Thanks. Interesting.

About ten years ago, I had a reward stay at a fairly upscale, west coast Doubletree.

Despite giving the reward cert (which -- talk about devaluation! -- the total points was 60K for 3 nights), the points were never actually deducted from my account. (This was when you could make a reward reservation without having the points in your account, and just show up with a cert -- and only when the the hotel sent the paper cert in were the points deducted).

I then had a decision to make....