News and notes from around the interweb:
- Holiday Inn eliminated hot breakfast back in December. I was first to report this. However it seems some hotel websites aren’t updated, and customers are booking expecting to be able to have one on-property.
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- GHA Discovery is again offering status matches they will match against airline, hotel, and even cruise status – and they will match against credit cards, too. I don’t see a ton of value in matching to Platinum, but their Titanium is quite nice. That status through end of year will run $150, but they give you D$75 in hotel credit to spend.
GHA Discovery has actually been my second favorite hotel loyalty program the last few years, and I’ve had many great stays with them.
- American AAdvantage introduces redemption of miles for gift cards. (1) It’s sort of amazing they didn’t already do this. (2) More options are better. (3) If you’re considering spending your miles this way you should probably be focusing your non-air earning efforts elsewhere.
- I really like The Chatwal hotel in New York. It’s formerly a Starwood property, now part of Hyatt’s Unbound Collection, but looks like Minor Hotels is taking over (NH, Anantara, etc). That suggests to me that the property will shift to GHA Discovery.
- Another card that rewards your mortgage payments but it’s not that valuable – 3x on gas, EV charging groceries and utilities; 2x on home improvement, maintenance and furniture; 1x on everything else. And you earn 1 bonus point per dollar on that spend up to the amount of your mortgage. Redemptions are for statement credits and gift cards.
The letter in the post you’re referencing is a HIX that transitioned to a HI so no more free breakfast, very much not the same as the HI transition (although that hotel should honor free breakfast for anyone who booked before the change). Plus, when you say “Holiday Inn eliminated hot breakfast back in December”, they never cut hot breakfast, they cut made-to-order breakfast, the buffet still requires hot dishes like scrambled eggs.
The decline of Holiday Inn. How does a Holiday Inn Express convert to a Holiday Inn? There used to be big, physical differences between a Holiday Inn and a limited-service Holiday Inn Express. Number of floors, room count, meeting and banquet facilities, bar, restaurant, etc.
@Gene, as our resident HIE expert, I’mm’a need a run-down on what, if any, actual changes have occurred. I got a few Kimpton and InterContinental reservations coming up. Should I keep those, or dive-in head-first to whatever’s goin’ on at these HIEs?
No idea what’s going on at that Holiday Inn, but Gary is certainly making more of this letter than is warranted. I don’t think it’s a Holiday Inn Express (which serve free breakfast) that’s converting to a “regular” Holiday Inn (generally no free breakfast for non-Diamond guests, but you can buy their hot breakfast buffet). There are a few regular Holiday Inns that DO serve free breakfast to everyone, and perhaps this is one of those properties that has now decided to switch to the ordinary brand standard. They obviously should comp breakfast to everyone who booked before the change and complains. But this is not a widespread change.