My wife and I both travel for business. With travel policies being what they are, different companies often have different preferences in terms of airlines and hotels. As a result, she frequently flies American Airlines while I flew United for many years (I stopped flying United after being repeatedly stuck in their crappy base level of service despite having status). As you can imagine, this often raises question marks about what airline to fly on and what hotel to stay at when we travel as a family.
To a certain extent, it's easy to correlate travel loyalty programs to individuals because the airline's business is measured by seats. One butt equals one seat equals one account. Over many years of travel, I never really questioned this idea. At the same time when it comes to travel loyalty programs, over the years, I've primarily been focused on airlines. Hotels and hotel loyalty programs have always been more of an afterthought. One key reason for this is that, while it's not too difficult to use a primary airline for your travel (assuming that they go to most of the locations that you go), your hotel options aren't going to be as clear-cut. For example, if you attend a lot of business conferences, you'll probably find them hosted at different hotel chains. If you travel somewhere like Las Vegas for an event and you stay in a casino hotel, it probably won't be in any of your hotel loyalty programs. And if you're traveling internationally or, at the other end of the spectrum, to rural locations, your hotel options may be limited. So, for me, hotel loyalty programs were always more about hoping the hotel would treat you a little better than a generic guest.
Some Airlines Offer Family Accounts
Last year, I happened to find myself booking a flight on British Airways (you might remember some of my British Airways pricing posts). At that time, I signed up for the British Airways loyalty program. In reading through their account info, I discovered that they let you sign up your entire family and accumulate miles in a pooled account. It turns out that several international airlines offer these kinds of loyalty programs. I also since learned that JetBlue has a family loyalty program, an unusual offering among domestic carriers and yet another reason to like them as an airline.
Recently, while discussing some aspects of our business travel, my wife and I began wondering if the hotels we often stay at offered family loyalty programs.
Here's the thing, when we travel together, we each can benefit from our individual airline mileage accounts. However, when we get to the hotel, only one of us can benefit. Sharing a room means that one of us loses. This year, for example, we've spent six days in Marriott properties, but my wife gets no credit for that time. In that same way, when she travels, there is no incentive for her to book a Marriott property since she won't have been credited for any of the stays that we've had as a family. In fact, you could argue that it's better for her to book stays in another hotel chain such that, when we travel as a family, we have multiple options for status-upgraded stays.
Perhaps the hotel programs look at things from the standpoint of trying to "avoid" giving out benefits to "people who haven't earned it". Perhaps they're looking at it from the perspective of "spouses don't travel for business very much" or "what's the point of incentivizing the wife we already have the business of the husband?" At the same time, if I'm a traveler with hotel chain loyalty status, what's my perception when my spouse stays at your hotel chain and receives a "lesser" experience?
In short, this lack of offering a family loyalty account at the hotel chains is a real customer relations failure on their part. This really seems like something designed in the framework of "the husband travels and works, the wife stays at home." When you break it down in that context, it seems pretty bad.
