The Conservative Political Action Conference will soon commence. For three days, enthusiastically plastered college kids will mingle with media personalities, merchandisers, and minor political celebrities. Speeches will be given, millions spent, and the fate of a movement decided.
But after the Republican faithful pack up and depart the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center, one question will remain: Who gets all of those hotel reward points?
Until recently, that was Vinh Nguyen. A seven-year contract obtained exclusively by the Washington Examiner and negotiated in 2014 between the American Conservative Union and Marriott Hotels made that former CPAC director the biggest winner of the entire conference. His name and his personal Marriott Rewards Number were listed as the recipient of “the eligible points for the given year.”
Renting the Gaylord costs upwards of one million dollars and racks up more than enough points to pay for stays in the very finest Marriott locations from Manhattan to Moscow. The company caps the points they pay out for a single booking to 50,000, so it’s not a life-changing windfall. But still, to earn those kind of points in a year, one would need to travel at least two nights a month and stay at a Marriott every time.
None of this is unethical, of course, and reached by phone Nguyen says as much. The contract was in his name. The rewards went to his account. The conservative carnival funded some personal travel.
“I don’t see why it’s an issue,” says Nguyen, who has since left CPAC and the American Conservative Union which organizes it. “There are certain entities that don’t allow points to be accepted and other organizations that do. It’s not anything that is under the table or inappropriate. It is a widely known practice.”
Still this was a somewhat recent discovery at CPAC HQ. Reached for comment, CPAC spokesman Ian Walters said the rewards arrangement “was unearthed three to three-and-a-half years ago” and then “immediately switched so that those points would be accumulated for work purposes rather than personal purposes.” It was a necessary change, he explains, to keep cost as low as possible for attendees.
When Nguyen left he turned off the spigot of points, but those points According to an April 2015 email from the global sales office of Marriott International: “Per the contract, these points will be assigned to the designee confirmed to us by ACU.”
Who is that designee? According to the email from Marriott International, none other than the ACU Executive Director Daniel Schneider. Schneider says putting them in an institutional account wasn’t an option Marriott allowed. He tells us he hasn’t accessed the points, and suggests that if he did, he would use them for ACU purposes.*
If he did use them for himself, though, who could blame him? CPAC 2018 will feature the most diverse cast of characters ever — speakers range from the French politician Marion Marechal-Le Pen to the Fox News Channel’s Judge Jeanine Pirro.
Anyone juggling those schedules and those ideologies and those personalities deserves a vacation.
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*UPDATE: This post and the headline have been changed after speaking with Schneider.
