The Top 9 Things To Know About the JW Marriott Masai Mara

The JW Marriott Masai Mara has quickly become one of the most popular hotels in the world of award redemptions.

This is partly because there aren’t many opportunities for point redemptions with safari hotels, but during a recent trip there, my wife and I found the JW Marriott Masai Mara also delivered on a truly exceptional experience that surpassed all of our expectations.

There is a lot of cover, so let’s jump straight into the details of our stay.

1. It’s More Affordable on Points

The JW Marriott Masai Mara is quite expensive to book with cash, with rates often fluctuating between $3,000 and $5,000 a night, depending on the demand and season.

Using Marriott Bonvoy points is a great way to book this top-notch experience and minimize your out-of-pocket cost, but full disclosure: It is also very expensive with points, too.

For our stay, we booked 5 nights to take advantage of the fifth-night free perk for Marriott Bonvoy elite members, and we still needed to pay an eye-popping 656,000 Marriott Bonvoy points, which we value at $4,592.

Still, this was an absolute bargain relative to the usual cash rates and much more palatable when you consider you can earn a large number of Marriott Bonvoy points quickly via credit card welcome offers.

To earn this amount of points, we used a combination of welcome offers on the Marriott Bonvoy Bevy^® American Express^® Card, the Marriott Bonvoy Boundless^® Credit Card, and we even transferred some Chase Ultimate Rewards points to Marriott during its 70% transfer bonus in 2024.

Hot Tip:

We usually advise against transferring your Chase Ultimate Rewards points to Marriott, as you can often get much better value from other transfer partners. However, in instances like this, where the value of the redemption you’d receive is quite high, or you’re topping off your account to make a booking possible, it can make sense.

Sadly, given how popular the JW Marriott Masai Mara has been with award bookings, the property has increased the number of points required for an award night to 200,000 or more.

In addition to the difficulty of achieving this number of points, there are only a limited number of award nights, as the resort has just 26 rooms. This can be even more challenging if you are hoping to book for 5 nights or more to take advantage of the fifth-night-free benefit. Given that, we highly recommend using award search tools such as Rooms.aero and MaxMyPoint to help you locate award space at the property.

Hot Tip:

When trying to locate award space for hotels or flights, it is helpful to be as flexible as possible to maximize the chances of securing highly coveted award space. For instance, we originally hoped to book our trip for September but had to settle for October in order to secure 5 consecutive nights and take advantage of the fifth-night-free perk.

2. How To Get to the JW Marriott Masai Mara

Once you’re in Nairobi, you have 2 options for getting to the property: flying or driving. Most people opt to fly, and I’d generally advise against driving as it takes 5 or 6 hours one-way, compared to about 40 minutes flight time, and costs are comparable.

There are 3 companies to choose from for your flight from Nairobi (NBO) to Mara: AirKenya, ALS, and Safarilink. While there seemed to be little that differentiated the companies when it came to price and service, we flew ALS because its flight times worked best for our needs.

Keep in mind that each of these airlines imposes a luggage weight limit of 33 pounds per person, and does not allow for hard-sided luggage. That said, I don’t recall our bags being weighed, so I can’t say for certain how strictly the weight limit is adhered to.

3. Rooms Are Comfortable and Spacious

Despite making a standard booking with our points, we were assigned the Deluxe Sunset Tent, which was extremely spacious and comfortable.

The “tent” was nearly 1,100 square feet, and it seemed the JW Marriott team had thought of everything, including a full living room, his-and-hers sinks and armoires, and a large indoor shower with a door to an outdoor shower. There was also an in-room minibar with complimentary snacks, wine, spirits, water, and sodas, replenished daily.

Just outside our room, we had an extremely large balcony that offered excellent views of the bush where we could see baboons during the day and hippos at night, and it even featured a Jacuzzi.

If you’re planning to visit, you should keep in mind that there is no central way to control the temperature of the room, meaning it can get quite hot during the day and quite cold during the evening. That said, our room attendant was proactive in lowering all of our window shades during the day and keeping the fans running. The staff provided heating pads for our bed at night in case we got cold.

One last great perk that we were pleasantly surprised by was that housekeeping would clean 5 pieces of laundry per person daily free of charge, and we took full advantage of this.

4. Game Drives Are Included, but Park Fees Are Not

While the game drives provided by the property are included in the room rate regardless of whether you paid with points or cash, the daily park fees are not, and these can really add up.

You must pay $100 per person daily from January 1 through June 30, and $200 per person daily from July 1 through December 31. You can pay the park fees when you land at the airstrip, at the park gate, or directly to the hotel. Credit cards are accepted.

My wife and I visited in the July-to-December window, which meant we needed to pay $2,000 in park fees for our 5-night stay. We paid directly after we landed.

These fees are effectively your entrance fee to visit the park each day. You have 2 game drives per day, one in the early morning from around 6:30 a.m. or 7 a.m. to around noon, and the second usually around 4 p.m. to sunset.

You only need to pay park fees on days that you actually take a game drive, so if there is a day you want for a break from drives to relax at the property, you won’t be charged the park fee for that day.

Keep in mind that your game drives are shared with guests from other rooms at the property, and the Land Cruisers usually seat 4 to 6 passengers. You can book a private drive for an additional $400 per day,

Paying more for a private drive didn’t feel worth it to us, but we were fortunate to be paired with a lovely couple during our stay. Sharing the incredible sights with them and getting to know them made the experience even better.

5. All Food and Beverages Are Included

During your stay, all of your food and beverages, including alcohol, are free of charge. It is not uncommon for the food at all-inclusive properties to leave something to be desired, but this was not our experience at the JW Marriott Masai Mara.

Basically, every meal we ate was excellent. The property had just 1 restaurant, Sarabi, where we took all of our meals, with lunch and dinner offered as proper 3-course meals, while breakfast was more à la carte. The menu rotated daily, featuring regional focuses such as Asian (primarily East and Southeast Asian), Indian, and, of course, Kenyan cuisine, among others.

That said, you can also request lunch in the JW garden, where the property grows dozens of different vegetables, fruits, and herbs. You can also have breakfast in the bush, where your guide takes your food the prior evening and sets up a buffet and seating in a safe part of the park so you can enjoy your breakfast with views of nearby animals.

6. Hospitality Is Excellent

I’m not exaggerating when I say that truly every member of the staff we encountered was lovely and went above and beyond to ensure we had an excellent stay. From our extremely knowledgeable guide, to our dedicated waiter during meals (with whom we were quickly on a first-name basis), to our room attendant who would leave us lovely notes when we returned from game drives, and everyone in between.

Like all great hotels, the service never felt stuffy, and instead was truly personalized, anticipatory, and warm.

7. You Can Use a Top-Notch Camera for a Minimal Fee

One of the best benefits of staying at the JW Marriott Masai Mara is that, through its partnership with Canon, all guests can rent an excellent wildlife camera for the duration of their stay for just a $25 fee.

The camera in question is a Canon R6 Mark II with a Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM lens … and if you’re not sure what any of that means, trust that the $25 fee is worth it, as this is roughly a $5,000 camera setup.

If you’re not very familiar with cameras, the team at the JW Marriott will give you a crash course on everything you need to know, including how to ensure your shots are in focus. They’ll even give you tips from day to day based on how your photos are turning out.

As if that weren’t enough, at the end of your stay, they will port all of the photos you’ve taken onto your personal devices, and even professionally edit 20 to 30 of the best photos you took during your stay.

8. You Can Book Additional Excursions and Activities

If you want variety outside of the game drives, you can book a handful of different excursions and activities, including a sunrise hot-air-balloon ride, a cultural visit to a Maasai village, archery, spear throwing, beadwork, and more.

We skipped a game drive one morning during our stay to take advantage of the balloon ride, and it was well worth the (extra) early wake-up to see the Mara as the sun rose from hundreds of feet in the air.

9. It Is Easily One of My Best-Ever Points-and-Miles Redemptions

It should come as no surprise that, as someone who writes about credit card rewards for a living, I’ve been fortunate to enjoy many top-notch travel experiences all over the world. Even then, this trip was easily one of the best and most enjoyable award redemptions I’ve ever made.

Despite the fact that the property set me back quite a few points, it felt truly worth all the effort we went to amass those points, finding award space, and the 50-plus hours of round-trip travel. While it was far from the highest cents-per-point value I’ve received for an award redemption, it was off the charts in a new metric I’m dubbing “awesomeness per point.”

Booking Summary

All in all, while using points and miles made this experience more affordable, it’s still not cheap by most standards. Here is approximately what the entire stay cost us in both dollars and points:

• Turkish Airlines business class flights to Nairobi: 88,000 United MileagePlus miles plus $100 per person
• Flights to and from Masai Mara: $377 per person
• 5-night stay at JW Marriott Masaai Mara: 656,000 Marriott Bonvoy points
• 5 days of park fees: $2,000 ($200 per person, per day)
• Camera rental fee: $25 (what a deal!)
• Staff Tips: Varies (tip as much as you feel is reasonable and within your comfort level, as all the staff at the property work their tails off to provide a top-notch experience)
• Excursion fees: $1,100
• Ethiopian Airways and United Airlines business class flights home to NYC: 90,000 Aeroplan points and $5.60 per person
• Total: 1,012,000 points and miles, plus $4,090.20

While this might feel like an eye-popping sum, this trip likely would have cost $30,000 to $40,000 had we paid cash for everything. Even though it took a dent out of both our point balances and wallets, we both feel it was worth every point and penny.

Final Thoughts

I honestly cannot say enough great things about our stay at the JW Marriott Masai Mara. Every aspect of our stay was truly exceptional. I would stay there again in a heartbeat, even at its new, even higher nightly rates of up to 200,000 Marriott points per night.

If a luxury safari experience is on your bucket list and you’re looking to use your points and miles to make the cost more reasonable, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better destination than the JW Marriott Masai Mara.