I was looking to book a hotel in Vegas through Idine and notice that they also listed several large chain hotels (Marriott, Westin, etc.) in their possible choices. Does anyone have any experience if you actually get double points if you book a chain hotel on the Idine website. What I mean by this is points with the Airline program you use with Idine and also points with the chains frequent guest program like Marriott Rewards or Starwood Preferred Guest Programs. I assume that if you make the reservation on Idine and then show them your Frequent Guest card when you check in that you may get double points. (or is it like Priceline where it shows up in the reservation and you do not get hotel points) Has anyone had any experience with this?

I would very strongly suspect that it's an either/or thing - NO double dipping.

Does it qualify as a cross-post if it's in the same forum?
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum1/HTML/009203.html

Asked by others (and not answered) here as well:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum1/HTML/009016.html
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum1/HTML/008659.html

Crhistianj

It seems that the idine points are in addition to the hotel reward. That is at least how I understand it from the latest edition of the MilesLink newsletter

Lurker

[This message has been edited by Lurker (edited Nov 12, 2003).]

Well, in theory, if the hotel gives you rewards no matter how you book it, that could be true. However, the fact is, more and more hotels every day are changing their policies to say that you don't earn points (or whatever) for stays booked at third-party sites, which would of course be the case here since you have to book through idine.com. Furthermore, many of the rates I see at major chains browsing through the iDine Hotels for sample cities are "websaver" PREPAY rates, which are often excluded even at hotel chains that don't (yet?) exclude ALL third-party site bookings.

So it would depend on the chain, but for example I wouldn't expect it to work (except if by accident perhaps) at Hilton HHonors properties.

And since iDine requires you to use an iDine registered credit card to pay for your hotel stay, I'm not sure whether you could successfully use the trick (that's sometimes used to get stay credit on award stays) of charging a little bit of incidentals (a coffee at the hotel restauarant, or a long distance call from your room) to your room and putting that on a different card, and providing your frequent stay number for that.