** New Choice Promo Stay 2 Get A Free Night **

So if I understand from reading upthread, these points post just like regular stay points and not as some sort of bonus, correct (1000 + 7000)?

The crux of my question is this: I am hoping to do two quick stays later this month to generate the 8000 points for one free night in the middle of nowhere later this summer where Choice is the only option. However, USAirways just started a promo for 3K miles when you do a fly/stay/rental car combo. In order to get 3K miles I am pretty sure you have to have US-DM as the earning preference on the hotel. So the 1000 + 7000 points will go direct to USAirways and thus be unusable for my free night, correct? (I was originally thinking that they might be bonus miles that wouldn't be subject to direct deposit)

Looking to double dip, like any good FTer!

To the best of my knowledge, that is correct. You can get either points or miles, but not both (this ain't Hilton )

What will go the US is the 3K miles. Be sure that they are listed as your preferred airline before you check in, and it wouldn't hurt to make sure of that while you're at the desk. They have been known to screw these things up.

Of course, if you have the Choice co-branded cc, you'll still get your points from that. But it seems you're a once-in-a-while Choice customer, so you probably don't have one.

I suggest you do some math. Is 3K miles worth half the value of that hotel stay in the middle of nowhere? (Only you know how much that hotel will cost you if you have to pay with money instead of with 8000 points.)

And this being US, it's not like those 3K get you any closer to status, right? It's just ordinary RDM, I presume.

It's one thing to participate in a 3K promo that involves a stay if you don't have much of anythihg else to earn, but another to do it when you're losing out on big hotel points that are actually valued more than 3K miles. (But I don't know how you use US miles, and I don't know much the Choice hotel you were planning to use those 8000 points at costs in money, so I can't evaluate which is higher value in this case, only you can.)

Or WyndhamRewards. Who have just started a summer promo, where you get 1000 bonus points (though only at a fraction of their hotels), even if you earn toward an airline for the "base" earnings on your stay. In that case, if your preference is set to Southwest, you can earn 600 Southwest RR 2.0 points plus 1000 bonus WynhdamRewards points.

Ie, Hiltion HHonors isn't the only one to combine points and miles, it's just the only one to do that on every stay, and the only allowed to called it that.

But Choice is not like WyndhamRewards either. It doesn't give points bonuses at all if your preference is set to an airline, and it doesn't give airline bonuses at all if your preference iset to Choice points.

However, neither is Choice like Best Western: At Choice, you don't have to register for any airline promos (that I can recall), and you can mix and match different stays, so for example if you're doing 3 Choice stays this summer, you can do stay 2 get 8000 points on two of them and then switch to airline preference and earn toward an airiline on the 3rd stay. (And you can do that in any order. If you're booking on the Choice website, the earning preference you have set at the time you make the reservation is the one that goes into the reservation. Only at the hotel check-in can you override that, and some people have had trouble sometimes with such overrides.)

(At Best Western, once you register for an ailrine promo, it locks you out of the points or voucher promo for the same period, and vice versa. Sometimes people may be able to get that changed by calling customer service, but it's not guaranteed, and definitely on the website you can't change back and forth between points vs miles promos.)

I think I just made this mistake. I've had five stays since the promo started and have many more before it ends. However, I started and registered for the promo as a gold member and now I just got plat. We'll see what happens.

If you check in at 2 different properties on the same day, will it count as 2 stays?
What if you don't show up or check in after you make the reservation but have already been charged? Will it count as a stay?

Those questions aren't specific to this promotion.

On the second question no, at no hotel program that I'm aware of (just like at no airline either). Otherwise you'd be hearing all the time of people just booking cheap rooms someplace where they don't live and not showing up and getting tons of points for it.

I don't offhand know whether you get points for 2 different properties on the same day.

I fulfilled the requirement, and my online statement only shows that I received 5,000 bonus points.
I used their website on Monday to send them my request for an explanation as to why I did not receive the full 8,000 points. Still no reply yet.
I'll update as needed.

Are you saying the sum of the points you got for the two stays was 5,000?

You[re not supposed to get 8000 bonus points. You're only supposed to get enough bonus points so that both stays' points added together add up to at least 8000.

What brands did you stay at? Are you aware that at those brands that normally earn 5 (instead of 10) points per $, you only qualify for stay 2 with 2-night (or longer) stays?

OT Update:

Well, per a discussion (about a promo only for Europeans) in the WyndhamRewards forum right now, it appears that in that program you can and regularly do get points for no-show stays. I'm not sure if there's any trick to it or not, and I'm not sure if it works 100% or not, but it's enough that people are suggesting it as a way for Europeans to get points from a promo by booking hotels in the US yet while staying in Europe!

At any rate, that's the first program I've ever heard of where you can do that...

I stayed 2 nights, check-in 5/31, at a Sleep Inn and received the normal 1590 points for doing so.
I again stayed 2 nights, check-in 6/28, at the same Sleep Inn. I received 6590 points, which the website says includes the bonus points.
I guess that I misunderstood the program.

is there a cheap hotel in europe? did not find any

I'm confused; are you ZurichFlyer because you're based in Zurich, or only because you fly to Zurich all the time?

From the T&Cs of this promotion:

"You must maintain an address in the U.S. (including U.S. territories) or Canada to be eligible for this promotion."

So if your address (with Choice) is in Zurich, it matters not where there may be a cheap hotel in Europe, because you're ineligible.

Meanwhile, to understand the difficulty of finding a cheap Choice hotel in Europe, consider the fact that there are fairly few cheap Choice hotels in the US too.

What there are lots of, in the US, is cheap Choice motels. But Choice in Europe doesn't tend to have motels (they leave that to Ibis or whoever), only hotels (from what I have seen so far).

Anyhow, for cheaper Choice hotels in Europe, how about 50 Euros a night for tomorrow night (July 13) at Comfort Inn Braga (Portugal) for Best Available Rate? (I dunno if any discount rates would lower that further or not, tried Senior Rate at random and it said not available.) That's about equivalent to US$70ish, which is not bad at all in many US locations, even though it's still of course not anywhere near the cheapest in the US.

Reminder, the last day for Arrival is 8/11. They kindly made this explicit from the get-go.