Originally Posted by
Dr Jabadski
“-100,000 Hilton buys 2 to 4 nights, pointstretchers increase this to 3 to 6 nights.
-100,000 Hyatt buys 5 to 12 nights, no discount rates for points.
-100,000 Priority Club buys 3 to 6 nights, discount reward increase this to 6 to 12 nights.”
Actually, 100,000 Hilton points can "buy" up to 8 nights if you don't mind paying a very reasonable cash price for each night. That's because Hilton often (but not always) has a cash + points rate which is about half the points but very little cash compared to the normal cash rate (and is thus in those cases usually a better value than either cash alone or points alone).
Same thing happens at SPG, but again, it's not always available.
And you've got the Priority Club math wrong. The one prevalent type of discount award is PointsBreaks, which is 5k/night, and tthus would stretch 100,000 Priority Club to buy 20 nights! (And while there are cash + points rates at Priority Club, they are of fixed value -- you're essentially just buying points and instantly redeeming them -- so it's not the great value it is over at Hilton and SPG. With Priority Club the great value is PointBreaks, if you can find one somewhere you want/need to go.)
But therein's the rub. The value of each program is very highly dependent on whether you need/want to stay at properties where the better values are available or not.
In my case, I have no so many points in some different programs, that I can avoiding using HHonors points or SPG points until I find them to be at a good value. I don't have a specific trip I need to "burn" them on (where I'm forced to accept whatever value they have). I can thus afford to value them for myself at cash + points rates, because I'm unlikely to redeem for an HH or SPG hotel when I can't find cash + points rates.
But if you won't limit your uses of hotel points to only the greatest values, you have to do your own calculations differently.
Finally, Hyatt has a tiny "footprint" (places where they have hotels) compared to SPG and Hilton, but it is slighly depeendent on destination type. If you were to dump everything into Hyatt (say, because you determined it had the highest point "value" in theory), but then find you're constantly going to places where there is no Hyatt, how would that help? But that can really happen with any chain, especially once you look internationally, since every major chain has some signficant countries where they have zero presence.