I've been HHonors Diamond for 5+ years and am thinking of trying out a different chain. Does anyboyd know where to find some sort of thorough comparison between programs?

If not, here is what I do for my HHonors points and maybe somebody can tell me there is something as good or better for me:

Here is how I am currently earning points:

10 points per dollar spent for HHonors
+5 points per dollar spent for double dipping
+5 points per dollar spend for Diamond status (+50% bonus)
+ 500 to 1000 points for MyWay preference
+6 points per dollar spent for using HHonors AMEX
+500 points per online booking with AMEX

If I assume the average room night for me is $119 (I stay at a lot of Hamptons), and the average stay is 2 nights, that means I am getting about 30 points per dollar spent at HIlton properties.

As an added bonus, I use my Hilton AMEX and get lots of 3/1 points per dollar spent on other items.

I generally book only the GLON 7 night discounted rates at category 7 resorts and I think these go for 210K points. This means I have to spend $7000 at Hilton properties (not including any promos) for a free week at a category 7 resort. That would be equal to about 59 nights @ $119/nt.

Granted, that does not take into account for any promos or a lot of use from my Hiton AMEX card.

Does anybody think I can get a better program somewhere else that i can stay at equavalent or nicer reward properties for less nights required than the 59 I need for Hilton?

There are a few different websites, but I can't recall to mind any one specific FT thread or website that had a phenomenal comparison.

great research and logic

satori does a remarkably sophisticated analysis of hotel programs in his blog:

http://boardingarea.com/blogs/loyaltytraveler/

That ratio sounds about right. Assuming the hotel cost at least $500 a night (about the cut-off that I would use award for), it is about 2:1 ratio for earning/using - which is not bad at all.

I have not done the math for other chains but I would be surprised if it would come much better than that.

The analysis does not take into account status benefits that also worth quite a lot of money, but much more difficult to quantify as it will vary from place to place.

Been looking for this sort of data for months! Thanks for posting. Diamond at Hilton and I have never really tried another chain for earning status. Lately I think about it more and more though with each additional devaluation.

There are other things to take into consideration. Marriott has some great promotions where you get one free night for every two stays. Starwood has their Cash and Points options as well as the option to use points for an upgrade to club level. Also Starwood now counts award night stays torwards your gold or platinum status.

OTOH Marriott's elite requirements are high. To earn Gold status you have to have 50 nights (as opposed to only 16 "stays" at Hilton - you'd have to hotel hop to do it in 16, but that's a significantly smaller stay requirement.)

You get 15 nights' credit for having the Marriott CC, and I believe another night for every 3K in spend (but that'd still be over $100K in spend, whereas you only need to spend $20K on Hilton's cards to get Gold.)

(For the record, this is the one thing that's stopping me from bailing on Hilton in favor of Marriott. Marriott won't status match and it'd be pretty hard to go from Hilton Diamond to Marriott Silver.

I'm going to downgrade to Hilton Gold and switch some stays to Marriott, just to see how I like it.)

Great analysis, OP. I have to confess to approaching this whole matter of hotel point accumulation in a much less sophisticated way, though, although it involves a good degree of advance planning. About a year or two in advance, I pick the combination of nice hotels and places my wife and I would like to go, run these recommendations by her (she's a take-charge person in a lot of ways, but when it comes to travel lets me take the lead) and tend to concentrate our business and personal cc spending and business travel accordingly. It's supplemented by signing up for good credit card deals when available, regardless of who's offering them.

For a while, the places and hotels we particularly wanted to go to tended to be Starwood-oriented. In recent years, it's been more HH, though with a smattering of other chains (Starwood, Hyatt, IC). Given the changes in the HH program and some future trips we have in mind, we might yet lean back towards Starwood in coming years, but that remains to be seen.

Not very scientific, and certainly not for everyone. But I just thought I'd mention it.

Now, having run through all that, I would suggest you take a good look at Starwood and it's cash plus points option. It often adds up to great deals, translated into dollars and cents terms. Sometimes available for great properties, sometimes not. HH is trying to replicate it, but it's unclear how widespread or effective that effort will be.

I get my status thru credit card spending, so the only comparison I looked at is

Hilton:
Spend $20,000 on credit card per year gets Gold
Spent $40,000 on credit card per year gets Diamond

Marriott:
Spend $105,000 on credit card per year gets Gold
Spend $180,000 on credit card per year gets Platinum

Starwood:
Spend $30,000 on credit card per year gets Gold
Cannot get to Platinum thru spending

Here's how I do it with SPG:

Charge $2000 on SPG Amex per month = 24,000 points per year. That's enough for 6 nights using cash+points @ lower cost resorts ($60 + 4k points per night) or 3 nights @ St. Regis Princeville ($150 + 8k per night). Not completely free but point requirement is far more manageable.

Another option would be to stay 1 nights @ $200 per night (SPG tends to have higher rates) = 600/night (for SPG Gold status, and excludes any CC spend), so you'd need 20 nights for the same result.

SPG 5 night awards for decent resorts usually start 48k, so you'd have to combine the CC spend and stays to achieve the same result as cash+ points (and would need 24k/night at St. Regis and comparable properties )

As cash+points is not the same as free, I realize this is apples and oranges. But gives you an idea of how you can leverage with SPG and stay far fewer than 59 nights.

What is really better about other programs? Im curious..........

Marriott won't status match, but they do offer a fast track (challenge) to Gold, and it's so fast that they give you instant Gold "provisionally" (which they ohly take away if you don't meet the requirements of the challenge). So it's almost as good as a status match without needing to document anything.

I got to Gold last year with I think about 13 stays (but I may slightly off) in something like 90 days. (I was pursuing a miles promo which took 17 stays to max out, so it was no problem.) I signed up for the challenge on the same day I was going to start my first stay. Since the "instant" Gold of the challenge sign-up takes a day or two to kick in, I wasn't Gold for that first stay. But by my next stay a couple days later, I was.

(Haivng said that, all my stays so far have been at Fairfields and one TownePlace, where Gold means little extra except free parking at one particular Fairfield which charges $5/night for non-elites. But they may even give the free parking to Silver, since they said "elites are exampt", I'm not sure.)

SPG is similar, btw: A challenge is offered, instead of outright matching, if you ask about a status match. (But in the SPG case, you don't get the new higher status until you've successfully completed the challenge, and still then you may to email them to get the new status instated.)

If you care nothing about status benefits, you can earn huge numbers of points on comparitively fewer and/or cheaper stays in Priority Club (IHG) and Choice Priveleges. This is especially useful if you have to pay for all your stays on your own dime and are on a tight budget, since these programs tend to have properties in the US that are less expensive than most HHonors properties in many places. For example, in Orange County CA I can easily often find nice Choice properties for <$70 and nice Priority Club properties for <$80, both with free parking, while HHonors properties tend to start around $100 and too often with $10+ parking.

Marriott tends to be better for airline promos, like their current one where you earn 2000 bonus miles with any of a wide variety of airlines on every stay starting with your second stay after registering, up to 50000 bonus miles on 26 stays through Apr 30. I've never seen HHonors do a promo anything close to this, but I've only been particpating in Marriott for a bit over half a year and this is already their third rich airline promo I'm doing in that short time! (And I also earned a few free nights along the way, by switching to earning points for just a couple stays per quatter, after registering for another promo.)

However, I started with "if you care nothing about elite benefits", because none of these programs that give you way more bonus points or way more bonus miles have as consistent elite benefits as HHonors does.

So you have to decide which is more important to you: The maximum elite benefits, or the maximum point (or mile) earnings? You have to choose different programs to get one or the other!

I've pretty much tried them all, and settled with Hyatt as my primary chain, Hilton as a close second - no others. You need to consider:

- Properties where you usually stay - which chains operate them, and which ones do you LIKE?

- Properties at destinations you want to use from awards.

- Status benefits vs points earn/ burn opportunities. I'm more concerned with on-premises benefits, hence I favour Hyatt over Hilton. Hyatt are exceptionally good at looking after Diamiond Elites, especially at my most frequent destinations (eg: always upgraded to at least a club room, usually a suite - lots of unpublished delights, staff really going the extra mile....). Of course this is true of the properties I typically stay at - YMMV.

SPG doesn't really get a look-in for me as most of their Australian properties (those that remain) are particularly unimpressive. US-based people clearly have a very different perspective.

Accor's appalling A-Club (dis)loyalty scheme must, however, be singled out as the worst hotel programme in the history of the multiverse - it is to be avoided at all costs.