Four in Ten Points Auctions Get Fewer Than Five Bids: A Bargain Hunter's Guide
The auctions that make headlines are the bidding wars: World Cup finals near three million points, F1 paddock weekends, Hyatt frenzies that crack a hundred bids. But across more than 2,000 closed auctions in our archive, the more useful finding is the opposite one. A large share of points auctions close nearly silent, and silence is where the bargains live.
How contested points auctions really are
Among the 1,785 trusted closes that carry a bid count, the distribution is lopsided toward quiet:
| Bids at close | Share of auctions |
|---|---|
| Zero recorded bids | 4% |
| 1 to 4 bids | 36% |
| 5 to 14 bids | 26% |
| 15 to 49 bids | 26% |
| 50 or more (true bidding war) | 8% |
The top two lines are the story: 40% of these auctions (715 of 1,785) closed with fewer than five bids. For every blockbuster, there are dozens of experiences that went to the handful of people who showed up.
Where the quiet corners are
• Accor entertainment has a median close of 12,000 points and averages about 1.5 bids. Suite tickets and festival passes regularly go to one or two bidders. In our tracking this is the tightest-clustered corner of the whole archive: the middle half of Accor entertainment closes sits in a narrow band around that median, so the "market rate" is unusually predictable. If Accor is your program, the arbitrage math is worth running first.
Median: 12,000 points
50 verified closes · median 12,000 points · updated monthly
• Wyndham Rewards averages about 2.4 bids across its whole catalog. Harry Styles suites at Madison Square Garden (browse Wyndham's experience auctions) closed six separate times between 100,000 and 155,000 points.
• Choice Privileges averages about 3.6 bids. Trackhouse Racing shop tours (search Choice auctions) closed at 5,000 points.
• Qatar concerts at the O2 arena cleared at a median around 36,000 Avios, with a JOJI show closing at 1,500.
• Restricted-eligibility auctions. Marriott ran a cluster of issuer-restricted World Cup packages, open only to cardholders in Brazil, that closed in the 50,000 to 60,000 range with zero or one bid. Open packages cleared far higher, into the hundreds of thousands. When eligibility shrinks the bidder pool, prices fall hard. These are only worth chasing if you actually hold the qualifying card.
The recent Accor entertainment closes below show the pattern in the raw: suites and festival boxes clearing low, often to a single bidder.
Closing-day timing
Auctions ending Saturday or Monday averaged about 7 to 8 bids. Thursday closes were the busiest at about 24 bids, with Wednesday and Sunday also crowded at roughly 19 to 21. Part of that gap is which programs close on which days rather than bidder behavior, so treat it as a correlation. But when the same experience appears with several end dates, the quieter closing day gives you the better odds.
Wins that actually happened
• Two ICC Women's T20 World Cup tickets for 2,500 Marriott points. Several matches closed at that level.
• JOJI at The O2 for 1,500 Avios.
• A NASCAR Trackhouse shop tour for 5,000 Choice points.
• And 50 auctions found no bidder at all, including a Lake Tahoe getaway with flights that went unsold at a 500,000-point start. Unsold lots frequently reappear, and each listing's results page shows when an auction has run before.
A quiet auction is not always a cheap auction. As our late-bidding data shows, some sleepy listings wake up violently in the final hour, especially on Accor and Qatar. The bullets above are where quiet usually stays quiet, but the bid history on each results page is your only reliable guide, not the mid-auction bid count.
How to hunt
New to points auctions entirely? Start here. For the full cross-program picture of how auctions actually clear, see our study of 2,000+ closed points auctions. Otherwise: filter live auctions by the programs above, browse closed results to learn what quiet looks like in your category, and set an alert so the listing finds you instead of the other way around.
About this data
• This is the PointAuctions.com closed-auction archive as of June 13, 2026: more than 2,000 closed auctions collected since early 2026 (2,046 to date), of which 1,807 are trusted closes. A trusted close is one we can stand behind as a real result, either a verified winning bid or a last-observed price with recorded bids. Every figure above is drawn from that trusted pool in the closed_auction_prices archive. The Accor entertainment median and chart above update automatically as new closes are verified.
• Bid-count stats cover the 1,785 trusted closes that carry a numeric bid count.
• Delta, IHG, and World of Hyatt remove their auctions at close, so we never re-verify a final there. Their prices are last-observed bids and are best read as floors, slightly understating the true closing price.
• All prices are actual points bid. We do not convert points to dollar values.