Originally Posted by
MePlatPremier
The current Double Points promo has already netted me some 75k points—if that’s not lucrative, I don’t know what is...
The promo started not even a month ago, so ignoring the fact that the first stay did not earn any bonus, that means $7500 spend in less than 30 days = $250 per night if you have been in hotels all month and did not spread the wealth to other hotel chains. Or maybe a 10-night vacation splurge at $750 per night.
I am not doubting what you say, but I would simply note that you are probably at the high end of who benefited the most from the promo; you are not the norm and therefore I would not call the promo lucrative simply based on your experience. Of course anybody spending $5k+ in the promo month will benefit, but most Ambassador level guests spend $20-40k per year, not $5k per month (= $60k per year), let alone $7.5k per month. Not even mentioning the large number of guests below AMB level who are nowhere near that.
I have spent $2600 since the promo started and cutting out my first stay I am at $2k spend, so 20k bonus points... as far as I am concerned it's nothing to write home about bonus-wise, it's a good bonus but not over the top. And I am sure I benefited more than 95% of folks, yet you are almost at 4x my bonus so far... which means you are possibly in the 99.9 percentile. For the vast majority of people, this promo is just ok.
Maybe it's just semantics but for the fun of the discussion, for me to call a promo "lucrative" I need to see better than double points because all it's doing is giving you an extra 10% discount, approximately. A lucrative promo in my humble opinion is Hilton's occasional triple points promo, or Hyatt's promo a couple of years ago where 25 nights during the period netted you 75k points (= great value if you stay at cheap hotels). Or when Hilton had a stackable promo of double points + 2500 Lufthansa miles per stay, great if you have lots of 1-night stays, in fact it made some stays almost free. Those promos resulted in a discount of far more than 10%. Double points is a decent promo, but fairly average. I prefer a 10% discount to no discount, but it won't change my decisions for many stays.