Wyndham Rewards has just given notice of some award pricing changes for their hotels, which kick in for bookings as of February 11, 2020.
In this post:
Wyndham’s recently adjusted award pricing
From 2015 until 2019, Wyndham took an innovative approach to award pricing. During this time, all hotels cost 15,000 points per night, which sure is a concept that many of us who like to maximize our redemptions can get behind.
In early 2019 Wyndham changed their points redemption structure, and started pricing hotels into three tiers — 7,500 points, 15,000 points, and 30,000 points. When these changes were made:
About one third of properties dropped to 7,500 points per night
Most properties remained 15,000 points per night
Around 200 properties increased to 30,000 points per night
Wyndham adjusting hotel award categories
Wyndham Rewards has announced that they will be shifting some of their hotel award categories for bookings as of February 11, 2020.
With these changes:
All hotels will continue to price at 7,500, 15,000, or 30,000 points per night, but they’re just changing the distribution of hotels
91% of Wyndham’s 9,200+ hotels will not change award pricing
Of the 800 or so hotels that will change award pricing, just under 500 hotels will move down in price, and just over 300 hotels will move up in price
If you book a hotel prior to February 11 that goes down in price, you’ll automatically receive a refund for the points difference
Wyndham Rewards has clarified that they anticipate this being an annual process moving forward.
at least appreciate that they’re providing advance notice of this, though it’s a bit frustrating that Wyndham isn’t actually sharing which hotels will be changing in cost.
That means they’re basically just warning you to book whatever you want right now if you want to be sure you can lock in the current pricing. If the price increases then that’s great, while if the price drops then you’ll automatically receive a refund for the difference in points.
Bottom line
It’s pretty normal for many hotel groups to have annual adjustments of which hotels belong to which categories. On the surface it sounds good that more hotels are going down in price than up in price, though in reality you can always expect that those most popular for redemptions will be going up in price.
What has your experience been with Wyndham Rewards since they reintroduced tiered award pricing in 2019?
