Earn Hotel Points Whenever You Can
Easily Earn Points for Free Travel, Hotel Strategies
If your hotel has a loyalty program, you should always join it before your stay.
You might as well earn hotel points on each of your stays. In most cases, you should be able to get some value from them. And simply signing up for the programs will give you special member rates, benefits, and promotions.
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Special member rates and benefits
Even if you knew you weren't interested in earning points, you should always join a hotel's loyalty program before you book.
Joining the hotel's loyalty program provides access to special member rates and at least some minor extra benefits, such as free internet access or bottled water. It only takes a minute to sign up and a free service called AwardWallet takes all the effort out of remembering and managing your account. With some programs, you may be able to take shortcuts to earn elite hotel status and unlock additional benefits.
Getting value from your points
It might take a long time before you can earn enough points for a free night, but that shouldn't stop you from taking the time to earn points on your stay.
- With the major hotel programs, you should eventually be able to put together enough points for a free night. Your points won't expire as long as you have some activity every 1-2 years (depending on the program). Even if you don't wind up staying again during this time, there are some easy ways to keep your account active. And if you have the hotel company's credit card, your points will either remain active or you will be able to keep it active with a single credit card charge. Keep Your Points from Expiring.
- You might be able to combine points you earn from your stays with points you get from your credit card. For example, any Ultimate Rewards points you earn can be combined with your Hyatt points to either book more frequent or more expensive award nights.Or you can add a lot of extra points to your account with a Hyatt signup bonus.
- Even if you never earn enough points for a free stay, you can still get some value from your points. Realistically you may never earn enough miles in some programs for a free ticket. Fortunately, most programs allow you to redeem smaller number of points for other things—allowing you to get some value from the points you earn. For example, you can use Spirit Airlines miles to purchase magazine subscriptions.
- Redeem for merchandise or gift cards. Many programs allow you to use your points to purchase merchandise or gift cards. On paper, this is almost always a bad deal. You are getting lower value per point than you would get by using your points for hotel nights. However, it is better settle on a $10 Amazon gift card than it is to have your points expire or just sit around in your account forever. And it is better than not earning points at all.
- Enjoy a meal at a local restaurant. Several hotel programs allow you to use your points on dining. If you don't earn enough points for a free night, maybe you can earn enough points for a free breakfast or diner. With the major programs there is likely to be a hotel within driving distance.
- Convert to frequent flyer miles . Many hotel programs, particularly the larger ones, allow you to convert your points to frequent flyer miles and often you can transfer fairly small quantities of points. Like earning using your points for gift cards, converting to frequent flyer miles looks bad on paper. The value of the hotel points you would be giving up is usually much higher than value of the miles you would receive. However, a handful of hotel points that will wind up expiring from your account aren’t worth anything. If you are never going to use them, you are better off earning some miles instead.
- Give them to a friend. Most hotel programs let you transfer your points to others and in some cases, including Hilton, Hyatt, and Marriott, you can transfer them to people who live outside your family.
- Just let them expire. You don’t need to lose a lot of sleep over just letting your hotel points (from infrequently used programs) expire. After all, you didn’t necessarily join the program to earn the points. You might have joined primarily to get the special benefits and the discounted room rates. Although, if you earned a lot of points through a credit card signup bonus or other route and you haven’t had a chance to use them yet, you definitely want to make sure you don’t lose them.
- You should have an account anyway. Once you've set up your hotel loyalty account to unlock special member rates and benefits, it only takes a second to add it to your reservation. If you are booking directly, signing in will fill in all your extra reservation details, so it actually takes less time than doing a "guest" checkout. And if you are using AwardWallet, it is easy to retrieve any forgotten account information.
If you doubt you'll be able to eventually use the points, you can sometimes choose to earn frequent flyer miles (in lieu of points) directly for your stay, rather than converting later.
