Yesterday I had posted about the opportunity to purchase up to $1,000 worth of Marriott gift cards, which in return, the purchaser would receive up to 12,000 Southwest Rapid Rewards miles. Reader DKAS asked the question “Do you see it as worthwhile to buy and resale the card just for the points?”

The quick answer is it does not look to be worth the effort to only buy and sell the gift cards to gain Southwest miles.

The long answer takes some analysis of the logistics of your options. So lets assume someone shells out $1,000 to purchase Marriott gift cards and is sitting on an additional 12,000 in Southwest miles. Your goal is to try and recoup as much of the $1,000 as possible to try and earn the Southwest miles for free or cheap.

A quick look at eBay completed auctions shows that Marriott gift cards sell for approximately 90% of value. Lets even assume you could get $950; however, factor in 9% for eBay fees ($85.50) and another 2.9% + $0.30 for Paypal fees ($27.85), which brings you down to a return of $836.65. So the 12,000 Southwest miles just cost you $163.35.

For comparison sake, there are lot of new services offering to purchase gift cards at discount, and they resell them to new customers. My Money Blog ran a detailed analysis a while back on Selling Unwanted Gift Cards for Cash. After looking at various websites, and running the numbers for sample $100 gift cards, he determined on average you could get between 70-75% of the value (which greatly varied between the retailer and gift card value). Therefore, while there is a chance they could offer you substantially more, on average, selling your $1,000 Marriott gift card could only earn you approximately $750, at a cost of $250 for your 12,000 Southwest miles.

I tried getting an estimate on Plastic Jungle, but they would not accept Marriott gift cards online. Giftcards.com would only give me $700, cardpool.com offered $830, and giftcardrescue.com offered $800. So even the best offer via cardpool.com would cost $170 for 12,000 Southwest miles.

So why is this important? The 12,000 Southwest is only worth about $200 in Wanna Get Away fares. So there is some potential for minimal savings if you really could maximize your return selling the gift cards. However, I do not see it as being too lucrative to warrant the extra work necessary to try and sell off the gift cards.

Thanks for your excellent question DKAS!