Citi added yet another hotel partner today, brings the total to 5: Choice Hotels, Wyndham Rewards, Accor Live Limitless, Leader’s Club, and now Preferred Hotels and Resorts “I Prefer”.
Points will transfer at a 1:4 ratio, so 1,000 ThankYou = 4,000 Preferred.
Interestingly, many of you still have Titanium status at Preferred Hotels and Resorts I Prefer program, from an opportunity a few months ago. (No longer available).
Another interesting thing about this is that you can already book quite a few Preferred Hotels and Resorts hotels via Choice Privileges, another Citi partner, and one that transfers 1:2.
But about that:
- Only a handful of the wider Preferred Hotels & Resorts portfolio is available via the Choice partnership. (Note that after that article, redemption rates rose twice, reducing the bargain).
- It doesn’t seem possible to find award availability using all points (where the bargains would be). The range of prices in points should be from 15,000 to 150,000 points per night.
I just did some searches and can only find Cash + Points options which lines up with what a few others have posted. I thought maybe in my Titanium account I might have more luck, but I don’t.
As a sample, I took a look at the upscale Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica.
Here are my options:
So 30,000 points saves me just about $200. That’s 0.67 cents per point or a more than reasonable 2.68 cents per ThankYou point. However, that leaves me paying cash for the rest, a move I’m not willing to make.
If we could find a full award, we could figure out how good a deal this is, however I searched tons of dates at this property and even though I’m checking the absolute lowest price nights in cash, I cannot find an all-points rate for any day.
I then went back to the I Prefer homepage and found that if you click into Benefits > Use Rewards it will show hotels with a points calendar!
Unfortunately, it’s not real time. Whether the hotel was 75,000 points or 150,000 points. night I consistently clicked a rate / date on the calendar only to be told no rooms at that rate were available.
Basically, in 30 minutes of searching, I found nothing. Have you?
The bottom line is that a new partner is great, but only if we can book hotels using their points 😉
Thoughts?
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