How Dynamic Hotel Awards Work With Accor, Hilton & IHG?

We earlier today published a piece about the possible Pros and Cons of dynamically priced hotel awards (read more here), and (not so) surprisingly, there are far more cons than pros.

I thought it would be a good idea to look at how Accor (purest dynamically pricing chain), Hilton, and IHG all deal with this issue.

Accor

Accor is the purest hotel company that we cover that prices hotel awards dynamically to the penny. So 2,000 points are worth exactly 40 euros.

Movenpick Maldives

Hilton

Hilton is a bit complicated. Although they were abolished, it has award categories in place, and each hotel has the maximum number of points that a standard award room can cost. Sometimes they are less when the rates are low.

You can book Premium Room using points that are entirely dynamically priced.

Here’s an example from Waldorf Astoria Maldives

The villa would cost $5,103.24 or 1,494,000 points. The value of a point is 0.34 each

You can always use your points towards Amazon purchases that value each Honors point at 0.2 cents each.

IHG

IHG is the latest to the dynamic awards are they are partially all over the ma right now, but usually, the rough value of a point is 0.4 to 0.7 cents each.

InterContinental Thalasso Bora Bora

The value of a point here is 0.72 cents each (higher than usual)

InterContinental Bangkok

The value of a point here is 0.42 cents each

Conclusion

I like Hilton’s approach the most. You have the points caps in place for standard rooms, but they can be had fewer points when the room rates are low. You can also use points towards premium rooms at a rough value of .34 cents for each point.

Accor’s approach is the “cleanest” the value of points is set at 40 euros for every 2,000 points that you can use towards most rates.

IHG points values are still somewhat all over the map and perhaps driven partly by market demand. The point value is the highest when the demand is the lowest (midweek) and not during the weekends when most would redeem.