Best Western Rewards - Got points instead of miles

My account is set to "US Airways miles" but I got points for my last stay. Does it not automatically credit ones preferred partner?

HHonors, SPG and many others use automatically ones preferred partner.

ChoiceRewards takes only the account settings if the room is booked via Choice websites. If booked somewhere else, one has to tell the hotel staff to credit to the airline program.

What's the rule with Best Western?

My account is set to "US Airways miles" but I got points for my last stay. Does it not automatically credit ones preferred partner?

HHonors, SPG and many others use automatically ones preferred partner.

ChoiceRewards takes only the account settings if the room is booked via Choice websites. If booked somewhere else, one has to tell the hotel staff to credit to the airline program.

What's the rule with Best Western?
I'm not sure, but I thinik you can call BW and get them to change it (in that direction, ie, take back the points and post the miles; it won't work in the other direction generally since by the time the miles post they've already been sent on to the airline).

Did you not book through Best Western? (I seem to remember from other posts that you tend to book a lot through other sites, though I'm not clear why. Even if I search on other sites, I always book on the hotel's own site to avoid all sorts of problems like this.)

The BW "Customer Service" really drives me crazy. Called them, explained the situation, got a nice "sure, we will fix it".

When I check my account this morning I see that they deleted all points, credited them in one single booking again. The specific stay, however, was not changed from points to miles - it was removed :mad:

How crazy bad can those people be? Again a lot of work to have it re-credited :mad:

PS: Yes, I booked via Orbitz (because it was a lot cheaper, but the hotel agreed to give me points for the booking)

PPS: The main question remains: Do I need to inform the hotel that I want to collect miles (in spite of my account settings)?

PPS: The main question remains: Do I need to inform the hotel that I want to collect miles (in spite of my account settings)?
BW hotels are independently owned and operated. Keep repeating this yourself; it explains a lot about BW.

What it means with respect to this specific question is that it may depend on the hotel. If the hotel uses the old tracking forms, then perhaps, since there is a place on that tracking form to indicate whether to issue BWG points or airline miles/credits (and in that case a write-in field for the airline). But depending on where that tracking form is sent, it may be used or may be ignored, I don't know. (I've certianly had tracking forms filled out wrong by hotel staff yet stays post correctly before, so at least sometimes these days it's definitely ignored.)

If the hotel doesn't use the tracking form, I would assume that it gets the information from BW central and not from the hotel itself. But again, since they're all "independently owned and operated", I'm not absolutely sure (and it could vary from hotel to hotel, depending on when they last updated with BW system perhaps?).

And I don't know if there's "one" BW central, or multiple ones depending on the region of the world. (Same goes about calling BW; I and other people have typically had good results calling it from and in the US, but I dunno about calling it from Europe.)

I just got a tracking form from a SoCal hotel which I expect to be ignored. Here in SoCal, my stays post much faster than I would expect tracking forms to flow to BW central. And the tracking form was filled out goofily anyway; he checked that I wanted points (I did, but he didn't ask), wrote "10/4-10/5" for the check-out date, wrote "1 @ 66" for the number of nights ($66.75 was the rate), wrote 66 in for points/miles/credits earned, put nothing in for bonus earned, and then wrote 660 for total points/miles/credits earned! As you can see, more than half of the fields are wrong (only the final "total" field is about right).


PS: Yes, I booked via Orbitz (because it was a lot cheaper, but the hotel agreed to give me points for the booking)

Well, I don't know if the hotel really had the power to agree to that. Is it possible this (rather than your attempt to convert from points to miles) is why your stay has been removed? (It could be that the hotel put in points, but when BW tried to convert to miles, they saw that it was an Orbitz booking code, and it got removed because of that!)

Of course some third-party places are cheaper. Myself, I don't care. It's too much of risk in my experience (across multiple hotel programs, I can't keep track of which ones make which exceptions when) to use third-party places if I absolutely want to earn points/miles and/or geet benefits. At hotels which have such a thing, the point of lower rates at third party sites is BRGs, not booking at third-party sites. But at BW, I don't "dare" go beyond Manager's Special. (But Manager's Special does not tend to work overseas as far as I can tell, and even only works at some fraction of the hotels in most places in the US where I've tried it.)

My account is set to "US Airways miles" but I got points for my last stay. Does it not automatically credit ones preferred partner?

HHonors, SPG and many others use automatically ones preferred partner.

ChoiceRewards takes only the account settings if the room is booked via Choice websites. If booked somewhere else, one has to tell the hotel staff to credit to the airline program.

What's the rule with Best Western?

It sounds like you may need to give Best Western Rewards your airline account number so you can start earning miles, versus points. Contact Best Western customer service.