Choice Hotels updated its website showing hotel reward rates worldwide for December 1, 2019 to January 31, 2020. Reward nights can be booked for stays within 100 days. Today the calendar has reached the November 30-December 1 date for reservations within the 100-day booking window.
You can find seasonal reward rates listed on each hotel’s homepage when you scroll down to the bottom of the page.
The new feature of Choice Privileges reward night searches is the stay dates calendar only allows a search for reward nights on dates within the 100-day booking window. The image below shows December 1 with a message “Date Limit Reached. When booking with points, reservations must be made within 100 days.”
The new website feature does not allow a calendar search for reward nights beyond 100 days. The issue this fixes is up to now anytime you were searching a hotel for reward nights beyond the 100-day window, then every hotel simply showed Sold Out. Many times when planning trips I forgot I was searching dates more than 100-days out and wasted time looking for available hotel reward nights.
December 2019-January 2020 Reward Night Rates
Comfort Suites Austin Airport, Austin Texas
Comfort Suites Austin Airport is an example of a hotel with lower reward rates for Dec-Jan compared to the two preceding seasonal rates.
I will be looking for good deals in a few weeks for Europe where I might want to stay in December or January as the 100-day Choice Privileges booking window reaches those dates.
My initial impression on Dec-Jan reward rates is most places I have checked show higher rates in those months compared to Oct-Nov rates.
Another trend I noticed is several of the hotels I like to frequent in Europe have no availability for days over several different weeks on dates I checked for Oct-Nov travel. With Choice Privileges it is hard to say if that is a technical glitch or a reward night blocking move. This seems most prevalent for locations I checked in Scandinavia at Nordic Choice Hotels.
Few rooms in Stockholm
For example, Stockholm, Sweden has 21 Nordic Choice Hotels in the city and surrounding area. I searched nearly half the dates October and November. Each date returns the same 4 available hotels and shows 17 other hotels Sold Out.
Clarion Hotel Sign and Clarion Hotel Stockholm are two hotels priced at 10,000 points. Neither hotel shows any availability, along with 13 other hotels in the Stockholm area from late October through early November. Not all dates show Sold Out, but far more dates than I have ever seen before at Nordic Choice Hotels. Finding a room Clarion Hotel Sign has rarely been an issue. I notice similar limited availability in Copenhagen and Oslo.
All the more reason to book any Choice Privileges reservations as close to the 100-day booking mark as possible and check periodically for availability when it is scarce.
Also keep in mind Choice Privileges seasonal rates are not set in stone.
I made a few reservations over the past year at hotels when reward rates were low, then the points price for a reward night increased in the weeks after my booking for the same posted seasonal rate period. At the time of my stay the posted reward rate in points was higher than the points rate I had redeemed for the hotel in the previous 100 days. This happened in both Atlanta and locally in California.
