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Comment by dcrazy | Hacker News Reader

Some large chains will only give you rewards points or honor your status if you book directly.

My wife and I just spent several days finding and booking hotels for a 2 week trip with several stops. We searched on aggregators (Booking’s “king size bed” filter was particularly useful) but always defaulted to booking directly with the hotel. Oddly enough, one hotel had no means of booking directly; they only supported booking through an aggregator. One other hotel was offering the same price via Chase Travel, so I took the extra bonus Chase points.

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No hotels that I’m aware of will give you loyalty points unless you book directly. You can also get more loyalty points by using a cobranded hotel card. But only by booking directly.

I’ve had mixed success asking to add my loyalty number at check-in, even if I already provided it to the aggregator.

I stay in IHG hotels a fair amount booked through work's travel agent - indeed I'm about to check in to one when the train gets in. Always get the points and credited stay.

Don't get them if you book it through booking.com or similar though (although hotels.com at least used to give you a 10% cashback as a credit for free nights, which is handy when you can't stay in one chain)

Booking through something like Concur is different. Concur doesn’t charge the hotel a fee for booking through them. Concur gets paid by the company.

I bet Concur gets paid for having slow page loads and thereby discouraging employee travel. It's the only explanation.

RIU hotels does. If you are part of their program after you stay you can go to your profile and add points for previous stays that weren't booked through them

source: staying now in the hotel and done it ;)

And some booking websites will also give you rewards points and free hotel stays.

Yes, but when you show up to your hotel across the world and they can’t find your reservation or they gave your room away because they didn’t know you were arriving after at 8pm, they then tell you to take it up with your third party booking company.

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