HOTEL POINTS TO MILES

One of the way’s to accumulate miles in the airline frequent flyer program is to collect points in one of hotel programs which allow point conversion to miles. Most often than not the conversion ratio from points to miles is bad but still there are few exceptions to this. So, why would you want to transfer points to miles?

• You are short by few thousand miles in your airline frequent flyer program and transferring points from a hotel program seems to be best bet than outright buying them.
• You got few thousand points in one of the hotel loyalty program but are way short on getting to a total required for getting free hotel reward night and thus it seems best to convert them to miles.
• You participated in a hotel promotion and have earned good amount of points which would give a great value when converted to miles and used for flying.

Apart from the above at times there are promotions by the airlines where they would provide “bonus” for transferring the points to their airline miles, but these are rare these days. Also there are quite a few hotel programs which provide great conversion ratio from hotel points to miles and thus can help to get best value out of them. So what are the best characteristics of good points to miles conversion programs?

• The points should be earned at a good rate at the program hotels.
• The points to miles conversion ratio should be such so as to give the similar value as it would give if used directly for hotel rewards night. For e.g. if 8000 points of a hotel program are valued at $100 then converting them to miles should still give a value of $100.
• The hotels partners with some of the major airlines for points to miles transfer.
• The hotel chain runs good value promotions so as to earn points which can be converted to miles later.

Let’s look into more details about the good hotel programs purely from points to miles conversion perspective.

Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG): SPG is one of the few programs which provides great transfer value:

• It earns at a rate of 1 point/$ at most of the Starwood branded hotels without any ongoing promotion.
• It provides from 1:1 to 1:1.25 ratio of conversion from points to miles for most partner airlines. For every transfer of 20k points to miles it provides 5k bonus miles (In all 20k points to 25k miles) thus giving a maximum transfer ratio of 1:1.25.
• Assuming you spend $100 in a hotel stay, earning at 1x, you would earn 100 points which converts to 100 miles.

It has huge number of airline partners and thus the points earned become much more valuable because of the flexibility. The partner list and the conversion ratio can be found here.

Wyndham Rewards (WR): WR is another program which provides great transfer value:

• It earns at a rate of 5 points/$ (Hawthorn Suites) or 10 points/$ at all other WR brand hotels without any promotion.
• It provides 2.5:1 ratio of conversion from points to miles for most partner airlines.
• Thus assuming you spend $100 in a hotel stay, earning at 5x, you would earn 500 points which converts to 200 miles.
• Although Wyndham has lucrative earning rate, the fact that it primarily partners with only few airlines gives a lesser value on flexibility count. The partner list and the conversion ration can be found here.
  

Apart from Starwood Preferred Guest and Wyndham Rewards there are bunch of other hotel programs which could potentially earn higher miles at times due to lucrative seasonal promotion offers. Some of the hotel programs which are useful for points to miles conversion are listed below.

Hyatt Gold Passport
Club Carlson
Marriott Rewards
Priority Club
Hilton Honors
Choice Privileges
Best Western

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