How to stay at the St. Regis Maldives for 60% less
Today's post has been kindly written by Henry Ross, CEO of Ruma Travel. Ruma Travel is a free reward flight search engine that compares the price in points and cash and tells you which is better value. You can read our write-up of Ruma Travel here.
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I needed 890,000 Marriott Bonvoy points. I had 109,270. Buying hotel points is normally something I'd tell people not to do, and I went and spent roughly £5,000 doing exactly that.
The hotel I was after was The St. Regis Maldives Vommuli Resort, for March 2027.
Cash price: $19,451.55, just over £14,400.
Points price: 890,000 points plus $1,884.
Starting balance: 109,270 points.
First, the cash price
We had already decided the Maldives would be our big trip. The harder part was finding the best resort to spend our six nights at. I looked across Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt and IHG, but the St. Regis was the one that kept winning for us.
Private island in the Dhaalu Atoll, overwater villas with private pools, a proper house reef and a resort that feels like the destination rather than just a base. Then I looked at the price.
$2,275 a night for six nights, and once Marriott added taxes, service charges and the seaplane transfer, the total came to $19,451.55.
I turned the screen round to my wife, expecting a fairly quick "absolutely not". She looked at it and asked the much more useful question: had I checked the points price?
Then I checked the points price
The award price came back at 1,036,000 points before Marriott applied its fifth-night-free benefit. This one night, priced at 146,000 points, was removed, and the total dropped to 890,000 points plus $1,884.
It's worth putting that free night in money rather than points. A night here, once taxes and the service charge are counted, runs to about £2,100. Marriott handed that back, giving us one night for nothing, and it's why five nights is a completely different proposition to four.
The $1,884 does matter. $1,740 of it is the seaplane, at $870 per person return, which I'd pay on the cash booking as well. So the points are replacing almost all of the hotel cost, not the transport to the island.
Marriott prices properties dynamically. While I was building the balance, the same stay briefly fell to 874,000 points, then moved back up to 890,000.
How to build the points balance
So the real question wasn't whether 890,000 points was a good redemption. It was how to find another 780,730 points anything close to the £14,400 it would otherwise have cost.
These are the Marriott Bonvoy rules and promotional limits I was working with in September 2026. They can change, so always check the current terms before buying points.
Marriott was running a 40% bonus on bought points at the time, which is what made any of this viable. There are four ways to build a balance, each with its own limit.
Buy for yourself: During the 40% promotion, the most points you could buy was 200,000. The bonus was applied on top taking it to 280,000 points, all for $2,500.
Have another member gift you points: Anyone with a Bonvoy account can buy points and send them straight into yours. It's their allowance that gets used, not yours, which is how a household total stacks up. Each member has one storefront allowance covering buying for themselves and gifting to someone else, so somebody who has already bought their maximum for themselves has nothing left to gift you.
Transfer: A member can move up to 100,000 points a year from their own balance, with a limit of two transactions a month and six a year. This is why 70,000 was a useful purchase: the bonus took it to 98,000, which transfers in full while staying under the cap.
Buy at checkout: Marriott's terms allow a further 100,000 points a year through the Points.com window on Marriott sites. That allowance sits outside the storefront one, so it's there if you're still short at booking.
One more timing trap, and it's the one that catches people out: if you're relying on several accounts, set them up early rather than at the end of a promotion. New members can buy points 30 days after joining, but an account receiving gifted points needs to have been open for 90 days, or 30 days if there has been other activity on it. Points bought through the booking path can also take up to 72 hours to post.
The key is to work backwards from the hotel you want. Find the award availability first, calculate exactly how many points you need, then work out the cheapest combination of purchases, gifts, transfers and checkout top-ups.
The real cost
Here's the whole thing, added up.
Cash (USD) | Points | |
Starting balance | — | 109,270 |
One storefront allowance (200,000 base + 40% bonus) | $2,500 | 280,000 |
A second storefront allowance | $2,500 | 280,000 |
Two purchases at $875, each transferred in full from a separate account | $1,750 | 196,000 |
Running total | $6,750 | 865,270 |
Checkout top-up for the last 24,730 | $262.50 | 24,730 |
Total | $7,012.50 | 890,000 |
That came to $7,012.50 across every purchase, about £5,170 at the exchange rate I was getting, for 780,730 points. Which is 0.66 pence a point.
The award price held at 890,000 rather than drifting down, so there was a final top-up to find at the end. That's why I call it roughly £5,000 rather than a fixed price.
Strip the seaplane out of both sides, since the cash booking includes it too, and the points are replacing roughly £13,000 of accommodation cost.
Turn the whole thing into a rate, though, because that's what decides whether this was clever or just expensive. The points cost me around 0.66 pence each in the sale. Against the cash price for the identical room on the identical nights, they redeem at roughly 1.46 pence.
Most UK valuations put one Bonvoy point at 0.50 pence, so I got close to three times what a point is usually worth!
Marriott points are usually mediocre. This is one of the few places they are not.
Would I do this again?
Yes, but only in this order.
Find the exact award availability first.
Check the cash price for the identical room and identical dates.
Wait for a strong points sale rather than buying at the normal rate.
Map out whose purchase allowance and transfer allowance you're using before you spend anything.
Leave enough time for transfer limits and account eligibility.
Had the trip fallen through, I could have been holding about £5,000 of Bonvoy points with no plan.
One last trick: stop searching only for Malé
The hotel was only half the puzzle. Getting there in business class on points was the harder part.
Going out, we found business class availability on BA direct from Heathrow to Malé, which was straightforward. Coming home, we found nothing. So rather than searching Malé to London as one journey, I searched it as two separate award tickets. Malé to Doha came up in economy, about four hours. Doha to London came up in BA business. Two bookings instead of one, and the longer overnight leg at the front of the plane.
The useful lesson is simple: if Malé to London is showing nothing, stop searching Malé to London. Search Malé to Doha, then Doha to London separately. Doha can have excellent reward availability with Avios and can give you another way in and out of the Maldives without waiting for the perfect direct flight to appear.
Not long to go
That's the whole bet. Roughly £5,000 of new cash turned into points and spent on a hotel that would cost thousands more if I wasn't paying with points. Only six months before we go.
At Ruma Travel, we're opening Ruma Concierge shortly, which does this kind of planning for people who'd rather not spend three months working out whose allowance goes where.
Give us a follow on Instagram and you'll hear when it opens.
Henry Ross
Co-founder and CEO, Ruma Travel
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