Best Hotel Promo of 2012

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You probably are familiar with Club Carlson hotels, you just had no idea that was the name of the chain.  Radisson Hotels, Country Inns & Suites, Park Inn (mostly Europe), Park Plaza, the very swanky Radisson Blu, or the very limited, Hotel Missoni (just two locations).

Here is how this promo works, when you stay one night at a Park Plaza Hotel, you get 50,000 bonus points that you can spend across the Club Carlson brand.  But what does that mean to the average traveler?  Free rooms (no blackout dates) go from 9,000 to 50,000 points per night, which means that for this promo, your first stay will result in at least a buy one, get one free experience, however, if you are able to take advantage of a less expensive hotel, it could mean buy one get five or six free.

Let me use pictures to show you.

Here is the math:

1,000 points for booking on their website

20 points per $1USD per booking

50,000 points promotional bonus

I am taking them up on this offer, and being based in Thailand I have a couple of Park Plazas to choose from, here are the choices for a random day on their website that I will be looking to book:

That may seem like a lot but in dollars it’s a mere $54 for a fairly decent hotel.  You can step it up though as well to the Park Plaza Sukhumvit:

Just $69/night!  What’s great about Club Carlson is that they show the rates for their rooms along with any packages (breakfast, etc.) they may have for sale or a use of points, or if you would like a combination of points and cash (though the deal is not that great) it’s also available for the taking.  So how would this work for my booking?

Booking Park Plaza Soi 18 for $54 = 1,080 points for the spend

1,000 point bonus for booking online.

50,000 promo bonus

GRAND TOTAL Club Carlson Points = 52,080.

According to this award chart:

My 52,080 points equates to as many as (5) nights with an opportunity to co-pay for an additional night, now the co-pay doesn’t seem like such a bad deal.

Full Disclosure: I had to search four cities (NYC, LAX, SFO, MCI) before finding a low level redemption in St. Louis…

Or just “near downtown” St. Louis.

Plug that into the equation though, and that makes your one night stay for $54 a seriously good deal, in fact, the best hotel promo of 2012!  Take for example the rate shown above, $71.20 at five nights = $356 of value for your $54 night.  In our case we didn’t need a hotel for the dates listed but this is a promotion too good to pass up.  Most of the hotels we would stay in would usually be a Category 2 or 3, meaning this promo would get us 3.5 or just nearly 2 free nights for our paid night, but it is still a worthy investment for us.

Click this link if you want to sign-up for the promo, it’s a limited engagement – only 20,000 registrants and then it’s closed.  Make sure there is a Park Plaza stay in your future as only stays during the period (now through August 28th, 2012) will qualify.

-Sherpa