Originally Posted by
beaubo
Hi there!
Could a BW veteran help me value a GC point.
I am looking for a $100 voucher that costs 23,000 GC points.
How many SPG points or airline miles would be arough equivalent for trading purposes on Coupon Connection!
Much obliged.
First of all, if you're talking about the $100 BW Travel Card, that only costs 22000 GC points (but it looks like it's available to Elite members only, or only to them at that price).
Anyhow, such a travel card is one of the poorer ways of using points IMHO. If you probe deeper, you can get a lot more than $100 value out of 22000 points. For one thing, you can turn them into 4000+ miles, and that's on average (depending on airline) 1/22 of a $4000+ business class trip to Europe, and $4000/22=$181. Gosh, even if you only value business class to Europe at $2500, $2500/22 is still $113!
Next, if you keep them as points and use them for hotels in Western Norway, 20000 points will get you 1 night at a number of hotels next June 15 (you have to plug in a date to get the calculator to come up with the points, so I just chose one at random around times when I had an idea of what cash rates would like), which costs an estimated (converted to USD) $247.38 per night! In fact, if you search for 100 mi around Bergen, you get 6 hotels all for 20000 points per night, and 5 of them are $169.30 or more, and the lowest priced one is $130.96.
So no matter how you slice it, it's possible to get 1.25, 1.75, or even 2.5 times the value out those 22000 points that you get from that $100 travel card!
And, btw, this is true of
all programs: Those "use anywhere" travel cards are designed to make the
program money (not to save
you money), and are always a poorer value than using points directly for particular hotels (if your travels take you to places where there's a good ratio of points to cash value, as with the current state of the dollar is increasingly the case all over Europe). They can be useful if they can be used in cases where you can't get the hotels on points (such as the travel cards from some other chains that work at non-major-brand hotels even!), but in this case, I'm not sure what the great value is at $100/22000 points.