Originally Posted by idkmybffjill

I wanted to get the community's advice on whether to book my hotels via Fine Resorts & Hotels vs. through Hotels.com via cash back portal.

I have 3 upcoming work trips to NYC. Each stay will be roughly 3 nights each with the hotels being about $1,000 a night for a total of say $9,000 across all 3 trips.

1. If I book through Fine Resorts & Hotels on my AMEX Business Platinum card, it will get me $9,000 * 5 = 45,000 MR points on the bookings. MR points are valued at 1.5 cpp? Which would give the points a value of $675 (45,000 * 1.5/100).

2. However, right now on a cash back portal I use, they are offering 10% cash back at hotels.com. It's normally only 4%, so it's currently elevated, and it will stack on top of the regular hotels.com rewards (which is basically also 10% back - stay 10 nights, they give you an 11th night free that is the average value of the first 10 nights). So with the cash back portal + the reward night, I'm basically getting 20% back, or $9,000 * 20% = $1800.


So the no-brainer here is to book the hotels through hotels.com, right? All the ones I'm looking at in NYC are independent hotels (Peninsula, Langham, etc.) and not run through Marriott/Hilton where I have status, so booking through the 3rd party OTA doesn't matter to me.