Category Archives for Hotels.
You earn a Hotels.com free night after staying 10 nights, and that’s an effective 10% rebate on hotel stays. As a result Hotels.com offers a useful program for two types of people. It’s great for those who do not stay regularly enough to earn elite status in a loyalty program. It’s also good for those who don’t concentrate on a single chain.
That rebate will become worth a little bit less in three months.
Homesharing sites, which are really just a marketplace for rooms, don’t do much to take care of you when owners cancel.
Make no mistake: this is a cost cut you’re shamed into liking because good people care about the environment – but it is not necessary to go to bulk if you want to make environmental progress.
For the past several years Hilton has almost always been offering double points. That’s necessary, because without double points the program’s rebate value is lower than competitors. That’s also what we should expect.
The road map for where Hilton has gone with their program was laid out by Jeff Diskin, now Hilton Executive Vice President, back in 2010.
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’.
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 »
