Sisyphus1carus

I foolishly have two rewards nights which will expire very soon and I can not possibly use them in time OR earn a new rewards night in time (in order to extend the expiration).

Does anyone know if I can do something like this below to essentially extend the expiry and thus not lose them ?

If I book a stay of 2 nights before the expiry date using my 2 reward nights for a date after the expiry date I know that my nights won't expire as they are booked to be used. This has been confirmed to me.

What happens though if I need to cancel that stay later (after the expiry date but within the specific booking cancellation period) because my plans have changed ? Do I lose the 2 reward nights or will they be returned to me renewed and refreshed with another 12 months to use them ??

Cheers.

Sisyphus1carus

Have been advised that I can save them by booking a hotel for the future and waiting until after the expiry date of the reward nights to cancel them.

GUWonder

Just booking a non-refundable sub-$10 place on hotels.com with a stay date before the expiration date of the reward nights works to extend the reward nights' expiration date.

Concerto

I am just vaguely worried, probably for no good reason whatsoever. But on this subject, I keep getting emails from hotels.com saying, "Hurry, redeem you 4 award nights", " Get your skates on...", etc. Now I have had plenty of recent activity on the account and yes, I have 4 reward nights of varying amounts to redeem (varying from EUR50 to EUR95). I presume that there is no end of year hard expiry for reward nights and they are subject to the same expiry rules as the activity on the account, namely one activity (stay) every 12 months.

I think they are just rattling my cage to use the damn things, right, not indirectly messaging me that they're going to expire? After all, unused reward nights are liability for them.

thedude99

I'm in the same boat. I'm not sure what is meant by sub $10 place? I can't imagine any hotel being that low - maybe in cambodia or something?

So can we confirm that I can book stay for hotel after expiry date (obviously cancellable one) and then if need be cancel afterwords and it resets the one year?

Example
Expiry date - May 30, 2019
Hotel stay - book for June 15 before May 30
Cancel - June 5 (meeting hotel's policy obviously)
IN the above my expiry date would now move to June 5, 2020?

When you do said booking should you use the rewards certificate or not?

SuperKirby

SuperKirby

s0ssos

This system won't work anymore. Don't know if this is the reason hotels.com has implemented a $5 award booking fee.

GUWonder

SuperKirby

Got it, thanks!

ens100

If you log in on hotels.com and then go to "your rewards" - about a third of the way down you should see a message saying something along theses lines: "Book and stay by MMM DD, YYYY to keep your collected nights and any reward nights you haven’t redeemed. (You have 12 months from the last date you collected or redeemed nights)."

bedelman

SuperKirby suggests booking a super cheap room such as a $2 hostel in order to get activity and extend expiration of Hotels.com value. Have others tried this? Does it still work? I suppose the question comes down to whether the hostel reports this as a stay versus a no-show, and whether Hotels.com cares about that difference. Money to hostel and Hotels.com eithe way, maybe they don't care.

GUWonder

It still works. Or at least it did last month.

flashware

Worked recently for me, too. You don't need to show up as the place will quite happily check you in and take the money and still have the bed to use.

Of course you can easily get around the redemption fee that will be coming in soon by just booking using the app, not that much hassle really.

LacMajeur

Which hostel, please?

Edit: I found some, by choosing Vietnam as destination (I didn't know you could do that for an entire country - it's not possible with countries I usually travel to) and sorting by price.