Points for hotels in Europe
 

My husband and I are planning a 2010 trip to Germany, Austria, & Switzerland, and in beginning to look at the cost of hotels, realized that we would be well-served to begin accumulating hotel points. Having only focused on airline miles up until now, I am looking for help & advice on how/where to accumulate said points.

Our goal is to accumulate points that would allow to book as many hotel nights as possible at safe, comfortable hotels- basic hotels are okay, the main goal to be able to redeem for as many nights as possible. Obviously chains with many locations within these three countries would also be preferable as it would give us more options to redeem to. Any general thoughts as to a strategy?

PS. My apologies if MilesBuzz is the wrong place for this; please move if necessary- there didn't seem to be an exact 'right fit'.

It depends where you're going in these countries. Big cities may have different chains in them than resort towns. For example, if you want to go to Switzerland for the Alps, few of the "big" upscale chains you know from the US are represented in Zermatt (Matterhorn) or Interlaken, but if you research around, decent hotels are not necessarily much more than a bit over $100US a night, but the only hotels you can get on points may require very high amounts of points. So even though points can work well relative to cash in some places in Europe, in other places (especially if you don't earn the points "trivially") points don't tend to be a good value.

Meanwhile, you need explain what your options are for earning hotel points. How much do you stay in hotels here in the US? Most great values in earning hotel points come from actual stays while registered for bonuses which earn you oodles of points. There are very few (recurrent) possibilities for earning tons of points without stays that I'm aware of.

And by bonuses which you oodles of points, I don't mean double points, I mean 5x normal points and stuff like that. So you may want to forget Hilton HHonors, as in the past couple years they've been pretty awful on bonus point promos. Hotel programs that are known for excellent promos include Choice Privileges. (Sep 1 - Nov 1 earn up to 70k points for 15 stays, which can be around $50/night one-night stays in many suburban areas, which would be around $750ish total. Then, if traveling to the fjords in western Norway, for example, redeem for 4 nights at 16k points/night in hotels that cost $200+, maybe $300+ a night, and thus redeem for hotels that would have cost more for those 4 nights than the 15 stays here in the US cost you! (Not that this is enough savings to make mattress runs work, which is why it can only work well if you have a need to stay in hotels a lot in the US.) The other hotel program with rich bonuses is Priority Club, but in that case the rich bonuses involve registering for multiple promos, most of which you can only find by reading the sticky Promos thread in the Priority Club forum here on FlyerTalk.

Thanks for the input, and pointing out what questions I still need to answer.

Right now, we are looking at staying in/around the cities of Zurich, Munich, and Berlin, with a few nights in between in the area around Neuschwanstein/Oberammergau, either on the German or Austrian side of the border (I don't think this is a big area for using points), and a possible night or two in Lutherstadt Wittenberg. We are definately early on, so changes are possible.

I don't regularly stay in hotels, so that limits my earning possibilities. I was hoping that I could earn hotel points in the way that I mostly earn airline miles- through credit cards, partner activities, and bonus promos. But it sounds like the hotels are an entirely different beast.

Yes: Airlines have "input" partners (ie, partners for earning). Hotels mostly only have "output" partners (ie, partners for burning).

I don't know of any hotel chain that uses Citi as their credit card providor. Why is that signficant, you may ask? Because AFAIK Citi is the only CC company right now that allows "heavy" churning -- apply for 1 or maybe even 2 AA credit cards every 60 days, and as long as you can satifsy the $750 minimum spend on them at that rate, keep repeating and keep earning 20k to 25k mile bonuses each time.

While you can certainly earn bonus points from signing up for hotel credit cards, with each hotel chain that's only once, and after that bonus, you'll never earn that hotel's points at a good rate (other than through stays at that hotel family) again. And the bonus points you earn from each application are likely good for no more than one night or so in Europe, at best.

If you have (or can get, through the above churning game) way more AA miles than you know what to do with, there is the option of transferring AA miles to Hilton HHonors miles (5k AA miles = 10k HH points):

https://www.aa.com/aa/i18nForward.do...ltonHotels.jsp

But I'm not sure if that'll be worth it. HH hotels tend to require lots of points, in most European cities a poor value if you're not looking specifically for a higher-end stay.

I know you can't forecast 2010 rates yet, but I suggest you do some sample searches with these cities for a similar time of year in the coming year (most hotels will let you book close to a year out), coupled with some research on TripAdvisor to figure out which low-priced hotels are decent. You may also want to look through some guidebooks at a local bookstore (you may or may not want to buy the guidebooks yet, given that they'll probably go through at least one more edition before it gets close to your trip date) to get some ideas about lodging possiblities.

You need to have some possible rates in mind for what you could pay cash to evaluate what points cost (at the rate it takes you to earn the points) would be reasonable. For example, you need to compare the value of AA miles turned into HH points used at HH properties in those cities (not all of the cities you mention may necessarily even have an HH property), to the value of keeping them as AA miles. To do that, you need to know what a non-HH property that you would be willing to stay at in the same city might cost.

I think your best bet is Priority Club. You can get a credit card (Chase) and participate in the shopping and dining portals to rack up the points without a night's stay. I have also found some economy in purchasing the points rather than actually paying for the stay.

Free nights can be had beginning at 5,000 points and ALL activity counts toward elite status.

The Citi hotel affiliation would be Hilton, which (unfortunately) had the massive devaluation of their program earlier this decade. However, I can't see how the 15,000 HHonors point bonus could ever be worth churning on that card, even if one could (coming from a former HHonors Gold).

Don't bother.

Unless you are going during a trade fair or visiting Moscow, you won't have any issues getting a decent hotel at a decent rate. If you earn loads of points through your normal travel and you want to use them or if you are looking to stay in presidential suites, then go ahead...But actively investing time, money and effort to get points to spend on nights that would cost you under 100 Euros in a 4-star hotel is a false economy IMHO.

I would call that a very distorted picture of Priority Club. While in theory free nights start at 5000 points, those are only Points Break sales, and (after the first rash of them a year or so ago) there are now precious few of them on any continent each quarter, and they tend to have limited dates, and in any case disappear quickly. I would not count on them. So I'd say it starts at 15k points.

Meanwhile, the Priority Club card only earns you one point per dollar, which is worse than many other hotel cards. (Choice points redemptions for hotels are roughly the same as Priority Club or even a bit lower, yet you earn two points per dollar on their card from BofA.)

Choice has a shopping portal just like Priority Club has.

So that leaves dining. Now, while it's true that there is Priority Club dining which can eventually earn you 15 points per dollar on qualified dines (after you've had 11 or 12 dines of any amount), I've belonged to them for several years, and can tell you that they pretty much never have bonuses of much signficance (while AA and UA and DL have bonuses giving me tens of thousands of miles a year every year). In fact, given that bonus-poor BA has dropped out of the dining program, and bonus-poor CO is about to drop out of the dining program, I would not count on Priority Club necessarily retaining its dining program for the next two years (the time horizon for the OP's stays).

The one good thing that Priority Club has over the others is no expiration. Choice has a "hard" expiration, but luckily for the OP for points earned this year it's not until the end of 2010, and thus after the OP's trip. Hilton HHonors has a 12-month expiration, but you can extend it by any "activity" (any kind of earning or redeeming).

(That's for non-stayers. Priority Club is excellent in bonus promos out the yazoo, but only for people who can do a lot of cheap or reimbursed paid stays.)

" Priority Club dining which can eventually earn you 15 points per dollar on qualified dines (after you've had 11 or 12 dines of any amount) "

15 instead of 8 list on their web site?

Kindly explain more details? Thanks.

Nobody votes for SPG? I think it may not get you the most number of nights, but the quality/point ratio is very good. You can get a AMEX starwood card with 10,000 sign up bonus. You get another 15,000 point if you spend $15,000 in the first 6 months. And of course, that is in addition to the regular 1 point for every $ you spend.

First of all, sorry, I forgot that it's 16, not 15. :)

What you missed is that for the past year and a half, they've had (like most of the airlines) the "rate your dine" bonus, which doubles your regular earnings (5+5=10 at participating airlines, but 8+8=16 at PC Dining):

http://priorityclub.rewardsnetwork.c...=elite&detail=

Yes, they claim that it is only until 9/30/08, but so far, for a year and a half, they've updated it "in the nick of time" every quarter.

The "rate your dine" bonus posts separately, after you (of course!) rate your dine. And unlike the original dine, which shows up on the dining website first as "pending" before it pays out to the partner (PC points in this case, miles in airline cases), the "rate your dine" bonus doesn't appear until after it has posted to the partner. But still, even if lagging, it's there on every single dine, so it's valid IMHO to consider it 8+8=16 PC points per dollar once you're at the top elite level.

(Meanwhile, the murkiness about 11 or 12 is because they always claim it takes 12 dines a year on their website, but for years we've always seen ourselves -- at the various programs -- showing as having (re)qualified after just 11 dines! Go figure...)

youshould definitely check out the point break list for europe region.

www.priorityclub.com/pointbreaks

There is a nice IC Mountain Ressort at Berchtesgaden, where it is really worth to stay on points there.

for United that takes it up to only 5 points...

You're getting points and miles confused on several counts.

First of all, you don't earn any points at all at United's Mileage Plus Dining. You earn miles!

Second, there's a reason, besides semantics, that that's important. The value of one mile (at any airline that uses miles as their currency, certainly including UA) is several times more than the value of one hotel point at "10 points per dollar spent on hotel stays" kinds of hotel programs (which includes Priority Club, Hilton HHonors, Choice, Best Western, WynhamRewards, etc, etc, but does not include Starwood). One way to compare them (though certainly not the only or even necessarily best way) is that if you need to convert hotel points to airline miles, Priority Club hotel points transfer 5:1 to airline miles.

So by any measure I can think of, 8 Priority Club points is worth far less than 5 miles.

And thus I don't understand the word "only" in front of 5 UA [miles]. At UA, you earn 5+5=10 miles for the typical dine, and that's worth way more to me than 8+8=16 miles. I wasn't promoting Priority Club Dining as a great value to someone equally interested in miles and points, I was just explaining it for those, such as the OP, who already have more miles than they need, and now want to focus just on hotel points.