A-Club Rewards Points

Readers will recall I spent two months staying at the Novotel in Hyderabad, India last year. Novotel is part of Accor Hotels. Knowing I would be spending 54 nights at the hotel, I joined their A-Club rewards loyalty program. Doing so resulted in gold status and over 14,000 points. Now the question how to reap rewards.

There are few hotels in the United States where I could enjoy my gold status or redeem points. Accor is primarily a European chain of hotels, and their main brand in North America, Motel 6, is not part of the A-Club rewards program. There are a couple choices in New York City, but I decided to look closer to home. I found a Novotel in downtown Toronto, Canada within driving distance of my home in Rochester, NY, and withing walking distance of many sites in Toronto. So now I'd found a where, but still had to figure out how to redeem points.

I've never redeemed hotel points before, but A-Club made it very simple. There are no tiers or blackout dates as I'd imagine in other programs. Instead, A-Club let's you trade in points for vouchers that you simply use to pay your bill at a participating Accor hotel. Every 2,000 points is worth $60, so I got $420 in value for 14,000 of my points. That will cover the better part of three nights at the Novotel in Toronto. I simply logged into www.a-club.com, chose to redeem for vouchers, and selected how many points to redeem. Moments later, my order had been processed and I opened a PDF file with seven $60 vouchers and printed them.