The Berlin Stay, in Numbers

Part of East, Central & West Berlin · AN EXPATVISTA COLLECTION

This was a three-night Berlin trip built around an 80,000-point Marriott Moments booking. The package included the Gourmet Odyssey, one night at the Ritz-Carlton Berlin, breakfast and a €100 hotel credit. We added Hyatt stays for the first and third nights.

This is the accounting for the trip: what we paid, what points we used, and what came back as a direct result of the stays and associated spending. Flights are shown separately at the end.

The Marriott Moments package included the Ritz-Carlton night, breakfast, the Gourmet Odyssey and a €100 hotel food-and-beverage credit. We paid another $103.33 at the hotel beyond that credit.

The package required 80,000 Marriott points upfront. The Ritz-Carlton stay, associated promotions and card spending generated 6312 Marriott points, leaving a net Marriott outflow of 73,688 points.

The two Hyatt stays generated 5774 Hyatt points between them. The Me and All stay and associated card spending produced 4355 points; the Lindner produced another 1419.

At the time of the trip, Frequent Miler’s Reasonable Redemption Values were 0.76¢ for Marriott points and 1.8¢ for Hyatt points. Using those as marks, the 73,688 Marriott points used net were worth $560.03, while the 5774 Hyatt points earned were worth $103.93.

That makes the net points cost:

$560.03 Marriott points − $103.93 Hyatt points = $456.10

Add the $496.10 cash outlay, and the hotel-and-experience portion of the Berlin trip had a total economic cost of $952.20.

Some of what we received is particularly easy to value because it was money we actually spent.

At the Ritz-Carlton, we consumed $219.35 of bar and minibar spending. The €100 hotel credit covered part of that bill, leaving the $103.33 cash payment shown in the ledger.

The Me and All bill was €247.34, which became $287.25 on the card. Of that, €92 was bar spending, equivalent to $106.84 at the exchange rate reflected in the final charge.

Together, that’s $326.19 of food-and-drink spending we actually consumed. Taking that at face value leaves:

$952.20 − $326.19 = $626.01

So $626.01 is the remaining economic cost to attribute to the three hotel stays and the Gourmet Odyssey.

The accommodation component of the three hotel stays came to:

For the Me and All, the $180.41 is the actual hotel bill after removing the €92 of bar spending. The Ritz-Carlton figure was the then-observed cash price of the same room included with the Marriott Moments package. The Lindner was the actual cash rate paid.

Breakfast was included in all three rates, so there is no reason to assign any additional breakfast value on top of the room figures.

That means the $626.01 residual economic cost was already below the $742.93 accommodation figure before assigning anything at all to the Gourmet Odyssey.

The Odyssey itself had no separately published cash price. In my contemporaneous trip ledger, I had valued the three-restaurant experience, including the food, wine and Champagne, at $600. There are arguments for higher or lower, but that was my estimate.

So ultimately we had $626.01 of cost to attribute to:

$742.93 of accommodation (including breakfast)

+ $600 (?) Gourmet Odyssey

I could be very wrong about my $600 Gourmet Odyssey valuation and still conclude that the redemption worked.

Flights were booked independently and aren’t included in the hotel-and-experience accounting. Round-trip airfare for two cost $560.76.

A late-year Ritz-Carlton card upgrade had unlocked a $300 calendar-year travel credit, which we applied against the flights, leaving $260.76 of cash cost after the credit.

The flights also generated points and miles across several programs. I’ve kept those outside this ledger for simplicity.