points

I like how everything is turning to a point system. It seems that any store you go to wants to give you a reward card that you can earn points through to get free stuff or discounts or whatever. Actually it's really annoying because I have to keep buying a new wallet to hold all my freaking discount or reward cards or whatever they are.

I much prefer the stores who will just let you give them your phone number and track it that way. There are some programs that I am part of and every time I enter my phone number it gives some other random name. So some other person is accumulating points because of me but I don't care enough to have it corrected. I'm lazy. I don't want to have to dig through my wallet and find your card, I don't care if I give you the wrong phone number and someone else gets the points, I also don't care to come to your restaurant 10 times before I can get a discount. Airline points seem to be the hardest to accumulate because you just want to fly whatever is cheapest. It's hard to do this on the same airline every time you go somewhere. But right now I am pledging my allegiance to a certain company that I think will prove to be very rewarding.

The conference that I coordinated a few weeks ago was held at the Doubletree Hotel which is part of the Hilton family. With the Hilton HHonors program (I don't know why they use 2 H's but they do) they give event planners points based on your final bill. The great thing about HHonors is they allow you to do what they call 'Double Dip'®—you can also score airline miles. Now typically they give 10 points per dollar spent on a hotel stay for HHonors and then 1 mile per dollar spent to your participating airline frequent flyer program. For event planners you get 1 point per dollar + 1 airline mile per dollar…the conference bill came in at just over $80K…do you really think they will give me 80,000 airline miles??? There is always that small print that says, "Other restrictions may apply". But seriously if I do get this many miles as well as hotel points……Joshua, we are going on a nice trip soon!

It is 60,000 points to stay at a Waldorf-Astoria in high season and 40K in low. But it is only 7,500 to stay at a low scale Hilton such as a Hampton Inn. A "free" ticket on my airline starts at 25,000 miles.

So today I am praying that God chooses to bless us with this opportunity because we are trying to savesavesave and paypaypay off debt and a vacation isn't necessarily in the budget this year but we would really love one.