Originally Posted by
rcross23
but they are surely losing clientele at a rapid pace.
They must be replacing them with clientele willing to pay more as REVPAR has been up over that past couple years and also the most recent quarter.
From a personal perspective, using points for cruises has never been a good return. Even $1000 for 145,000 points only yields 0.68¢ per point.
I personally won't use points unless I get a return of 1.5¢ per point or better. Now I pay for all of my stays personally, so I have to pick and choose which ones earn points and which ones burn points.
For those that do a lot of business travel, they are very lucky to earn not only a salary from their employer but also hundreds of thousands of MR points and airline miles as a result of business travel. Their threshold for use may be a lot lower. I have a friend who does a lot of business travel never pays for hotel rooms or airfare for personal trips. A luxury that just doesn't exist for me.
So for those like me, they would probably never be interested in the cruise certificate offers as it doesn't give a good return. For those at the other end of the spectrum, it just doesn't matter because they earn more points each year than they use.
For those in between, you will need to find your own comfort zone, and I would recommend it be somewhere closer to 1.5¢ per point. Keep in mind that I do a lot of leisure travel to places where $400-600/nt hotels are not uncommon (Europe/Hong Kong) which are great places to use points at a rate of 1.5¢ per point or better. Others may be at a point in their life where 1¢ per point might be a more realistic target considering their travel desires. Bottom line is budget them out and determine where the best places to pay cash or use points are.
I have friends that just started in MR. We are all going on an RTW trip and we have already determined that Hong Kong JW and Rome Grand Flora are the two places to use points as that will give us the best return on our points and we will pay for the other hotels on our trip to earn the points for those stays. About $6000 in savings for each of us by using our points wisely. This is using about 300000 points, which we could have gotten 2 $1000 cruise certificates for instead.
JMHO