Club Carlson Hotel Reward Category Analysis

As of March 31, 2011 the goldpoints plus hotel loyalty program will be overhauled as Club Carlson. One of the major changes will be restructured hotel reward categories with the points cost decreasing for hotel reward nights in category 1 through 6.

All these changes come with some drawbacks. The tables below show the shift in hotels from the lower categories to higher categories.

The good news is there is not a significant increase in the hotels populating category 5 and 6. The biggest changes impact the US properties currently loaded heavily in category 1 and 2 and soon to be shifting to a large degree to categories 3 and 4.

The Club Carlson hotel category list I received makes this category shift analysis possible, but unfortunately the hotel list of the new category assignments for Club Carlson is only ordered by reward category and broad geographic region of Americas, EMEA and Asia Pacific. Starwood Preferred Guest and Marriott Rewards also released their impending hotel reward category changes this past week in a similar consumer-unfriendly format without city, state, country descriptors.

Actually tracking changes for specific hotels requires my searching each hotel individually for city and country location and will require about 30 to 40 hours of work. This is more work than I can commit to the project at this time.

Here is a general overview of the category shift to expect for March 31, 2011. The 2011 numbers shown for Americas/Caribbean is a composite number for all hotels in the U.S., Canada, Caribbean, Mexico, Central and South America.

Update April 8: The chart below shows Club Carlson Hotel Category 2 as 16,000 points. This was the information provided by Carlson Hotels to Loyalty Traveler in February 2011. This is not correct.

The actual Category 2 reward night cost was changed to 15,000 points when Club Carlson launched March 31, 2011.

Overwhelming shift we will see with Club Carlson is in U.S. hotels moving out of category 1 and 2. These two lowest hotel reward categories held over 480 hotels and will be dropping to under 150 U.S. hotels with the Club Carlson launch March 31, 2011.

Category 3 and 4 currently hold 131 U.S. hotels and this number will rise to over 400 hotels in the U.S. with the Club Carlson changes.