Club Carlson - The cost of the current CC promo's

All,

Being the sad economist that I am, I was wondering how much these current promo's must be costing CC.

Both myself and my family members have been able to triple dip on PP, PI and RB.

However, it must be costing them an absolute fortune. I guess it's a small price to pay if you can attract new customers and maintain the volume, however I suspect the latter will be difficult given the savviness of the average FT'er.

In future, if anyone is looking to take advantage of their promo's, I highly recommend Belfast. All 3 hotels with a one mile radius and cheapest rates in Europe.

These must be part of chain wide membership/marketing drive to get more frequent travelers to try out Club Carlson properties. Quite frankly, I hadn't really given them a thought from a personal point of view previously.

As long as the points are used for free nights or points + money awards, the money stays in the chain. Hotels get reimbursed very little for free nights so it is not that expensive, but of course not sustainable for long.

Hyatt used to have their Faster Free night promotion twice a year for years.

I agree that you can't just look at the stay vs award used with the promo for that stay cost. The objective is to get people into the hotels. I too have used Carlson Hotels in areas where I might have not considered them in the past...and I've been pleasantly surprised. Best example is Frankfurt Airport where I would normally stay at a Holiday Inn Express if all the Starwood options where too expensive. I tried the Park Inn and I must say it's much nicer than the HI so I will definitely consider it in the future.

These are worldwide promos, but the effects may be different in different areas. There may be a PP, PI, and RB close to each other in Belfast, but Belfast is kinda far away for those of us in California (and the promos require geting to the hotel within two months). Meanwhile, there are few PIs in North America (only one in the whole West), and only one PP in all of North America (near Minneapolis MN).

Furthermore, a trip to Belfast doesn't help if you booked it and went on it before the PP promo was announced. If you did that, and you don't live near Belfast, you need to book a second trip!

So ironically, for those who don't realize this up front, the effect is that a bunch of people may be registering for these promos "just in case" but then never ending up staying at the hotels (because they turn out to be too hard to get to). That's especially likely in the case of the PP promo IMHO, at least for North American members.

These are worldwide promos, but the effects may be different in different areas. There may be a PP, PI, and RB close to each other in Belfast, but Belfast is kinda far away for those of us in California (and the promos require geting to the hotel within two months). Meanwhile, there are few PIs in North America (only one in the whole West), and only one PP in all of North America (near Minneapolis MN).

I registered for all 4 but definitely won't be able to travel to MN in the next month or so. The promotion is quite generous but I think a lot of points are used for C&P, particularly because you can generally get better value that way unless you are redeeming for a Cat 1 or some Cat 5 hotels.

I understand the thinking of the OP, but look at the popularity of Groupon. Typically that will give the customer about half off some deal, and half of that goes to Groupon. So the company gets 25%.

That seems to be roughly in the ballpark of what this promo is costing Club Carlson (maybe it's costing them a bit more), but look how much more attention CC is getting than the average Groupon deal. It's in all the travel blogs, on FT and the other travel sites, Fatwallet, etc. Many millions of impressions, I'd say.

Call it advertising if nothing else. And the income goes to us instead of the media. I think it's brilliant.

And I have had some extra paid CC stays and likely will in the future.