Update 1/11/25: Looks like the pricing increase was a mistake. Choice confirmed to FM:
‘During an update to our system, there was a brief change in valuations for some of our properties in Europe and Japan. The valuations have now returned to their previous rates’
Worth checking to see if rebooking makes sense, even if you booked months ago. Hat tip to FM
Update 1/8/25: Expanded booking window is now live, it looks like they might have introduced dynamic pricing as well with rates at some properties jumping dramatically.
Choice Privileges is making some changes in early 2025.
- Expanded booking window: Book a reward night up to 50 weeks in advance, giving them more time to plan their trip. (Currently this is 100 days)
- Premium room types: Redeem points for the premium features that matter most to them, such as extra space, a better view or an upgraded room, at select hotels.
- Choice RewardSaver: Choice is re-introducing the popular Radisson Hotels Americas redemption tool that allows members to book rewards nights starting at 6000 points–down from the previous minimum of 8,000.
Main improvement is the expanded booking window, almost tripling the time in advance you can book.
This is a great program for Scandinavia. I did have 4 nights booked in Norway for this summer totaling $1,000. I just moved points from my Citi Strata card to Choice at a rate of 1:2. For only 27,000 points, which became 54,000 Choice points, I erased $1,000 in hotel cost! Huge savings!
nice, where in Norway? Any other Scandinavian countries with good value like Iceland or Denmark?
I booked nights in Oslo, Lillehammer and Sangdel. I would have to look if they are in Denmark and Iceland as I haven’t traveled there yet.
Finnland too
Extreme value in Norway, espicially in Oslo. Okay value in Sweden. 16k point nights in Oslo seemingly flate rate for very expensive hotels easily reaching $300-400/night during busier season.
Choice is licenced by Strawberry Hotels in Scandinavia. Choice is a low end budget brand in North America, but a medium range+ brand for Strawberry.
Choice points are on sales several times a year at 70 cents a point; with 16k redemption rates, the hotels are $112 a night tax included. Some of the bes thotels in Oslo are included in Choice, and they are only 20k a night.
It is a pretty worthless program. Their better hotels set its own calendar not only on point redemption but also on cash booking as well. The property at Venice, Hotel Acquarius, an Ascend group which Choice bought out in 2008? only shows bookable calendar to Feb 13th, both point and cash. Yet this hotel sells on Booking.com all the way till early Summer months.
Contacted Choice official social media rep on Flyertalk yielded a very laughable reply – said that the franchises set their own calendars, there is nothing Choice Hotels can do.
I am trying to use up the points from Radisson. Was able to use some Apr 2024 in Prague for 8K/night and a suite was bookable. That was for good value. Unfortunately after this usage there are still a good balance remaining.
Never find this program useful for our travel needs.
Worthless? Just booked several nights in Scandinavia for 12k points a night. Great value.
I don’t think I’ve ever gotten better value out of a hotel program. I love this program. Favorite program. Can’t get enough. Stayed at Venice, so easy. My only complaint is not a single hotel in Spain will book rewards. I’m not gonna go complain to the social media rep tho, I’m just gonna move on
Devalued? Yes. But worthless? No. Remember that IHG still exists, they will fight out every other rewards program to be the least valuable hotel rewards program overall . Choice points at worst have yielded me 0.6 cpp, but I can often find myself valuing them at 1-1.2 cpp. Still a lot of premium rooms available at the base price in points. Still a ton of properties offering solid cpp in Scandinavia and Japan. And you can still earn and transfer Citi to Choice at 1:2. There’s still a lot of
lovelike.Choice is definitely very lenient with their franchisees with respect to both policies and standards. It’s as if they don’t want to enforce a policy that may result in a loss of a franchisee.
The other thing they’ve changed which I find significant is that they’ve gotten rid of a chart they used to have at the bottom of each domestic hotel’s page showing the points rates for the next few months.
Now checking the Comfort Inn in Costa Mesa CA, which used to have different rates at different times of year, it no longer does, it has 16k most of nights of the year, except for Fri & Sat nights in July only it shoots up to 30k a night.
Which implies that any Comfort hotel can raise the rates for any dates they perceive as high-demand (that period is near, but not exactly, the Orange County Fair dates, and that fair is fairly near that hotel).
And then I checked a hotel in Otay Mesa CA that used to have rates around 30k and now it has rates between 15k and 20k. So it’s not all devaluation, it’s presumably raised rates for some high-demand hotels but possibly lowered rates for low-demand hotels.
And that brings up another possibility which will be hard to figure out: Marriott Bonvoy has for decades been pricing points rates based on points-redemption stay demand, not money-paid stay demand. Perhaps Choice is doing the same? Where people most have paid with points, they might raise the points rates, but where people mostly paid with money not points, they may have lowed the points rates? Again, that’s just a possibility, it’ll take a lot of work to figure out if that’s the effect.
A comparatively “easy” way at Marriott is to stay yourself a lot on points at hotel that has very low points rates, and then see if the next year the points rates go up. But even if Choice is basing it somehow on points-redemption demand, it might not be based on demand from just one person, so the same “trick” might not prove that’s how it works.
That’s why it can be very hard to figure out exactly how a particular hotel’s program points redemption rates work.
The one thing we can see for certain is that for now Choice redemptions are still unrelated to cash cost for the night. They’re stable over a period of time when cash rates can change at sample hotels which I checked.
For me, the fresh January 2025 devaluation has killed any consideration of Choice or Preferred.
The Comfort Inn Manhattan – Midtown West jumped from 30,000 to 45,000 points. That’s a 50% increase. I need to rethink the Choice program, as well as the credit card.
I still can’t book past April 18 with points. Maybe this is gradually being rolled out? I’m in Mexico right now, not sure if that matters. I updated the app and tried in a web browser. Still only 100 days out.
Wow. Major Deval. Booked in Rome for 16k a night 2 weeks ago, now 40k a night.
Even makes the credit card borderline not worthwhile, $95 for 30k anniversary points.
At Comfort Hotel Bolivar? I love that place, great breakfast room.
Yup! Thanks for confirming that I made the right choice.
When is it 40K a night? I just checked the Comfort Inn Bolivar, and when you click on the input date, the calendar shows 20K a night for every night between now and December.
While that’s a slight devaluation from 16k a night, it’s nowhere near the devaluation it would be with 40k a night.
So perhaps you made a two-night reservation and got confused about how many points it was per night, or perhaps there was a temporary glitch and it was showing the wrong amount?
Or if the calendar is wrong for some date, you need to explain which date it’s wrong for. I tried several random dates, and it always came up 20.0k, but it’s too time consuming for me to try every possible set of dates for the next 11 months.
Interesting. I went back to check and it dropped down to 20k for my dates now.
I’m booked for almost two weeks, so this would still be a significant increase compared to the 16k I booked for originally.
But seems to confirm that they’re also on dynamic pricing now.
But if so, and not just a temporary glitch, it’s a different kind of dynamic pricing than most.
Most dynamic pricings are fairly proportional to the paid rate, but that’s not the case so far with Choice.
Remember, this whole change of the hotel points pricing not being tied to a chart was just made very recently, so hotels are having to adjust, and it’s possible sometime mistyped and that’s why it was temporarily 40k across the board when it should have been 20k across the boards.
The dynamic pricing makes more sense in one of the hotels I reported in another post above, where in June they have a higher points price (almost double) for Fridays and Saturdays than any other days of the week that month, or for any other month of the 50 weeks (almost a year), where it’s probably based on seasonal demand experience.
And remember, in a sense, Choice already had a bit of dynamic pricing before, because the chart that used to be at the bottom of each hotel’s page (at least in the US) let the hotel assign different prices for different groups of days of the week as well as different periods of time within the 90 day booking window. So for a long time there were some variations over time in points pricing at many Choice hotels, at least in the US. I definitely remember significant seasonal variation in points price at many Choice hotels in the US near the coast, or in other places where seasonal demand differs, happening for many years.
But many places overseas there are different divisions of Choice, so it has always worked a bit differently at different divisions of Choice. That’s been one reason why at many overseas locations, you long couldn’t earn Choice points on a paid stay, you could only redeem Choice points for a stay.
<<Most dynamic pricings are fairly proportional to the paid rate>>
That is definitely not true for BonVoy properties. At least that is how I have found in making over 30 reservations for a Spring trip. The cash rates are far far better than using points which in many occasions dont even come up to 0.003 per pt value. Per your logic, it should be close to 0.007/8 value. Not so.
That’s because, unlike most other programs, Marriot Bonvoy properties points rates are primarily based on how many points redemptions there were at that particular hotel in recent times, and the cash cost is just a minor secondary factor in the points rates.
Marriott only added that minor secondary factor a few years ago, while having had the primary points redemption factor for well over a decade (since before its merger with SPG).
I’ve found fantastic Bonvoy points redemption rates at “far suburb” properties where presumably no one else tends to do points reservations. They still vary a bit with cash rates, but not much — examples like 19k vs 20k vs 21k vs 22k and maybe some other small variations around that.
And I’ve found such low rates on Bonvoy “far suburb” hotels as high as $300ish or more during a high-demand events, including one time when there were simply no “nearby” point hotels bookable any more, because demand was so high.
But places where everybody with points wants to redeem points, that’s where Bonvoy points rates tend to be on the high side, no matter what the cash cost of the hotel is.
And that’s why I said “most“, not “all“, in what you just quoted above. Because I already knew there were exceptions such as Bonvoy which doesn’t base their primary cost on cash rates, and cash rates are only a minor “tweaking” factor in Bonvoy points rates.
And there are some other exceptions, but not as obvious: Hilton HHonors has a small handful of properties that don’t have dynamic pricing at all, just flat, but most Hilton HHonors properties do have dynamic pricing.. Best Western Rewards has mostly dynamic pricing, but occasionally runs promotions in the winter with less-dynamic or non-dynamic pricing on points stays.
So that’s why I’m careful to often say “most” instead of “all” when I want to make a general point about hotel programs (or other things).
Property I had to 20K points/night last year is now 40K points/night.
Big devaluation for hotels in the Nordic Choice group. Normally they are for 16K to 20K now all 30K +.
For all the hotels in Japan, they are used to be 8k to 25K. Now, they are 14K+.
dang…was gonna use that…in Norway, etc…did take advantage of it in Japan a few times though.
Just booked two weeks worth of Choice for July in Norway. All less than 20K points. Most had a small discount from 16K to 14K or 12K per night. Rates less than last year.
Apparently, they changed some of the pricing back, blaming the system glitch.
I think a clear devaluation is coming.
I will definitely consider canceling the credit card.
I see rewardsavers…so dynamic.
In addition to the possible Deval on premium rooms already mentioned below (given that at most properties premium rooms are currently the same number of points as regular rooms), the other question is how many hotels will be available at 6000 points, and will that mean their promotions will downgrade from offering 8000 points (per 2 nights or stays) to only offering 6000 points, or will their promotions stay at 8000 points despite this change?