<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by Tino:
If it's the company's money, I'll go the hotel program route and try to keep it reasonable. When it's my money, it's Priceline all the way.
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Why would I pay 3-4 times as much when I receive the same benefits except points? There is no way a night at any of these properties yields $100 in frequent guest points...
I save up my points for when the Priceline deals are unavailable, which isn't very often.</font>
Ditto. Government travel regs do not permit me to use priceline for business travel, so I usually book the best hotel I can find at the government rate. For a while that was Marriott due to the breadth of choices, but lately I have become partial to Hyatt and Starwood.
Priceline is my first choice for leisure travel, particularly for weekend nights in cities with Hyatt locations. Otherwise I will go with a discounted internet reservation service (e.g. londontown.com, travelworm etc.) depending on the location. I usually end up with a 3*-4* room in the $40-80 range, depending on the season and location.
In the last year, I have only booked 2 leisure stays at posted rates: (1) Bajamar Mexico (I had no choice for a friend's wedding) and (2) Fort Bragg, California. In both cases I was rather pissed off to pay $100+ (the rack in Mexico) for a mediocre sub-holiday inn room. Boy do we get spoiled on priceline.
I expect to have low level elite status by the end of the year in a couple of programs. Depending on the benes, I may re-direct some of my business travel to these programs. But I seriously doubt I will do any "hotel runs" at year end just to get status, with the exception of Hyatt, which still allows you to double-dip (or at least counts PCLN nights for status and provides status benefits on PCLN stays).