The other day I stumbled upon a terrific hotel point value near LAX airport. I needed a one night stay and was looking for a good deal. I checked paid and point prices for nearly every chain. Then I found the new Cambria Hotel & Suites which was available for only 10,000 points per night. That was a surprise. Lesser brands in the area were charging more.
Cambria is an upper-end brand of the mostly low-end Choice Hotels. There were no reviews, but the artist renderings looked very nice.
After a bit of Googling and a phone call I learned that the hotel was set to open on May 1. My stay was May 4th. Perfect.
The Cambria is not a luxury hotel, but it is stylish and it is full of quirky and fun details. For example, there was the touch on/off lighted mirror in the bedroom:
The bathroom mirror doubled as a wireless speaker. I’m not sure why anyone would want to pair their phone with a bathroom mirror, but if you stay here, you can. Even though I only used it long enough to see if it worked, I thought it was cool, quirky, and fun.
The room itself was basic, comfortable, and happy.
And the lobby was quite nice.
Buying points
Choice sells points for 1.1 cents each. At 10,000 points per night, it is significantly cheaper to buy points and use them to book the hotel than to book the hotel directly. Room rates seem to range from $169 to $239 before taxes, depending on the night. By buying points, you can get the room for $110 any day of the week. Or, buy 6,000 points for $66 and pay $30 more for the points + cash rate. All-in you’ll pay only $96 per night.
Even better, if you have at least 6,000 points to begin with, you can buy all of the points you need by booking and cancelling points + cash stays. This is an indirect way of buying points for just .75 cents each. At that price, you can stay in this hotel any day for only $75 per night all-in.
Suites included
If you can find a day where a regular suite is available, it too will be available for only 10,000 points per night.
It won’t last
Like all things in this game, when a reward value is out of wack, it changes fast. I don’t know if 10K per night pricing is a mistake, a promotional rate, or simply a great value. Regardless, I’m sure the price will go up. So, if you need a hotel stay near LAX in the near future, hop on this now.
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[…] Great hotel point value near LAX, and a magic mirror: This deal doesn’t have any sort of scheduled end date, but I would suggest booking this one if you have the points and the desire to go to LA. […]
Thanks! Booked a night before my early LAX flight. Get to cancel the Marriott annual free night cert and use it for my 1 night stay in NYC in DEC and cancel my Wyndham New Yorker booking and use that towards my March Boston trip.
Thanks so much for this timely post! I had a four night stay next week at another LA hotel booked with my Citi Prestige. But, even with my fourth night free, I’d be looking at $675 plus an extra $100 for parking. But I had 12,000 Choice points sitting around. So I “bought” another 12K points by booking then cancelling a points plus cash stay, then booked my four night points + cash stay. All in, I used my original 12K points and spent $210 for my extra points and cash. And I got free parking.
I stayed at a Cambria in midtown Manhattan last year. A very nice hotel.
$210 is way better than $775.
Again, many thanks.
For future reference, the Hyatt Place LAX is very new, convenient and provides a good points value. Have used it 3 or 4 times for those early flights.
Does that brand have a card with a sign up bonus? Is it worth signing up?
Yes, they have a 40K point offer. It’s not the first card I’d recommend, but it’s certainly not a bad offer. You can find it here (scroll down a bit): https://frequentmiler.com/best-credit-card-sign-up-offers/#Barclays
Glad you’re writing about the Choice program. It’s a very odd and mysterious loyalty program, that gets near zero blogger attention. Some of us (myself included) purchase Choice points cheaply in the annual (just completed) Daily Getaways auction, and then try to figure out what to do with these points. 🙂
As you’ve seen, there’s often screwball redemption pricing at Choice. And it’s gotten even weirder in the past year as the award rates can fluctuate by night-of-the-week. A 10,000 point redemption can be 25,000 points the next night (even if published room rates are the same).
In the past, I’ve also noted attractive pricing at the small number of Cambrias for certain nights. Like if you need a room near MIA, for some nights, the Cambria there can be quite cheap on points.
And they are nice hotels. Kind of like an upscale suite hotel. The only downside is that, unlike at most Choice hotels, there’s no free breakfast. Of course, most Choice free breakfasts are terrible, so it’s not a big loss if you’re getting a cheap point redemption on an otherwise nice hotel.
Thanks. Yeah, I’ve been pleasantly surprised lately to have found excellent value in the program within the US (other blogs have written about great value in Europe).
There are some great redemption deals in the USA, but there are now probably more bad deals. Kind of like how the Honors program was BEFORE they went revenue-based. Choice really needs to go revenue-based — I would think their core customer base (non-aspirational travelers) would much prefer it (just like Southwest’s customer prefer revenue-based), but Choice is historically under-managed. Give ’em a decade and they’ll figure it out. In the meantime, keep looking for the oddball lucrative redemptions.