Love’s young dream is over, and the rambutans have wilted.
The calculations above rested on an assumption that doesn’t hold in real life.
You can’t pay with points for a discounted price such as Red Hot Rooms or other promotional rates.
Only the base rate.
Let’s work through a live example from the screenshot:
Rate 1: €211.75 — Red Hot Rooms
Rate 2: €280.61 — Base
Difference: €68.86 for 5 nights
In other words, the Base rate is roughly 32.5% dearer than Red Hot.
Pretty?
Zajebiście zajebisty!
Remember the 75,000 points “on the Brazilian system, 42% off”?
75,000 ALL points = €1,500 of spending power at Accor.
If we bought those points for €876, we got a discount of:
€1,500 − €876 = €624
€624 ÷ €1,500 = 41.6%
But only as long as we count the points within the logical paradigm of an Accor manager with a bottle of Dom Pérignon in the office canteen.
The moment we take them into a real hotel, along comes Grandad Archimedes with his ruler, like a Victorian schoolmaster, and spoils the girls’ party.
If you can get Red Hot for €211.75 in cash but have to pay the €280.61 Base rate in points, part of our 42% gain is simply eaten up by the difference between the rates.
In our example:
€280.61 − €211.75 = €68.86
So nearly a third of the potential gain dissolves in Accor’s marketing department (hello again, Anton Kuznetsov 😎).
That’s why a handsome 42% turns into a far less handsome ~10% of real saving compared with what you could have bought for cash.
Sad?
Yes!
Then why bother with these points at all?
One example from my personal portfolio on my paid channel: near Rome’s FCO there’s a Mercure where special rates never happen.
A free shuttle runs, and the price-to-bonkers ratio is excellent.
There, you can’t use points to chase Red Hot Rooms, because there aren’t any.
In a case like that, points bought “on the Brazilian system, 42% off” genuinely help you survive the price aneurysm known as “the hotel next to the terminal”.
So Accor points are not a magic 42% discount on everything.
They’re a tool, best used where the cash rate can’t hide behind the discount tinsel of French Pères Noël.
And with that, I take my leave.
Off to soak in Phuket.
Do miss me 😘
