Radisson Rewards – remember them? – has launched a new shopping portal. To celebrate the launch, you can earn up to 30% bonus points on your first three purchases through the portal. It’s highly unlikely that’s going to be worthwhile though due to the large devaluation of their points in recent years.
The Deal
- The new Radisson Rewards shopping portal is running the following promotion:
- Earn 10% bonus points on your first purchase
- Earn 20% bonus points on your second purchase
- Earn 30% bonus points on your third purchase
- Direct link to offer.
Key Terms
- “Promotional offers are subject to terms and conditions” (but what those terms and conditions are is anyone’s guess)
Quick Thoughts
As a quick reminder, Radisson Rewards split into two parts a few years ago – Radisson Rewards Americas and Radisson Rewards International. Radisson Rewards Americas was subsequently bought by Choice Hotels and subsumed into their loyalty program, while Radisson Rewards International continued as its own entity. It’s Radisson Rewards International that has launched this new shopping portal.
There are two main players in the world of white-labeled shopping portals – Cartera and Collinson. Cartera runs most of the major airline shopping portals such as American Airlines, United, Alaska, Delta, and Southwest. Collinson runs the shopping portals for some of the more niche programs such as British Airways, JetBlue, Emirates, and Caesars. This new Radisson shopping portal is run by Collinson.
Some of the earning rates are eye-catching initially. For example, at the time of publishing this you can earn 18x at Lululemon, up to 10x at Giftcards.com, up to 14x at Dell, etc. The key thing to bear in mind here is that Radisson has some of the lowest value points of any kind of travel loyalty program.
They underwent a significant devaluation a couple of years ago. I haven’t kept close track of their rewards program in that time, but according to Head For Points their points are worth £0.0015-£0.0022 which means they’re worth ~0.2-0.3 cents per point in the US. That 18x Lululemon rate is therefore more realistically worth 3.6%-5.4%, 10x at Giftcards.com is worth 2%-3%, etc.
Those specific rates aren’t necessarily terrible, but those appear to be temporarily boosted rates. Other retailer rates are downright abysmal like 2x at Lowe’s (0.4%-0.6%), 6x at Macy’s (1.2%-1.8%), 8x at Viator (1.6%-2.4%), etc.
As for the launch promotion, I personally wouldn’t count on earning any additional bonus points, but would be pleasantly surprised if it did work out. I received an email from Radisson Rewards detailing the promotion in terms of the fact that you’d earn 10%, 20%, and 30% bonus points after your first, second, and third transactions respectively. However, that’s the extent of the promotion details. The email stated that “Promotional offers are subject to terms and conditions,” but they didn’t bother to provide those terms and conditions in the email. When clicking through to the link in the email, there are no promo terms and conditions listed there. That link isn’t the shopping portal itself, but when clicking through to the portal and hunting all around the site, I couldn’t find a single mention of the 10%/20%/30% promotion. Well, apart from on a scrolling banner on the home page, but that doesn’t have any kind of clickable link to the terms of the promotion, so that’s not at all helpful either. Like I said, if you earn bonus points then that’s great, but I certainly wouldn’t count on them and I can’t imagine there’d be any recourse for unearned bonus points in that way if they’re not awarded.
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Will it keep your points alive?
RIP the old days of Club Carlson Second Night Free and some awesome Radisson Blu 2 night stays… boy has this program gone downhill since then 🙁
I’d rather earn fewer points in a program I actually use than more in a program like Radisson that is dead to me.