I was a TW subscriber long ago and was enrolled in a program called Time Warner Rewards automatically. At first glance, it's a pretty lame program - they give you huge amounts of a fake currency (more than you could ever use) and you buy products at a "discount."

Example: Magazines with a face value of $125/yr. that smart shoppers get for $25/yr. will be made available on the site for $50/yr., using $75 of your "rewards cash" to get the discount.

Anyway, for reasons unknown to me, I keep getting the emails. For kicks, today I clicked on one since it featured a hotel link.

Much to my surprise, I found Priority Club hotel rates that are surprisingly good. Example - a one-night stay at the IC North Dallas through Time Warner's site is $54.33 on a night when the PC website wants $115.

Even odder: the TW site claims to have a $69 publicly-available rate, thus using only $15 of my "fake" dollars. Again, the number of "fake" dollars is meaningless - I have thousands of them - but the $69 rate that TW is pulling from somewhere is intriguing. It's a confirmed 1 King Bed, slightly stricter cancel policy (3 days) but not a full prepay.

Anyone use this? Anyone even familiar with it? Would these rates interfere with my ability to participate in promotions? (e.g., Are they valid for everything else points/promo/elite qualification/etc. wise?) Where's Time Warner getting the low rates to begin with?

I'm used to these kinds of home-grown programs doing the opposite: jamming users with bad rates because people don't know any better. That's definitely what I'd expect from a cable company.