IBpark

This poll will determine which benefit for this rewards program will appear on the January ballot for the 2014 FlyerTalk Awards.

Please note that once you have cast a poll vote, it cannot be changed.

You may vote in any or all of the nominations polls across FlyerTalk. Simply navigate to your favorite program’s forum and cast your vote. Links to all polls can be found here!

This poll will close December 17, 2013.

Official FlyerTalk Awards balloting begins January 14, 2014.

(View information about the Awards and last year’s results)


The 2014 FlyerTalk Awards are sponsored by:

uk1

I do not wish to be a party pooper - simply wish to be helpful - but I am puzzled as to how you can mix benefits feedback in a single poll for what is effectively two entirely different programmes with a different set of benefits available and therefore of variable importance to each group ie Ambassador versus Royal Ambassador.

Also the poll completely ignores the Priority Club programme. The issue is compounded because you have not captured the status of each respondant and the results therefore will be impossible to analyse meaningfully.

You need to have a different poll for each programme type member.

IMH

Yes. This poll is more of a mess than most of the others -- IHG Rewards and Ambassador need to be treated separately and there should be some differentiation between status levels.

uk1

The problem is everyone thinks they can "do a survey"!

nicolas75

Definitely Royal Ambassador as a whole is a major benefit (upgrade, club access at most properties, early check-in/late check-out guaranteed, free minibar, free pay per view film, free internet, and generally very well welcomed at other IHG properties).

FLYGVA

Let me try to answer some questions.

The poll has also to reflect a little bit the structure of flyertalk, where Priority Club / IHG Rewards Club and Ambassador are together and also Ambassador is only valid at IC hotels, both belong to IHG. And we had no separate poll for Ambassadors last year. Also there is the need to pay for Ambassador ...

A reason not to separate was that the benefits for members of the former priority club at non IC hotels of IHG have been - well - a bit weak. I am in contact with IBBrands and we might change this for next year.

Making different polls for different status levels is a good idea, The major problem is that one could not verify if the participant has the status he claims to have to.


I tend to agree, but we have no written criteria how to become a RA other than buying a certificate on ebay or trading it at Flyertalk. Also from my point of view, RA is not quite a benefit of IHG Rewards Club.

FLYGVA
co-moderator IHG Forum

uk1

But the POLL is worst than doing none at all because it can only produce totally misleading results. It cannot do otherwise. There are many reasons but I'll just summarise the obvious.

If you take as a group Ambassadors and Royal Ambassadors together - which the poll has - let's assume that 98% are Ambassador members and 2% RAs. (It has completely ignored Priority Club members which outwheigh Ambassadors and RAs combined by a considerable factor - but presumably they will be answering questions in the poll that has absolutely nothing to do with them.) This will mean the the benefits for RAs - which are extremely important to them - will not be available to 98+++% of the respondents. So it cannot therefore register as being an important benefit to 98+++% of respondents. People reading the results of such a poll will not be aware of these fundamental flaws and will therefore be bound to misinterpret what members actually think.

Compounding this is that the vast majority of ICHG club members have been excluded from the survey ie Priority Club members who probably outwheigh Ambassador Members and RAs by a considerable factor. Their progamme has not been included in the poll but they will be responding.

The only methdology that will produce a half-coherent approach to a meaningful result is to have a seperate poll for each and every seperate programme and then put in order the % of members of each that have voted for a benefit ie so that if (for example) 99% of RAs vote for free minibar this outwheighs 95% of Ambassadors that vote for 5k points. That is closer to the concept of a "winning benefit". This is far from perfect but is closer to what the poll is setting out to acheive. The way the current poll is being constructed is that the programme with the most members and what they vote for will nearly always win however popular or unpopular what they actually vote for is because more popular benefits for higher elite tiers will be excluded because the number of members experiencing them are too low.

To explain this more crisply, with this current methodology, if this were a poll about which is the best car feature - you would have effectively excluded all of the features of the best top-end cars.

Then when you take this forward and make comparisons across several hotel brands the whole project has just become totally silly. The compound effect of just the few factors I mention alone, mean that you should abandon this approach now before it becomes a real joke. This is a real mess - make no mistake at all.

hhoope01

I will agree that Priority Club and the Ambassador programs are two different programs for stays at different hotels. So lumping them together doesn't really make any sense as you will have two different groups answering the poll about different programs and different benefits.

But I'm not sure I completely agree with a problem around lumping all elite levels in a program together. My understanding is that the award is designed to evaluate the whole program (i.e. all elite levels). Thus even though someone may only be an Ambassador, they may still understand that RAs get free mini-bar access. Thus both levels can state that the free-minbar access is the best "single" benefit of the program. I don't have to be at any particular level to have a decent understanding of what the benefits are for each level and vote in the poll accordingly.

Now with that said, changing the poll to take into account responses on a "per elite level" basis could provide some very good information. There are numerous threads in all the programs about the "best primary and/or secondary and/or tertiary" programs. Having poll results based on elite levels could provide great information about which has the best top tier program and which as the best middle-tier levels. Thus maybe SPG would be a great primary, but IHG/Priority Club may be a great secondary program and we can all use the FT awards as a mechanism to help make those decisions.

So while I may argue (just a bit mind you) against your current poll issue, I do think it has a lot of merit for a possible poll/award change for the better.

uk1

To be honest I cannot really see what you are contradicting or see any more value I can add.

Isn't a Priority Club member going to vote for which of the choices is most important to him/her?

To take your point to it's logical conclusion, asking Priority Club members to rate the attractiveness of a free minibar to RA's - or to anyone - begs the question why bother with a pre-poll poll at all and how how or what on earth can any set of results from this poll possibly be interpreted as usefully meaning.

What do you think you could understand from the results so far? Presumably that 5k pointsbreaks are six times "a better benefit" than a free minbar.

IMH

It's a missed opportunity. The FlyerTalk membership is sufficiently large and diverse to allow meaningful comparisons between programmes based on carefully chosen categories and sensibly structured surveys. FlyerTalk Awards could be highly regarded and coveted. As things stand, this is just another very unscientific poll.

In this category I voted for "room upgrades" because that seems to me to be the best of those benefits that are (at least in theory) available to most elite members. It's not really the "best benefit of Priority Club Rewards / Ambassador", though: that would be, as noted by nicolas75, RA status. But only for those that have it, obviously, and for the vast majority of travellers not a reason to choose IHG as a whole.

uk1

You have summed it up precisely.

FLYGVA

Okay I agree for certain points, but also disagree in some points (e.g. I do not see them as two different programms) - but want not to to go into details as I fear this will not lead to a result.

But let me add, that I am in contact with IB to see if we can solve this.

FLYGVA
co-moderator IHG Forum

IMH

Thank you for taking the comments made here in the spirit in which they were made. (If the poll is amended, is there a way of allowing those who have cast votes to reconsider their choice?)

uk1

deleted

hhoope01

Basically, all I am saying is that I agree on the point that differentiating between the "Priority Club" and "Ambassador" programs makes a lot of sense.

I disagree with the statement "But the POLL is worst than doing none at all because it can only produce totally misleading results" especially around the assertion that only by differentiating between elite levels can a poll of this type bring useful information. I may not be an RA, but I do know that the free-minibar access is a very nice benefit and something other programs don't have. Thus I can still vote it as the best single benefit out the program (even though I personally am not receiving that benefit myself at the moment.) So even without differentiating elite levels, useful information can still be gleaned from the Poll.