xcalibir

The redemption are too good right now. I can find availability during Christmas to use my pts for all inclusive resorts!

How long do you think this will last until Wyndham pulls a Club Carlson on us?

sdsearch

It depends in part on how many people use their points for all inclusive resorts at Christmas. If it's just the people who post here about it, it's a tiny blip in the world of WyndhamRewards. And if it causes people to stay a lot more at WyndhamRewards properties, because it's hard to get many WyndhamRewards points continuously other ways (with no ways to transfer in, with limits on buying points, etc), so anyone who doesn't have many points can't take advantage of this. So it's not like everyone who might be intrigued by these redemptions who didn't belong to WyndhamRewards before can just join and immediately stay at all those resorts. They have to stay at least 15 nights (if at $100ish or below/night properties) to earn one night at an all inclusive resort, and how many people who want to stay at such a resort only want one night there?

So this works well right for those people who were participating in WyndhamRewards for a while and banking their points, and who have time and means at Christmas to go to an all-inclusive resort, but I bet that's a fairly small subset of current WyndhamRewards members. Most who might want to go don't have enough points, and many who have enough points don't want to or can't go.

GUWonder

It's just a guessing game in parts, but I think Wyndham will not so quickly be under as much pressure from creative, high-cost redemptions as was the case with Club Carlson.

1. The customer demographics and the marker positioning are different.

2. Wyndham, unlike Carlson, has relatively more useful redemption data for comparison so as to model things by using data from back when high-cost redemptions were mainly in the 16,000 point range and from when high-cost redemptions where much more than that (as in the period leading to the current 15k-level award situation).

These two factors can be expected to make a difference in some ways in how and when devaluations will take place.

mnelson

Even leaving aside some of the more creative redemptions at all-inclusive resorts and such, just the regular redemptions for the high-end hotels are surprisingly good, so far. I'm frequently finding $300-500/night hotels with redemption availability, even during peak periods. Getting a $300+ hotel for 15,000 points implies a value of 2+ cents/pt, which is much more than they used to be worth.

edit: Upon further investigation, it seems maybe I'm just lucky in where I travel, because these high-end properties are not at all common. Wyndham Grand Collection has.only 13 hotels in the USA, 1 in Germany, 1 in Austria, 5 in China, etc., so your odds of finding one are pretty low unless you seek them out. But it just happens that 3 of them are in locations I visit, so I thought they were more common. With so few of these properties, it's quite possible most people are redeeming for cheaper stays.

satori

As far as I know, the highest GoFast copay amount was $95 in May when the new program came out. Noticed last week the top published copay is $150 for some hotels in places like New York, New Orleans and San Francisco.

That is a devaluation of the GoFast reward rates within six months.

Even worse are the vacation rental properties where the GoFast co-pay amounts were higher than the published room rates for several hotels I checked. I was told by two different representatives that the GoFast co-pay on timeshare properties is 80% best available rate.