new to FT, longtime uninformed traveller =P
which would you rather have, cashback or hotel points?

my company pays all hotel on the corp card so i lose there getting cc points/miles. however if i use quidco and link to hotels.com. i can pay the bill using the company cc and net myself 10% cashback, all within the rules =) if i do this, i've noticed that the hotels themselves wont give hotel programme points. flip-side is i just have the company travel agent book it, and when i check in, i give my hotel programme card and earn points but no cashback.

id like to build miles and status in AA and UA, so i can take fab free F class trips all over like many have described on these forums. which do you think is the smarter path? im thinking cashback, but maybe im wrong? thanks!

To answer this question, you have to decide what a hotel point is worth to you.

Many people have high valuations (2 or 3 or more cents per point) because they plan to redeem for $500+/night rooms.

Personally, I don't redeem for luxury. I'm a quantity over quality guy (above a certain baseline). And I have no problem using priceline, if I need to.

So here's an example. My typical Priority Club redemption is 15k points for a room I could have pricelined for $65. In that math, a PC point is worth about 0.4 cents.

One of the great benefits of PC are the copious promos. But let's say I've already earned all the promos. My baseline earning as a Plat is 15 points per dollar. If I'm traveling somewhere with, say, a $150 rate, then my earning would be:

150 x 15 x 0.004 = $9 or 6% back. So if I could get more than 6% back, I should book using a cashback method.

Now, in reality, there are considerations like elite status perks, branded credit cards, etc. But all else being equal, it's simply a monetary calculation.

(This can also be helpful when comparing programs. With no promos, I can consistently get twice as much payback from Marriott as PC, for example.)

Note: For those who CAN use their own CC for bookings, the math is a little different. You can earn both cashback AND CC booking points. For example, for Priority Club, the CC pays 5 points per $ and mrrebates will pay 5% back on the booking. So the math looks something like:

150 x 20 x .004 = $12 of points plus 150 x 0.05 = $7.50 of cash, or 13% back. (Actually a little more, because you'll earn CC points on the tax, as well.)

Hotel points may help you build miles, but they do nothing to help you build status in UA, and it's quite likely that starting later this year they'll also do nothing to help you build status at AA (and even right now, they only help you build lifetime status, which currently requires 1 million miles from all sources but could change to flown miles on purchased flights only very soon). Thus I'm not even sure I understand that part of the question.

If you use a Priority Club credit card in the US on a Priority Club stay you booked through Priority Club, you earn 10 points per dollar spent from the hotel stay
itself and another 5 points per dollar from the Priority Club credit card being used at a Priority Club hotel. If you only use 15k PC points when the hotel costs $150 or more, then you are valuing the PC point at 1 cent. So in that case you are earning at least 5% cashback on the card itself and 10% cashback on the hotel stay itself.

So if you can book the hotel in on the hotel programs website (or some other booking method on which you can earn points), then it seems to me it's worth it to pursue the point (if that's how you're going to redeem themn!). However, if you can't earn hotel points on the hotel itself because it has to be booked through some non-qualifying method per your company rules, then it's murkier as to whether the PC Visa itself would be better than 10% cashback some other way.

But not being familiar with these UK things, I"m unclear how much of that 10% cashback is on the hotel booking side and how much is on the credit card side.

(In the US, people mostly talk about cashback with regards to credit cards, and it's hard to find a credit card that gives more than 2% casbhback on hotel stays.)