I need to reserve a room for 5 nights at the end of July for a convention in downtown Houston. There are 2 different ways of online reservation:

1. Directly from the convention center's lodging site, Crowne Plaza is in their list for a special rate of $155/night. I tried their online reservation site and they do have a place to input Prority Club membership number so I assume booking from them will still give me points and stuff, making it a qualified stay. But I'll lose the 5k bonus points for booking online through Priority Club.

2. This is the way I got from a phone rep working for the Crowne Plaza toll free reservation center. On Priority Club's site, the rate for this same hotel is about $50 higher than the convention center. So I called up their toll free number to see if there's any group code for this convention that I can use when booking online through PC. The phone rep told me that he could see this convention's rate as "hotel restricted" so he could not do much from his side. He then suggested me to book online through PC with "best flexible rate" then call up the local hotel and asked them to switch my reservation to the convention's rate. By this, I can get the online booking bonus points. But a risk part here is whether the switch from "best flexible rate" to this "hotel restricted rate" would disqualify my stay or not. I don't want to lose all my other bonus such as stay 5 get 10k etc just for 5k online booking bonus.

The other question is the 5k bonus pts for booking online is part of the deal of stay x get 10k which expires this month, while my stay will be in July. I can certainly book the room before 06/31, but will this be qualifed for the online booking bonus pts only?

Thanks very much.