Originally Posted by
Explorer789
...most FFs will realize is that you have to book through their prepaid portal, which deprives you hotel rewards points. This sort of already acts as a restriction since Amex knows this benefit is mostly useless for heavy hotel spenders and will be utilized by very few members. Amex wants to reap the benefits of advertising 5x hotels as a benefit even though it is quite poor value in reality.
You may have a point. I found these stats on where people booked hotels last year
Internet Source for Hotel Booking
Share of Bookings
Brand Website: Website where distribution is operated and managed by the brand (e.g
www.marriott.com/).
65.4 %
Merchant Website: (e.g. Expedia/Hotels.com, Travelocity and Orbitz).
19.5 %
Opaque Website: Customers to choose a fare or rate without knowing the brand of the supplier until after the item is purchased (e.g. Priceline).
11.3 %
Retail Website: Third-party distributor where the hotel lists inventory at the same price that it is sold to the consumer and hotel pays distributor agreed upon commission (e.g. HRS, Bookings, Venere in Europe).
3.7 %.
The above of course refers to all Internet bookings. I have no idea how Platinum card holders compare as a subset.