sailingman22

We will be arriving in Paris Nov. 1st - Nov. 6th and hope to use choice points for our trip. Do the hotels usually lower the amount of points required for a nights stay in the fall season? The Comfort Hotel Mouffetard/Latin Quarter is currently at 20,000 pts and the Comfort Hotel Andre Latin is 25,000 pts. Thanks.

GUWonder

Well, they have a history of pulling rate changes with or before little (if any) advance notice -- sometimes to one's advantage but other times not. You are at their mercy when it comes for stays beyond the very limited redemption booking window of a couple of months or so at best.

BigLar

On the other hand, many of us here have scored 8K/night deals in London and Paris (among other European destinations), and the after-September time frame is when we usually do it.

I'm planning a trip to Rome October-ish, and watching the redemption rates closely.

In reality, depending on where/how you obtained your points, pretty much anything in the 8K/10K/12K range represents a very good value.

Travelomania

I have the same question for the same time-frame and came basically to the same results
And am wondering now how all these prior "blogged" 8000 point redemptions happened ?
(April thru June is high season in Paris)

Any updates - since the last post - that I didn't catch ?

sdsearch

The 8000 points "sales" aren't announced ahead of time. They just seem to happen once in a while. Then someone notices them, and people whose schedule meshes with that jump on it, while people whose schedule doesn't mesh with that are bummed out.

A couple years ago, I noticed a "suddently" discovered 8000 points sale, discovered the Hotel Diana in Venice was available for 4 nights at that price (but disappearing fast), checked that flights were available at a good price, booked the hotel, booked the flights.

Another strategy: Assume you may not hit an 8000 point sale, and book a hotel (that hotel or some other hotel) some other way (more Choice points, points in another program, cash) with refundable terms. Then, if a Choice "sale" happens, you can rebook into the Choice hotel at the low rate and save yourself a bunch of points. But this second strategy obviously requires that you have (and accept) that fallback booking that isn't quite as good a value.

(I had a similar experience recently in another program. I booked a Holiday Inn in Canada for 15k points a night, and then a week or two before my stay it went on PointsBreak sale for 5k points a night, so I cancelled and rebooked at that lower rate. There was no way I could have predicted that that hotel would go on "sale", so I consider it just luck. But the part that wasn't luck is that I was using the other hotel program that sometimes has sudden deep redemption "sales".)

Travelomania

Thanks so much for your explanation ^

Coincidentally, an update of the blog I was referring to, just posted.
This is not YOU I assume ?

sdsearch

If you're asking whether that's my blog, no, I don't have any blogs. Posting on FT at the rate I do is quite enough typing about this stuff for me.

satori

The rates have dropped to 8,000 points for nearly all Choice Hotels across Europe, except for Nordic Choice Club countries in Scandinavia and Baltic region.

This is my blog post: Across Europe Choice Privileges Cheap 8,000 points Hotel Reward Nights to November 30, 2013. http://boardingarea.com/loyaltytrave....Hzc8Bk0T.dpbs