Originally Posted by
thorthor
By booking through hotels.com you can get around 20% back (7% cb portal +10% welcome rewards + 3TYP)
The prestige benefit gets you 25% (if you stay exactly 4 nights)+ 3TYP on the spend for the non-free nights.
So do the math and see if the extra hassle to book with CWT is worth the extra savings (for me it's not, but we usually stay at B&B's and not high end chains)
You can't really do the math like this. You are mixing your denominators.
At hotel.com, if you stay 11 nights you pay for 10 of them. Your rebate is (1 + 10*(10%) = 2/11 = 18.18%
With the Citi benefit if you stay 4 nights you pay for 3 of them so your rebate is (1 + 3*3%) / 4 = 1.09 / 4 = 27.25%.
Obviously the number for Citi is much higher, but the downside is that it's a max -- you only get that amount if you stay exactly 4 nights. If you stay 5 nights it's 1.12 / 5 = 22.4%. If you stay 6 nights it's 1.15 / 6 = 19.16%. If you stay 7 nights it's 1.18 / 7 = 16.8%.
So the best stategy seems to be to use the benefit on nights of 4-6 nights only, and use hotel.com through a portal for any other length stay.
This also all assumes that TYP are worth 1c each, which seems low. If you have a different valuation in mind you can redo the math (it probably won't change much)