Originally Posted by
deltame
Many FT have a preference of using miles/points for aspirational travel (flights and/or hotels) and there are many threads posted here and in hotel program forums that highlight best uses from that perspective. While I do aspire to fly in comfort (especially long-haul flights), I don’t really have a strong desire/need to stay in luxury hotels in order to feel pampered. It just came to me recently, as I wasn’t able to quickly get an airport hotel from PL, that using points for lower end hotels could be a reasonable redemption option for me (and perhaps some other FT members). In my specific example, I could get 8K points/night at a Hyatt Place or 4K points/night at an Aloft, both are airport hotels and would be good use of my points as the cash rates were relatively high. The hotel points are, by large, earnings from CC spend: 1 *wood points per dollar spend on SPG Amex, 2 Hyatt points per dollar spend on Sapphire Preferred (transferred from Chase UR). So, on the surface the above redemption (8K Hyatt points and 4K SPG points were earned from the same dollar amount of spend on CC. I have not been to either of the hotels in person and don’t have a strong preference between these 2 brands (Hyatt Place vs. Aloft) in general.
I’m interested in your thoughts/experience for redeeming hotel points for lower end hotels, and furthermore whether/how you value points from one particular hotel program over another in normal (i.e., non-aspirational) travel situations.
I'm finding that Hyatt's uses are bimodal -- at the low end and high end. At the low end, I've been thrilled to redeem at a Category 1 property in Cincinnati, and yet another at the Bali Hyatt. At the end high end, the top tier hotels are capped at 22k points, so when prices go through the roof, you can get some value there.
OTOH, SPG points are best for lower tier properties. My favorite redemptions are Cat 1-3 C&P redemptions. I'll redeem up to Category 5 (hate the peak season surcharge, will typically avoid that) but never 6 or 7.
In some places, "not nice" is pretty crappy. Paris and NYC come to mind. In these places, "nice" is pretty high end, or at least pretty expensive. In other places, low category hotels are far from dumps, and are quite suitable. For example, I have an affinity for SPG Cat 1-3 properties in Asia, particularly in Thailand and Malaysia.