Website Spotlight: Priority Club Rewards

Priority Club Rewards is a program to help you earn points for things you'd buy anyway, especially in regards to travel.

You can earn points in any of the following categories:
Hotels - Crowne Plaza, Hotel Indigo, Holiday Inn/Express, Staybridge, Candlewood, and InterContinental (plus other selected ANA partner hotels)
Air Travel - AeroMexico, Alaskan Airlines, American, Continental, Delta, LAN, Mexicana, Northwest, United, and US Airways
Other - Priority Club Visa Card, Hertz Car Rental, Florist.com, FTD, Gift Sense, T-Mobile, Lending Tree, USA Today, and much more

Great, now you've earned points by traveling around the world and using your Visa. But now what? What do you actually get out of the program? Once it's time to redeem your points, you can do so for many different things. Hotel, airline, car rental, magazines, and gift cards are all options, plus a huge variety of good brand-name merchandise from manufacturer's like Bissell, Apple, Canon, Nintendo, Phillips, and more.

Depending on how you pick your rewards, you need between 236 and 750 points per dollar's worth of reward (most things fall in the 300-400 points/dollar range). Hotel vouchers give you the best rate of return at 236 points per dollar (59,000 points for $250 Any Hotel voucher). CDs are 5,000-7,000 points each. Gift certificates work out to 350-400 points per dollar. Using the MSRPs of various items I spot-checked, merchandise redemption works out to about 400-500 points per dollar, with a few exceptions (the Wii rewards are 657-750 points per dollar). You can also bid points in eBay style auctions for a wide variety of goods.

Now, that seems like a lot, but you also earn a lot. On most purchases with the Visa card you get 1 point per dollar (3 points per dollar at selected places), but hotel stays earn up to 10 points/dollar (so a weekend stay for a family could easily earn 1500-2000 points). You can also earn points for shopping through the website for online merchants, and there are many offers on the website that are worth thousands of points.

If you don't do much traveling, it may not be the best rewards program for you. But
if you travel a lot, PCR is definitely something worth checking out!