It's been crazy recently, even though my team travels all the time and usually, our hotel visits are totally standard. I have a ton of points and often use them to cover travel so we don't have to pay anything, but honestly, this one place made it ridiculously difficult. You'd think being a Diamond Elite member with Choice Hotels would get you a little special treatment, but nope. Most Choice Hotels are easy to deal with when using points, but the requirements at this location felt completely extreme. For starters, they demanded a $100 cash deposit from my field engineer who was staying on my points. I called them up, even sent my driver's license via a secure email—which they could see and take a photo of, but couldn't print—and the only solution they offered was for me to book through a third-party site like Hotels.com. After all that hassle, I'm just absolutely done and lost for words. We will never be returning, and they've completely lost our business.
It's been crazy recently, even though my team travels all the time and usually, our hotel visits are totally standard. I have a ton of points and often use them to cover travel so we don't have to pay anything, but honestly, this one place made it ridiculously difficult. You'd think being a Diamond Elite member with Choice Hotels would get you a little special treatment, but nope. Most Choice Hotels are easy to deal with when using points, but the requirements at this location felt completely extreme. For starters, they demanded a $100 cash deposit from my field engineer who was staying on my points. I called them up, even sent my driver's license via a secure email—which they could see and take a photo of, but couldn't print—and the only solution they offered was for me to book through a third-party site like Hotels.com. After all that hassle, I'm just absolutely done and lost for words. We will never be returning, and they've completely lost our business.