Wyndham Rewards, Less Rewarding

When it comes to building a winning loyalty program, Wyndham has the key ingredient: a network of almost 7,000 hotels, all over the world, at a wide range of price points.

What Wyndham lacks, however, is a commitment to consumer-friendly policies and practices.

In particular, Wyndham has recently made two moves that significantly devalue its Wyndham Rewards program. And both were made with no advance notice to program members.

First, the program added a ninth tier to its award chart.

Second, the program doubled the number of points required for points-to-miles conversions.

There’s no information on the Wyndham website announcing or explaining the new policies. Program members only learned of the changes if they happened to read travel blogs, or travel forums like FlyerTalk.

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Program devaluations are a fact of travel life. We’ve seen negative program changes from most of the major hotel chains during the past 12 months. But most programs give their members a heads up that, for example, award-price increases are coming. That’s common courtesy. And ethical business practice.

With the two recent changes to its program, Wyndham has treated its members neither courteously nor ethically.

Caveat emptor.

Reader Reality Check

What do you expect from your loyalty program when new policies are implemented?

This article originally appeared on FrequentFlier.com.