Originally Posted by
iahphx
Yup, I've done this once too (huge Vegas convention when all rooms in town were booked), but this isn't a very common thing. Indeed, I was at the eclipse in Tennessee, and I preferred a Hampton Inn at the standard redemption level. That's because 20,000 Hilton points will (probably) never get me into a resort property or 5 star hotel, but 15000 Wyndham points will. So using Wyndham for a Days Inn would kind of be a last resort.
BTW, charging $1000+ for a Days Inn during the Eclipse is the definition of "chutzpah" (or gouging) to me. I have seen Econolodges in small towns with college graduations go as high as $500. That's pricey, but this was insane (especially since there was a 2000-mile eclipse band).
You went in Tennessee where there are way more hotel options that in relatively rural central Oregon east of the Cascades. The Days Inn I got was in Bend OR (about half hour drive outside of the band of totality), and the main town up inside totality (Madras OR) has a whopping total of 3 hotels, 2 Choice and 1 indie. Madras has a 6000ish population, maybe around 10k once you factor in the surrounding area, but that weekend the ballooned to about 200k people staying there (most camping out on farmland converted to eclipse RV/etc parking lots). When it's estimated that 100s of thousands of visitors are coming to an area with very few hotels, it's understandable that hotels may try to keep rooms available by charging high rates, when most of the rooms have already been booked up.
There was another thread here in the WR forum about people finding only a Super 8 in Jackson WY (actually in totality) for 15k, about a year out, when all the other points-bookable hotels in town were already sold out. And, again, there's no other towns close to Grand Teton NP.
So the hotel options were completely different in the west (whether Oregon or Idaho or Wyoming) because of the sparsely-populated areas the totality path went through once you got east of the Cascades (which, in weather statistics terms, increases the likelihood of clear skies that time of year). But some people who had to fly anyway to get to totality decided they'd prefer to go out west, whether because of greater chance (months out when you're reserving) of clearer skies, and/or just because of the viewing environment. (Out west where the eclipse was mid-morning, it was at a lower angle than further east where it was at midday. At lower sun angles, in totality you can see the eclipse framed by the surrounding landscape more so than when the sun is almost straight up.)