Choice privileges has made a nice little update to its website: they now show nightly award rates in their calendar view, making it easy to see at a glance what the award price will be on any given night. This is a really helpful improvement of their website.
This is a great enhancement. You’ll need to select an individual property and then click on dates to see the calendar view (you won’t see this in city search results but rather on an individual property page). Then you can advance to see which dates are available and at which price. As you can see in the screen shot above, it is easy to see at a glance which dates aren’t available at all (see the dash for no award availability).
Furthermore, most Choice properties vary in price at certain times of the year. For instance, I scored a great deal at the Hotel Napa Valley a couple of years ago. You can no longer book that property quite as cheaply, but you can indeed find variance in the price by date. See the screen shot below where January 2023 dates are pricing at 30K points per night and February dates are 25K:
I did not check cash prices so I have no idea whether either is a particularly good value during these dates, but for those who would be willing to hunt for a great Choice Privileges redemption, this could be very helpful.
Keep in mind that you can transfer 1:1 to Choice Privileges from Amex Membership Rewards points and Capital One Miles, but if you have Citi ThankYou points, those transfer at a favorable rate of 1 Citi ThankYou points to 2 Choice Privileges points, which can make for some excellent deals.
Overall, this is an exciting enhancement that should make hunting for award availability far easier in the Choice Privileges ecosystem moving forward.
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Choice’s investment in this is unfortunately anything but reassuring to me. It suggests to me that they may be getting ready to make Choice Privileges more akin to Radisson’s program with hotel award pricing as Choice starts on-boarding the acquired Radisson properties into the Choice Privileges world.
While Choice’s having “seasonal” variation in award night prices has long been around and even sort of opaque at times, anytime they make award price changes or get ready to on-board new properties, it has taught me that the program’s best award opportunities are not with future additions and may even too soon and suddenly become a historical footnote.
Even if you are correct as long as there is a sort of grace period from when they allow transfers to when they explode the cost I will not complain as all my reservations will be booked and all points expended. Then I’ll just fallback on all my other award programs, though they might be experiencing their own issues… Marriott no award charts. Though obviously Hyatt remains a favorite of many of us here.
This is a good thing. I’m still waiting to hear what the conversation rate will be from Radisson to Choice points and when the transfers will be possible. Like probably many others here I have hundreds of thousands of Radisson points. I strongly favor moving them to the Choice hotel program as long as they provide some sort of decent transfer ratio.