Absolute

That's the best idea - check the SPG Hot Escapes (although this week was terrible with ~30 hotels only), or redeem for points. If you find a cheap rate for one night, reserve 3 rooms. Since you're doing it based on nights, you can reserve those 3 rooms for multiple days. If you were doing it based on stays, you would only get 1 stay for that hotel, even with 3 rooms.

Oxon Flyer

Just pause a moment and consider what would happen if SPG allowed everyone to become Platinum by booking 25 stays at the lowest cost hotel in the whole world and then not showing up.

No, it’s really not. It’s more like Macy’s saying that if you’d like to go and buy the $29 suit from their rural China store instead of the the $199 suit in metro California, you’re most welcome to.

RogerD408

The root desire of having a hotel loyalty program is to drive people to actually stay at their properties. If they only wanted those that were willing to throw money at them to get status then there would be no need for the properties in the first place. We look at the rules to see how we can bend them to our favor. Some properties are more strict about following them than others so that leaves an opportunity to gain status without having to go through all the pushups. Until someone cracks down, we will take what we can get. If someone would do an extensive study, we may find that hotel/airline programs are limited in their payback. Maybe going with a pure cashback program based upon actual spend has a much higher return. But since we each get to value the program benefits that meet our needs, there will be several programs to choose from.

ContinentalFan

Let me posit another scenario, which I think wouldn’t violate the SPG T&Cs. If I arrive in a city and discover that hotel room rates are low that week, could I book a room in every property, on the same night, drive around and check into each one and garner a bunch of stays? Is there anything (apart from my wallet) preventing me from benefiting from such a scheme?

remymartin

By all means churn away. You will, however, only get stay/night credit and points for one of the stays according to the terms and conditions. It is unclear which of those stays post.

JackE

Here's what would happen if everyone in the world booked 25 stays without staying... OK first, that lowest cost hotel in China doesn't have enough room for everyone, so billions of people (you said everyone) would have to book at other properties. But there aren't enough properties for everyone, so SPG would have to build more and more. Everyone wins, given your assumption.

Except that in this analogy everyone is telling the China store not to ship the suit because they are not going to wear it. I'll bet Macy*s would gladly take those orders.

JackE

Except even if they allowed guests to remote book and no-show, they would ALSO want the old fashioned kind of guest. This is not about people booking 25 stays and never show up because there is no point in having status if you never visit a hotel. It's about someone topping off their account. It's also about how silly mattress runs are. Who benefits by making us walk into the room and spend the time to tussle it up to look slept in? Certainly not the housekeeper. Certainly not the environment. Certainly not us.

margarita girl

itsallgood

You'll only get credit for one property. You'd do better to book 3 rooms at one property; that way, you'd get 3 nights'/1 stay credit.

mahasamatman

Not neessarily if there are tangible benefits that Macy's would have to give you for the product you're not using.

margarita girl

clublounger

Is this crap gonna continue???

lingua101

err I thought you will still get 3 stays?

HHQX888

You would get 3 stays / 3 nights or if you stay longer than 1 night you would get 3 stays / nights (3xdays of your stay) .

sandyph

3 rooms is 3 stay as per my experiences