Hotel Points for Planners: Who Cashes In?

Hotel points earned from booking room blocks for meetings can present ethical challenges when awarded directly to an individual planner instead of an organization. Who gets those free room nights is sometimes anyone’s guess.

Marriott’s Bonvoy loyalty program, the world's largest with more than 200 million members, awards programs to individual members, while others, like World of Hyatt, allow them to create a corporate account to apply points to future events.

Hotels award planners points when they book blocks of hotel rooms, as well as for eligible food and beverage and audio/visual purchases for meetings. This can be a significant number of points: Bonvoy advertises up to 60,000 points per event and up to 105,000 for Titanium Elite and Ambassador Elite members, which go to the individual planner who booked the meeting. In addition, they can earn 1 Elite Night Credit for every 20 room nights booked — up to 20 Elite Night Credits per event. (Attendees can also get points for block rooms they use.)

This leads to various tricky scenarios. Should the planner find a way to separate the rewards account from his or her personal awards account? Should a more senior staff member own the account so he or she can decide how to use the points? What will happen to the points if the account holder leaves the company? Is it acceptable to negotiate points as part of a planner’s compensation?

Marriott’s Tammy Routh, SVP, Global Sales, Marriott International, is aware of the challenges faced by meeting planners and says her company is taking action. “Our B2B customers have shared their concerns with the inability to have an account under their company or organization name. We have heard this feedback and continue to work on potential solutions for the future.”

Different Approaches

Many planners use the points in their personal accounts in various ways for the benefit of the company: VIP travel upgrades, comp rooms for staff, site inspections and staff travel, and last-minute lodging when participants or staff have travel delays. Non-travel uses include speaker gifts, client incentives, disaster relief rooms and employee rewards. Some negotiate double and triple points to reward their team members.

Industry speaker and educator Angela Layton has worked for two companies that handled points in different ways.

“At my old company, the CFO made a second account and all points went to that account and were used for employee travel. But at a different company, a random person in HR managed the account. She changed departments and got to keep all the points instead of using them for travel, as they were intended.”

That was “very frustrating,” she said. “It was unethical for a staff member who wasn’t in executive leadership to manage the reward point accounts because there was no transparency as far as how the points were managed.”

The Hard Line on Ethics

Some individuals feel that keeping hotel points is their right for doing all the heavy lifting for a meeting. “When executives travel and the organizations pay for the travel, the executives personally collect the points. What is the difference?” said Susan Avery, managing director, Andromeda Group.

There’s also the question of whether planners would make hotel decisions based on points or not consider a brand because of its points policy. Many large, publicly held companies have ethics policies that include points, and employees must sign off on their use. Some companies have gift policies, and taking points directly violates those.

For companies without policies, the planner has two choices: use their personal points account or find a workaround. One planner set up an account under her name but using a different account number than her personal account. The points from all contracts she signs go to that account, which she makes publicly accessible in her office.

The Events Industry Council’s CMP Code of Ethics outlines the points' ethics. New Certified Meeting Professionals (CMPs) agree to never use their position “for undue personal gain and to promptly disclose to appropriate parties all potential and actual conflicts of interest.”

Planner Pamela Esbrandt Wynne teaches the Meeting Professionals International (MPI) Basics Boot Camp: Meeting Fundamentals and has been an educator for over 20 years. “This is an ethics issue. There is a huge difference between you getting points for your own personal travel and the meeting planner points for a 500-person meeting worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The janitor or the admin or finance teams work just as hard for a program or a company as a meeting planner. Why are you entitled to the points that your company is spending money for?”