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The Radisson Rewards program often flies under the radar, but we’ve written about them a couple of times recently.
On the positive side, they came out with a decent promotion which is valid through the end of the year (See: Radisson Rewards: Earn 5,000 Bonus Points Per Stay Through End Of 2020), although listen to FM On The Air from last week as Greg and Nick discuss why the promotion isn’t worth mattress running.
On the negative side, Radisson made a change at some point in the last couple of weeks which is preventing members from being able to book award nights at the standard rate. Instead, only premium award nights are showing which are 50% more expensive. (See: Radisson standard awards not available (but e-certs work)).
I noticed a further change to their search functionality last night, but this time it’s a positive change as they – in theory – now allow you to search for all the properties in a state.
When doing a search on their website in the past, you could try searching for properties by state. However, after clicking the Search button it would take you to a page listing every city and county in a state and you had to choose one of those to proceed. You were therefore restricted to searching for hotels in a much smaller region.
At some point in recent weeks or months though, they appeared to have changed things so that if you try searching by state, it’ll provide search results for all properties in a state. For example, a search for Maryland doesn’t ask you to then pick a city; instead it’ll show you all the hotels in Maryland.
As you might notice in the above screenshot, it says ’30 hotels found in or near Maryland’. The search results therefore don’t only show you properties in the state, but some properties in nearby states too. For example, the Maryland search results include a handful of hotels in Virginia and Pennsylvania as well.
This improvement isn’t limited to smaller states though. Doing a search for Radisson properties in California provides results for all hotels there.
There appear to be shortfalls for some states though. With the Maryland search mentioned earlier, it listed 30 hotels in or near Maryland. This included all the Radisson properties in that state with the exception of the Country Inn & Suites Ocean City.
Somewhat strangely, the Country Inn & Suites Ocean City does show up when doing a search for hotels for the same dates in Delaware. While it’s not surprising that hotels in Ocean City would show up in the Delaware search results given their proximity, it is strange that it doesn’t show up for the state it’s actually in.
There’s an even bigger shortfall when doing a search for Texas. The search results list there as being 30 hotels found in or near Texas…
…but based on the main Radisson directory, there are 34 properties in Texas.
That doesn’t tell the full story though. The search results for Texas include 8 properties in Oklahoma and New Mexico, which means that search only displays 22 out of 34 hotels in the state.
My guess is that when searching by state, Radisson isn’t displaying results based on their database of properties in a state. Instead, it’s likely displaying properties within a certain distance of a certain spot in a state. Using Texas as an example, they might have picked Abilene as the central point and display properties within 300 miles. That would explain why hotels in Hobbs, NM (212 miles away) and Oklahoma City, OK (291 miles away) show up in the search results, but not some other Texas hotels like those in Corpus Christi (390 miles away).
That doesn’t necessarily account for the hotel in Ocean City not showing up in the Maryland search results though as Ocean City on the far eastern side of the state is only 283 miles away from Frostburg on the far western side of the state.
As a result, this change to the search functionality is positive if you’d like to get a broad overview of Radisson properties in a state, although it’s not currently quite as comprehensive as you’d hope for in all instances.
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Good catch!
Just as there is a shortfall in states with lots of Radisson hotels, that works the other way around in states with few Radissons. The statewide search will pick up hotels in neighboring states. Searching California will include Yuma AZ and Las Vegas NV. An Arizona search includes hotels on the other side of the state line in California, Nevada and Utah.
Very useful for road trips.