Using Air Miles at Marlin Travel

[Canajan]

I'd love to use some Air Miles for a hotel stay at WDW.

I called Marlin Travel, and the staff person on the phone said that I'd need to redeem the miles first for travel certificates before we could make a booking.

Is this right? The person sounded quite hesitant.

I understand that I could redeem 11400 air miles for $1200 worth of travel certificates for our party of 3, and that I'd be waiting about 3 weeks to get the certificates.

We'd like a hotel-only booking (e.g. a Disney Moderate). I'd like to take advantage of the next room-only promo at Disney, but I don't want to redeem so many miles until I'm sure that the availability will be there for us.

I'm hoping we could use Air Miles to cover almost the whole hotel stay!

On the other hand, I wouldn't want to get stuck with travel certificates that either expire or can only be used for a package holiday.

Air Mile fans, please help!

Thanks so much.

 

[cab0899]

In the past I've called airmiles directly to book universal and disney hotels. That's probably the most direct route.

If booking through Marlin travel then you order gift cards off the airmiles website and then when it's time to "pay" Marlin travel, you pay with gift cards except that Marlin has a maximum amount of gift cards that can be used but I can't remember what it .

 

[momof2gr8kids]

Last year I booked our package online as soon as I got a FD pin code and paid the $200 deposit.

Afterwards, I had our reservation transferred to our Marlin Travel rep. Then she requested directly from AM our certificates to be applied to our account.

So, from our experience, no, you don't have to wait to have them in hand to book. Our friends did this with a trip to Mexico. Booked with Marlin, paid deposit, then Marlin requested the airmiles certificates to be applied to account.

I'd talk to someone else there.

 

[Canajan]

Thanks so much! This is really helpful info.