It was recently announced that members of the United Airlines Mileage Plus program can use their mile points to get Hotwire hotel rooms. Is this a good deal for members or should you use your points for flights instead? This is the question I wanted to answer.
How Hotwire Works: First a quick overview of Hotwire’s unpublished hotels. With Hotwire, you don’t know the name of the hotel until after you bid (that is, unless you use the Hotwire hotel lists to match up amenities to reveal the name of the hotel). All you know about the hotel star rating, general vacinity, and the hotel amenities.
United Points for Hotwire Hotels: Now, instead of using cash to book your Hotwire hotel, you can use United miles. My instincts tell me that generally, using points to buy 3rd party goods (whether it’s a hotel room or other) is not a good thing. There’s just too many players all wanting a piece of the pie. But I’m a numbers kind of guy, so I decided to put this to the test. My objective, take a few Hotwire offerings on United and see how many points were required to purchase a hotel. Then compare the same hotel to what you would have paid on Hotwire straight up. From this, you’d be able to deduce a price per point for Hotwire hotels purchased with United points.
This Hotwire hotel costs a lot of United MilesPlus points.
Hotel Example #1: San Francisco, 4.5 star hotel in Union Square East – Mascone Center. This hotel is going for $168 on Hotwire or 28,434 miles on United. This works out to a value of just 0.6 cents per mile. What… a fraction of a penny for each mile I’ve worked so hard to earn. Let me double check my math. Yup, my math is correct. Hmmm… I think I’ll pass on this one.
On Hotwire, you can pay $86 for this hotel or use 15,000 United Airlines points.
Hotel Example #2: Sometimes you get weird anomalies, so I thought I would check out another hotel and see if it’s any better than the measly $0.006 per point. This time another San Francisco hotel (sorry for the SF examples… I’m actually looking for a hotel in San Francisco so it’s easy to use this as an example). This time, a 3.5 star hotel in the Civic Center South – Hayes Valley area. This is going for $86 on Hotwire if you pay cash, or you can have this hotel for 14,734 miles if you use MilesPlus on United. The point to dollar value for this hotel is actually less than the example #1, but it’s in the same ballpark. Roughly each point is worth $0.006 if you use United miles to book Hotwire hotels.
Should you use MilesPlus for Hotwire hotels: Generally, no. There may be some case where you want to. E.g., if you really need to use up miles for some reason, or you come across a rare arbitrage situation. Generally, I wouldn’t