Deal Dispatch: Get ready for Daily Getaway Travel Deals 2016!

This week’s Deal Dispatch is a heads-up for the 2016 Daily Getaway travel deals. I reported about them last year and they are back this year with new offers. The offers are available for sale starting April 4th, with new deals available every day for four weeks. I will post the deals as well as my personal evaluation of the value you’ll get – just because it says “deal” on the can means there is one inside!

The first week of daily deals includes offers by the global hotel chains Choice Hotels, IHG and Best Western, as well as more local offers by casino resorts in Las Vegas and entertainment park tickets. Check out the full calendar of offers for next week below:

Screen Shot 2016-03-29 at 11.28.30 AM

I’ve gone through the offers and here is my personal ranking of the value they provide:
The best value offer is on day one by Choice Hotels. While the deal description makes it sound that you are buying certificates for specific brands (which might be harder to use), you actually buy points in Choice’ reward program that you can use at any of their participating properties around the world, which makes them much more flexible than it sounds! You can see how much you are paying per point below:
Daily Getaway 2016 ChoiceThat makes the “Cambria Suites” offer of 40,000 points for $160 at 0.40 cents per point the best deal. Based on many searches at HotelHustle (and not just anecdotal evidence), a Choice reward point is worth about 0.7-0.8 cents, so you get discount of close to 50%.
Before you go of and buy the points, you want to make sure you’d actually like to stay at one of their hotels: I’d consider most Choice properties in the budget category and some as mid-scale. You’ll find them all over the US and they might be your only “choice” in some smaller towns. You’ll also find some in Europe and Australia, if that’s on your travel list!
I personally haven’t stayed at a Choice hotel in many years, but wanted to check out their rewards program. I recently earned 4,000 points for signing up,  so I might buy some points to be able to redeem them on an upcoming trip to Europe and the US!

InterContinental‘s IHG Rewards Club is one of my favorite hotel programs, in combination with their no-brainer IHG Master Card! They are regular participants of the Daily Getaway and have four offers to buy points on April 6th:
Daily Getaway 2016 IHGThe more points you buy, the better your price is. With IHG Rewards points worth 0.6-0.7 cents per point, you don’t get much of a discount. IHG also does regular sales of point in this range and you can always buy points at 0.7 cpp buy using the cash & points option for reward stays.
I have plenty of IHG points and will sit this round out. One reason I like IHG is that they have so many hotels in so many places, from good mid-scale options (like the Holiday Inn Express Sathorn Bangkok , Singapore or Kuta Square Bali) to great luxury InterContinental hotels in desirable places (like the IC Bora Bora , IC Ko Samui or IC Hong Kong), so I’d recommend to buy them if you already have plans to travel to expensive places or during expensive times, when IHG points can be worth a lot more than 0.7 cents. I would not recommend to buy them speculatively, the discount is not big enough to justify that!

The offer on April 7 allows you to buy 10,000 points for Best Western for $55 or 0.55 cents per point. While nobody is tracking Best Western points value, based on anecdotal evidence that is roughly the value of the points, so you don’t really get a discount. While I’ve been a Best Western Rewards member and even got a status match to their Diamond level, I’ve not been a fan of their hotels or rewards program. The hotels are budget to mid-scale and the quality varies greatly, making it difficult to rely on the brand. The program benefits are lackluster, so to me it’s more like selecting an independent hotel than a brand. I won’t be buying the points and I recommend you only do it, if you already have plans to stay at one of their hotels AND the cash price would be significantly more expensive than buying the points at 0.55 cents!

The last two offers for entertainment park tickets and casino hotels in Las Vegas target a much more narrow audience, so unless you have plans to visit these parks or hotels anyway AND the discount over buying tickets/rooms outright is significant, I would recommend to participate in these deals!

If these deals sound great to you, you can buy them on the scheduled dates at the Daily Getaway site. You have to be quick though, the great deals have sold out quickly in previous years, so you have to be online the moment the deals come out to participate!  Good luck and happy travel savings!

If you’d like to get more deals like this, please follow me on Twitter – I’m posting great deals daily and many will sell out quickly, so stay ahead with my Twitter updated!


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *