Hi, I am posting this question here, as I didn't see a general discussion for hotel programs.

I am wondering with all the hotel franchises, which program is the best one to use to get the most benfits?

When I am traveling I want to try to stick to one brand, to build my hotel points faster, and I been trying to compare the different programs, and wondering if anyone has any thoughts?

I don't have a hotel credit card, so I would most likely only earn hotel points when I am actually staying there.



Thanks
Duane

Can you let us know which countries you will be traveling to and also what type/level of hotel you normally stay in?

1. Starwood
2. Priority Club
3. Hilton Hhonors

Mostly I am staying in cheaper hotels, (ie $100 or less night) in USA for my work trips, but want to build up some points in order to use them in more expensive locations when I do some reward flights to europe. I read about one guy here on FT using hotel points to stay in bora bora, that is what caught my attention.

Keep in mind that with a Hilton Amex (free) you can accumulate points quite rapidly. I believe the Starwood Amex is free for the first year only.

Priority Club should work best for you especially with all the promotions.
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/inter...ad-2009-a.html

When I first started travelling I used IC Hotels quite a bit but then I realized when I take my wife on vacation I didn't want to stay at a Holiday Inn because you never know what you'll get. I've switched to Hilton Honors and have been very happy with the service and quality of hotels...^

Having stayed at various chains associated with Hilton Honors, Marriott Rewards, and Starwood Preferred Guest, my pick for top dog in North America are the Starwood brand of hotels.

Since the OP's goal is to be able to maximize hotel points to use for future stays in nice locations, our MilesBuzz forum would be an even better fit for this thread. Let me move this to MilesBuzz for further discussion. Ocn Vw 1K, moderator, TravelBuzz.

the price tag for your business seals the deal in my book, Priority Club. If your company doesn't have a corp charge card that you are supposed to use, I'd get a priority club cc to build points even faster.

Holiday Inn Express (HIX) are nice cheaper hotels with which one can take comfort in a general level of comfort. Holiday Inns can be a crap shoot but there are some nice properties. The points build much faster than any program to use at IC's while you travel in Europe.

I would take a look at the 4th qtr of the calendar year when Hyatt offers a stay twice get a free night at any property worldwide promo, by far the quickest way to earn a free night at higher end properties.

--

hsolo

Are you based in Canada? If so, your options for earning hotel points through a credit card are limited, but I think you can get an MBNA SPG (Starwood) Mastercard. For your budget, I wouldn't recommend that you focus on accumulating SPG points on your business travel - many Starwood hotels are likely to be too expensive - at least in major North American cities. As others have suggested Priority Club (Holiday Inn, etc) or Hilton might be better choices for hotel stays. Nevertheless, it would be worthwhile for you to accumulate some points through purchases using a Starwood credit card. Combining the sign-on bonus and points from purchases, you could accumulate enough points for a night or two at a nice hotel in the Starwood chain. Starwood also gives you the option of paying for a stay with a combination of $ and points. Starwood (like Hilton and Marriott) have a no blackout policy, which means that it's relatively easy to get a free night's stay even in peak season, provided that they still have standard rooms to sell.

The question is where exactly in Europe.

If in Scandinavia, for example, you'll find precious few Priority Club properties there, but tons of wonderful, expensive-on-cash-but-cheap-on-points properties through the Choice Privileges program, which in the US has hotels usually much cheaper than even Priority Club. (You can earn with Choice Privileges in the US and non-Scandinavian Europe, but in Scandinavia/Baltic you can only redeem.)

OTOH, in Spain, for example, Choice has very few properties, while Priority Club has many.

I thus find no one program that covers all of Europe, but these two programs cover it quite decently together, with overlap in only some locations.

I thus concentrate on both programs in the following manner: When Choice has a rich promo (like starting next week, earn 8000 points total every 2 stays, and btw those expensive-on-cash properties in Europe are often only 16000 points and thus only 4 of those cheapo US stays), then I focus on that (hotel hopping, as you don't earn the maximum unless you change hotels every night). On the other hand, in December and January Choice had no earning promo (and the earnings are not very fast when they have no promo), so during that time I focused on Priority Club, and earned over 100k in just two months with three nights a week (hotel hopping not as necessary, but depends on the particular promo, and there was one promo called 6x which turned out to work for only two stays and thus the longer those two stays were the better).

Btw, whichever program(s) you decide to join, make sure you read the FlyerTalk forum about that program, as some promos will either only be announced there or the way to max them out will only be explained there.

... But you confused the question by mentioning "benefits". See, the hotel chains that are good on points tend to poor on benefits, and the hotel chains that are good on benefits (like Hilton HHonors once you get to at least Gold) tend to (a) be more expensive in the US, very often over your $100/night limit, and (b) have pitifully few promos and thus are much harder to accumulate tons of points quickly with them.

Thanks for all the feedback, just to provide some more info, and answer some questions. I don't want to get a hotel credit card as I am pushing as much as I can on my Amex Aeroplus Platinum to build up my AP (just passed 250K, should be over 1mil by end of the year)

So I will have more then enough miles for traveling, and I want to avoid paying for luxary hotel/resorts if I can, so my thought was to concentrate on one family of hotels, when I am doing my business traveling in USA and canada, such as holiday inn, or other budget hotels, to build up points and use them later in Europe, Asia, Hawaii, etc

In the past I have not been picky on hotel, staying in hiltons, marrorits, fairmount, etc. I have joined all their programs, just not sure which one is the easiest or provides to most incentive or benfits to the card holder?

HSOLO

PS yes I am in Toronto area, Canada.

Starwood is by far superior, even in Europe. I would recommend staying with *wood. However, HHonors is very good as well, but from a points/value standpoint *wood cannot be beat.

The MBNA SPG MC will provide you better point accumulation for 30k of spending than an AP card will if you choose to go the SPG route. Hotel points are generally worth more than FF points because you don't get dinged for taxes and fuel surcharges on redemptions.