I originally saw Up to $200 Worth of Southwest Points For Buying Marriott GiftCards by The Points Guy and looked a little deeper into churning the gift cards.

Before you continue reading the rest of the post, I want to let you know that it’s not worth pursuing. It is more to open the idea of new avenues to manufacture spend and gift card churning.

The Idea:

You want to maximize the Southwest Points bonus, which would require purchasing $1000 worth of Marriott gift cards. When you sell the gift cards you would receive $860 back for them.

You would then take your newly minted Southwest points and redeem for Walmart gift cards. 5,000 points for $50.

Selling your $100 worth of Walmart gift cards would leave you with $92

Your total cash return would be ($860 + $92)=$952 and cost would be $48. Assuming you use a Sapphire Preferred, you would receive 2.14 points/$ (2x for hotel purchase, and 2 times the 7% dividend for 2.14 points per dollar), for a total of 2140 Ultimate Rewards points. $48/2140 points = $.022/pt. It’s quite expensive. Also, unless you fly with Southwest Airlines, the balance of 2,000 points would not be worth very much.

Hypothetical:

Let’s stretch this promotion and made the assumption that Marriott and Southwest Airlines run this promotion four more times and we participated five times in total. Also assume the promotion details are the same, 12,000 bonus points per $1000 Marriott gift card purchase, the cost would drop to $.014/point.

The Math:

$4300 back for Marriott gift cards + $552 back for Walmart gift cards = Total cash back $4852

Total cost = $148

Total points from using Sapphire Preferred = 10700

$148/10700 = $.014/point