Bid on Choice Privileges Experiences (It’s worth checking this out)

Choice Privileges launched an auction site this week whereby they are offering the chance to bid with your choice Privileges points on a variety of experiences. Some of these experiences look pretty cool — and given what I expect is a relatively smaller pool of people with both a pile of Choice points and an eye on Choice Privileges, I wouldn’t be surprised if there end up being opportunities to score some pretty good deals here.

The Deal

• Choice Privileges this week launched an auction tool to bid on select Choice Privileges experiences
• Direct link to this deal

Quick Thoughts

Choice has a relatively limited selection of experiences available for bidding at this point, but some of them look pretty awesome.

Unfortunately, by the time I got looking into this, it was too late to get this published in time for this Detroit Red Wings ticket package, but with just 45 minutes to go the bid was only at 13,000 points.

That package included:

• All-inclusive Suite Tickets
• Early Entry
• Watching warmups from the penalty box with photo
• Gift Bag
• Meet and greet and photo with John Walton, Capitals broadcaster

There was a similar package for two tickets that was at 11,000 Choice Privileges points. I told Greg that I would gladly pay 11,000 Choice points for a picture of Greg the Frequent Miler in the penalty box, but alas he wasn’t available to make the game.

However, as it turned out, the auctions jumped up considerably toward the end (the 4-ticket package went for 37K and the 2-ticket package went for 32K). It is worth knowing that bidding activity appears to extend the auction end time by 5 minutes. Unfortunately, that means you won’t know exactly when the auction will end — it won’t end until somebody cries uncle and everyone stops bidding for 5 minutes. If you want to try to snipe an auction, you’ll want to do it as close to 5 minutes before the auction end time as possible since I imagine that the former high bidder is probably notified by email when the auction gets extended and if it ends up being just two people paying attention to an item, you probably don’t want to give them much more than 5 minutes of lead time to see the email, log on, and try to outbid you.

There are some upcoming auctions that look pretty exciting, too — like a package for two tickets to a Chicago bulls game that includes all-inclusive suite tickets and watching the warmups courtside.

Pricing on the auctions is weird. For instance, you can currently bid on a “Silver Experience for an upcoming Kane Brown concert starting at 40,000 points.

Bidding for a slightly higher Gold package starts at 80,000 points. However, I can’t imagine why you’d bid on either of those right now since a Platinum package, with far more attractive inclusions, is currently at 19,000 points at the time of writing.

I’m thinking somebody mis-ordered things there. Truth be told, I don’t even know who Kane Brown is, but I know enough about past Choice Privileges Experiences to know to check the details of package inclusions.

And that’s ultimately why I find these auctions so exciting: this round of auction items might not work out, but I know it’s only a matter of time until the stars align and present some great opportunities with Choice points. I have to imagine that the pool of people who both have a large enough quantity of Choice points and are paying close attention to these auctions is likely far less competitive than similar offerings from other loyalty programs. With the initial attention that these auctions will draw since they are recently launched, maybe these first few auctions will be tougher to win — but I intend to keep an eye on these over the coming months.

Want to learn more about miles and points? Subscribe to email updates or check out our podcast on your favorite podcast platform.