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Helpful readers explained what Choice Privileges does not about their Q4 promotion. I wrote in My Week in Points that I was frustrated that I only got the minimum 5,000 point bonus, with no explanation of how that was determined. I should have looked that my overall balance was 8,000.
Katherine explained:
The promotion is actually gives you the difference between the points on your 1st stay and 8,000 points. However, the minimum bonus is 5,000 points.
If you paid $100 and received 1,000 points, you would received 7,000 points on your second stay ($100 stay would generate 1,000 base points and 6,000 bonus points)
If the bonus points earned on the 2nd stay is less than 5,000 points, that is when you would receive 5,000 points.
Loyalty Traveler, the hotel guru, added:
If you received 5,000 bonus points, then you should have received over 3,000 base points for your stays.
As Katherine said, the bonus is equal to the points needed to reach a total of 8,000 points after two stays. There is a 5,000 points minimum bonus.
There are about 1,500 hotels in Choice Privileges available for 8,000 points at any time. Currently there are many hotels in Europe that were 20,000 points over summer that are now available for 8,000 points. London and Paris have several hotels currently available for 8,000 points.
At least they updated the terms to state there is a 5,000 points minimum. That term was just added in mid-2012 and this is the third time in 2012 Choice Privileges has run the 8,000 points after two stays promotion.
Seems awfully complex and nowhere official I found makes it clear to me. The promotion provides an incentive for short stays to maximize the bonus , though there is that 5,000 minimum bonus that would still apply on long stays.
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On balance, while all that is painfully true, mebbee we need reminded once in awhile that actual road trips in the US (or Australia) aren’t always about multi-star digs and elaborate breakfasts. When we do the Paris Hyatt Vendome later this month (!) I’ll appreciate it a little differently 🙂
But yeah, the bottom rung on amurican road hotels can be kinda grim.
Writing this from an 8000 point Choice Hotel in Hot Springs AR — the nicer of the two in town. The curt, borderline surly desk clerk, apparently pleased to no end that I had a reward and not a revenue stay, put me in a room with a bare light bulb in the light fixture overhead, and I had to step around a gnarled garden hose to get to the door. 3 guys are drinking beer and smoking cigarettes on a pickup gate outside my door, and the (non-smoking) room has that faint odor of old cigarettes and pet pee.… Read more »
@dale m – that is hilarious! I started on a quest for a sub-$200 hotel room in Australia, a room without roommates but with a bathroom, and that started me on this irritating trip.