Originally Posted by harryhv

Well the hotel comment on FT tends to be highly US-centric, in fact the talkboard refused to have a board for the world's largest hotel group (Accor) as they're European.

In my limited experience, as an infrequent stayer, there's only two programs where you would see a benefit

a) Hilton, just to get those valuable miles for Diamond-club

b) IC (Holiday Inns etc) because they always have a list of hotels for a really cheap award called "pointsbreaks", 5,000 points instead of the usual 25,000. Usually some good hotels in the list too.