sdsearch

I hate that question because it assumes (incorrectly) that eveything must fall into or the other.

Is traveling to someone funeral really "leisure"???

In my case, most of my travel is "commute reduction". I choose to stay in hotels near work several nights a week because work is too far away from home, and I don't want to change work, and I don't want to move close enough to work. (The area I live has horrible traffic between where I live and I work during rush hour.) But I'm not paid by my work to stay in these hotels; it's of my own choosing. (I'm paid hourly, though at professional rates, but don't have a fixed schedule, so if I can work more hours because I spend way less time commuting that pays for half the hotel cost; and the free vacation stays I get in turn for always "following the promos" on choosing hotels pays for the other half of the hotel cost.) So it's related to work but it's personal.

I thus think the question should always be something more like "required by work" or "personal". My "commute reduction" travel is personal.

To answer your question about hotels, I choose largely based on price, but within the group of hotels that give me good bonuses (earning points for later stays or earning lots of miles) while paying inexpensive rates. I've chosen Marriott as my primary "major" hotel because their Look No Further (LNF best rate guarantee) program lets me stay at hotels at 70% to 40% of the "normal" published rate. I stay there exactly however many nights it takes to "max out" the promos, not a single more a year. Then I use "naturally cheaper" hotel programs like Choice and Best Western and WyndhamRewards and (North America only) La Quinta (these are roughly like choosing Ibis in Europe in terms of cost in USA outside of city centers), but again I only stay at each brand when I can earn a bonus there. (Many of these bonus are "per stay", and a stay is defined as "any number of consecutive nights at the same hotel, no matter how many times you check in or check out", so I have to "hotel hop", ie change hotels every thing to maximize my bonuses, and I do.)

I thus stay 140+ nights a year in hotels, totally on my own dime, always "following the promos".

But am I typical? No.

By is anyone typical in this airline miles and hotel points world? I think not! (Everyone just has their own different way of being "not typical".)

This is such a specialized world, where you have to play all sorts of tricks (like the "hotel hopping" I just described), that most "ordinary" people wouldn't do. And that's why most people are "not typical", because each one who gets a lot from the system has their own different way of getting a lot from the system.

The only "typical" people will be the one who don't get much from system. (But FlyerTalk is not necessarily the place to find them; many of them don't get that much from the system because they don't visit FlyerTalk.)

By the way, you didn't specify which countries you wanted this input from. The hotel points and airline miles world works very differently in different countries (how many countries besides the USA do you find people applying for multiple airline and hotel credit cards many times every year?). So since you're in Germany, I'm not sure what audience you're looking for, and I'm not sure if you understand that the answers you get (if they just tersely answer the questions you asked) are going to be very skewed depending on where the person answering is based.