Category Archives for Hotels.
Starwood Preferred Guest had a policy they called ‘true redemption’. It wasn’t just no blackouts, where a hotel put certain dates off limit for using points. It was no capacity controls. That meant if any standard room was available for sale you could use points to book that room.
Now with Marriott Bonvoy it seems some hotels are able to play games they weren’t able to before.
Starwood Lurker no longer works for Starwood — or Marriott. The online face of hotel loyalty received the ultimate status match, a new job at Hilton.
IHG Rewards Club is out with its new promotion and to the surprise of absolutely no one on earth it’s called Accelerate.
Registration required for the earning period between September 1 and December 31. You’ll be able to take advantage of a targeted set of offers — various tasks that earn various levels of points. My offer is to earn up to 40,650 points.
Hyatt is offering 25% off the cash portion of cash and points redemptions and up to a 25% rebate on free night award redemptions at top properties, and for a brief period this even stacks with the 10% rebate available to co-brand credit card customers.
This includes the Park Hyatts Maldives, St. Kitts, Mallorca and MIlan as well as Andaz Papagayo and more.
Last month we learned Hyatt would begin adding Destination Hotels properties to the Hyatt portfolio August 20.
At the time we learned which 8 out of three dozen Destination Hotels would join early on. Now Hyatt has shared the new redemption categories for each of those.
Twitter used to be the “go-to” way of getting personalized customer service, and with some brands it still is. Many companies assign super competent agents to deal with twitter, and empower them to cut through bureaucracy to solve problems.
Not all do however. And some just follow the ‘first rule of social media’ which is to try to get customers to stop blasting the company as quickly as possible. The easiest way to do that is to get the customer to ‘take it to DM’.
I don’t think the Fairfield New Orleans Downtown studied Seinfeld well enough to internalize what reservations are for.
When Marriott first announced their new program they told us they’d be adding a new highest redemption category 8 and also adding peak and off peak pricing for 2019. They put off category 8 until March but postponed peak and off peak pricing even further.
They’ve been silent on when to expect it until now, giving us a month’s notice before the new top redemption price could go as high as 100,000 points per night. Effective September 14th they’re making some other changes to the program as well.
According to a laughable AOL article you should call a hotel directly to secure the best price and use a three word incantation to save 20% off of the lowest price online.
However there’s a nugget of wisdom here that’s worth unpacking.
I’m often tired when I travel. Doing some exercises before bed helps, but between flights, time zone changes, and extremely long work days I find when I’m back home Friday morning that I’m dragging. In fact I can get up dragging while I’m on the road too. Coffee is part of my morning ritual.
But I won’t make coffee in my room.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
