Does availability vary ?
 

So I've been looking at some BW hotels in Athens for the last few months for a stay in June (I'm waiting for my bonus points to be transferred to my BW account). There was this hotel that was available but suddenly today one of the nights of my stay is not anymore.
Do you guys know if this means the hotel is full (or the redeemable rooms have all been taken) or it's something that can change day to day and it may come back available ?
Thank you for any insight :)

At many hotels only certain types of rooms are available for rewards. So if that type of room is sold out, then reward availability can go away.

But in any case, any hotel can suddenly get a tour group booking which jumps up their number of rooms used by a large number in one fell swoop. Or, if you haven't been counting inventory, they could have only had one reward room left, and someone booked that one room (whether as a reward or with money).

It generally takes a cancellation to make a hotel reward "come back" after not being available. Of course, hotel cancellations can happen all the time, so that's not impossible, but OTOH it's not something you can count on either.

What you apparently didn't know that could have helped out: Best Western, unlike other programs, does not require you to have the points in your account to make the reward booking, only to have the points in your account soon before your stay (I've seen hotels pull the points a few days before my arrival, but never months before). So you should have made the reservation while you were waiting to get the points, when there was availability.

Oh really ? I knew you could do that with Marriott but I didn't know that was possible with BW... when I look for BW points rates it just says "not enough points for stay" on the place of the button to book. Look :

http://s32.postimg.cc/kmepletzp/Cap...s_18_51_39.png

Thank you very much !

Just $116ish (100.80 Euro) per night? That doesn't sound like that great a value at 20000 points. You may want to consider earning, rather than redeeming, at that rate.

You may want to call up Best Western and see if that "not enough points" is enforced on over-the-phone bookings.

I did have enough points for each booking individually, so I guess that's why didn't run into that online "not enough points" issue, but they still didn't deduct my points anywhere near booking time, just shortly before the actual stays. And they allowed me to book more nights than I had points for, at least as long as they were broken up into multiple stays (no one stay needing more points than I had). I booked one stay for April and one stay for July, and didn't have enough points in my account "momentarily" for both, though I covered it fairly quickly after that.

Oh.. I'm new at BW program, what would be a good value for 20k points ?
I've got Marriott and SPG points but there are no option for Athens.. I might end up paying a cheap hotel then.

I'm not saying don't use it if you have no other plans, depending on how many points you (will) have.

For comparison: I'm staying this summer at a Best Western in Seward AK which is 36000 points or about $300 per night. And I need 5 nights there, so that tied up 180000 points. But that's better in my book than using up $1500 or so for that stay, since I have 180000 points (and nothing else I need to use them on for a while). And Best Western is the only hotel program with a hotel in Seward (since Holiday Inn Express pulled out of there a while back).

But if your travels never take you to where you can get that kind of value (with that little choice), then that may be irrelevant to you, so you may want to redeem at lower value. It's up to you.

Btw, there are two SPG "special collection" hotels in Athens, but they require 16k SPG points per night for one of them and 25k SPG points per night for another one of them, so for the SPG program that's on the high side.