Originally Posted by
AsiaTraveler
My husband and I are planning a 2010 trip to Germany, Austria, & Switzerland, and in beginning to look at the cost of hotels, realized that we would be well-served to begin accumulating hotel points. Having only focused on airline miles up until now, I am looking for help & advice on how/where to accumulate said points.
Our goal is to accumulate points that would allow to book as many hotel nights as possible at safe, comfortable hotels- basic hotels are okay, the main goal to be able to redeem for as many nights as possible. Obviously chains with many locations within these three countries would also be preferable as it would give us more options to redeem to. Any general thoughts as to a strategy?
It depends where you're going in these countries. Big cities may have different chains in them than resort towns. For example, if you want to go to Switzerland for the Alps, few of the "big" upscale chains you know from the US are represented in Zermatt (Matterhorn) or Interlaken, but if you research around, decent hotels are not necessarily much more than a bit over $100US a night, but the only hotels you can get on points may require very high amounts of points. So even though points can work well relative to cash in some places in Europe, in other places (especially if you don't earn the points "trivially") points don't tend to be a good value.
Meanwhile, you need explain what your options are for earning hotel points. How much do you stay in hotels here in the US? Most great values in earning hotel points come from actual stays while registered for bonuses which earn you oodles of points. There are very few (recurrent) possibilities for earning tons of points without stays that I'm aware of.
And by bonuses which you oodles of points, I don't mean double points, I mean 5x normal points and stuff like that. So you may want to forget Hilton HHonors, as in the past couple years they've been pretty awful on bonus point promos. Hotel programs that are known for excellent promos include Choice Privileges. (Sep 1 - Nov 1 earn up to 70k points for 15 stays, which can be around $50/night one-night stays in many suburban areas, which would be around $750ish total. Then, if traveling to the fjords in western Norway, for example, redeem for 4 nights at 16k points/night in hotels that cost $200+, maybe $300+ a night, and thus redeem for hotels that would have cost more for those 4 nights than the 15 stays here in the US cost you! (Not that this is enough savings to make mattress runs work, which is why it can only work well if you have a need to stay in hotels a lot in the US.) The other hotel program with rich bonuses is Priority Club, but in that case the rich bonuses involve registering for multiple promos, most of which you can
only find by reading the sticky Promos thread in the Priority Club forum here on FlyerTalk.