Choice Privileges Devalues Preferred Hotels Awards (Again)

Choice hotels are trash. Thank God Wyndham's board successfully rebuffed their attempted purchase earlier this year.

When Choice acquired Radisson, I was concerned and against it because of the high risk that the Radisson devaluation mentality was going to infect Choice and lead to major devaluations of Choice points and be done with no advance notice. Then last year when Choice suddenly and massively hiked up the number of points required for award nights in Scandinavia, I knew the next plays from the Choice program would be massive devaluations of the points elsewhere and there too because they weren’t even increasing the reimbursement amounts to the nordic Choice hotel properties despite raising the price in points for award nights. Since then we have seen Choice continuing on this road of major and sudden devaluations of an extent never before seen in the program in absolute point price terms.

This is why last year I was already advising people to keep their Choice point balances locked up in the free-to-cancel award reservations because you really can not trust the points to be a good store of value in a Choice program infested by the Radisson loyalty programs’ mentality and a corporate management team needing to justify its acquisitions.

Went spend-heavy on 4 Citi cards last year + a 90k Wells SUB. Cashed all in at The Wort in Jackson & Sundance Resort in Utah stays this summer. PH Titanium status was applied for suite upgrades. Awesome hack - too bad on the drastic point increases, we really enjoyed these properties & redeemed for $250/nt cash value when they were going for $600-$1.5k/nt

@GUWonder I think you’ll find it’s the reverse. While Radisson Europe is a basket case with their devaluations, the Radisson Americas team (which was bought by Choice) were actually pretty anti-devaluation and doubled down on keeping reward charts.

Since then, two things happened:
1/ Nordic Choice rebranded as Strawberry and has been distancing itself from Choice Americas.
2/ The Radisson Americas execs who were pro reward charts (there’s some public quotes somewhere) aren’t there anymore.

So I’d say it’s the Choice mentality that is the prevailing one, combined with the politics with Strawberry (ex-Nordic Choice).