Originally Posted by
sdsearch
Last year Choice launches a new website.
We have yet to find a single way that the new website makes things easier than the old website. We constantly find things that are harder on the new website than they were on the older website. Yes, maybe the newsite looks prettier, but that's about the only improvement.
Now, how that relates to this specific issue: On the old website, we could see
on each hotel page a chart such as:
Jan-Mar 2016: 16000 points/night
Apr-Jun 2016: 24000 points/night
Jul-Sep 2016: 20000 points/night
(The chart didn't show a full year; it showed the current period and one or two periods into the future.)
But these charts disappeared with the new website, and with the disappearance of those charts there's less visibility about what the "normal" hotel redemption rate is, and thus it's less clear about what is a discount than if the website still showed those charts (and then explained that there may a discount on certain nights of the week).
Meanwhile, to those people who are claiming that "this hotel used to be so and so many points, and now it's this many points", those charts showed that hotel points requirements have varied
for many years at Choice, though they used to vary only by season, not by day of the week. So hotel redemption rates going up and down is nothing new.
However, what is new is that now there's no "published visibility" of when a hotel redemption rate goes up or down (because of that missing chart online). And many guests don't like lack of visibility of redemption rate changes.
Actually, they gave us back that chart with these changes - you can see the points cost on each hotel page again, currently updated through 30 June. Hotels participating in the FlexRewards program also show the days of the week that the 'discounted' rates apply to.
The Henderson property mentioned above is an excellent example. The 12k/16k rates that are referenced appear to be 'high season' rates - now through April 15th. From April 16th through June 30th, the 'low season' rates of 10k/12k will apply. I unfortunately don't have the data on what the 'high season' rate was last year, so I can't speak to that, but the 'low season' rate is definitely showing an increased cost for weekend nights.
My complaint is not with the FlexRewards concept. I don't like any devaluations, of course, but even that isn't my issue in this thread. My issue here is with Choice being blatantly dishonest when describing these changes. As I said in my first missive,
"Play up the fact that we can finally see seasonal rates again. Play up the fact that all of your hotels are now on an equal footing for promotions. Play up the fact that you managed to stave off full time devaluations by increasing the points costs only on certain days - but don't pretend that you're decreasing the number of points required for redemption."