On a recent holiday I was talked into signing up to the hotel group’s loyalty program, to collect points for my stay. I now receive all-too-frequent email updates about my ‘status’ but am coming to the conclusion that I am unlikely to ever use the points.
I don’t seem to have enough for anything useful, yet as a traveller who will always pick the best deal or most appealing hotel on offer at the time, it could be some time before I stay in another participating hotel and add to my points.
With about a dozen major hotel groups in Australia alone, not to mention all the smaller chains and individual properties, your points can be spread pretty thin as a leisure traveller.
It’s no wonder that the founders of the loyalty program-tracking website Perkler estimate less than a third of Australians regularly redeem awards from loyalty programs. All too often we sign up and then find it’s too hard to
redeem our points, either because we don’t have enough or because the scheme is too complicated.
Should you be loyal to one chain or just opt out and save yourself the trouble? Or is there a way to collect some benefits without getting too bogged down in it all?
A simpler way?
The Expedia-owned Hotels.com recently launched a program that could be an easier option for occasional travellers. With no complicated points system, status tiers or other hard-to-understand calculations, it offers a free night for every 10 nights booked. The value of the free night is the average spend of the 10 nights booked (not including taxes and fees), so the scheme is pretty transparent and easy to follow.
Then again, what are you going to do if Wotif or another site has the hotel you want to stay in for $10 a night less? Are you going to stick with Hotels.com to earn one-tenth of a free night, which you could give a paper value of $15 on a $150-a-night room, or save $10 in real terms by booking elsewhere?
Nothing is ever simple when it comes to loyalty schemes, because they are by their very nature trying to influence your behaviour.
“The whole point of loyalty schemes is to lock you into a particular provider,” says a spokesman for Choice magazine, Christopher Zinn. “One hates to be a spoil sport, because the concept of getting something for nothing is a very attractive one, but I think we would say that someone has to pay… the cost has to be borne somewhere.”
Choose wisely
If you do want to collect hotel points, it is important to understand that loyalty schemes rarely belong to a single hotel brand. Most are run by hotel groups, so you need to know which brands belong to which umbrella companies. For example, the Accor group takes in brands including Novotel, Sofitel, Ibis, Mercure, Pullman and All Seasons, while the Starwood group encompasses brands such as Sheraton, Westin, Four Points, Le Meridien and W Hotels. Points can be earned and redeemed across any brand in the program and in some cases this gives you a range of price points, from budget to five-star.
Look at what hotel brands you are realistically likely to use before signing up to a program. If you are staying in a Sheraton or Le Meridien for a special occasion but normally stay in much more modest hotels, you are unlikely
to accumulate enough points to redeem for accommodation in the Starwood group.
However, there can be other benefits to being a member, such as sales and discount rates that are limited to loyalty program members. The hard part is staying on top of all the offers, especially if you belong to multiple programs.
If you are a very infrequent traveller, one option is the scheme offered by the accommodation website hotelclub.com.au, which gives you ‘member dollars’ to put towards your next booking. The returns are modest, at four to six per cent of the value of the booking – $6 to $9 on a $150-a-night room, depending on how many bookings you make a year – but you don’t have to wait to redeem your rewards. Even if you have only one member dollar in your account, that’s a dollar off your next booking.
Frequent flyer points in the mix
If you decide not to bother with hotel loyalty schemes, it still pays to ask about frequent flyer points when you check in. Most major hotels are linked with one or more frequent flyer
programs and usually all you have to do is hand over your membership card at check-in.
The Qantas frequent flyer program offers points for thousands of hotels around the world and the Virgin group’s Velocity Rewards program works with a big range of hotel groups, with points redeemable for
everything from flights to shopping vouchers.
This article was published in Jane E. Fraser’s weekly travel column in The Sun Herald, Sydney.
