Originally Posted by NickB (Post 31082415)

First, nobody has been "scammed" by this as there is no scam here. A scam implies a deliberate dishonest intention to mislead. There is no evidence of such an intention here. At most, what there might be is clumsy wording inherited from the era where rewards were issued in the form of vouchers. I think that most LCAH members would understand that the phrase "any stay paid in full or in part with one our more LCAH vouchers" refers primarily to stays paid using reward points.

Now, it is possible that somebody who is less familiar with LCAH might conceivably be misled although I would have thought that the above sentence would at the very least raise some doubts in the mind of the individual concerned and prompt him or her to seek clarification from LCAH to find out for sure what the story is with stays paid with reward points, especially as the exclusion of reward nights/nights paid with points from those kinds of promotions tends to be SOP in the majority of hotel frequent stayer programmes.

Whether complaining to your local advertising standards or consumer complaints agency will help, who knows? That surely depends on what its expectations are and what remedies it has to offer. This is, however, very far from being the strongest case of misleading advertising that I have ever come across even if there is some degree of carelessness in the phrasing of the promotion.

Originally Posted by kaizen7 (Post 31082442)

Originally Posted by theaugbunnies (Post 31082467)

yeah, i used points and not vouchers? Have LCAH ever refer to their reward points as vouchers?

Originally Posted by NickB (Post 31082473)

Yes, not so long ago all points were issued in the form of physical vouchers that you had to redeem at the hotel. Voucher dematerialisation was considered a huge progress as we were finally able to redeem vouchers against online prepaid rates.

Originally Posted by theaugbunnies (Post 31082478)

Then that will be a legacy issue and not something contemporary. Should all new consumers be familiar with what a company does in the past?

Originally Posted by NickB (Post 31082526)

Whatever. You have information and context so you can make up your mind. I have zero interest in engaging in a pointless polemical discussion.

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Originally Posted by AlwaysFlyStar (Post 31085536)

I feel like both positions here are reasonable. As someone who has been with Accor for nearly 10 years, I see voucher and automatically assume that means using points. However, if I just joined today, I would not understand it in that way. Additionally I just checked the security email from the last time I redeemed points at a hotel which was a couple of weeks ago, and there was no mention of voucher in the email.


And in the bill, it said points redemption, not voucher. So even if they still refer to them as vouchers internally, outwardly, for non-terms and conditions issues, it seems they have shifted away from that term. So if I had recently joined, I would assume that the LCAH vouchers mentioned in the terms are some unrelated entity. So while I have read and understood the terms and conditions, I think that they were indeed unclear and would agree that, for the OP, he should be entitled to receive the points from the promotion. However, in reality, I am not sure how likely this would be and how far they are willing to go in order to achieve this. And while this is not legal advice and I am not a lawyer, as far as the law is concerned, my understanding is that based on the contra proferentem rule, if the terms that were published when OP chose to participate in the promotion only mentioned LCAH vouchers and not points, in theory, the OP should be entitled to the points both legally and morally. However, as it is not a huge amount of worth in the grand scheme of things, I would question how much effort it is worth to pursue such a thing, but that is for the OP to decide.

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