In last month’s issue (see Part 1) we looked at the benefits of hotel loyalty programmes, how you should choose the one best for you and how you can quickly progress to the top tier.
So you have finally made platinum status, racking up perhaps 30 to 50 stays during a calendar year, and finally waved goodbye to the gold card and received your long-awaited platinum card in the post. Suddenly, you are Ryan Bingham, as played by George Clooney in Up in the Air. On check-in, you have a dedicated line allowing you to skip the queue. You are greeted with a smile, automatically upgraded, perhaps even to a suite, and there is a hand written welcome message from the guest relations manager in the room along with a welcome gift – perhaps fruit or some high-end chocolates, possibly even a bottle of wine or champagne. Breakfast might be complimentary, or there might even be access to the Club Floor, and indeed any of those little touches that make a hotel stay so much more convenient.
It’s a dizzying prospect, and one which you enjoy for the first few months until a day dawns when you realise that your new status is not for life, but just for the next 12 months. Yes, the hotel chain values your custom, but only as a way of ensuring it retains it in future years.
The moment your platinum status is confirmed, your tier points reset to zero. Your points in the programme are still there, but unless your platinum status is to be a short-lived affair, you must continue to be a frequent customer of the hotel company. Loyalty is a relationship. You show it and are rewarded accordingly.
For most travellers, retaining status isn’t a problem, and for those who change jobs (or simply job roles) and find themselves travelling less, losing status isn’t such a big deal. But what’s most frustrating is when, for reasons beyond your control, you find you are getting towards the end of the year and your calculations show you will just miss out on retaining top-tier status. In such circumstances, what can you do? And what have the experts done? Well, the answer from our readers gathered together for the lunch was – just about anything.
Since tier status sometimes depends on how many individual stays you have had with a chain, several around the table admitted breaking up a stay of, perhaps four nights, into two stays of two nights. There are various ways of doing this. One traveller admitted having stayed two nights in a hotel in Kowloon, Hong Kong, then checking out, travelling across Victoria Harbour and checking into another hotel in the chain for the second set of two nights. For others, the answer was to walk down to the reception, check out, and then request a different room. One further person said he didn’t even bother doing that. He just told reception to check him out and then check him back in again.
A word of caution, however. The hotel chains know you are doing it. Most will have a “non-contiguous stay” criteria in the programme, and bear in mind that, as well as refusing to credit your account with the points or the extra stay you need to retain tier status, they could kick you out of the programme altogether. One traveller admitted he had been blacklisted from a programme for just such behaviour, although in the current downturn most hotel companies would be loathe to punish a traveller who was showing this sort of ingenuity to be loyal.
One strategy which is allowed, though perhaps is a little extreme, is simply to stay in a hotel when you don’t really need to, balancing the inconvenience and cost of doing so against the benefit of another year’s worth of upgrades and excellent treatment. One guest at the lunch said that if it looked as though he would miss retaining his card he would simply stay in a hotel round the corner from where he worked, or even occasionally close to where he lived. Is it worth it? Well, consider purely from a business travel point of view that one of the benefits of top-tier status is being able to get a room in a hotel even when the hotel is full.
Of course, what hotels are hoping for is a more subtle modification of behaviour, most particularly business travellers tending to ignore company travel policy the closer they get to the next tier level of a hotel loyalty programme. Travellers may go on trips that are not strictly necessary, and perhaps stay in hotels that are not the most convenient, just to make the grade. A similar phenomenon happens with those responsible for organising meetings and off-site gatherings. Most hotel companies have reward programmes for meeting planners where they either get a fixed point award on the basis of the room nights related to the specific event or based on the total spend for the meeting. In such cases, meeting planners hold their meetings at a specific hotel
(perhaps one with a bonus points promotion) to get them up to the elite level of the programme. At such times it’s easy to see why hotel chains have loyalty programmes when they can influence behaviour to this degree.
