Frequent Miler on the Air - Greg's experience booking a Preferred Hotel with Choice points | Coffee Break Ep40 | 1-7-25

Episode Date: January 7, 2025

You can book Preferred Hotels with Choice Privileges points, (which has a 1:2 transfer rate from Citi Thank You points), or Preferred Hotel points (which has a 1:4 transfer rate from Citi Thank You points). There are reasons to book with one points over another, but is this worth doing? Greg's recent experience booking a Preferred Hotel with Choice points can help shed some light on the question. (01:24) - The Seagate Hotel & Spa Delray Beach Florida (01:48) - Different booking options... (05:17) - Booking experience... (12:17) - Hotel stay experience (the good and bad) Visit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media. Music Credit – Beach Walk by Unicorn Heads

Here we go. This is not your typical Frequent Miler on the Air episode. This is a standalone segment we're calling Coffee Break. Each Coffee Break segment will cover a single topic related to miles and points. And each Coffee Break is limited to 20 minutes or your money back. Enjoy. Today, we're talking about Greg's experience booking a preferred hotel with choice privileges points. So we've talked a bunch about preferred hotels recently, both for the ability to book them with choice privileges points and for the ability to book them with preferred hotel points, because both are transfer partners of Citi. And so you can

transfer your Citi thank you points one to two to choice privileges or one to four to preferred hotels. And either way, you can book preferred hotels. We've talked about the complexity of that, the various different ways, and sometimes it's better with one or the other. And Greg is fresh off of a preferred hotel stay that he booked with choice privileges points. And I'm really, really curious to hear about how this all went, because we've had a number of reports from readers, some good, some a little shaky in terms of how it all played out. Not the hotels themselves. Of course, that's always going to vary, but I'm talking about just the process of booking and having a reservation. So I guess let's just kick it off by finding out, well, where'd you go? Where'd you stay? Yeah. So I stayed at the Seagate Hotel and Spa in Delray Beach, Florida.

So that's on the Southeast coast, north of Fort Lauderdale. And so the cash rate at the time after taxes, $515 per night. I went to see whether I could book it with preferred points because that would have been 75,000 points per night. Booking with choice points was 57,000 points per night. And you would think that choice points would be the better deal because it's fewer points than I prefer points. But because Citi transfers one to four to I prefer versus one to two to choice, I prefer would be a better rate. Now, here's the thing. Of the preferred hotels that exist, not all of them can be booked with points at all. Like, only maybe half or a third can be booked with points at all. And of the ones that are bookable with points, some are bookable with I prefer points, some are bookable with choice points, and some are bookable with both. There doesn't seem to be a correlation between like – you would think that if a hotel was points bookable, it would be bookable with both, but it's not the case.

In this case, it is bookable with both, but the award availability varies a lot so for the dates i wanted to stay there there was no availability at all with i prefer points none choice though was wide open that's so weird yeah yeah so um choice was still a good value it wasn't like spectacular value but it was good value i also had the of, I already had a lot of choice points, so I didn't have to transfer from Citi. So in the end, I got 0.9 cents per point value for my choice points, which is good for choice. It's not, again, it's not great, but it's decent. Yeah, that's pretty good. So that's not bad. So to kind of back up a step. So 57,000 choice privileges points, if you had transferred from city, that would have been about 28,000, 28,500, if I'm doing the math right. Thank you points per night. So, I mean, that's certainly not too bad. That's a pretty good value. So if you were transferring from city, then even though you only got 0.9 cents per point out of your choice points, really would have been like 1.8 cents per city thank you point, which is really good for city. It is. I mean, it's just solid value. More and more, we're seeing that around that range, like with the leading

hotels, you're getting around 1.6. With this, I mean, it varies a lot, but getting around 1.8 is very respectable, I think. I'm happy to do that with my city points. And so, yeah, from a value point of view, it was a good deal. And it would have been even better, like Greg said, if he could have booked with, I prefer points since they transfer four to one. And I can't do the math quickly enough in my head on that one, but it's 15,000-ish, 16,000, 18,000, something like that, points per night, somewhere in there. City points, yeah. If you were transferring city points to I prefer, if it were available with I prefer points. It's kind of interesting that it was available to Choice and not I prefer.

So, I mean, I wonder if that means they're getting more money from Choice in that case than they would. I don't know. The whole thing. Who knows? Who knows how organized it is? I think that's totally possible. Yeah. But who knows?

We don't know what's going on behind the scenes with terms of how much the hotels are getting from these different programs. Crazy. All right. So that gives me a little bit of a rundown. Was it easy to book? Was it difficult to book?

Because I mean, we've heard various things, and I know that seeing the availability calendar and actually booking these things can be tough. Were you just able to book it on like the choice privileges side? How did you book? Yeah, the actual act of booking it was super easy. The act of keeping the booking legitimate was harder. But let's talk about the active booking first. The active booking is, you know, I go to Choice has a preferred hotels page on their Choice Privileges site. And it says log in to search for hotels. So you log into your Choice account from that screen. And it brings you to a special preferred hotels page that's for choice privilege members where when you search for hotels there, it shows you the point price and brings up an availability calendar when you click through a particular hotel.

And then you just pick your start and end dates and book it. And it's really – when it goes right, it's seamless. I mean, I've sometimes what happens is at that stage, it might give an error and say there isn't availability, but that didn't happen to me. It just, I, I went all the way through to, to booking. No problem. But seamless as that may have been, you found the seam somewhere there, right? Yeah. Um, one more thing though, uh, to say about it is that the cancellation policy was good. I don't remember exactly what it was, but it was something like 48 hours, you know, before the stay, you can cancel for free. And when you book through Choice, you get an email confirmation that has a link that lets you cancel it. You can't change it afterwards, but you could cancel it and rebook.

Okay. So, all right, that's good news and useful to have that. But like I kind of insinuated there, and you talked about briefly or alluded to on a previous podcast episode, things did start to come apart at the seams here at some point. Things were rocky. So I got a call from the Seagate Hotel saying that they needed a credit card in order to take a deposit, in order to keep my stay valid. And so I thought, okay, it's a prepaid stay, but they need a credit card to hold it fine. So I called up, gave them my credit card information. And then I looked at my account and I saw they had charged the full cash rate of the stay to my card. So they weren't looking just for a deposit. They were looking for full payment um i called them

back and said hey what's going on i paid with choice points etc and it turns out what happened was they had been given a virtual credit card number um from choice or from preferred hotels it's unclear to me where they got it from, but that was intended to pay for the stay. They were trying to charge that full cash rate to that virtual credit card. It was being denied. And they didn't know what else to do. And so they called and got the payment from me. They were quick to reverse it. So I have to say that they didn't put up any fight about reversing it. Once they understood what was supposed to happen, they pursued that. So I got off that second call feeling pretty good that they now understood that they had to go to Choice or Preferred Hotels and get the payment that way. But you should have been feeling a little bad that Choice's credit card is getting declined. So I thought things were fine. Then I don't know, maybe a week later, I get a message from them saying, can you send the

confirmation you got from Choice? Because we're trying to find contact information for who to talk to about this virtual credit card that's not working. And so I sent it to them, but there was no information about how to contact anyone in that confirmation. So ultimately, they called me again and told me how they tried calling preferred. They tried calling choice. They couldn't get anyone who knew anything about this. The choice people told them that there's no way to book the Seagate Hotel with choice points,

you know, because it's not a choice hotel. And this is really common with choice, right? If you have to call them about preferred hotels as a customer, they don't, you know, most of their call center people don't know anything about it. Until recently, that was the only way to book a preferred hotel with choice points. And so I've done that in the past,

a few years back where you have to basically keep calling till you get someone who's even heard of the fact that to talk to choice and ask them if they know about the relationship and if they don't, hang up and call again. So I never heard. And I asked multiple times for information about how this got resolved. But all I know is she eventually emailed me and said, it's all good. Your stay is good. And I even emailed on the morning that I was going for like a third time, like, we're going to be checking in tonight. It's everything good. Yeah, you're all set. No problem. Choice to actually take care of this or what? Yeah. So, I mean,

that's really interesting and it's got to be fascinating because presumably, I guess we'll hear more about this in a minute or two, but presumably it's a pretty nice hotel that you're booking. These preferred hotels in general are pretty nice places. I just imagine the front desk person at like a fancy-ish hotel calling choice privileges and like getting person after person that's like, no, we have no relationship with preferred hotels and be like, wow, what a booking experience. Like, you know, that just, that would, I would think that that would raise an eyebrow at the hotel level. Like, you know, what are we doing here partnering with these people that don't even know who we are?

Yeah. Yeah. And I was really hoping to run into her during my stay. I never did. I think she, they have like a back office area. I'm guessing that she handles things in the back office. And so anyway, I never saw her. Yep. All right. So that part, you know, it eventually got solved. That's good.

But then another kind of horror story that we've heard from a few people is the hotel just not having any record of the reservation. Obviously, you've been back and forth with the hotel. So one would think that they knew you were coming and you emailed them the day of. So presumably you were able to check in without an issue. Yeah, surprisingly, I don't know if I should be surprised after all that back and forth. But yeah, check in was seamless. The only thing that was not great about the check-in or the stay was that my I prefer number was on the reservation. And I have titanium status, which is their top tier status because they had done this, like, I don't know, status matchy thing last year. And so I thought I would be eligible for a room upgrade and titanium status guarantees

a food and beverage amenity. It doesn't say what it is, but you'd get something. We didn't get either of those things. So I even asked at the desk about it. Now, you have to understand something about this hotel. They just went through a major renovation. The physical space is fantastic. It's like five-star physical space. Wow. Their staff training is not five-star. Not quite there yet.

I'm not going to say too much about that here, but they're working on that. So anyway, this guy didn't understand titanium what what it meant to have status he kept looking at the my reservation and saying it doesn't say anything on here about a food and beverage amenity well of course it wouldn't because yeah because it's a status thing it's not it's not part of the reservation yeah right so he said he would call someone and if if it turned out that they didn't have a food and beverage amenity for my room, he was going to send us a bottle of Prosecco as like a gift from him just to make up for it. Well, neither one ever happened. Well, you know, swing and a miss there. Yeah.

So you didn't follow up with anybody like a manager or something to find out if you would get any elite benefits? So I emailed the same person I had been emailing back and forth with. She had always been like, other than answering about what happened with Choice, she had always been pretty quick to answer me, including the day I was checking in. You know, she answered right away. So I said, I was basically gentle about it. I didn't say, you know, do you know who I am? I should be getting Berksley. Instead I said, I have titanium status. The rules, you know, the website says that it should include a room upgrade and food and beverage amenity. I didn't get those. What should I have expected is how I put it. And not a peep.

Still now, not a peep. They're like, listen, buddy. Listen, no. Choice's credit card still isn't working over here. Right, right. That's probably what they were thinking. It was like, this person has been such a pain in the you know what. But you know what?

I went in not really expecting. I was hoping for the benefits. I wasn't really expecting it. I don't know whether they failed on the benefits. There's several reasons they could have. One, the most likely, I think, is they just don't know what they're doing with respect to that. I think there was a huge amount of turnover during the renovation. And so I think the staff are new. I think that, so that's one possibility. Another is that, you know, it could be that when you book with points, you're not eligible for

those benefits, or at least the hotel thinks you're not eligible. That's another possibility. And it could be there's a difference, It's possible there's a difference between booking with choice points and I prefer points as to how that goes as well. So I think there's a lot of possibilities there. Again, I think it's probably the hotel though. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's good to know. Yeah. It would have been, I guess, good to find out one way or another, but who knows? Yeah. Very difficult to say. And I think that that is worth though, a call out that when you're dealing with these, you know, kind of boutique sort of hotels that are, you know, you know, loose, connected marketing partnership go in like you're going to lose sleep if you don't get your food and beverage amenity because it's not worth having that level of expectation when there's a decent chance that it may not happen. Yeah, exactly. And we had a great stay anyway.

Well, that was my final question. So how was the stay? I know obviously you alluded to the fact that staff could use a little bit of polish, but what about the stay overall, the breakfast? Overall was great. a little bit uh a little bit of polish but what about the stay overall the breakfast overall was great i'm gonna tell one i'm gonna tell one's service story which was our very first interaction where we drove up to um valet park our car which seems to be the only way to deal with a car there and you have to pay 40 a day for that but um anyway we pull up to do it. They had this really big area for pulling your car up. And it was unclear where to pull up. The area that looked like it should be the right area,

there was no one there. So there was another area like in front of the front door that had someone that appeared to be valet standing there. So I thought, oh, drive up there. And so rolled down the window, said, we're checking in. And he literally scoffed at me and said, you could have parked over there and pointed towards the first area that I had slowed down. That was my greeting to the hotel. Wow. Yeah, that's a rough start. It's a rough start. It was a rough start. It was a rough start. Luckily, it was all better after that. Did you respond? You could have been polite about that.

Yeah, seriously. I mean, how about a little bit like, you know, welcome to the hotel. Next time you pull up, pull over there and we'll come to you. Something like that. Pretty simple. Anyway, I have to say,

all the other valets we interacted with were great. They were very polite and nice. Probably because we pulled up to the right place after that how dare you pull into the wrong unmarked place yeah well i'm glad that it all worked out yeah this place it's it's in del rey which is a very thriving like uh town with lots of restaurants and bars um and it also has its own beach club uh where you um club where you have like a saltwater pool and beaches where they set up chairs for you and umbrellas and all that kind of stuff. There's restaurants there that you could dine,

like looking out over the beach, which is really nice. And yeah, I mean, overall, and also it has a pool and hot tub and all that at the hotel too. So it's got a lot of features. Also has a golf club, which we didn't go out to that. I don't play golf.

But for those that do, a lot of great five-star-ish features in this downtown Delray Hotel. So a really nice place. They just need to get their act together service-wise. Well, good luck to them and good luck to you if you book this place. They just need to get their act together service-wise. Well, good luck to them and good luck to you if you book this place. But it sounds like overall a pretty easy experience and knock on wood, a good start to this adventure venturing forth with preferred hotels and choice points. It was.