Based on Gone4Good's feedback on this thread, I decided to try out hotels.com to see how I liked their rewards program. We finished a trip to Asia last week which I booked on hotels.com. The trip was for 8 nights, but we book two rooms so we had a total of 16 nights (we're a family of four). This earned us one free night.
Over the weekend I booked our hotels rooms for Europe this summer. I was able to use the one free night for one of our bookings and it was easy to redeem. The hard part is trying to get the per night hotel room cost that you are booking to be close to the average of the 10 that you previously booked. For example, our average was around $120/night and the hotel that I booked cost $110. I lost out on a potential $10. But that's only a concern if you're trying to maximize. For me, close enough. Scratch that. I just read their rules and "You can redeem your free night for a night of greater value and pay the difference." I'll have to remember that next time.
For Paris, I was going to use Chase Sapphire points. This is where I hit an issue, which made me wonder how valuable Chase Sapphire points are compared to the hotels.com rewards program.
I went to the Ultimate Rewards website to find a hotel in Paris. Their website isn't that great, but I eventually narrowed it down to a place that I liked. It came out to 11,906 points per night. Two rooms, five nights, a total of 119,060 points or $1,190.60. The problem is that when I tried to book it, the website came back saying the hotel was unavailable. I played around with this for a while, but it was gone (it's back today however). I realize inventories change, but it took me a while to find a location/hotel that I liked and I didn't want to go through the search process again and I didn't want to wait and hope that it might show up again. So I spent some time comparing how much it would cost if I booked it through hotels.com
On hotels.com the same booking costs $1,272.60. That's $82 more than using points. If I book the hotel using the Chase Sapphire CC I get two points for each of those dollars spent, which if I redeem as cash is $25.45. Now it's only $56.55 more. Plus, I get a free booking on hotels.com worth $115.69. So if my analysis here is correct, I'm ahead about $60 by booking the hotel through hotels.com instead of using my Sapphire points. Easy choice. I booked the hotel on hotels.com.
Looks to me like hotels.com is a winner. Mucho thanks to Gone4Good for pointing this out, otherwise I wouldn't have given it a shot. It's already saved me over $100 and after this summer I'll have another few hundred dollars worth of nights to redeem.
Now I need to figure out how I'm going to use the Sapphire points. I'll probably leave them for now and look to transfer them to an airline loyalty program when booking flights. Any other ideas?