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Starwood and Hyatt Get Tricky with New Loyalty Program Offers

May 3, 2010 at 9:00 AM | by | Comments (2)

W Hollywood

Starwood Hotels is offering a new promotion that allows loyalty program members to earn a free weekend-night award for every three stays at one of its properties.

But you can't earn the award by staying in a Starwood hotel for three nights during a trip. The catch is that the "three stays" means you'd have to stay at one of its properties on three separate visits. Three consecutive nights at a hotel would equal one stay.

That's a lot more work—and money—required to earn the award. But if you want to give it a go, you have to stay at one of Starwood's more than 920 properties between May 1 and July 31. There are no limits to how many free nights can be earned, and awards can be combined to make a longer weekend stay. Starwood Preferred Guest members can redeem their free night awards between May 7 and December 19 on any Friday, Saturday or Sunday. You can sign up to be a Starwood Preferred Guest online.

Meanwhile, in other hotel loyalty program news, Hyatt's Gold Passport is upping the points needed per night at certain properties by 22 percent. That means that starting June 4, if you want to spend the night in places like the Park Hyatt Chicago, Park Hyatt Tokyo and Grand Hyatt New York, you'll have to pony up 22,000 points instead of the usual 18,000. Let's hope these hotels start offering better incentives for loyalty program members.

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As good as hotel loyalty gets

First, you state - "But you can't earn the award by staying in a Starwood hotel for three nights during a trip. The catch is that the "three stays" means you'd have to stay at one of its properties on three separate visits. Three consecutive nights at a hotel would equal one stay."

All hotel loyalty programs define a stay as one or more consecutive nights in the same hotel.
So while you can't earn the free night credit with three nights in one Starwood Hotel, you can earn a free night with one night in three Starwood Hotels.

This is not necessarily any more money or more work to earn a free night credit with Starwood.

Your article ends with the phrase, "Let's hope these hotels start offering better incentives for loyalty program members."

The current set of hotel loyalty program incentives make the next few months one of the best times in the past decade to earn high value free nights at hotels with Hyatt (2 stays earn a free night at any Hyatt hotel in the world), Starwood (3 stays earn a free weekend night at nearly any Starwood Hotel in the world), and Hilton (4 stays earn a free night at any Hilton in the world).

The opportunity to earn a free night at high priced luxury hotels after staying at low-priced midscale hotels like Four Points (Starwood), Hyatt Place, or Hampton Inn (Hilton) makes the next three months an extraordinary time to travel and leverage low cost hotel stays for high value vacation free nights in luxury hotels in Paris, London, Tokyo.

Hotel loyalty incentives right now are as good as it gets.

For travelers who don't realize the significance of these promotion opportunities available to loyalty program members right now, come check out the airline and hotel loyalty program specialists writing blogs at BoardingArea.com.

Ric Garrido on May 3, 2010 at 8:02 PM #Permalink

Hotel Loyalty Could Get a Little Better

Ric, thanks so much for your comment and offering your perspective. We are very much in favor of hotel loyalty programs. But we didn't like the wording of this particular Starwood promotion. If you sift through all of the information, there's nothing there that explains that you would have to make three separate visits to a property. It's a bit misleading and requires more work to earn the free night within three months. Thanks for reading HotelChatter!
Jennifer Kester on May 4, 2010 at 2:08 PM #Permalink
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