When you choose hotels based on loyalty programs you've got to watch out for the honey trap problem. The honey trap is when your pursuit of elite status and points causes you to pay more-- in the form of higher nightly costs, primarily-- than those benefits are worth.

One way to avoid the honey trap is to choose a program based on where you actually like staying. For example, I got started with hotel loyalty programs years ago when I started traveling for work. Prior to that it hadn't made sense to join a loyalty program because my leisure travel wasn't frequent enough to make a program worth joining and there wasn't enough of a pattern to it anyway. But with that job my first travel project sent me onsite to a particular suburban location 5 or 6 times over the course of a few months. In that town were about a dozen hotels. The best for the combination of location, quality, and price, was a Sheraton Four Points. I joined SPG because I was staying at that hotel anyway, irrespective of elite benefits.

I got my first lesson about the honey trap on my next project. After having such a great experience with the Four Points at that one location, I gleefully sought out a 4P for my next project elsewhere in the country. I found one 10 miles away from the client site in commuter traffic, but I figured it was worth it since the other Four Points had been so awesome. Turns out the place sucked. That's also when I got my first lesson about brand (in)consistency.

Since then I've understood that brand loyalty works only if the brand is one you genuinely want to stay at. Look at your travel patterns and the kind of hotels you like to stay at in those places. If one brand family fits your needs a suitable portion of the time-- i.e., location, quality, and price make sense for you-- go for it. If not, you're probably falling into a honey trap.