Ritz-Carlton Amelia Island using Marriott Free Night Certificates & Points
The Ritz-Carlton Amelia Island is a gorgeous property situated right on the Atlantic coast of this beautiful barrier island in northern Florida. Here you will find picturesque sand dunes, a pristine, uncrowded beach, a pool with a firepit table right in the middle of it, a splash pad for kids, lawn games, and more! This hotel is exceptionally family friendly with their Ritz kids program, daily crafts available, face painting and balloon animal vendors on certain days, and even a treasure box filled with candy that they open every evening and pass out to the children in the lobby.
As expected given the Ritz-Carlton branding, the cash prices here are expensive! Using points and free night certificates; however, is a great value! We consider this property to be a sweet spot in the Marriott portfolio. We first discovered this hotel in 2019 before transferable points were on our radar and Marriott points were the only travel currency we collected. We had been migrated from the excellent Starwood Preferred Guest program (RIP) and had settled into Marriott without giving other options much thought.
We had a toddler, I was pregnant with twins, and we wanted one last family vacation as the 3 of us before life became a lot more hectic (in a good way!). I searched for luxury properties in the U.S., ruled out large cities, and focused in on warmer climates than New England. We ended up choosing the Ritz on Amelia Island. One of the things we love about Marriott is the 5th night free on award bookings. We booked 5 nights in a King room (and had a pack and play delivered to the room for our daughter) for 200k points. We felt our experience here was an excellent value for that amount of Marriott points and vowed to return.
Balcony View - Ritz Christmas Tree - Atlantic Ocean
Our stay was from 12/29-1/03 and January 1st and 2nd cost 50k and 54k points, respectively. I booked these last two nights of each room category with my husband’s certificates, adding a total of 8k Marriott points on top to accomplish this. The first three nights of the stay were booked using Marriott points I had built up over time. We used 388k Mariott points for 12/29-12/31 for both rooms. I had hoped to be able to use 5 free night certificates for one room and then get the 5th night free for the 2nd room but New Year’s Eve never fell below 66k points. Still, I felt fortunate to have booked it at that price as the redemption cost jumped up to 87k over time. I could have finagled the use of the last night free certificate into the early part of the stay but I decided it wasn’t worth the additional hassle and I had another use in mind for it anyway.
The cash rate for our rooms, using the Stay Longer With Us price, would have been $5k per room. We did pay $500 in resort fees, but even still we got about 2.4 cents per point value factoring in the free nights. If you break down the stay into points vs free nights then we got about 1.5 cents per point for the first three nights and each free night certificate was worth $1k. That is an excellent value for a 50k free night certificate and I hope to take advantage of that welcome offer again the next time it comes around.
Putting Green by the pool at Ritz-Carlton Amelia Island
That brings us to 2024. We had taken advantage of a great welcome offer of 5 Free Night Certificates (valued at 50k points each) on the Marriott Bonvoy Boundless card from Chase. Before applying for this offer, I looked around for opportunities to use these certificates for excellent value at resorts we were interested in. I narrowed down our choices to The Ritz Dove Mountain in Arizona and The Ritz Amelia Island. We were looking to travel over winter break and the shorter flight to Florida won out this time. When I saw that the free night certificates could be applied to our stay, I had my husband apply for the card and we got straight to work to hit the bonus threshold and get those certificates in his account asap as Marriott points prices are always changing!
Now that we are a family of 5, we need two hotel rooms at most properties. We are comfortable squeezing into a 2-Queen room with an air mattress on short stays (like our overnights in Anaheim) but for a relaxing vacation, we want that extra space of a 2nd room.
For this stay over New Year’s we booked one Coastal View King room and one Coastal View 2 Queen room. With Marriott free night certificates you are able to top them off with up to 15k points meaning our certs could be used for nights priced up to 65k points. I had to book our stay in multiple blocks in order to maximize these and I contacted the hotel ahead of time to have our reservations linked and to request connecting rooms (this request was granted). Of the 5 free nights my husband had earned with his welcome bonus, we were able to use 4.
Sunset Amelia Island Ritz-Carlton
Eligibility for Marriott card welcome offers can be confusing but Frequent Miler has a great explanation and chart. I have seen the 5 free nights offer available on the Boundless card from Chase, and the business card from Amex. My play will ideally be to get this offer if/when it comes back around on the business card because then I’ll still be eligible for the Bonvoy Brilliant card from Amex if a great offer comes around for that or if I want an easy way to Platinum status for a particular stay. All in all, I was thrilled with our use of this welcome offer and I can’t wait to take advantage of more free nights again.
