Ah Trini Travelogue Trinidad & Tobago's most travelled blogger through 99 countries. Create and Re-Engineer your life for travel.
When a consultant is on the road, we live and die by the hotel promos. It is the bread and butter perk of all perks (well that and the airline status). However in the chase for business, hotel chains are constantly competing with each other to get the most out of the business people and consultants who work on the road for a living. Every quarter, they come up with a new promo to drum up business.
My Q1 promo was with the Marriott, where they offered a MegaBonus of 50,000 points, if you stayed 25 nights in a quarter with them, on top of the regular points and platinum bonus points one got. This was a great promo, since the points I got for Q1 will allow me to stay at a Marriott Hotel/resort in Trinidad for 11 nights like the Courtyard Marriott in Port of Spain, which isn’t entirely bad at all. (Don’t mind the ridiculously crappy service at the hotels in Trinidad)
Promos like this are easy to get and require no work, aside form booking your reservations in advance, so that the other consultants don’t book your favorite hotel up and get their stays easier!
The Q2 promo I’m doing is from Starwood is a “Stay 3 times and get one night in a resort free” promo. Now every promo they offer, might not necessarily be the best one for you, but a road warrior always takes advantage of the quarterly promos on offer. This promo is awesome, since it will practically pay for 3/4 of the stays on my next Asia vacation in a couple weeks – Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Maldives and Seychelles.
Now this promo actually requires some work, before one can truly take advantage of it. A stay doesn’t mean a single night, it actually means the period between check in and check out. So if one stayed in a hotel for 3 nights consecutively, then you would only have one stay and you would need basically three periods of 3 nights to get one stay. That would be silly and unproductive!
The right way to completely abuse this promo would be to “Hotel Hop”. There are many FAQ’s on hotel hopping, but the most appropriate one for this promo is located on FlyerTalk.
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/starwood-preferred-guest/1213242-switching-hotels-every-night.html
By jumping from hotel to hotel every night, you rack up three stays in a week leading to a free resort night per week, rather than every three weeks.
Hence three free nights within 2 weeks of this promo!!
Now this is not meant to be some sort of FAQ on how to do this, but rather an insight into how one can travel for free or cheap without spending any of your money, but rather accumulating a perk of the job.
Yet another promo that I found, was the introduction of a “Social Networking” promo offered by Sheraton, where they will give another 250 points for doing nothing but using your phone to check into their hotel! This is absolutely crazy and of course, it’s gotten me addicted to foursquare. Any traveller should be aware of this app on your iPhone … it is crazy addictive! Here is my profile … https://foursquare.com/rishiray
So here I am in Q2 racking up points and hotel stays with foursquare and hotel hopping! Yet another consultant 101!!
