Choice Privileges is a hotel loyalty program that gets little attention from travel bloggers. The Points Guy gives Choice Privileges points a value of $6.00 per 1,000 points. I find that value ridiculously low based on the hotel reward nights I have managed to book over the past five years for around 100 hotel reward nights.
Since I have stayed at hotels like Park Hyatt Chicago and InterContinental Park Lane London, I can confidently state The Thief Oslo, Norway is a similar luxury class hotel category.
Choice Privileges 20,000 points buys a reward night at The Thief. And a night at the The Thief is always priced significantly higher than $120 (TPG 0.6 cents/point).
Aker Brygge
The Thief is located in the Aker Brygge development on the Oslo waterfront that was formerly a shipyard and industrial area. Aker Brygge is one of the most popular areas of Oslo with restaurants, museums, stores, a boat marina and high-end residences. During my previous stay at The Thief a yacht exhibition was happening at the Aker Brygge marina.
The Thief Lobby
The reception desk is located to the right of the cowboy art.
Room 821
Our room was 821 on the 8th floor of the 9-floor hotel. A key card is required for the elevator.
One night was not sufficient time for me to figure out how to work all the electronics in the room. One of the cool features of the bathroom lights are dimmer switches to keep the lights really low at night with sufficient light to see where to walk in the room, but not so bright to disturb my sleep. Turns out the lights are motion activated and twice during the night when I rolled over in bed the lights went to full brightness forcing me out of bed to dim them again.
The other electronic issue I had was the automatic blind on the windows. I pressed the button and lowered the shade on the windows. Three minutes later the shade automatically retracted again. Gave the button a second close. A few minutes later the blinds automatically opened again. Not sure what was up, but it was not a necessity to have the blinds closed. I simply was pressing buttons on the wall to see what they do.
Electronic mini bar is one of my pet peeves in hotel rooms. At least I had no need to refrigerate anything and there was an ice machine near the 8th floor elevators.
Kelley pointed out the hairspray in the drawer available for purchase. Fortunately we had stopped by a Rossman in Prague the day before for a 60 CZK/$2.64 travel size can of hairspray. The Thief would have robbed me of 135 NOK/$15.84 for the hairspray.
The room has a sliding door to access a balcony. One of the highlights of the stay was gazing at lights dotting the hills around Oslo at night.
Room 821 bathroom
The bathroom had both a bathtub and separate rain shower stall with comfortable and large bath towels.
The Thief Floor 2 Breakfast Buffet
One of my disappointments was our 10am flight meant we had only about 20 minutes to plow through the breakfast buffet, one of the highlights of staying at The Thief.
The Thief 9th Floor viewing deck and bar
My one regret is I did not get to the 9th floor in the evening. We could hear music from our room and I assume it was the roof top bar. The door was locked in the morning when I went to the 9th floor.
The hotel spa has a 12-meter indoor pool and there is a hotel gym free to guests open 24 hours.
The Thief Oslo, Ascend Collection
The Thief is one of the highest rated hotels in Oslo. At time of this post The Thief ranks #3 of 107 Oslo hotels on TripAdvisor.
Lowest rate at time I booked was Nordic Choice Club member rate at 3,220 NOK/$377.54 USD.
20,000 Choice Privileges can currently be purchased for $147 USD until April 22 with Choice Privileges buy points promotion for 50% bonus points. Members can buy up to 75,000 points during this promotion.
Loyalty Traveler – Choice Privileges Buy Points 50% bonus is great deal for many hotels (March 20, 2019).
8 Comments
Comments are closed.