As I mentioned in the Radisson 50,000 Point post and the Carlson 88,000 Point post, Club Carlson is having a great promotion right now that I just took advantage of over the weekend during a trip to Orlando. Here are the results!
As you can see, I stayed at the Radisson-Celebration and the Country Inn-Universal Blvd which were pretty close to each other. I started out by going to TopCashBack and clicking through to Radisson.com. This gave me 10% cashback on whatever I paid for the rooms. Once there, I looked for Orlando and found the hotel prices on those dates. The Radisson Celebration was $89 a night or 5,000 points+$53 and the Country Inn was $84 or 5000 points+$59. Since I had some points still in my account from the last 50K giveaway, I considered both options. One way to look at it was I was getting 50,000 points for $89 or 45,000 (the 50,000 for the offer minus the 5,000 for the cash+points option) for $54. So when I was deciding which to choose, I did a quick calculation of the cost per point for both options. With Radisson it came out $89/50,000=0.178 cents/point or $54/45,000=0.117 cents/point. The math worked out similarly on the Country Inn stay. I decided to do the cash and points option to minimize my out of pocket cost and give me the lowest possible cost per point.
The Radisson was quite nice with a resort feel and a beautiful pool with water slides that I unfortunately wasn’t able to take advantage of. Since I have Silver Elite status with Carlson (which I status matched from my Hilton Gold status a while back), when I checked in they upgraded me from the basic room to a sleep number bed room. I didn’t like the bed that much (it felt like a under or overinflated air mattress to me), but a free upgrade is always nice!
The Country Inn was more of a no frills hotel, but it was still fine. The buffet breakfast that was included was top notch though with a waffle maker, juices, eggs etc. I had noticed while booking that they offered a whirlpool suite there. When I was checking in, I asked due to my status about a room upgrade to the whirlpool suite and the guy checked and gave it to me! He mentioned that there was only one whirlpool suite in the whole hotel which was a nice treat. I think a good way to fish for upgrades is to already have which room you want in mind when you are checking in (by looking at the web site ahead of time) and ask for that room directly rather than taking what they offer.
I still have the Park Inn that I could get another 44,000 points for, but it might be a challenge since the closest one to South Florida is in Texas. But stay tuned! 🙂
