How we rank “worth it”
Most award tools show you a price. The real question is harder. Beating cash is a low bar — almost every redemption clears it — so it tells you little. A stay can be worth more than cash and still be a mediocre use of a scarce cert: spend your one annual Free Night here and you miss the hotel where it would’ve been worth twice as much. So the question isn’t “is this positive?” — it’s which hotels are the best uses of your points, free-night certs, and card credits, measured against everywhere else that program could go. Stayplot answers that with one data-backed number, graded on each program’s own curve — and it’s the heart of Plus.
The problem
A free-night certificate or an award redemption is only as good as the hotel and date you spend it on. Chains don’t tell you this — and the stakes are real: burn an 85k Marriott Free Night on a $180 night and you’ve quietly wasted most of it; the same cert on a $700 peak night is a steal. Multiply that across five programs and a year of dates and “is this worth it?” is genuinely hard.
How we score it
The right yardstick depends on the currency, so we use two — each matched to how that program’s points actually deliver value:
Scarce points & free-night certs — Hilton, Marriott, IHG. Here the prize is absolute dollars, so we score the net cash surplus of a redemption: the night’s cash − any top-off points × the program’s point value − the cert’s own cost. We value each hotel at its 90th-percentile bookable night (Hilton: its standard-room going rate, which we sample for every hotel) — a value it reaches regularly, not one freak date.
Cheap, flat points — Wyndham, Choice. A Go-Free or SRD award is a fixed tier and the points are easy to pile up, so what matters isn’t total dollars saved but efficiency: how much cash each point buys. We score the hotel’s median value per point (¢/pt) — the cash a night costs ÷ the flat award — across all priced future dates. We use the median, not a best night, so the badge means a hotel is consistently good value (every hotel has one pricey date — a best-night metric would flag almost everything). This rewards a $200 night at a 7.5k tier (≈2.7¢/pt) over a $300 night at 30k (1.0¢/pt) — the cheaper tier is the better use of the points, which a dollar-surplus score gets backwards.
A few guards make both honest: we cap each night at 2.5× the hotel’s own median (for the $ chains) and require ≥20 priced nights (for the ¢/pt chains) so one freak date can’t game the rank; we drop FX/data glitches; and we only rank hotels at a TripAdvisor rating of 4.0+. Then the grading is one rule everywhere: a hotel is worthy when the redemption is net-positive — it beats what the cert or points would return anyway. Among worthy hotels, 💎 great = the top 30% (70th percentile) and 🏆 trophy = the top 10% (90th percentile), on each cert’s own curve — so a trophy is comparably exceptional whether it’s a Hilton Free Night or a Choice award.
The smart filter shows every use where you come out ahead — solid, great, and trophy — because a net-positive redemption is a real win worth seeing. The percentile grading then tells you how good: 💎 great and 🏆 trophy are the standouts, badged so they pop, while a solid use is a net-positive night you’d still be glad to book. Only skip — where a cert doesn’t beat cash — is left off.
On the site these tiers appear as the verdicts you’ll see on hotel pages: 🏆 trophy = “Top-tier burn”, 💎 great = “Strong burn”, solid = “Solid value”, and skip = “Save it for somewhere better.”
| Cert / award | Assumed cost | 💎 great ≥ | 🏆 trophy ≥ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hilton Free Night | $280 (what a low-effort burn returns) | $275 | $615 |
| Marriott 35k FN | $225 | $100 | $205 |
| Marriott 50k FN | $320 | $125 | $260 |
| Marriott 85k FN | $545 | $215 | $410 |
| IHG 40k Free Night | $200 | $35 | $70 |
| Hyatt Cat 1-4 FN | $250 | $100 | $175 |
| Hyatt Cat 1-7 FN | $300 | $175 | $360 |
| Wyndham Go-Free | 0.7¢/pt (the points' cost) | 0.95¢ | 1.25¢ |
| Choice free night | 0.7¢/pt (the points' cost) | 1.15¢ | 1.45¢ |
(Net surplus per redemption, USD. Hyatt award nights are points-only, so a category-capped free-night cert is valued by the cash it replaces on the priciest standard-award night its category covers.)
Why you can trust it
- It’s computed from a live rate scan across the whole portfolio — a year of forward dates for tens of thousands of hotels — refreshed regularly. Not a blog’s anecdotes or a static “best uses” list.
- One method everywhere. The same net-surplus rule and percentile calibration runs for every chain, so a trophy is a trophy whether it’s a Hilton or a Wyndham.
- We show our work: the per-hotel value, the best date, and the math behind each verdict are right there on the hotel page.
- No affiliate kickbacks. Nothing is ranked higher because it pays us — you click out and book directly with the chain.
Where it shows up
- Leaderboards — the best hotels for each cert, ranked by this value. See the boards →
- “Worth it” filters — narrow the whole map to the hotels where your cert clears the worth-it bar (solid and up — only “skip” is left off).
- The per-hotel badge — 🏆/💎 on the map pin popup, your saved list, and the hotel page.
- The Read — the full per-hotel rate analysis: value, points-vs-cash, and the best dates to book.
It’s the heart of Plus
The facts — points price, ratings, which programs cover a hotel — are free forever. This verdict (the badge, the smart filters, and The Read) is what Plus adds: instead of guessing, you see the few hotels actually worth your points and certs. One well-placed free night usually pays for a year of Plus.