Back at the beginning of October I spoke with Peter Van Dorn, one of the founders of PointsHound.com, a new hotel booking service that awards you with Frequent Flyer miles for making bookings via their site. I played around with the site a bit during the private beta stage and believe that these guys should do relatively well especially with hotels that don’t have their own loyalty program or if your are going to be making a one off stay at a big name chain brand that you normally don’t use as there are instances you can earn more miles via PointsHound.com than you can from the hotel frequent guest program (see my example further below)
PointsHound.com is now out of beta stage and you can earn 100 free miles in one of their four participating programs just signing up. The four programs are AeroMexico Club Premier, Delta SkyMiles, Hawaiian Airlines HawaiianMiles and United Mileage Plus. You can also earn more free miles by referring people to PointsHound.com who make a booking via the site. If you like you can use my referral link to start and feel free to start a conga with your referral links below! (A referral list has started, please use the next referral link below to sign up)
You can also earn more miles the more you book through the site:
Now you do have to note that since this is a third party booking site, many of the major hotel loyalty programs will not let you earn the standard points or miles or earn elite status credit for the stay (just as if you used Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz etc) but as I mentioned above in some cases you may earn more miles using PointsHound.com over using a hotel loyalty program directly. Take the following example of a stay at the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise, if you don’t have status with Fairmont President’s Club and don’t care to earn status you can earn more miles (at least 631 versus a flat 500 with FPC) using PointsHound.com with the same room rates:
