How much are hotel points worth? (2024)

Points & miles can unlock valuable opportunities for all types of travelers, but figuring out how much your points is challenging because the value of one point varies wildly between different hotel brands. 

Plenty of other travel blogs provide their own points & miles valuation charts, but I often found that the cent-per-point figures were not realistic. I quickly realized that many of those websites didn’t cater to frugal travelers like myself. The more I traveled, the more I saw that spending time at luxury hotels wasn’t an enriching way to spend my money (or points). 

I slapped together the below valuation chart for budget-conscious travelers like me who would rather stretch their hotel points over as many stays as possible instead of blowing them all on massive redemptions. 

Sometimes, the quantity of redemptions really is more important than the “quality” of the stays.

Current Value of Hotel Points

Best Western Rewards	0.6 cents per point
Choice Privileges	0.6 cents per point
Hilton Honors	0.3 cents per point
IHG Rewards Club	0.5 cents per point
Marriott Bonvoy	0.5 cents per point
World of Hyatt	1.8 cents per point
Wyndham Rewards	0.7 cents per point

Point Valuation Methodology

This project started with me looking at my upcoming trips and the available cash rate versus the points price. Once I saw that there were some discrepancies between the current rates and the point valuation charts that I was familiar with, I started building a table of historical pricing for previous stays (both with cash & points) to see what my past redemptions were actually worth.

The historical data was helpful, but it didn’t account for recent devaluations & program changes. I then resumed the search of future redemptions at properties that I was actually planning on spending time & money instead of basing my valuations on the highest-tiers of luxury properties.

This is an important distinction because I knew I would never be deciding whether to redeem my points or spending $500+/night at the same hotel. Sure, it’s nice to say that you got a huge cents-per-point value for your points at a luxury hotel, but those “savings” aren’t truly padding your pocket if your actual alternative was a $150/night Holiday Inn Express down the road.

Apples-to-applies comparisons are the only way these valuations work for the regular traveler.

Final Thoughts

Determining how much your points & miles are worth is like trying to hit a moving target. By the time you formulate a points & miles strategy and open the right credit cards to amass your balance, there’s no telling whether or not the redemptions you were banking are still available.

By using this points valuation guide, I now have a baseline by which to compare the cash rate of a hotel property against the available rewards night redemption rate. Once you have the cash equivalent of the rewards night redemption rate, you can quickly see which rate offers you more “value”.