Event Tickets With Points: The Complete 2026 Guide
You can spend hotel points and airline miles on event tickets, and the people holding those points mostly have no idea the market exists. Nineteen loyalty programs run their own experience marketplaces where concert seats, stadium suites, Formula 1 paddock passes and chef's tables go to whoever bids the most points, or to whoever claims them first at a fixed points price. No cash, no resale market, no queue. This is the hub page for that whole world: what is on offer, which programs run which format, what lots actually clear at, and how to get into one without overpaying.
Right now PointAuctions.com is tracking 266 live sports lots, 197 entertainment lots, 212 culinary lots and 102 arts and culture lots across those programs. Those numbers refresh on their own, so whatever you see above is what is genuinely open as you read this.
If the whole concept is new, read how point auctions actually work first, then come back here for the event-specific detail.
Two ways to spend points on an event
Every event lot you will meet is one of two things, and telling them apart is the first skill to learn.
An auction runs for a set window. You bid points against other members, and the highest bid when the clock stops wins. Most programs use proxy bidding, where you enter the maximum you are willing to spend and the system nudges your bid up on your behalf only as far as it needs to. Auctions are where the headline numbers come from, and they are also where people overpay, because a competition invites you to keep going.
A fixed-price lot, which we classify as Buy It Now (BIN), has no bidding at all. The lot has a stated points cost and you claim it first come, first served until it is gone. It is a yes-or-no decision at a known price. On a busy drop, the whole thing can be over in minutes.
Of the 1,035 listings live on the site as we write this, roughly two in five are auctions and the rest are fixed price. Whichever a lot is, the listing tells you before you commit.
Which programs actually list event tickets
The nineteen programs we track do not split evenly. Some run almost nothing but auctions, some have never run one. As of August 2026, counting only lots in the four event categories (sports, entertainment, culinary, arts and culture):
• Marriott Bonvoy Moments is the biggest event marketplace by a distance, with 259 live event lots, 234 of them auctions. It is also the most contested. Start with what Marriott Bonvoy Moments is.
• World of Hyatt FIND has 123 live event lots and zero auctions. Hyatt is a fixed-price catalog, so the skill there is speed, not strategy. See the Hyatt FIND beginner's guide.
• Hilton Honors Experiences runs a mix, 79 event lots with 22 of them auctions, and it holds the highest ceiling of any program we track. Details in what Hilton Honors Experiences is.
• AAdvantage Experiences (57 event lots) and Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer (23) are fixed-price catalogs rather than auction houses.
• Choice Privileges (50 lots) and Qatar Airways Privilege Club (34) run auctions on every single event lot. Choice Privileges opens its auctions from 5,000 points, the lowest starting bid of any program that auctions everything.
• Accor ALL (39 lots, 19 auctions) is the European specialist, heavy on Paris Saint-Germain and Paris theatre. See what Accor ALL Limitless Experiences is.
• Wyndham Rewards (31 lots) leans fixed price at the moment, but its auctions are the quietest anywhere. See Wyndham Rewards Experiences.
• Delta SkyMiles Experiences (22 lots, all auctions) is small and fierce. See what SkyMiles Experiences is.
• Virgin Red, IHG One Rewards, Alaska Mileage Plan, Flying Blue, Emirates Skywards, United MileagePlus, Southwest Rapid Rewards and Capital One Entertainment round out the tail with a handful of lots each.
The practical takeaway: if you hold points in a program with no auctions, your job is to watch for drops. If you hold points in an auction program, your job is to decide a number and hold to it.
The five kinds of event lot
Concerts and festivals
The category most people come looking for. Concert lots are rarely bare tickets. Programs bundle them with a suite, premium seats, a hotel stay or occasionally a meet and greet, which is usually why the exact package has no cash equivalent on sale anywhere. Festival packages (Lollapalooza, Outside Lands, Coachella) show up seasonally as multi-day passes with lodging attached.
We keep a running page on this: concert tickets with points.
Sports tickets and stadium suites
The category with the widest price range on the site. At one end are minor league baseball nights that clear for a few thousand points. At the other are World Cup and Formula 1 packages that have gone for seven figures.
Suites are their own sub-market: a private box, catering, sometimes parking and a host, listed as a single lot for a whole group rather than per seat. Because a suite is priced per box, it is often the best points-per-person value on the whole site if you can fill it. We cover it in sports suites with points.
At the other extreme, minor league fireworks nights are the cheapest genuine event experience we track, listed from about 1,000 Wyndham points.
The largest single event market we have ever tracked was the 2026 World Cup. If you want to see how a mega event behaves from first listing to final gavel, read what World Cup tickets actually went for, then what is still live.
Motorsport
Formula 1 deserves separating out because it behaves differently from other sport. The lots are weekend-long hospitality packages rather than tickets, the sponsoring programs are locked to specific teams, and the prices sit at the very top of the market. Hilton's McLaren packages are the clearest example: the biggest verified close in our entire archive is a Hilton Canadian Grand Prix McLaren package at 4,410,000 Hilton Honors points. Full picture in F1 tickets with points.
Dining
Chef's tables, Michelin-starred tasting menus, wine dinners and cooking classes. This is the quietest category and often the best value, partly because a dinner for two is a smaller commitment than a stadium suite and partly because fewer people think to look. See dining experiences with points.
Arts, culture and one-off spectacles
Theatre, museums, gallery openings, fashion week, and the genuinely strange lots that make this market fun. It is a thin category by count but a high one by median price, because what does list tends to be unrepeatable. A travel-flavored cousin of this is the Maldives on points, where the lots are experiences attached to a destination rather than a date.
What event lots actually clear at
Here is where we have to be careful, and where most coverage of this market goes wrong.
We do not blend programs into a single average. A Marriott Bonvoy point, an Avios and an Accor point are different currencies with different earn rates, so a cross-program median would be a number with no unit. We also never convert a points bid into dollars, because there is no honest cash equivalent for it. What we publish instead is per-program, in that program's own currency, using only verified closes: lots where we confirmed the winning bid after the auction ended, rather than the last bid we happened to see.
Sports lots, by program:
• Marriott Bonvoy: median 312,500 points, middle half 100,000 to 503,750 points, across 527 verified closes.
• Qatar Airways Privilege Club: median 180,872 Avios, from 126 verified closes.
• Accor ALL: median 51,000 points, from 96 verified closes.
• Choice Privileges: median 70,000 points, from 29 verified closes.
• Hilton Honors: median 268,000 points, from 34 verified closes.
Entertainment lots, by program:
• Marriott Bonvoy: median 50,000 points, middle half 30,000 to 90,000 points.
• Wyndham Rewards: median 36,250 points, from 114 verified closes.
• Accor ALL: median 12,000 points.
• Qatar Airways Privilege Club: median 28,300 Avios.
• Hilton Honors: median 260,000 points.
Those figures update monthly on their own. The spread matters more than the midpoint, so here is the full distribution for the largest single slice of the market, Marriott's sports lots:
Median: 312,500 points
527 verified closes · median 312,500 points · updated monthly
Two honest caveats. First, a verified close tells you the price a lot closed at, not that a bidding war happened. Across our whole archive, all categories included, 171 of 2,277 verified closes had no bids at all and settled exactly on the opening ask, and on some programs it is far more common than that: 45 of Wyndham's 150 verified closes and 34 of Hilton's 84 landed that way. A price on the board is not proof anyone competed for it. Second, near-identical titles are usually separate items, not repeats of one. Programs routinely list ten packages for the same night under the same headline, and the description is what differs, so never read a title twice and assume you are looking at the same lot at two prices. Our method for all of this is in what 2,000 closed points auctions reveal about each program.
Recent verified closes across the entertainment category:
How contested is each program
Price is only half the story. The number of bids a lot attracts tells you whether you are competing or just showing up. Across verified event-category closes as of August 2026, average bids per lot:
• Marriott Bonvoy: 19.2 bids per lot (median 11), across 1,518 closes. This is a real auction market and you should expect to be outbid.
• United MileagePlus: 9.1 bids per lot, but on only 16 closes, so treat it as a hint rather than a pattern.
• Qatar Airways Privilege Club: 6.6 bids per lot, across 179 closes.
• Accor ALL: 5.7 bids per lot, across 203 closes.
• Hilton Honors: 5.5 bids per lot, across 81 closes. Contested, but nothing like Marriott.
• Choice Privileges: 4.2 bids per lot, across 32 closes.
• IHG One Rewards: 3.0 bids per lot, across 16 closes.
• Wyndham Rewards: 2.2 bids per lot across 144 closes, with a median of 1. Half of Wyndham's event lots close on a single bid or none at all.
That last line is the single most useful fact on this page for a newcomer. If you hold Wyndham points and you have been assuming these markets are picked over, they are not. We refresh these figures periodically as the archive grows.
The mechanics that decide whether you win
Programs differ in the details, but four rules show up almost everywhere, and every one of them has cost somebody a win.
The points have to already be in your account. You cannot bid against points you plan to earn or transfer later. Hilton is explicit about it, and if you are bidding on several lots at once you need enough to cover all of them at the same time. Come up short at close and you are disqualified even if you were the high bidder. Transfers from a bank program can take days, so move the points before you bid, not after.
Proxy bidding means your maximum is the only number that matters. You are not going to win by watching the clock. Enter the highest number you would genuinely be happy to pay and let the system defend it.
Anti-sniping extensions are common. Hilton pushes the close out another five minutes on a late bid and only ends once bidding has gone quiet. Marriott does not publish a rule, but bidders consistently report a similar late-bid extension. Either way, a last-second swoop does not work here the way it might elsewhere.
Winning is binding. The points come out of your account automatically, and confirmed redemptions generally cannot be cancelled, refunded or resold. A max bid entered "just to see" is a real purchase order.
One more program-specific trap worth knowing: Hilton caps each member at five Experiences packages per calendar year, so every small win spends a slot you might have wanted for something bigger.
If you want to sanity check whether a lot is worth your points before you bid, the method is in how to calculate cents per point on points auctions.
When event lots appear, and how far ahead
Most event lots are dated, and most of those dates are close. Of the live listings carrying an event date as we write, the overwhelming majority fall inside the next ninety days. That is the rhythm of this market: programs list a few weeks to a few months ahead of the night itself, not a year.
The practical consequence is that browsing once a month does not work. Lots appear, run their window and close inside the gap. The exceptions are the mega events, which list far earlier and run in waves as the tournament schedule firms up, the way World Cup lots did across the first half of 2026.
Listings that have not opened yet show as coming soon, and the number on a coming-soon auction is the starting bid, not a live bid anyone has placed. Do not read it as evidence of demand.
Chasing one specific event or venue
If you want a particular night rather than a category, we group listings by venue and by event so you can watch just that one:
• Every venue and event page we run
Each of those pages carries what is live now plus what past lots at that venue closed at, which is the fastest way to calibrate a bid for a place you actually want to go.
How to start without watching all day
Nobody wins this market by refreshing a browser. The realistic routine is short:
1. Check which programs you already hold points in, and whether they run auctions or fixed-price drops.
2. Pick a category rather than a single dream lot. Sports, entertainment, culinary and arts and culture each have their own page.
3. Look at what similar lots closed at before you decide your number.
4. Set an alert so the site tells you when something matching opens, instead of you going to look.
Frequently asked questions
Can you really get event tickets with credit card points?
Not directly, but the bridge is short. Bank points from Amex, Chase, Capital One, Citi and Bilt transfer into the hotel and airline programs that run these marketplaces, and those program points are what you bid. The exact routes differ by bank: Amex Membership Rewards reaches Marriott Bonvoy and Hilton Honors, Chase Ultimate Rewards reaches World of Hyatt, Marriott Bonvoy, IHG One Rewards and Wyndham Rewards, Citi ThankYou and Capital One both reach Accor ALL, Choice Privileges and Wyndham Rewards, and Bilt reaches nearly all of them. Transfers are one way and can take anywhere from instant to a few days, so move the points before the lot you want closes, not after.
Which loyalty program is cheapest for event tickets?
By entry price, Wyndham Rewards is the cheapest: its minor league sports lots have listed from 1,000 points fixed price, and its auction starting bids go as low as 5,500. Choice Privileges opens auctions from 5,000 points, and Accor ALL from 1,000. By competition, Wyndham is the quietest market on the site, averaging 2.2 bids per lot with a median of one. The expensive end is Marriott and Hilton, where the marquee lots run into six and seven figures.
Do I need the points in my account before I bid?
Yes, on every platform whose terms spell it out, and Hilton is the most explicit: you must hold enough points to cover the bid at the moment you place it, and enough to cover every lot you are bidding on at once. You cannot bid against points you intend to transfer in later, and being short at close disqualifies your bid even if you were the high bidder.
What happens if I win an auction?
The points are deducted from your account automatically and the program contacts you with fulfillment details. Confirmed wins are generally final: not refundable, not transferable, not resellable. That is why the max bid you enter should be a number you would be content to actually pay.
Are these tickets, or packages?
Usually packages. Very few of these lots are two bare seats. The typical event lot bundles tickets with something the general public cannot buy, a suite, a hospitality lounge, pre-game field access, a hotel stay, or a chef's table with the kitchen. That bundling is the whole reason programs can offer them at all, and it is also why comparing a lot to a face-value ticket price misses the point.
The bottom line
The event side of the points world is small enough that most of it fits on one page, and quiet enough that a patient bidder with a modest balance still wins things. The two habits that matter are knowing the format before you engage, and knowing what similar lots closed at before you name your number.
PointAuctions.com puts every program's live lots on one page, so start with what is live right now, calibrate against the closed-auction archive, and let an alert do the watching.