5 Tips For Using Travel Reward Points

Contributing Author

Are you member of multiple hotel loyalty programs? Do you consider yourself a road warrior and pointshound? Are you traveling on the company’s dime? If the answer to these questions is YES, your goal is simple, to optimize all your trips to build or grow your personal stockpile of hotel points. So when it’s vacation time, you’ll wind up with a free stay of Caribbean luxury instead of a few days in Akron, Ohio. Here are a few tricks that will help to achieve your goals.

1. When booking hotels you should consider another factor other than price and distance: Reward Points

When you search for a hotel on whatever search site you use, your results are almost always displayed in terms of price and distance. For the frequent travelers and points-obsessed among us, you need to understand the hotels that will give you the best return on your investment in terms of reward points.

There’s actually a website with a tool that tries to help when factoring reward points in your hotel selection, it’s called muchopoints.

The website is easy and free to use, and just requires plugging in your hotel loyalty program information including current status, points earning options and whether or not they have a branded credit card with that chain. From there, you can search for a hotel based on points.

The website uses your destination, dates and preferred programs in order to calculate how many points you could earn for any given stay. Once a traveler selects a property, they are taken straight to the hotel chain website to complete their booking in order to optimize points and benefits, including free Wi-Fi for booking through the hotel chain website.

 2. Investigate how many points you will earn for a paid stay. 

The earned points must be translated into how those points will earn you a free night at the hotel. Some tools in the market allow you to determine how many points you will earn for a paid stay. They will factor into the calculation redeeming requirements as well as loyalty status for each hotel reward program.

On muchopoints, you will find another interesting feature to help you to better understand how many points you will earn of a paid stay. By clicking on the ‘muchoscore’ number assigned to a hotel result, it will show details of the point’s calculation.

3. Always compare multiple chains and the comparable reward rates or hotel costs side by side at the time of an initial hotel search.

Use hotel booking sites that allow you to compare and filter your desired hotel chains. Then, once you have a few different options lined up, use the reward point comparison to see which hotels offer the most points for your stay!

4. Work with hotel booking sites that include the biggest Hotel Reward Program brands worldwide

You want to have the opportunity to manage hotel program point balances from the biggest hotel chains worldwide. Based on the loyalty status for each hotel reward program the amount of points added to your account will be different. It helps to have a comprehensive view of the overall point balances.

On muchopoints you can compare the award charts and availability of 30,000+ hotels belonging to the 7 largest chains world-wide.

 5. Be smart when redeeming your points!

When you’re ready to redeem your points, try to use tools that will show the redemption options organized by hotel chain. You’ll know exactly how many points you’d have to spend for your entire stay, so you can make the most out of your points.

Another helpful tool that muchopoints has is the “Redeem Points” option.  It will show users all the points redemption prices, organized by hotel chain. What is also really helpful  is that when searching by points cost, the program shows you the points needed for the entire stay – not just the points cost per night.

Using travel reward points is just another way to help you travel more, so you might as well take advantage of them in any way possible!