Originally Posted by
GHA_Insider
We feel that we have corrected some unfairnesses in the old programme - for example we had a surprisingly large number of members who would take a 7-night holiday in a luxury resort, spend $20k on the stay and still be stuck on Gold level because we were only counting nights.
The majority of our members live in locations where there is only 1 brand or maybe 2 brands available
The real road warriors who are doing a very large number of nights and/or brands and/or spending in a year will now be considered for the Red tier
For the first point, definitely GHA has nothing to lose by offering higher tiers to big spenders. Most hotel chains offer the spend-related route to top tier, it makes sense. Very few will criticize this new feature of the GHA program.
For the second point, FT probably has a greater proportion of people who are travelling in many countries and have access to multiple brands, compared to the general or average GHA member, many of which might travel domestically 95% of the time. So those voices will not be heard here on FT as much, relatively speaking. Domestic travellers in markets with only 1-2 brands will benefit from your change.
For the third point, the real road warriors are in greater proportion on FT, but like I mentioned previously the lack of clear target for Red tier is a significant deterrent, at least for me. I can make the same argument about IHG Royal Ambassador which is a moving (undisclosed) target. I achieve top tier with hotel chains when I know what I am shooting for (Marriott Ambassador, Hyatt Globalist, Hilton Diamond), and if GHA told me what I need to do to reach Red and what the benefits are, there is a chance that I would move a significant number of nights away from my other hotel programs to stay at GHA when I can. But without knowing the target and the benefits, I am very unlikely to increase my GHA stays when Titanium / Black benefits remain the same or are being cut. I will possibly stop after 3 brands in a year or if I exceed it will not be by much. Perhaps over time if enough Red members share info here on FT about what benefits they received and how many nights / brands / spend they achieved in order to qualify, I would be in better position to revise my stance. But for now I do not intend to ramp up GHA stays, quite the contrary. That's unfortunate but it explains why the FT crowd might not be very well aligned with the customers who will benefit from the new program.
I am aware that members on FT might just be small fish in a big pond... you would like to have actively engaged members, and some folks here have written hotel reviews on FT for GHA properties which triggers some discussion and awareness of your hotels, but I suspect that is bound to decrease significantly going forward for reasons outlined above which hopefully you will find logical rather than emotion-based.