Choice Hotels

[mickeycrimm]

Over on Wov, Mission told what he knows about hotels from the management perspective. I think he was running a Choice Hotel, most likely an Econo Lodge. So I thought I would tell what I know from a Choice Hotels longtime regular customer's perspective.

There are about 6200 hotels nationwide under the Choice Hotels umbrella. They include:

Cambria
Ascend
Main Stay Suites
Comfort Inns and Suites
Suburban Lodge
Quality Inn
Econo Lodge
Rodeway.

As far as quality goes the Econos and Rodeways are at the bottom of the heap but they also have the cheapest prices. Quality Inns and Suburban Lodges are a little better. The Comforts, Main Stays, Ascend and Cambria are very good quality but you also pay a premium price.

Econos and Rodeways serve a cold breakfast. The rest serve a hot breakfast except for Suburban which doesn't serve breakfast at all. And....during covid they have all seen fit to quit serving a hot breakfast so all we are getting is cold now.

The rewards program is called Choice Privileges. You start out getting 10 points per pre tax dollar you spend on rooms. It takes at least 8000 points to get a free room night. So if you buy a room at $75 but pay $85 after tax is added you will average only about 9 points per dollar spent.

So on average you will spend about $889 to get 8000 points. What will you get for 8000 points? Not much. You will generally get either a Rodeway or Econo room for 1 night that normally sells for $55 or less. A Quality Inn will generally run 10,000 points. The hotels higher up the quality ladder can go even higher, 12,000 to 20,000 points, maybe even higher.

The good news is when you ascend up the membership ladder you get more points per dollar spent. It takes 25 nights to become a diamond member, the highest level. They advertise that you get 25 points per pre-tax dollar spent but I don't average that much, maybe 23 points, then after tax it's even lower, about 21 points. So I average 8000 points per every $380 spent, 10,000 points per every $476 spent.

[mickeycrimm]

deleted

[mickeycrimm]

The good thing about Choice Hotels is they frequently run a promotion called BOOK TWO NIGHTS EARN A FREE NIGHT*

The asterisk is a warning. First, you can't run two consecutive nights at the same hotel. The two nights have to be at separate hotels. 2nd, if you buy a night at a high quality hotel like Cambria and a night at another one like Main Stay you will probably close to $300 but only get enough points to qualify for a free room night that normally sells for $70 or less.

The value with the promotion lies at the bottom of the totem pole, the cheaper hotels. The best I've had it is paying about $45 plus tax per night for two nights which gets me about 9000 points then getting a free room night from a similar quality hotel for 8000 points. This takes my hotel bill down to about $100 per three nights or about $33 a night.

[mickeycrimm]

I have the Choice Hotels app on both my laptop and iphone. It stores your information so makes it real easy to book a room. The good thing about Choice Hotels is you can find them in the small towns and they usually have many hotels in a major town.

When on the road I usually do same day reservations. I rarely have a problem finding a hotel for the night on such short notice. If I'm long distance driving I check the towns ahead for the best rates. Some towns are much cheaper than others.

If I think a hotel is sketchy (downtrodden) I'll drive to it and take a look before booking the room. It's an instant reservation so I can book the room on my iphone then immediately walk in the door. All Choice Hotels have a 3 PM check-in which I like.

[mickeycrimm]

After my first trip thru New Mexico and Oklahoma I started getting free night offers from some of the hotel/casinos:

Buffalo Thunder in New Mexico, 4 nights a month.
Winstar in Oklahoma, 6 nights a month.
Indigo Sky in Oklahoma, 4 nights a month
Buffalo Run in Oklahoma, 2 nights a months.

I didn't used every free night available every month but those free nights cut my hotel bill even further. It got down to where I was spending maybe $500 a month.

[mickeycrimm]

Another point collector is the Choice Privileges credit card. I use it almost exclusively to pay for the hotel nights. I get 5 points per dollar spent on Choice Hotels. They dump the points into my Choice Hotels account every month. The good thing about this one is I get the points on the entire price, not just pre tax dollars. I rate this as about 4% cashback.

[mickeycrimm]

Another point collector is the Choice Privileges credit card. I use it almost exclusively to pay for the hotel nights. I get 5 points per dollar spent on Choice Hotels. They dump the points into my Choice Hotels account every month. The good thing about this one is I get the points on the entire price, not just pre tax dollars. I rate this as about 4% cashback.

I forgot to mention that I pay the card off every month so I never get stung for interest

[The Boz]

Another point collector is the Choice Privileges credit card. I use it almost exclusively to pay for the hotel nights. I get 5 points per dollar spent on Choice Hotels. They dump the points into my Choice Hotels account every month. The good thing about this one is I get the points on the entire price, not just pre tax dollars. I rate this as about 4% cashback.

I forgot to mention that I pay the card off every month so I never get stung for interest

Great information. This forum (and others) could use a lot more information sharing like this. We do Bonvoy which is Marriotts program. Maybe I’ll take some time and do a write up on the airline program I use as well.

The nice thing about this type of AP, which it is to a degree, is in most cases you are not sharing anything that hurts others. Unlike AP gambling which usually gets someone pissed off when information is shared and can hurt someone’s play.

[mickeycrimm]

Another point collector is the Choice Privileges credit card. I use it almost exclusively to pay for the hotel nights. I get 5 points per dollar spent on Choice Hotels. They dump the points into my Choice Hotels account every month. The good thing about this one is I get the points on the entire price, not just pre tax dollars. I rate this as about 4% cashback.

I just got an email from Choice Privileges (Barclays). I'm now getting 15 points per dollar spent instead of 5 on Choice Rewards hotels. Combined with the averge 21 points per dollar spent by Choice Rewards I'm getting an 8,000 point free room per every $222 spent and a 10,000 point free room per every $278 spent. This is before any promotions. There was no expiration date on the offer.

[Mission146]

Another point collector is the Choice Privileges credit card. I use it almost exclusively to pay for the hotel nights. I get 5 points per dollar spent on Choice Hotels. They dump the points into my Choice Hotels account every month. The good thing about this one is I get the points on the entire price, not just pre tax dollars. I rate this as about 4% cashback.

I just got an email from Choice Privileges (Barclays). I'm now getting 15 points per dollar spent instead of 5 on Choice Rewards hotels. Combined with the averge 21 points per dollar spent by Choice Rewards I'm getting an 8,000 point free room per every $222 spent and a 10,000 point free room per every $278 spent. This is before any promotions. There was no expiration date on the offer.

That's pretty killer! Of course, this would greatly piss me off if I were still in the business. Not at you. Good on anyone who can take full advantage of these things...might actually bring the effective rates down to what they would be if all of this bullshit wasn't in place to begin with.

[Mission146]

Ozzy,

Okay, so getting back to the industry, I suppose:

I don't know what it is, but the mentality of many hotel owners is that they feel like they must always be as shrewd as possible, or what they perceive as being shrewd in business. Unfortunately, they seem to view, "Shrewdness," as extracting as much money as possible from every single guest whilst spending as little as possible and consider anything else a failure. I differ in the respect that I consider, "Shrewd," hotel management to make as much as I possibly can in profits even if it means, God forbid, actually spending a little money to cater to guest needs/wants.

Of course, I was the manager of this hotel (as opposed to owner), so I only had limited control in that regard. If I had been the owner, I'll freely admit that I considered some of our common guest areas/amenity areas downright repulsive and I never would have allowed it at any hotel that I would own. But, what am I going to do if I can't convince the owner? I'm certainly not going to spend my own personal money to make some of the changes/improvements that I saw as optimal...not that I made enough to even be able to do that had I wanted to.

One example is that he just wanted to be able to say that the hotel had a pool, even if it meant the pool area being disgusting and way out of date. Personally, I would absolutely not swim in this pool or spend any time in the pool area. It was disgusting. It wasn't exactly unhygienic...at least in terms of the water itself...but the conditions were deplorable. Not unsafe, just gross. I could have taken the kids to swim for free anytime I wanted and did so exactly zero times. But, we can say it has a pool...we can put a much edited picture of a pool from the most flattering possible angle on the website, so there you go.

He wanted to have the cheapest continental breakfast that we could possibly have while still adhering to the minimum requirements of the franchise. I'd have spent more. Not for the one-night guests who, as mentioned, I mostly didn't care about...but for the weekly/worker guests. I'd have had multiple, "Hot," items, even though we were only required to have one.

Here's an example: At one time, we'd actually get donuts directly from a nearby bakery. That was awesome. We would get more on Saturday morning because they did not deliver on Sundays. If less than expected had been eaten, then we'd adjust the order accordingly and put the unused portion in the refrigerator until about midnight, then we'd take them out to warm back up. People LOVED these donuts, and honestly, they were pretty good.

Eventually, God forbid, the bakery decided that we had to do a minimum order of three dozen donuts. We also had to have some delivered at least five days per week. Can you imagine? The bakery actually wants us to order an amount that might monetarily justify the fact that they are bringing them to us. The horror.

Well, we kept pre-packaged pastries handy in case we ran out of donuts on a particular day, so he decided to switch to those all the time. We would then have about four different selections, but then he decided that people were eating or carrying away too much, so we knocked that down to two selections in (HIS) hope that people would eat less.

Cereal, even when opened, takes some time to get stale. We were required to have a minimum of two different cereals, but I'd have done something like six if it had been my choice. Again, his reasoning for only having two was that such was the minimum franchise standard AND that people would be less likely to like either of them, therefore less likely to eat any at all, and we would save money.

So, that's who I had to convince anytime the issue of spending money came up. LOL

Improvements

The first major improvement I talked him into making was I found a really good bulk deal on LCD HDTV's well before they were considered expected in hotels, particularly hotels at our level. In fact, we were the ONLY hotel in the entire town to even have these TV's for the better part of a year...and that's partially compared to MUCH better franchises and MUCH nicer hotels in every other possible respect.

But, we dominated in the weekly market (pre work boom in the area) and nobody could figure out what the hell we were doing...even though it was very simple. People who like to watch TV, or let's be honest, porn...like good TV's. That's not a difficult concept. So, our rooms had the best TV's in town, many with built-in DVD players, I might add.

The next improvement when other hotels started getting the good TV's was to get full-sized refrigerator/freezers in every room. Even when I left, we might have been the ONLY hotel in town (of those that already existed when I started) to have actual full-sized ones.

Again, we kicked ass in the weekly market and commanded pretty good weekly rates, despite being far from the best hotel overall. But, we gave the guys who were in town for long stretches at a time the sort of amenities that they would actually care about. When I say, "Pretty good weekly rates," I mean that the hotel chains that were a full two categories better than us weren't charging that much more than we were, and we were definitely a little higher than most in our category. I never tried to be a ton higher on weeklies because I was most concerned with volume.

Remember, an empty room pays nothing.

But, you have to pick your spots. Like I mentioned in the previous post, if we had some special event and I knew we were going to sell out, then I got cold-blooded really quick. If the roles had been reversed and it was someone else quoting me the rate, I would have laughed right in their face...and many walk-ins did. Doesn't matter. If we're going to sell out, all I need to do is fill-up. Whether 10 out of 10 people who stop in take a room or 3 out of 10, makes no difference to me. Knowing you're going to sell the rooms no matter what you do, the only goal is to get as much for every room as you possibly can.

[mcap]

The bad thing about Choice and some of those hotel cards is that if you book 3rd party like Hotwire then those stays aren’t good for points and it’s often easiest to find the better deals by checking Hotwire, Priceline express etc.

[mickeycrimm]

The bad thing about Choice and some of those hotel cards is that if you book 3rd party like Hotwire then those stays aren’t good for points and it’s often easiest to find the better deals by checking Hotwire, Priceline express etc.

I have Trivago on my iphone. I've never seen Priceline with a cheaper price than the Choice Hotels app. Never checked Hotwire.

[mickeycrimm]

Choice Hotels runs the STAY TWO NIGHTS promotion several times a year. They usually run for two months with a one month gap between them. You can run the STAY TWO NIGHTS promo over and over again. In a two month period you can get a lot of free room nights. Sometimes I won't use my points much during the promotion. I wait until the one month downtime when the promotion isn't running to use the points. I've banked as many as 200,000 points.

The current STAY TWO NIGHTS promotion started June 5th and runs until Sep 7. I just used my 3rd consecutive free night with one more coming before I have to bank points again.

[Ozzy]

Mission has never officially confirmed, he managed Econo Lodge, I asked about a week ago. For a guy whose been very transparent in his ups and downs, of day to day life, he must have his reasons for not confirming this.

[LMR]

Mission has never officially confirmed, he managed Econo Lodge, I asked about a week ago. For a guy whose been very transparent in his ups and downs, of day to day life, he must have his reasons for not confirming this.

Ha. I guess the corrupt bugger just buggered off. Either way, no big mysteries here. Just more paranoid or whatever AP gobbledygook. As old Mickey would say, psychobabble. As MrV would say, a crock.

LMR's AKA Onehitwonderwas banned by Druff and is a coward that keeps creating sock puppets to circumvent his bannings. A MAN would take his medicine and disappear. But not the crying little coward, Onehitwonder, LMR, Garnaby, Billyung. This guy has no useful purpose on a gambling forum. I've had him on ignore forever and it was a mistake to take him off to see his frivolous, get his rocks off, trashing of people. Back on ignore he goes and everyone else should do the same. Not one word he writes is worth reading.

He's the only poster on this forum, that's completely useless. Tasha/Nathan even adds more value.

What's this you're going on about?

[Mission146]

Mission has never officially confirmed, he managed Econo Lodge, I asked about a week ago. For a guy whose been very transparent in his ups and downs, of day to day life, he must have his reasons for not confirming this.

What difference does it make to you? Would you also like the address of the hotel?

If you must know, my concern is that I open myself up to potential doxxing by volunteering too much in the way of specific information.

But, more immediately, I hadn't logged into this forum since 7/21 (prior to a few minutes ago) and don't even read here everyday or even weekly. I don't even read WoV every day. I did read here yesterday, but was quite busy, so did not have time to respond here yesterday.

ADDED: Also, I kind of dumped on the owner (of that hotel) a little bit in the WoV thread, so it seems like it might not be appropriate to give too many specifics anyway.

[Rob.Singer]

Not sure if or how mickey handles his taxes, but as a professional gambler all those hotel and other travel expenses get claimed as a direct deduction from profit on schedule C. There are also a number of other very legal "AP-type" maneuvers that professional gamblers can utilize to maximize their net income. Some are little known.

[LMR]

Some are little known.

Good. All this bullshit will make some nice fertilizer for your gravesite.

[mickeycrimm]

It looks like LMR is in wrecking another legitimate thread. It has to stop. I'll be letting Dan know that LMR is previously banned Onehitwonder and ask him to prevent LMR from ruining serious threads.