FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - Consolidated "Points Devaluation" thread
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Old Jun 12, 2019 | 5:08 pm
  #1545  
eponymous_coward
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Originally Posted by klanfa
For everyone praising hotels.com...
Originally Posted by klanfa
Quite a shabby loyalty program IMO.
As opposed to one that regularly devalues your points with no notice? Is your opinion that you are pleased to have the value of your stored points disappear such that you can't reliably plan aspirational travel?

Even the programs that DO give notice like IHG (barely) or Hyatt, I've had 25-50% devaluations hit hotels that I've stayed at and would happily redeem at again in the space of a year or two (I got whacked in the latest IHG and Hyatt devaluations for 2019, and not for fancy five star places either). So walking from Hilton over to (insert_chain_name_here) isn't really going to help me.

I'm fully aware of the limitations of hotels.com (and I fully expect them to someday pull the trigger on a devaluation), but at least 10% is 10%, not some vague aspirational number of points that gets changed at a whim in a completely non-transparent manner.

Originally Posted by notquiteaff
I was looking at booking some Hilton stays in Europe last week, and when I finally got around to finalizing my itinerary on Sunday they had all increased their award rates by 10k points. That cost me 70k points in one fell swoop.
Yeah, this is pretty much exactly why I'm finding hotel loyalty programs to be less and less useful. In a devaluation environment, you're either a sucker for holding on to point value while it disappears like snow in a Chinook wind, or you're just burning your value as fast as you can (or your corporate travel accumulates points so fast you CAN'T spend them all, in which case, you probably don't even care).

Last edited by eponymous_coward; Jun 12, 2019 at 5:17 pm
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