Originally Posted by
Kacee
Marriott requires 9 stays in 3 months. I know, I just completed that challenge (in about 9 weeks). It's easy if you're a frequent traveler, so calling Hilton's 8 stays in 3 months "difficult" is IMO not accurate.
For years, the Marriott challenge was nights-based. I don't know who else upthread said it or didn't say it, but I will say it: 8 stays, or 9 stays, is a reasonably stout challenge for most of the target audience. If you're a business traveler on the road 75% of the time, you about hit 9 stays in 3 months. Three months of giving ALL of your business to Hilton or Marriott? That's a decent-enough barriers.
Maybe people got hung up on "difficult", because we (Flyertalkers) think of hotel-hopping and knocking that out in a couple weeks. But to the rest of the world ("normal people"
), that's a lot of freakin hotel stays. It's also likely 20-25 paid nights, since - again - normal people don't hotel-hop. So, solidly on/above an HH Diamond or MR Platinum pace.
I thought about directing 40K to Surpass this year to keep Diamond for next year, but am now thinking the Chase UR points will be more valuable.
No doubt about it: they will be. I run my 40k through the HH Visa every 2nd year but sometimes wonder whether it'd be better to just accept HH Gold and enjoy 40k more Starpoints. This is my "off" year for HH Visa spending, so I guess I have time to wait and see what unfolds with MR/SPG before starting another 40k on HH.
Originally Posted by
arlflyer
Do you think it is Millennials who are gutting these loyalty programs?
No. Millenials aren't yet doing the bulk of the business travel. I'm Gen X...it's probably our fault.
By "our fault", I think our generation is *probably* the first one to have a very high participation rate in hotel programs. Everybody I know - even people who have never heard of Flyertalk and don't travel for work - *knows* about points and miles. Friends who stay in a few chain hotels a year know to collect the points - even if it only leads to 1 Holiday Inn Express night award. They don't ignore the points. I suspect that people 10-20 years older than me were pretty locked in on airline miles from the 80's-90's on, but thought of hotels as a place to earn more airline miles by providing their AA number at check-in. That was what I did right when I started traveling...until I saw a Marriott Marquis sign in a lobby and got seriously hooked on free hotel awards.
Since information arbitrage, orphaned points, and people simply not asking for the points they'd already paid for was a huge enabler of some crazy-sweet awards back in the day, I suppose you can say that Gen X broke the model. (Sorry.)
Trust me, we Millennials have spent plenty of time hearing about all of the very, very bad things we have done - and strangely, most of them happened before we were old enough to drive, yet it's always still our fault somehow...
Weird thing is that #kidsthesedays are actually pretty cool, and probably less douchey than we were in our 20s. We were mostly materialistic pr*cks in our 20s, something I think we inherited from the Boomers...
Originally Posted by
IcHot
Some Gen Xer is raking the Baby Boomers over the coals in a recently published book. Maybe that set Baze off...
I've seen a few of these pop up in recent years. Gets quickly into P/R territory...