lost_in_translation, I’m so glad that you, too, kept thinking about this. I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I invested more time thinking about the D$ promo, but I spent countless hours taking my dad to doctors last week and needed some distraction … so I came up with a plan to win the D$200,000.

Turns out I could do 20 brands for a total cash outlay of $14,982. This includes all unnecessary flights I’d have to take (for pretty decent trips to places like LHR, Greece and FLR/MXP), but does not include flights I’m taking anyway, like Portugal or HKG or SIN (where I would just be replacing IHG or Hyatt with GHA). I’d apply approx. D$1500 from the initial 10 brands promo on rates exceeding $600 at expensive brands like Capella, and would be left with D$4620, which I could blow on better rooms or incidentals during those 20 stays (this sortof negates the no club/no breakfast problem).

Now, would 20 brands be enough? Discovery has 37 brands, so 20 doesn’t sound like much. But four of these brands are just a single hotel (in tertiary Chinese cities or Iraq) and many others have just 2-5 hotels. It’s relatively easy to pick up 4-5 brands in places like London or Dubai or Amsterdam or SG, but the brands are repetitive and even if someone visited all of these major cities, they’d only hit 10-15 brands. Anything more than that takes some efforts.

Of course the problem is that there might be someone else sitting down like me and realizing that you can basically buy D$ credit at 90% off with this — and plots an even better scheme that exceeds mine by 1 or 2 (or 8 if I’m terribly mistaken) brands. I could make it to 23 if I included Dubai, and of course there are some brands in the US and Australia, where someone else could do a checkin as second guest (although that’s probably best avoided in case of an audit). I’m pretty sure that 20 brands is a lot, but you never know if there’s some freak who hits all 37.

Of course the whole plan is highly theoretical — the promo is just so poorly designed, I’m not convinced they won’t simply hand the grand prize to one of their buddies. And in any case, if you win the D$200,000, that’s when your real problems begin. You have to spend it in 6 months. It cannot be applied to taxes and fees. So if you go to places like Japan or Bali or SG, you end up spending $40,000 in cold hard cash to cover the taxes/service charges on your free nights. The D$ are transferable in theory, although in practice that seems to be highly buggy, and they’d probably take a close look at your account to make sure you’re not selling any credits.

So basically, I’d have to stick to redeeming at very high end places in London and Paris and other places where there are no taxes or they’re rolled into the rate (which GHA does, like so many other things, in a very haphazard manner). All this has to happen within 6 months, Oct-Mar, which in Europe (where I’m based) isn’t exactly the best season.

Considering how crazy prices are these days, some of these hotels are actually competitive (for the average person, not a very skilled FTer) if you look at places like Milan or Florence or even London — €300 or £300 a night is less than you’d pay at many Bonvoy or Hyatt properties, so paying that much at a GHA and getting the promo kickback isn’t a bad deal (assuming you go for the D$5200/10 brands). Of course, that calculation negates the manifold problems you may encounter with GHA, from stays randomly not posting correctly to false conversion of currency (just reading the rules for that gave me a headache). Realistically, if you do 20 stays, you might have to fight to have 10 of them credited correctly, and I wouldn’t be at all comfortable staying on a $607,23 rate that somehow shows up with $0 in taxes on the GHA rate breakdown, in a country with 7% VAT on hotels.

IOW, as tempting as it sounds, not gonna do it, but I’m pretty sure the eventual winner of the D$200,000 will come in at less than 20 brands.