Originally Posted by
MDtR-Chicago
Are you saying that you can personally pay for a hotel room, to save $25-50 of travel costs?
If so, it will probably be very hard to find a loyalty program with points accrual high enough to offset the additional $50-75 of spend to stay in the hotel.
You might be able to break even using priceline and get the benefit of the good night's sleep.
Or is someone else paying for this hotel room?
EDIT: Or maybe Choice, Wyndham, and/or Best Western would have cheap enough properties to earn enough on their promotions to make it worthwhile.
Well, I'd be saving $25-$50 in travel costs, plus 2 hours of my time. "Someone else" is paying for it, but I also have certain motivations to minimise my expenses.
The market I am in (CLE) also has extraordinarly cheap hotels. I checked out Priceline and Hotwire, but my understanding is that they aren't worthwhile for loyalty.
Probably the best analogy for my situation is that I can do unlimited mattress runs.