UPODATE 8/6/2013 10AM: My AMC Gold Movie Ticket arrived today, only 3 days after I ordered it online.

What will 2,000 Best Western Reward Points get you? (Not much).

Every now and then, there will be a promo to open a new hotel loyalty account and earn a few thousand hotel points.  I always jump on the promo, regardless if I have every stayed at the hotel chain, heard of the hotel chain, or am planning on staying at the hotel chain.  Free points are free points.  Unfortunately, if you are like me, you end up with several accounts with very few points.  What do you do with the points?  Ideally, you would want to redeem them for a free night, but that is not gunna happen with only a handful of points.  Your next best option is to transfer the hotel points to a frequent flyer program.  Unfortunately, depending on the hotel program, you need a certain number of points to transfer to a frequent flyer program.  Last but not least, redeem for SOMETHING!  As you will see below, aside from Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, and SPG, I have very small balances of hotel points.

What’s a guy to do?

Right off the bat, I can ignore programs that have 0 points.  That leaves me with Best Western (I should have taken a screen shot before I planned on writing this article), 2 Club Carlson accounts, and La Quinta.  To redeem Best Western points for frequent flyer miles, I would need 6,500 points.  Unfortunately, I only have 2,000.  To my surprise, the only thing I can get is an AMC Gold Movie Ticket for exactly 2,000 points.

I decide to purchase the ticket and fill in my home address.

After purchasing the ticket, my Best Western account has 0 points left.

I also received a confirmation email from Best Western.

There is 1 AMC theater close to me, but I have never gone to that theater.  If I decide to sell the ticket on Ebay, I might get around $10, before fees and shipping.

Sometimes buying points to redeem for a free night or to transfer to a frequent flyer program is worth it.  In this case, I could have bought 1,000 Best Western points for $10.  If I bought 3,000 points ($30), I would have 5,000 points, which is worth 1,200 Southwest Airline miles (2.50 CPM) or 1,000 Alaska, American, Delta, or US Airways miles (3.00 CPM) – neither of which is that great of a price in my book.

So there it is folks, redeeming free points for SOMETHING is better than keeping them and not redeeming them.  Have you exchanged hotel points for anything before?  Let me know in the comments.

UPODATE 8/6/2013 10AM: My AMC Gold Movie Ticket arrived today, only 3 days after I ordered it online.