We are going to review Accor A|Club in the May issue of InsideFlyer magazine and would like your input.
If you would like to participate, please post your response in the thread with the pros and cons of membership in A|Club and grade the program from A to F (A being the highest grade). You can include a plus or minus with the rating.
Programs: AA EXP, UA 2P, DL Silver Medallion, CO Silver, SPG Plat, A-Club Plat, IC Plat Amb, Hertz PC
Posts: 1,137
I am an A-Club Platinum member. Overall I would give the program a C...relative strengths and weaknesses listed below:
Positive:
- Upgrades provided consistently at Sofitel properties (upon request)
- Sofitel benefits (free drinks for 2, amenity in room, 4pm checkout) are good
- With Platinum bonus, points accrued per dollar spent seem reasonable relative to other programs.
- The quality of the properties, especially Sofitel, is generally high...better than most competitors.
Negative:
- No benefits other than points earning at non-Sofitel properties (e.g. Novotel)
- Terrible, non-responsive email support (phone support is OK)
- Cumbersome award redemption involving paper certificates that take weeks to arrive
- Points don't post automatically more often than they do (maybe 1 of 3 stays in my experience)
- Requalification criteria is confusing (they don't say what time period is used to measure requalification)
- No credit card option for points accumulation
- Can't use awards on pre-paid rates
Overall, the program is OK but not great. I much prefer SPG Platinum overall.
I'd also give it a "C" (speaking from A/club gold experience)
Pros:
So far (5 stays), 1 level upgrades have been consistently given on both free and paid stays
Cons:
None of my stays posted automatically, and phone customer service contact number is pretty hard to find unless you dig deep into the website. Ended up doing retrocreditby email, and never got a reply -just woke up one day finding points credited
Positive: Check-in desk staff are familiar with programme even though it was only rolled out recently.
Initial promotions look to be sufficiently generous given initial value of points (+100% of base points for all 2008 bookings; +2000 points = €40 for 2 or more stays in Q1 2009)
Voucher scheme's clear conditions mean no surprising difficulties redeeming points.
Rapid response from Customer Service and automated services (e.g. card delivery - under 2 weeks from status to UK, voucher delivery - 3 working days from order to reach UK)
High bonus rates combined with low points tier thresholds makes valuable earning rate (Platinum equivalent to 7% cashback) easy to achieve.
Negative:
Poor success rate at points automatically posting.
Poor customer service response to faxed points credit requests.
Online points submission does not state that they will not consider requests without a copy of the bill, and .TIF (a common format from an e-fax output) is not accepted by the online submission page.
Cheapest stays not eligible for voucher use due to need for full CC prepayment - lowest flexible typically 15-20% higher making vouchers less valuable for redemptions than they appear.
F rating from me. Stayed at the Sofitel's in London, New York, Los Angeles and a Mercure in Paris in January (14 nights total).
Positives:
None encountered yet
Negatives:
Only my stay from the Sofitel London has auto posted, no points from the other stays so far. Emailed them to find out what was going on and was told to wait for a minimum of six weeks. If no points had posted after this time then I would need to send them the invoices electronically.
I thoroughly enjoyed my stays at these Accor hotels (esp NYC) but a 25% auto post rate means that I will no longer take A-Club point earning into consideration when booking a hotel.
I'm SPG Plat, Best Western Plat and Priority Club Gold. Accordingly, I'm pretty familure with these types of programs. I've stayed somewhere around 100 nights/year for the past couple years.
AClub is totally useless. Period.
There is nothing good about it.
I've stayed over 30-nights at an affiliated hotel in Jakarta and have had to fight tooth and nail to get my points and nights credited to my account. The hotel here won't give me room upgrades because the stays haven't posted and I can't ever get anyone to return an email, fax and most times a phone call.
Eventually when this sorts out, I'll be AClub Gold but see no reason to make any efforts to stay at AClub hotels in the future. If necessary, sure I will, but it won't be my first choice.
Even Best Western's program is better and it's one of the worst.
I've got a bunch of AClub points and can't do anything with them...useless...totally useless.
SPG Plat continues to be my favourite without question.
Programs: AA EXP/2MM UA 1K DL GM, HH Diamond, SPG Plat
Posts: 427
A/club Platinum due to Sofitel Privilege which while not generous was not quite as onerous.
Agree with most that Accor A/club on the surface is pretty straight forward about what few rewards are offered.
Goes down hill from there with having to present or note A/club number numerous times and still not getting proper points credited. Prepaid nights booked through Accor.com are not shown on folio and therefore points not credited properly. Missing points link requires folio which doesn't show amount spent, so no points.....and around and around we go.
Sitting on 3 folios with these problems and not sure where or whether to start again or if worth the bother.
We are going to review Accor A|Club in the May issue of InsideFlyer magazine and would like your input.
If you would like to participate, please post your response in the thread with the pros and cons of membership in A|Club and grade the program from A to F (A being the highest grade). You can include a plus or minus with the rating.
Good - about time their lame programme was exposed.
I stay regularly at the Mercure Southgate Hotel in Exeter, UK. Never had a single upgrade yet, and the staff do not seem aware of club promos even though the lobby is littered with brochures for them. I also tried exchanging some points for vouchers for my last stay at the above property, only to find when they arrived that said vouchers could only be used in France. When I complained, they told me to send the vouchers back to them so that they could "investigate" and then return the vouchers to me. When I tried again, asking what use that was since I wanted to use the vouchers in the UK, they repeated the same answer. To be fair, the hotel concierge tried to reason with them on my behalf, and seemed to reach an understanding with them that they would re-issue replacement vouchers which could be used in the UK. However, that was 3 weeks ago and I have not even had an acknowledgement that they have received the vouchers.
Every time I stay I have to chase up points on the account - they are never applied automatically, and then usually there are mistakes where they only credit part of the due awards.
Couple all this aggravation with the relatively low value of the scheme, and I really wonder whether it's worth it.
Cons:
*Very cumbersome redemption policy involving paper certificates.
*Plat benefits only given at Sofitel and MGallery
*Low earn rate
*terrible customer service by email
Location: Seat 1A, Juice pretty much everywhere, Mucci des Coins Exotiques
Posts: 14,934
I give Accor an A++++++ for the hotels themselves. Many of the worlds Sofitels are excellent hotels, and they now have the distinct brands of Pullman and M-Gallery. Plus they are the best in the hotel industry in having a full range of about 8 different levels of hotels in their program. In many ways, Accor is the best chain in the industry.
However, if you compare the frequent stay program with what we have now at Starwood, Hilton, IHG, etc., the current Accor program is just not there yet. I recall when Starwood first started and the others, they were nowhere near as good as they are now. So I'm willing to be patient with Accor. They have a lot of room for improvement in the frequent stay program organization, service and support, and attractiveness.
Location: Seat 1A, Juice pretty much everywhere, Mucci des Coins Exotiques
Posts: 14,934
This was in a recent Sofitel email...not sure of it's value.
4th best brand hotel for Travellers’ choice 2009
Acclaimed by travellers on Tripadvisor.com, Sofitel has been voted 4th best luxury hotel brand with 6 hotel in top of hotels: Sofitel Lisbon Liberdade, Sofitel New-York, Sofitel Fidji Resort&Spa, Sofitel Montréal Golden Mile, Sofitel Chicago Water Tower, Sofitel Impérial Mauritius Resort & Spa.
And
4 Sofitel in Top hotel for travel experts
4 of our hotels were also rewarded by travel experts and designed among top 500 best hotels for Travel&Leisure: Sofitel Chicago Water Tower, Sofitel Metropole Hanoi, Sofitel Melbourne On Collins, Sofitel Philadelphia.
Aweful
