Via @PriorityClub on Twitter, they’re running a 24 hour award sale at 50% off (or more) on a handful of properties:
We’re pilot-testing our One Day Sale with reward nights starting at 50% off! Hurry, it’s only around for 24 hrs!
Here’s the award sale and the page says that the sale is available from “12:00 a.m. Thursday morning to 11:59 p.m. EST Thursday night.” However there’s also a countdown clock on the page that shows the deal expiring an hour before that, at 10:59pm Eastern. IT glitch, it seems…
There are only 12 hotels on offer, although two of them are Intercontinental properties — Johannesburg for 15,000 points per night and available for redemption February 24 through April 13, and Panama City, Panama for 12,500 points per night and available for redemption through April 6.
The Crowne Plaza Beijing Sun Palace is available at just 10,000 points for 19 days in March, and a Candlewood Suites in Cary, North Carolina is available at just 5000 points for 13 days in March. This last, along with the Holiday Inn Express Houston-Brookhollow, are the only ones which match the value of a PointBreaks award.
But it’s still a good, though terribly limited, sale. Excellent value even for folks who only have 5000 points in their account currently, since Priority Club points can be acquired for 6/10ths of a cent apiece by booking and cancelling cash and points awards. (With 5000 points in your account you can redeem a 10,000 point per night room for $30, when you cancel that room within the cancellation guidelines you get the full 10,000 points back in your account, you’ve just bought 5000 points for $30. Rinse, repeat as necessary though at some point the merry go round on this deal which has been around for awhile may stop, caveat emptor.)
Not a lot of choices but 50-75% off the reward price is pretty nice.
I really like this promo: seems like a win-win for both PC members and the and hotel chain. It creates excitement among the membership — who doesn’t like a great awards deal? — and allows the chain to dispose of unsold inventory. So hopefully they make it weekly: I think most of us would agree that this would increase the “value” of our PC points and our interest in the chain.
Of course, the downside of the promo is that it’s very needle in a haystack. I couldn’t find the needle in the current offerings, but I suspect I eventually would if they gave me 12 new hotels each week. That would be enough to get me to continually look at the list.