Well, it’s official, after this weekend Marriott and SPG are now one program. While there have been a ton of chances that I intend to cover in a few days or weeks, one thing I want to cover today is how to combine your Marriott and SPG loyalty accounts.
You have have remembered a few months back Marriott and SPG gave members the ability to link accounts. If you linked your accounts your elite tier and other benefits carried over between programs, but the two loyalty accounts remained completely separate. That means most of us carried two points balances, two levels of elite nights, etc. Now, going forward, you can combine those accounts so that they quickly become one.
The process is straightforward enough, but is something you apparently have to do manually if you want your accounts combined today. What isn’t clear is how long it will take Marriott to combine if you opt to let them handle this action for you. By manually combining your accounts to day you can speed up the process. Likewise, by doing this manually you can choose which loyalty number to keep as you should currently have two separate account numbers.
How To Combine Your SPG and Marriott Rewards Accounts
To begin combining your SPG and Marriott Rewards accounts I’d recommend first picking which account number you’d like to maintain. Keep in mind your SPG account number should have recently changed following the combining of the programs on August 18. There isn’t any real benefit in choosing one number over another so I decided to keep my SPG account number as it’s must easier to remember.
After deciding, if you want to merge your Marriott account into your SPG account, use this link. Likewise, if you want to merge your SPG account into your Marriott account, use this link.
As I mentioned, because I opted to maintain my SPG account number the page I used looked like this.
To begin, first click on the “Get Started” button at the bottom of the page. At that point a pop-up box will appear and reads as follows.
On this page you must first type in your SPG account number and password. Keep in mind this is the number that you will keep going forward. Once completed, you will be directed to another page to then enter in your Marriott or Ritz Carlton rewards number and password.
Once both of your accounts are verified you can begin the combination process. You should first see a page the shows summaries of both accounts.
Once you review your summary, at this point none of this should be a surprise, click the “Next” button. From there you’ll see a listing of your personal information which can be changed later on.
After that, you’ll see a projected timeline of how long it will take for your two loyalty accounts to fully combine.
Then, finally, you’ll see your new combined loyalty program totals.
Next, click done and you’re all set. However, there are a few things to keep in mind before combining your accounts.
Caution: Read Before Combining Your Accounts
As I mentioned earlier, before combining your accounts you need to choose which rewards profile you want to keep. I say this for two reasons. The first is that one of your two rewards numbers will disappear, seemingly forever. The other reason is that all of your points, nights, certificates, etc. will transfer to the new “master” account. That change happened instantly as I noticed in my Marriott app shortly after combining accounts.
All of my nights and points transferred to my SPG account, but not the other way around.
Another BIG thing to know before linking your accounts is that any free night certificates won’t be accessible online for up to 72 hours. I realized this after combining accounts because I wanted to check the expiration date of the free night and was unable.
If I remember correctly my free night certificate expires in September of this year so I wanted to try to make a reservation today using that certificate. Sadly, I was unable and it appears as though I won’t be able to use the certificate (online) for up to 72 hours. I haven’t checked to see if I could book by phone, but most of us don’t do that anyway.
Final Thoughts
I’m not 100% sure what is going on here on the back end. If I had to make a guess, Marriott is combining customer accounts systematically behind the scenes. They are most likely completing this action on their own in waves as to not overwhelm their systems.
I’m guessing that over time all accounts will automatically combine, but in the interim Marriott is letting customers opt-in to expediting the process. By doing this they are also letting customers choose which loyalty number they want to keep. I suspect going forward members’ accounts that auto-combine won’t have that luxury.
Either way, you are able to manually combine your loyalty accounts if you want before Marriott does it for you. If it doesn’t matter to you at this time then I suppose you can just wait to see what happens. No matter what you choose I suspect the only benefit of doing it yourself is that you get to keep your desired membership number.
