Knowledge Hub · Glossary
Hotel Category
A hotel category is the tier a hotel program assigns to each property, which sets how many points a night costs. Lower-category hotels cost fewer points, top-category ones cost the most. Programs reshuffle categories periodically, which can quietly raise prices.
What it means in practice
Category-based pricing gives you a rough map of value across a brand's portfolio. A mid-tier property in an expensive city can be a strong redemption because its points price stays fixed by category even when the cash rate spikes.
Watch the annual category adjustments. When a program bumps popular hotels up a category, the points cost rises without any change to the room, a common form of devaluation. Programs that use dynamic pricing blur the lines further, since category becomes more of a range than a fixed number.
Example
A category 4 hotel costs 25,000 points a night while a category 7 in the same chain costs 60,000, even though both are the same brand.
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