Hotels Introduction

If, like me, you enjoy flying all over the place then you will be probably spending more time in hotels than you do in aeroplanes. This is of course the case for me but, until recently, I’ve never really spent much time noticing hotels, or what they have to offer and their loyalty programs to go with them. So this little section on my site is purely about what I know about hotels.

Loyalty programs

Let’s start talking about loyalty programs. Much like airlines, hotels have various loyalty programs, in fact nearly all hotels, apart from some very small independent ones, have some kind of loyalty scheme. However, there are many more types of hotel than there are airlines. There are way more brands of hotels than the airlines, and of course there are many independent hotels as well. Within those brands there are course big chains of hotels, companies which contain multiple brands under one overall heading. For example, the Hilton group contains over 20 different brands of hotel, some of which are obviously part of Hilton others which are not.  The programmes that tend to work best are the big chains, and most big chains fortunately have developed a portfolio of brands that range from budget to luxury hotels to give you a full range of options depending on where you want to stay. It is only in recent years that I have fully adopted the concept of brand loyalty.  Up until about two or three years ago I was very loyal to hotels.com. This is because they had a very simple process of every 10 nights you stay they would give you one night free, the value of the this night was an average of the 10 nights stayed previously.  This worked particularly well for me as I didn’t have to stick to a particular brand and I could find a hotel in almost any location that was on hotels.com. In my many years of travel I built up quite a large number free nights, which I managed to use on holidays later on.  This all changed when hotels.com became part of the Expedia group and they ditched this offer. Something I noticed they’ve partially backtracked on recently, now offering you £100 voucher for every 10 nights you stay. This obviously doesn’t work if your average stay is more than £100 per night, so the old deal would’ve been better. But it’s better than the 2% return they offered initially.  Still, by the time they backtracked on this my loyalty to hotel.com was gone and I’d moved onto the big hotel chains to find out what they had to offer.

So what does hotel loyalty mean? Just like airlines hotel loyalty gives you points and status the more you stay within their brand.  Many hotels, again like airlines, you earn regular points on stays, which you generally keep until you spend them. In most cases you separately earn loyalty status points for status, which often resets annually. For the basic point system, the game is just like airlines, you spend money at a hotel you earn points. You can also earn points through other methods, like credit cards. You can then redeem those points to stay at hotel. The biggest difference between hotels and airlines on this system is that I have never seen any availability issues when booking hotel rooms with points. Unlike airlines where you have to have a “points seat” available to buy which you can then purchase with points, and once all the point seats are sold out, you can’t buy any more seats with points. Hotels mostly give you either a discount or entirely free rooms if you’re paying with points, no restrictions on when or where.  The other side is points for status. Different hotel chains measure your status in different ways, some of them in multiple ways at the same time. For example with Hilton you can earn status by the number nights you’ve stayed, number of stays you’ve had or by amount spent. Note that the difference between stays and nights is important here.  If you book a 5-night trip to a hotel that is classed as 5-nights towards your account or 1 stay. Meaning those people that do lots of different stays for one night can benefit just as easily as those that do be long single stays but many nights.  What do you get for your status? Well that varies from hotel chain to hotel chain. Unlike airlines, where the offering is quite similar even across the different airline alliances, hotels offer a huge variety of benefits for your status. Typically status gives you simple in hotel perks like early check-in, late checkout, free Internet or more valuable things like free breakfast or room upgrades.  Uncommon perk of a higher status people is access to the executive lounge. What is an executive lounge? It’s actually quite similar to a airport lounge, a separate space made more exclusive for certain guests. Access is usually four people staying in executive rooms, typically the more expensive business rooms in the hotel, and of course for people with enough status to access it.  What is in a executive lounge? Again, it’s very similar to airline lounge, but maybe a little simpler. As usually soft drinks, tea and coffee available day, along with some light snacks. They will often serve breakfast in the mornings. And some serve food at lunch or dinner. Many will offer free alcoholic drinks in the evenings. They tend to be quieter places where you can go to relax or work with less distraction. And of course it is a more exclusive place to go and have a drink or at breakfast for example.

There are many ways to get hotel status, and I would say it is easier than it is for airlines. The most obvious way is to earn it, with many hotel chains it doesn’t take a lot of nights to get your first status level. Just like airlines the first status level is just a teaser to give you a few minor benefits, usually the second and third tiers are the more important ones that give you the more useful benefits.  It is also much easier and more affordable than other systems, to buy status from hotels. There are many credit cards and loyalty schemes that come with hotel status as part of the package. For example, I have a Hilton debit card that comes with guaranteed gold status, I pay for the debit card on an annual fee, so that fee is effectively paying for my status. But I’m pretty convinced I’ve earned my money back through the numerous free breakfasts and upgrades I’ve had by staying at Hilton throughout the year.  In some cases you can buy loyalty directly with the hotel chain, for example IHG where you literally pay $225 per year to have the platinum elite status. Hotels are also quite keen on status matching, and they will status match to other hotel chains very easily. They were even status match on airline status, assuming that you are frequent-flier that you must also be a frequent hotels visitor, meanings of benefit to them to give you status to try and get you into their system.

Do hotel loyalty schemes work?

Yes, absolutely! The loyalty schemes work on me, but not for the reasons you might expect. With airlines I fly Star Alliance as much as possible because I want to earn points as I’m trying to get the elusive Senator level. With hotels I’ve pre-bought my status, but that’s not the reason for staying in the chain. Now I’ve got my status the best way to make use of the benefits is to book cheaper rooms and use my benefits to get better rooms. For example, with Hilton, I have gold status through my debit card, which means that they will always try to upgrade me when I check in and I get free breakfast every time. There’s also other perks like free Internet and a bottle of water in the room, etc. For me this means if I book a Hilton hotel, I will always book the cheapest available room with no breakfast added and that saves me money. When I get to the hotel, they will nearly always upgrade me and I get a free breakfast added. Sometimes this has worked particularly well, when you find a breakfast that is £25 a day, the free breakfast adds up very fast. On one occasion in Las Vegas I was upgraded to a suite, simply because the room level above mine was fully booked and as the rules say you have to be upgraded to the next available room, it meant that I had to go all the way up to a suite. Not bad for booking the cheapest room in the hotel to end up in a full suite.  Also, the early check-in and late checkout can be a huge benefit for travelling and I have used those benefits a lot as well. All these extra perks are often chargeable and over a year of travelling this adds up to way more than I spend on my annual debit card fee to get the status in the first place.  Plus, if I’m staying in a hotel chain I have loyalty with then I’m earning points and those points can contribute towards hotel stays when I go on vacation. For example, Hilton offer a fantastic sliding scale system when you book with points, you can either pay for your room fully with points or you can slide the scale down and opt for how many points you want to pay versus how much cash you pay. I frequently use this system to use some of my points to half the price of hotel rooms.  At the time of writing my next trip abroad is going to be a holiday to Zürich and I’m staying in the Hilton by the airport for two nights, this wasn’t the cheapest hotel but I managed to save on it by using my points.

How I choose my hotel.

One of the biggest problems with the hotel world is that you will find places that are completely to void of any hotels in the chain you’re looking for. This has resulted in being loyal to number of chains simultaneously to try and get the best possible coverage. Even then you’ll find small towns and villages that do not have any big chain hotels at all and only have small independent hotels.  This is when using hotels.com becomes valuable, even though I’m not a big fan of the new loyalty scheme, it’s better than nothing so I will use them when I cannot use any other big chains. My usual technique for staying in a location is to initially search with two biggest chains that I’m loyal to, that is Hilton and IHG. 9 times out of 10 they will find me a hotel in those locations.  If there’s more than one, then I’ll look at the pricing and location to decide what the best fit is. Sometimes it might be better to stay in a more central, higher priced hotel than staying out of town. It might cost me more in Uber or taxis every day than the price difference in the hotel room prices.  If I can’t find a hotel on the two major chains then I will start looking on hotels.com. This recently did result to me joining another new chain, I noticed the part of Munich I was planning to stay in for an upcoming trip had a Wyndham hotel very near where I was working, and this seemed like the best option. I looked into Wyndham and discovered they had a status match scheme,  so I status matched from Hilton to Wyndham and they made an offer of staying 10 nights in the next three months in order to keep the status for next year. This worked out particularly well as I had two weeks in Germany, two separate trips both of which would suit a Wyndham hotel.  So, I status matched to Wyndham, booked the hotel in Munich and then for a second trip to Dresden later in the year I booked another hotel. So that’s another hotel chain on my list. Not having stayed in those hotels yet, I don’t know if they’re any good, they don’t have quite the same range that Hilton or IHG have.  For my trips to the Middle East, in Dubai it’s very easy to find hotels, in fact each chain has multiple versions of their own hotels in same location. In Marina Dubai, they have two IHG hotels facing each other on opposite side of the water, both of which I’ve stayed in.

In this section of the website I’m going to write short reports about my hotel experiences, so you can use this as reference for possible hotel choices. I’ll also provide more detailed reports on the loyaty programmes I’m in and the experiences I have with them.

Below is a list of hotel chains, from most rooms to least rooms worldwide (correct as of October 2026):

1. Marriott International – Brands: The Ritz-Carlton, Westin, Sheraton, Marriott, Courtyard, Delta Hotels
2. Jin Jiang International – Brands: Radisson Hotel Group, Louvre Hotels Group, Campanile
3. Hilton Worldwide – Brands: Waldorf Astoria, Conrad, Hilton, Embassy Suites, Hampton by Hilton, Doubletree.
4. H World Group (Huazhu) – Brands: Ji Hotel, HanTing, Steigenberger
5. IHG Hotels & Resorts – Brands: InterContinental, Holiday Inn, Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn Express
6. OYO Rooms
7. Accor Group – Brands: Sofitel, Pullman, Novotel, Mercure, Ibis
8. Wyndham Hotels & Resorts – Brands: Wyndham, La Quinta, Ramada, Days Inn, Super 8
9. Choice Hotels International – Brands: Comfort Inn, Quality Inn, Clarion, Cambria
10. BTG Homeinns (BTH Hotels) – Brands: Homeinns, Yitel, Jianguo