee is now $650, but the card gives you Platinum status instead of Gold, and the annual free night certificate is much more valuable at 85,000 points. Overall, my recommendation for it stays the same.
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