Priority Club Rewards Buy Points 10% bonus

Buying points is a good way to top off the points in your hotel loyalty account for that free hotel stay award.  Until November 6, 2008 Priority Club will add a 10% points bonus to all purchases.  Priority Club raised the price of points this past year to $11.50 per 1,000 points on purchases of 20,000 to 40,000 points. 

Priority Club points purchase link and rules:

Points must be purchased in 1,000 point increments

·         Only 40,000 points may be purchased in a rolling 12-month period (this favors buying points sooner rather than later if you plan to buy 40,000 points so you can repeat purchase in another 12 months).

·         Price:    

o   $13.50 per 1,000 points for 1,000 to 9,000 points

o   $12.50 per 1,000 points for 10,000 to 19,000 points

o   $11.50 per 1,000 points for 20,000 to 40,000 points

·         Points will appear in account within 48 hours.

The current promotional bonus deal allows the Priority Club member to purchase 44,000 points for $460.  And if you think buying 44,000 points seems like a waste of money, keep reading.

Holiday Inn Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco

Buying points can be a great hotel cost savings

No other program offers the opportunity to get a high value room for so few points as InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) Priority Club Rewards with their PointBreaks for 5,000 points award nights.  The challenge with PointBreaks is getting your reservation in as soon as new hotels are listed.  The list changes every couple of months and as hotel reservations are booked the PointBreaks hotel list dwindles in size.

Current offers for PointBreaks are valid for hotel stays through November 30, 2008. 

Consider the Hotel Indigo Columbus Architectural Center in Columbus, Indiana, one of the new boutique brand hotels of IHG.  (I realized there is a Columbus, Indiana after several minutes searching for this hotel in Ohio.) 

A four night stay at the Hotel Indigo Architectural Center from Monday, November 3 to Friday, November 7, 2008 will cost 20,000 points using the PointBreaks special offer.  A Priority Club member can buy 22,000 points with the current bonus points promotion and book this four night stay for $230.

This same hotel stay will run $153 per night + 12% tax for a nonrefundable room rate of $171 per night.  A four night fully paid stay will cost $684. 

Just buying Priority Club Rewards points and booking a PointBreaks stay will reduce the four night hotel stay at the Hotel Indigo, Columbus, Indiana by $450.

 Now that is a discount!

HHonors will revert back to calendar year elite qualification and end rolling 12-month qualification as of January 1, 2009.  Members who reach an elite level in 2008 will maintain that status until March 31, 2010.  The membership year will now end in the month of March rather than April as had been the rule.   

Elite Membership Year:  Qualify for a membership level in 2008 and your elite status level will remain effective through March 31, 2010.

The new membership year is a change from the prior membership year rules which allowed a member reaching an elite level in one calendar year to maintain that membership level through the month of April (HHonors member attaining Diamond elite in 2007 holds that level through April 2009).

HHonors has always done things just a little differently. 

·         HHonors is the only program that qualifies hotel stays using points towards frequent guest elite status activity.

·         HHonors requires a 6-night stay or longer to get the points reduction on multiple night hotel stay awards.

·         HHonors almost exclusively targets bonus points promotions tailored to specific members rather than recruiting frequent guests from the masses with open registration for high value promotions.  This targeted marketing strategy comes from the hotel program that used to give away thousands of points a year just for updating your guest profile online every quarter.

HHonors introduced “Rolling Tier” elite qualification in the beginning of 2005. 

HHonors has been the only major hotel loyalty program in the past few years to offer elite qualification on a 12-month rolling tier model where any 12-month period could be used for qualification.

Advantage of Rolling-Tier Elite Qualification

Even HHonors diamond members struggled to understand how HHonors rolling tier was calculated.  There is a 92-page thread on FlyerTalkto attest to the confusing aspects of the Hilton HHonors rolling tier elite qualifying method. 

In my opinion, rolling tier elite qualification was primarily a benefit for a frequent traveler who may have finished one calendar year (assume 2007) short of desired elite status. 

Let’s say the traveler started a new job in June 2007 and made 20 Hilton stays by December 31^st, 2007.  The member stayed enough to qualify for mid-level elite membership as HHonors Gold member after 16 stays, but the real benefits of hotel frequent guest program high-elite membership come with top-tier elite membership. The frequent guest needed 28 stays, 60 nights, or $10,000 of eligible hotel spending to reach 100,000 base points and qualify for HHonors Diamond elite membership.

Under most hotel loyalty programs (Hyatt, IHG, Marriott, Starwood) the member would have started January 1, 2008 of the new calendar year with a cleared slate of 0 Stays and 0 Nights towards elite membership qualification. 

The HHonors member with 20 stays on December 31, 2007 had a much lower threshold for elite status qualification in 2008.  Only 8 more stays by June 2008 in the rolling tier qualification period was needed to reach top-tier Diamond elite membership in Hilton HHonors. 

A hotel frequent guest seeking top elite status in one of the major programs but without this status on December 31, 2007 had minimal incentive to stay with their particular loyalty program for 2008.  Each program requires about the same amount of hotel activity for earning top elite status and the member starts from scratch on January 1, 2008.  Rolling tier qualification should have been a competitive advantage for Hilton HHonors in maintaining loyalty for 2008.

Qualification Criteria for Top-Tier Elite Membership

(all these programs now base elite qualification on hotel activity for Jan 1- Dec 31 calendar year)

Hilton HHonors Diamond: 28 stays, 60 nights, or earning 100,000 base points.

Hyatt Gold Passport Diamond: 25 stays or 50 nights

InterContinental Hotels Group Priority Club Platinum: 50 nights or earn 60,000 points.

Marriott Rewards Platinum: 75 nights

Starwood Preferred Guest Platinum: 25 stays or 50 nights.

The transfer of loyalty to a different hotel frequent guest program becomes much more costly to the loyalty program member in terms of lost amenities and benefits once top-elite membership is attained in any hotel loyalty program. 

This is why most hotel loyalty programs will give a top-tier frequent guest in one program a complimentary status match to top-tier elite membership. 

And this is why the benefits and privileges of top-tier elite membership are usually generous as a means of keeping the high value frequent guest loyal to a particular hotel chain. 

Hilton HHonors has decided to eliminate rolling tier elite qualification, so apparently there was not ample competitive advantage with this hotel loyalty program feature.

Pebble Beach, California Lightning Strikes
June 22, 2008

No Woman No Cry
“gonna make the fire light
a-log-a-wood burning through the night”

A week ago in Monterey it was 90 degrees Fahrenheit and a lightning storm crossed the Central Coast. This is a photo of the lightning over Pebble Beach area. A storm front with lightning strikes lasting less than 30 minutes only dropped about five minutes of heavy rain here in Monterey. The lightning strikes set off fires along the Central Coast.

The Los Padres National Forest southeast of the town of Big Sur has burned over 30,000 acres in the past week. Some of the oldest existing buildings on the coast ridges around Big Sur burned. The Henry Miller library was almost lost to the fire. Ventana Inn and Post Ranch Inn were evacuated. 20 miles of coast Highway 1 have been closed for the week.

San Jose Mercury news article on Big Sur fires Friday, June 27, 2008

The fire was originally called the “Gallery” fire due to the proximity of the burning forest to an art gallery on Highway 1 and just south of the Nepenthe cliff top restaurant and store. There is a web camera mounted on the deck of Nepenthe’s and the fire area could be seen in the webcam images last Sunday.

Nepenthe Webcam, Big Sur, California

Big Sur Fire Map from KSBW Monterey local TV news

The town of Big Sur is actually open and accessible. Big Sur is hurting at the start of this tourism season, but the air quality is so bad here that I would not recommend anyone coming to this area at the present time. The wind has blown the fires’ smoke over Monterey Bay and all the way up the Salinas and Santa Clara Valleys and it is a week of sore lungs and officially “unhealthy” air.

The “Indians” fire in southern Monterey County on the eastern side of the Los Padres National Forest has been burning for several weeks and so far has scorched over 100 square miles of mountainous land. Together with the Big Sur Basin Complex fires, the Monterey County fires are just about to go over 100,000 acres in burn area. Conditions seem like 1977 when the Los Padres forest fires burned for several months and over 250,000 acres in Monterey County’s mountains and hill country.

California is facing a long hot summer.

A website has been established to coordinate news and resources for those affected by the Big Sur fires:
http://surfire2008.org/index.php

July 3 update: The fire has burned over 55,000 acres. Big Sur was under mandatory evacuation yesterday as the order affects Highway 1 on both sides of road and the road has been closed for a 30 mile stretch. The road looked like the fire line as the flames fanned the ridge above the reporter at Andrew Molera State Park, just north of Big Sur village on last night’s report. The fire is spreading in all directions. Fire still only 3% contained. No more buildings lost yet, but I read the fire is getting closer to Ventana Inn and Resort location. The air has not been too bad in Monterey the past few days with an onshore breeze.

July 8 Update: The fire has now burned over 80,000 acres over the past two weeks.  The smoke was attached to the fog yesterday and the smell in Monterey was present all day.  Good news is the fire has not crossed Highway 1 at Big Sur and the regular blogs from a person at the Post Ranch Inn indicate the fire danger has decreased around the Ventana Inn and Post Ranch Inn hotels.

The temperature is set to skyrocket this week to 100+ in the inland areas around Big Sur.  The forecast for Monterey is 70s, but we never know here in Monterey and the temperature may just creep up past 90 again for the third heat wave stretch in two months. 

July 31 update:  The Basin Complex fires were 100% contained last Sunday and the acreage burned was about 163,000 acres.  Big Sur is open and getting back to summer business. 

San Francisco InterContinental as seen from Howard and Sixth

InterContinental is the California rage with two new hotels in the past few months. The San Francisco InterContinental is the largest new hotel to open in San Francisco in 20 years and The Clement in Monterey is the city’s only newly built hotel in nearly 20 years.

The New York Times published a review of the San Francisco InterContinental the week before last. The review starts off with the provacative statement, “As San Francisco’s largest new hotel in two decades, the 32-story InterContinental San Francisco has prompted its share of architectural controversy. “

Front View of InterContinental San Francisco from across Howard Street

I have visited the San Francisco InterContinental hotel a couple of times, but at the wrong time of day to be allowed a room tour as I referenced in this blog post.

Yesterday, after reading the NYT review, I asked my wife to look at a picture of a building and give me her impressions. She had never seen the San Francisco InterContinental hotel.

Our conversation went something like this as she looked at the photo shown at the top of the blog post (click on the photo for a larger image):

K – “Are there windows missing?

Ric – “What? No. Those are windows with open curtains. It is a hotel building in San Francisco.”

K- “Oh. My initial impression was the building is a prison.”

K – “The lines running up the building give the appearance of grain silos. There is no decoration on the exterior walls. Look at the molding on the tops of the buildings around it. Why did they make it so plain looking?”

I guess my wife falls into the dislike the building exterior camp. The floor to ceiling windows inside the rooms are a feature we have loved in hotels like Vancouver’s Sheraton Wall Centre. The view is an attribute of the hotel in my opinion.

Here is another review from the San Francisco Chronicle back in February 2008.

Our record heat of last week tops off one of the driest winter/spring rain seasons in years. The high winds moved in the last two days after the heatwave high pressure system moved out.

The fire in the Santa Cruz Mountains around Mt. Madonna Road and Loma Prieta Road is actually in the mountain area between Gilroy and Watsonville/Santa Cruz northeast of Monterey Bay. The fire has spread from 500 acres to over 2,000 acres in four hours as homes and forests and brush burn.

The high winds lately with gusts of 30 and some over 40 mph in places are going to make this a tough fight.

Wishing everyone the best and a safe return.

Update 10am: Our wind here where I live in Monterey is keeping the smoke to the east of this part of Monterey. I can see the thick smoke over the central Monterey Bay coast over Marina/Fort Ord area.

Update 12:30pm: Word is the fire is up to about 3,000 acres and fire spokesman states the fire may spread to 10,000 acres before the wind dies down tomorrow night. 500 firefighters in the region now, and another 500 firefighters expected by tomorrow. Wind is still blowing smoke east of Monterey. I am teaching in Salinas this afternoon and expect the air quality to be poor over there.
KTVU has incredible video of the high flames burning the trees for miles along the ridges. This could be a long week for the area.

Sat 7:00pm update:
Good fortune brought the fog around the Monterey Bay coast and nearby mountains and kept the wind calm most of yesterday. The air was clear and mostly blue in Gilroy. The smoke was actually blowing north over the San Jose basin and foothill communities of the Santa Cruz Mountains most of the day and just started blowing towards Gilroy in late afternoon. The fire did not spread with the ferocity experienced Thursday.

The day the fire started there was a thick pall of smoke that funneled across the Pajaro Valley of Watsonville and wound its way down the Salinas Valley and the Highway 68 pass between Salinas and Monterey where the smoke blocked up against the mountains and the smell was strong. Ash was falling in Salinas from the 15 mile wide swath of smoke. By the time I returned home to Monterey after 6pm, the wind had changed direction and the smoke had blown over the western part of Monterey and settled over the hills.

The fire is estimated around 4,000 acres now on late Saturday and about 25% contained. The winds were strong for the past couple hours and now have subsided here. Hopefully this fire will be contained with some cool weather, low winds, and hard work.

Hyatt Regency Suites Palm Springs

Palm Springs Hyatt Regency Suites lobby

This hotel’s main attribute is location. The Hyatt Regency is a 6-story hotel located directly in the center of Palm Springs nightlife on Highway 111, where Palm Canyon Drive slows to a mini-strip in the section of downtown Palm Springs with high end tourist shops, bars, and restaurants.

Lobby Atrium Artwork

Hyatt Regency Palm Springs lobby bar


The Hyatt Regency hotel has an outdoor bar on the sidewalk strip in front and a large lobby with an indoor bar. The outdoor swimming pool is a little small for a hotel this size, but sufficient for a good workout swim or cool dip. A poolside cafe is available for drinks and snacks.

There is even a small putting green near the outdoor bar.

The pool view rooms will have less noise than rooms facing North Palm Canyon Drive, the main Palm Springs strip.

The workout room was tiny and hopefully will be enlarged when the current remodeling is completed (scheduled to be completed May 2008).

The street outside seemed to be fairly active for a Tuesday night in April.

TripAdvisor Ranking: #55 of 66 Hotels in Palm Springs (#6 of 7 hotels rated 4-star). Complaints tend to be a worn hotel (recently remodeled rooms in 2008) and the noise for rooms facing Palm Canyon Drive (Highway 111). The hotel location is perfect for people who want to party on the Palm Springs strip, but Hyatt Grand Champions is the place to be for a more desert resort like experience. My impression is the Hyatt Regency Suites Palm Springs is the better hotel for people who don’t want to make the drive all the way to Vegas to get a little crazy.

TripAdvisor reviews of Hyatt Regency Suites Palm Springs

Hyatt.com AAA hotel rates for a 2-night stay Wednesday, May 21-Friday, May 23
Hotel has 13.5% tax on rooms.
$119.20/night (street side)
$144.20/night for pool/mountain view (highly preferable for reduced street noise).

Weekends in Palm Springs area have higher room rates:
2-night stay Friday, May 16-Sunday, May 18
lowest AAA rate $159.20/night or for pool/mountain view room $184.20.

Hyatt Regency Palm Springs homepage
Hyatt Gold Passport Category 3 hotel = 12,000 points for free night.
AAA = 3-diamond

Welcome to Boardingarea.com and the Loyalty Traveler blog.   This is the place for discussion on Hotels and Points, the state of hotel frequent guest loyalty programs, and current promotions.

Bring on your questions, prod me to clarify the meaning of my words, and contribute to the understanding of all the readers looking for a little better value with hotels in their travel lifestyle.

 With a little shared knowledge, many of us will find our way to a better place.

Ric Garrido, Loyalty Traveler

Sheraton Libertador, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Presidential Suite stay, June 2007

An article I read earlier this week keeps coming back to my thoughts. “Travel Editors Gather to Rap about the issues du jour.” appeared on http://www.travelweekly.com/ April 1, 2008.

The editors were asked about how the economy will impact travel. Erik Torkells, editor, Budget Travel stated something I keep remembering:
“There will always be people who want to continue to spend money, and if travel’s their No. 1 priority, they will continue to do it. And there will always be people who want a deal, and an incredible part of the experience for them is finding that deal. People tend to do what they do unless they absolutely can’t.”

Last week I was hanging out in San Francisco. I woke up in my lovely hotel room at the Hyatt Regency and read the paper. I read about an old man who was beaten to death around Mission and Fifth Street the day before. The murder happened by the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper building, just around the corner from the new InterContinental San Francisco hotel.

When I made the comment in my blog a couple of weeks ago about the InterContinental pushing the slum boundary another block south and west, I was not intending to make a slur against the InterContinental. The fact is the SoMa (South of Market Street) district is a scary place if you wander into the wrong streets. I approached the new InterContinental hotel coming from Sixth Street and Howard and I had to walk the gauntlet at 9am in the morning around hundreds of homeless, some mentally ill, some drunk, some sleeping, some bathing on the curb, but I wasn’t bothered by anyone.

A couple of years ago, I exited a restaurant at midnight across the street from the W Hotel San Francisco, and witnessed a couple of street people harassing tourists in a threatening manner. I was glad the hotel entrance was so close.

Last summer, outside the Westin Seattle, a crazy man threatened my wife and I with a large piece of lumber on his shoulder if we didn’t give him $5. We ran into the street and took our chances with cars rather than risk being clobbered by a nutcase an hour before embarking on a cruise. And this was at noon time on a sunny Saturday.

Westin Seattle

A luxury hotel in the slums is all fine as long as you stay in the hotel. To me it is like being in a Caribbean or South American hotel where the world is kept outside and inside luxury abounds. I’d rather be in the nicer parts of San Francisco and for me that means Union Square (Grand Hyatt, Westin St. Francis, JW Marriott), the Financial District (Hilton Financial District, Le Meridien), or Nob Hill (InterContinental Mark Hopkins, Renaissance Stanford Court, Fairmont, Ritz-Carlton). Fisherman’s Wharf hotels are in a highly touristed area, but unless the price is lower at Fisherman’s Wharf (which it usually isn’t) than downtown, I would opt for the larger downtown hotels. It only takes 15 to 20 minutes by cheap public transportation ($1.50) to reach Fisherman’s Wharf.

Many of the new luxury hotels in San Francisco are on Market Street (Four Seasons, Ritz Carlton Residences) or South of Market (Westin Market, W Hotel, St. Regis, Marriott, InterContinental San Francisco) and it will take some time for this area to develop into a safer location.

Heidi Mitchell, editor of Town & Country Travel, commented that the advantage of travel writers is their experience in having a large inventory of hotel experiences to enable valid comparisons between one hotel brand and another and one location in a city compared to another.

My hotel comments in reviews and blog posts are based on having stayed about 500+ hotel nights over the past ten years with hotels in the major corporate chains in locations around Europe, Australia, New Zealand, South America, Asia, Canada, and the USA. It is not a lot compared to many road warriors, however, as a leisure traveler it is a solid foundation for making hotel comparisons.

And I take travel seriously, even if I don’t take myself and my writing too seriously at times.
“Travel is the frivolous part of serious lives, and the serious part of frivolous ones.”
Anne Sophie Switchine

Fuel surcharges on award tickets has been a common complaint this past year. Air France/KLM Flying Blue is the program about which I have heard most of the complaints. The taxes and fuel surcharges add up to make many award tickets nearly as pricey as paid tickets (which generally have the added value of earning miles).

Here is my Aeroplan story. I have been writing about this Easter travel season and the incredibly low fares to Europe. This past weekend I actually found a fare of Monterey-Frankfurt for $499 on United Airlines.

I have Air Canada miles I have been also trying to spend for an award ticket. I found availability from SFO-FRA using my Aeroplan miles. I went through the screens and finally the ticket charges appear.

$375 and 60,000 miles in taxes and fees for an economy award ticket to Europe on Aeroplan. My frequent flier miles are worth about $2/1,000 miles with this award. This is less than 10% of the value for a frequent flier mileage award I typically redeem. (I did not buy it.)

Last year, an award ticket from San Francisco to Prague in business class cost $115 and that has been the norm for every award ticket I have ever redeemed. And I have redeemed dozens of awards. The most I ever paid was $241 to British Airways and that was for a 31,000-mile itinerary from the US to Europe to Asia to Australia and back with 6 First Class flights, 2 stopovers, and an open-jaw.

Two years ago my First Class awards to New Zealand cost under $19 each.

The fuel surcharge on award tickets completely undermines the value of miles. Forget economy class awards. With award fees this high, the traveler needs to blow the miles for a seat in the front cabin of the plane.

I was checking out train schedules in Austria and thinking about Vienna. Made a search and came across EuroCheapo blog on Austrian rail train specials.

The blog is an entertaining read as the bloggers are currently in Berlin. The blog led me to the EuroCheapo website which is a great niche resource for bargain travel planning in Europe.

Their Cheap Flight Finder has low-fare airline links and provides a useful tool and resource for flights around Europe. The website design to “Find an Airline by Country” is a useful planning feature allowing users to search for low-cost European airlines by country. I have spent many hours in the past trying to figure out what low cost airline travels from a city like Prague or Berlin when I was trying to piece together budget travel between several European cities.

The hotel listings cover 22 or so cities in Europe with reviews hundreds of budget-priced hotels and lodging options that have been looked over by a member of the team.

Great resource for finding ways to save your travel dollars when heading over to Europe.

http://www.eurocheapo.com/

I put this website in my favorites.