Worth Playing With Priority Club Award Reservations Tonight

Update: As of about 8AM Central on Wednesday it seems the rates have reverted to the old rates.  It was a fun 12+ hours while it lasted!  Stay tuned for more updates on the new rates when they are revealed….any other possible hiccups along the way.

If you have some free time (or a need for some Priority Club award reservations) you might want to play around with Priority Club reservations tonight.  On January 18th Priority Club is changing to a new award chart that will result in some properties shooting up in the points price per night, and some properties going down in points price per night.

However, crazy things may be happening during the transition.  I first saw a tweet by Loyalty Traveler who referenced Loyalty Lobby (who is doing a great job at chronicling the transition to the new Priority Club award chart).  Loyalty Lobby lists many properties that are now showing up at different points costs than they were a day or so ago.  What is especially interesting about this is that some properties are coming in at 5,000 and 7,500 points per night – which is lower than the stated 10,000 points per night that the new award chart is supposed to start at.  This leads to speculation that some of what is displaying right now may be errors.  If so, who knows what will ultimately happen, but it may be worth it to try and snag a hotel at a discounted points rate and see what happens.  You can transfer points in from Ultimate Rewards, if necessary.  This isn’t normally a great option, but is for some of these steals.

I did some searching or my own and saw the Holiday Inn Express Playa del Carmen for 5,000 points per night when rates are $160 per night and the Intercontinental Presidente Cozumel Resort and Spa for 20,000 points per night when rates are $218 per night.  These are both good points rates and one or both may be mistakes so act quickly if you want to lock something like this in.  I do want to point out that when I went to book some of these, I got error messages (update: I later think I got it to work, so the error probably was a fluke).

Some other steals that are shared on Loyalty Lobby and this Flyertalk thread are:

• Holiday Inn Old Sydney for 10,000 points
• Intercontinental Buckhead Atlanta 15,000 points
• Holiday Inn Munich City Center 10,000 points (ahem Oktoberfest)
• The Hamilton Washington DC Crowne Plaza – 15,000 points

These are amazing rates considering that Priority Club points can be obtained for .7 cents each!  I’m going to be playing around later seeing if I can find any gems that haven’t already been pointed out.  I’ll update if I find anything interesting – feel free to share your finds in the comments section as well.