Billy Mumphrey

I was successful at a Ramada hotel. I called the hotel after booking online and they added my Wyndham # to the reservation. I could then see the reservation in my online account. Wyndham doesn't have much in the way of status benefits, but I did get points on the stay which was nice.

akr1970akr

I've tried a couple times with other chains, and the front desk as well as central reservations says they can't add the # manually when it comes through as an OTA booking.

Pretty cool that you were able to pull it off though. I guess I ought to at least try next time, although we normally use ours 4NF at indys.

Probably going to cancel the Prestige soon though. It's pretty sad how little it offers for a flagship card, especially on the protection/ancillary benefits side.

alexgav

Here's my experience after the change. I used up my 2 "post-change" nights for 2019. Tried booking 3 hotels in Japan, two in Tokyo and one in Kyoto. On the positive side, all three were in their system. On the negative side, one of the hotels had name spelled incorrectly "Hotel Century South Tower" instead of "Hotel Century Southern Tower", so I was able to find it only after searching for *all* Tokyo hotels.

For two of the hotels, rates matched roughly the best rated on the hotel own site and other OTA web sites (tried Expedia, Kayak, TripAdvisor). For the third hotel, the price with the disount/4th night free was about the same as the price on the hotels own web site. That was because hotel's web site had 15% advance booking discount not available via Thankyou/Connexion. I went all the way to the checkout screen on all sites to make sure all fees + taxes were shown in the total.

On the negative side, the room categories were super confusing as others have mentioned. The same category showed up several times with different prices. I read a comment above where someone mentioned that Connexion sources rooms from several different channels and then just dumps all that spew on you, so now it makes sense. Also not all room categories were available via hotel web site were available to book via Thankyou/Connexion (upper-end rooms were missing).

On the positive side, previously you were unable to book room+breakfast rate if a "bare" room rate was available. Now I am seeing both "bare" room and room+breakfast rate showing up on the Thankyou site, and all are marked as 4NF eligible. In general, that's an improvement though most of the time I skip the "+breakfast" rate not knowing the quality of the breakfast provided or prices in the establishments nearby. This time around I also skipped the +breakfast rate as it wasn't attractive even though it matched hotel rates. There was one time pre-change when I was trying to book an "extras" rate via Concierge and was denied (fortunately before I booked) and was told I could book only the "bare" rate.

I was charged for both reservations immediately, but that also meant I got my 4th night credit immediately, so I don't consider it either positive or negative. I can live with it. The reservation verbiage sounded like I can cancel and get a refund in line with the verbiage on the hotel own web site.

I ended up saving $240 on one hotel, and only $120 on another (inexpensive property in a good location, so room rates were about $120/night). I could not save $200 on a more expensive 3rd property because booking via hotel I direct I got 15% advanced booking discount I mentioned above. If I went via Thankyou/Connexion, I would've saved only about $50 on that particular hotel instead of $200.

So overall it was kind of a success, with a total of $360 savings. Considering the annual fee, it's barely enough to justify keeping the card even with airline credit. I consider that I came out ahead by just a bit, but not by much. I don't value other current Prestige benefits much as I already have other premium credit cards I prefer that provide similar benefits. I am thinking I will use up my 2 free nights for 2020 and dump the card.

I spent a few hours doing the above, partially because it was my first time using the Thankyou web site. Prior to that I booked everything by calling Concierge because of much better hotel availability, loyalty program applicability and being able to use any special rates advertised. I guess going forward it won't take as much time, but I can see being able to find hotels being an issue.

One of the biggest disappointments for me is that I wasn't able to find any of the Club Med properties in the program, as I was expecting. They aren't really available to book via other OTAs either, but I was able to book those without any issues via Concierge. Those are probably the most expensive properties I stay in and would've been a good use of the 4NF benefits.So the card is definitely not a keeper.

Hope the data is useful. Let me know if you have questions (though I don't frequent this board). I appreciate data that everybody else shared. It helped me understand those confusing room categories listed (again, they come from multiple channels, so you will see the same category with slightly different descriptions and sometimes very different prices).

Colin

you sure about those savings?

Polytonic

For hotels with extra person fees, does Citi just eat the extra person fee on 4NF bookings? If I do a dummy booking direct with a property, I see it, but if I do it through the thankyou portal, it doesn't show at all.

SLINKYTRAVEL

Has anyone booked a Le Accor hotel (i.e Fairmont)with 4th night free and was able to add the reservation to their Le Accor Loyalty account? thx

llngoc

The 4th night free benefit is really becoming hard to use. I was looking to book Mandarin Oriental since it has the complimentary night promotion but through thankyou.com, it does not take the promotion into account so it ended up significantly higher than Amex FNR which showed the promotion offer, For the Taipei MO, it comes out to be $240 per night vs $370 for a 3 nights stay. For most bookings, I found that the Citi website ends up with a small 10-15% saving at best and never the 25% which it should be. I used to use this benefit a lot through the concierge and now this is a zero dollar value benefit to me. The only reasons I am keeping it are for the 5x dining bonus and Double Cash point conversion.

i do fly CX and SQ a lot so the transfer partners work out well for me too.

uclabruin82

The thing that is bothering me is that the 25% savings are not accurate. I have been looking at some hotels in Venice and Paris, and the savings end up being in the mid-teen %. That is best case if the hotel is not offering any promotion and is not part of a loyalty program where I have status.
Really the benefit has gone down dramatically, but that is what they wanted. I made a booking in 2019 for Amansara in 2020 so going to keep it for that, and the earnings are still worth it, but this benefit is a bummer.

brc01

The 4th night free through the TYP portal is such a scam and was the final straw that made me dump my Prestige. The prices are so over-inflated that a 4th night "free" only saves $100 or so compared to booking direct on a $200-250 a night hotel. If you book more expensive hotels you might come out slightly ahead. Also, booking hotels in countries where all taxes/fees are included like in Australia is the only instance where I've found the TYP portal has prices that are in-line with elsewhere.

briggek8717

Anyone able to book via the ThankYou site for any of the Hyatt Ziva/Zilara's? Every time I search, it tells me rooms aren't available, but rooms are clearly available via Hyatt's site. Doesn't really matter what dates I put in. I'm mainly interested in the Hyatt Ziva Rose Hall, but I've looked at pretty much all of them and the only one that even will show rooms is the Zilara in Cancun.

akr1970akr

Random snippet from playing around on the TYP hotel portal this week: I was playing around looking at 4 night stays in a bunch of Western US ski towns and saw something vaguely new. A lot of houses and condos are showing up in the portal - not as something like 1 bedroom in some big condotel - but as a named address for a standalone house. One sees stuff like 700 Fir Tree lane or what not. With a floor plan. These tend to be high dollar units, like $900 a night or so. So the 4NF could be worth something, if the unit is not overpriced/marked up via this channel.

I have not dug all that deep into to find where the inventory is being sourced from (google reverse image search is helpful for that) and I suspect at the end that the 4NF will not really be any material discount when buying lodging this way.

But historically they have resisted offering big houses/condos through the program since it drove up Citi/Mastercard's losses. I have tried for years to book big units through it and only every now and then can I find one, typically within a hotel complex, that might have a couple bigger suites / units that make it on to GDS. Normally properties prefer to rent those directly.

mh4ll

I get a "This property is not available for your travel dates on our site. Try adjusting your travel dates or number of travelers." when attempting to book lots of different higher-priced properties. Has anyone tried calling in to see if phone agents have any better luck?

akr1970akr

Phone agents have told me they use the same website as consumers do. I called in for some other problem with a hung/cancelled booking and that's what they told me. Tech support had to eventually fix my booking.

In the past when you could use the OneTen concierge and they could book most anything, with whatever rate codes you fed them, and were not limited to the Expedia inventory.

As Colin notes, a savvy hotel consumer would not find the Prestige 4NF benefit all that impressive, even if, occasionally you might score an ok deal. I think that should be tempered by how unnatural 4 night stays are, at least for us. Our normal pattern is long weekends, or solid weeks. Sometimes we cobble together two 4NF stays back to back but that is harder given that one is limited in how many times a year they can use this now.

jaybert

Anyone available to do me a favor? I was trying to figure out if it’s worth signing up for the prestige to take advantage of the buy 3 get 1 free for Disney world but I don’t know what the prices are listed as

can someone get me the price for 3 different Disney hotels on 6/20/20-6/24/20?

disney’s Polynesian village resort
disney’s contemporary resort
disney’s grand floridian

looking for the cheapest club level room in all 3 of these.

dcaiadflyer

They all show up on the TY portal, but none of them have any availability from Connexions on your dates, so I guess you have your answer about whether the Prestige is worth it.