The comparison of rates came up in this thread, but it seemed to cause the conversation to lose focus from the OP's topic, so I thought that I'd break it off and give this its own thread.

Cliff Notes(TM) summary: Sometimes the Virtuoso rates are the same as the Best Available Rate (BAR) at a property. Sometimes they are not.


This evening, I went through all of the Starwood (Virtuoso-affiliated) properties that I could find, and I compared 3 rates for a 1-night stay on October 31, 2009:

• Lowest advance purchase (non-refundable) rate;
• Best Available Rate (BAR);
• Virtuoso rate.

In all, I reviewed 34 properties. Of those:

• three were sold out, so I used either November 1 or November 2 to check rates;
• two had no availability for a variety of nights that I searched (could be due to minimum-stay requirements, or perhaps simply due to a peak in business during the first week of November);
• one had availability, however the property did not appear to have Virtuoso rates loaded into the system.

Of the 30 Starwood properties that returned Virtuoso rates:

• 10 of them (33%) had a Virtuoso rate that was lower than the BAR rate associated with the same room type;
  - Discounts ranged anywhere from 9 - 33%, with an average of 14.2%.
• 2 of them (7%) had a least-expensive available Virtuoso rate that was lower than the least-expensive BAR rate, however that was because the Virtuoso rates came back with a lower-category room than what appeared as available when simply looking at standard BAR rates;
• 18 of them (60%) returned BAR rates & Virtuoso rates that were identical.

I converted my spreadsheet with all of the rates into a .pdf that can be viewed by clicking here. I have not gone through and cleaned it up much, but hopefully it can still be helpful.

Special thanks to DavidO, ABG & Luxetravels for your helpful insights in the previous thread -- you each helped to peak my curiosity enough to do this review.