The hotel desk
Every hotel programme an Indian card can reach, read from the hotel end rather than the card end — what feeds it, what one of its points actually costs you, and whether buying beats earning this week. Hotel points are the most-asked question in this market and the least served; this is the answer with the arithmetic shown.
This is the chain view. The card ranking is the other end.
13 chains · 40 direct routes · 58 cards · pricing models read 2026-08-29
the chain board · buy or earn · what a night costs · the method
One transfer on this desk turns hotel points into more money than went in: HSBC Reward Points into Accor Live Limitless (ALL) at 1:1 — ₹1.00 of bank points becomes ₹2.15 of hotel value. Every other hotel route on this board loses value crossing it.
13
hotel programmes we price
40
direct card→hotel routes, + 18 hops
58
cards that reach at least one
7
of them publish what a night costs
Ordered by how many Indian cards can actually reach the programme, which is the order a reader standing in front of a wallet needs. Ordering by what a point is worth would crown Shangri-La Circle at ₹6.35 — a programme 10 cards on this desk can reach — over the one 44 of them feed. "Costs you" is the rupee value of the bank points the cheapest route spends to land one point of the chain's own currency.
Every points sale this desk tracks, priced against two things: our own mark on the point, and the rupee value of the bank points the cheapest Indian route spends to land the same point. The second comparison is the one nobody publishes, and it is the one that decides. All 13 verdicts are computed — none of these sentences is hand-written per sale.
buy IHG One Rewards ₹0.48 a point
₹0.48 a point at the 100% tier, 14% BELOW our ₹0.55 mark, and it undercuts every Indian route in: the cheapest transfer, Axis EDGE Miles (one of 5 at that price), spends ₹1.00 of points you already hold per point. Buying beats earning here before you have even picked a redemption. That window closed on 17 Aug 2026; this is the record of it, not a live call.
buy IHG One Rewards ₹0.48 a point
₹0.48 a point at the 100% tier, 14% BELOW our ₹0.55 mark, and it undercuts every Indian route in: the cheapest transfer, Axis EDGE Miles (one of 5 at that price), spends ₹1.00 of points you already hold per point. Buying beats earning here before you have even picked a redemption. That window closed on 16 Jul 2026; this is the record of it, not a live call.
only way in Alaska Airlines Atmos Rewards ₹1.79 a point
₹1.79 a point at the 100% tier, 79% above our ₹1.00 mark. No Indian card on this desk reaches Alaska Airlines Atmos Rewards at all, so a sale is one of the only bulk ways in — which is a reason to buy against an award you have already found, never a reason to hold. That window closed on 20 Aug 2026; this is the record of it, not a live call.
only way in Alaska Airlines Atmos Rewards ₹1.79 a point
₹1.79 a point at the 100% tier, 79% above our ₹1.00 mark. No Indian card on this desk reaches Alaska Airlines Atmos Rewards at all, so a sale is one of the only bulk ways in — which is a reason to buy against an award you have already found, never a reason to hold. That window closed on 5 Jul 2026; this is the record of it, not a live call.
only way in American Airlines AAdvantage ₹1.79 a point
₹1.79 a point at the 100% tier, 79% above our ₹1.00 mark. No Indian card on this desk reaches American Airlines AAdvantage at all, so a sale is one of the only bulk ways in — which is a reason to buy against an award you have already found, never a reason to hold. That window closed on 22 Jul 2026; this is the record of it, not a live call.
targeted Avianca LifeMiles ₹1.36 a point
₹1.36 a point at the 130% tier, 36% above our ₹1.00 mark — but still cheaper than moving points: the best Indian route, HDFC Reward Points, costs ₹2.00 of bank points per point. Worth it only against an award you have already priced above ₹1.36 a point. That window closed on 24 Jul 2026; this is the record of it, not a live call.
skip Air France-KLM Flying Blue ₹1.61 a point
₹1.61 a point at the 80% tier, 61% above our ₹1.00 mark. Skip it: Axis EDGE Miles (one of 5 at that price) transfers in at ₹1.00 of points per point, so the cheapest Air France-KLM Flying Blue point on this desk is one you already own. That window closed on 28 Jul 2026; this is the record of it, not a live call.
skip Avios (BA / Qatar / Finnair) ₹1.56 a point
₹1.56 a point at the 40% tier, 56% above our ₹1.00 mark. Skip it: Amex Membership Rewards (one of 4 at that price) transfers in at ₹1.00 of points per point, so the cheapest Avios (BA / Qatar / Finnair) point on this desk is one you already own. That window closed on 16 Jul 2026; this is the record of it, not a live call.
skip Emirates Skywards ₹2.28 a point
₹2.28 a point at the 25% tier, 153% above our ₹0.90 mark. Skip it: Amex Membership Rewards transfers in at ₹1.00 of points per point, so the cheapest Emirates Skywards point on this desk is one you already own. That window closed on 22 Aug 2026; this is the record of it, not a live call.
skip Hilton Honors ₹0.48 a point
₹0.48 a point at the 100% tier, 19% above our ₹0.40 mark. Skip it: Amex Membership Rewards transfers in at ₹0.33 of points per point, so the cheapest Hilton Honors point on this desk is one you already own. That window closed on 25 Sep 2026; this is the record of it, not a live call.
skip Hilton Honors ₹0.48 a point
₹0.48 a point at the 100% tier, 19% above our ₹0.40 mark. Skip it: Amex Membership Rewards transfers in at ₹0.33 of points per point, so the cheapest Hilton Honors point on this desk is one you already own. That window closed on 24 Jul 2026; this is the record of it, not a live call.
skip Marriott Bonvoy ₹0.79 a point
₹0.79 a point at the 50% tier, 21% above our ₹0.65 mark. Skip it: Amex Membership Rewards transfers in at ₹0.50 of points per point, so the cheapest Marriott Bonvoy point on this desk is one you already own. That window closed on 9 Sep 2026; this is the record of it, not a live call.
skip United MileagePlus ₹1.79 a point
₹1.79 a point at the 95% tier, 79% above our ₹1.00 mark. Skip it: Axis EDGE Miles (one of 2 at that price) transfers in at ₹1.00 of points per point, so the cheapest United MileagePlus point on this desk is one you already own. That window closed on 20 Aug 2026; this is the record of it, not a live call.
The uncomfortable pattern, and the reason this section exists rather than a price board: 7 of 13 programmes publish any price for a stay, and the four with the widest Indian transfer access publish nothing. Where a programme does publish, the numbers are here verbatim. Where it does not, the row says so.
Accor Live Limitless (ALL) published fixed rate
Accor's own page states the rate in five characters — "1.000 PTS = 20€" — and states no minimum and no step rule beyond it. Points settle against the bill rather than buying a rate class, so they stack on a member rate or a private sale. At EUR/INR ≈109.8 that is ₹2.20 a point against our deliberately conservative ₹2.15 house mark. This is the only chain on the board where "what is my point worth" has a published answer that does not move.
the programme's own page · read 2026-08-29
IHG One Rewards no chart — dynamic
IHG dropped its published chart in 2022 and prices Reward Nights off the cash rate, so there is no table to print. What its own Redemption Options page does publish is a FLOOR — "book a Reward Night at 7,000+ destinations worldwide, starting at just 10,000 points" — and a standing 15% discount on Reward Nights at new and renovated hotels. Read from a 21 August 2026 Wayback capture, because ihg.com answers a live browser-UA fetch with a 403; the date above is the CAPTURE day. A floor is not a chart: it is the cheapest night IHG will admit to anywhere in the world on any date, and the reader's actual night is set by the cash rate. Treat 10,000 as the best case that exists, never as a price.
the programme's own page · read 2026-08-21
Wyndham Rewards published flat tiers
Wyndham's own Redeem page, re-read live 2026-09-25 — "four simple free night tiers—5,000, 15,000, 30,000, or 45,000 points per bedroom". The tier-update notice says free nights "start at 5,000 points (instead of 7,500)" and "our most elevated hotels are now in a new 45,000-point tier." Discounted nights start at 500 points plus cash, down from 750. The 20 August 2026 capture that this row used to cite still showed the three-tier chart and a notice that the change would land on 15 September; that notice has now been priced.
the programme's own page · read 2026-09-25
Radisson Rewards no chart — dynamic
Dynamic pricing cut the programme 25–50% against the old scheme (Head for Points' arithmetic, carried on the currency record). Radisson's own award pages were not re-read for this pass, and no chart is claimed.
Hilton Honors no chart — dynamic
Dynamic, no published chart, and structurally the most inflated economy on the board — which is the whole reason its house mark is ₹0.40 and its buy price is repeatedly ABOVE that. hilton.com answered 403 to this pass, and the 2026-08-29 archive pass that unblocked Hyatt, Wyndham and IHG did NOT unblock this one: the newest Wayback capture of Hilton's Points page is from 19 January 2026, 222 days old, and it names no price for a night at all. That is 102 days past the 120-day budget this desk gives an archived award price, so nothing is printed here. Note what the silence is and is not: it is a statement about the two Hilton pages that are archived, not a proof that Hilton publishes nothing anywhere.
Orchid Rewards published fixed rate
The operator's own T&C prices a Petal outright — "Value of each Petal is Re.1 at Participating Hotels and Participating Restaurants, also Petals are available for redemption on Orchid Rewards store with 2 Petals = Re.1" — and that quote is carried, with its provenance, on the currency record in data/currencies.yaml. It was not re-read for this pass, so no URL or accessed date is asserted here; the pricing model is established, the numbers are quoted where they were verified.
The Postcard Sunshine Club published fixed rate
Points offset the invoice one-for-one in rupees, which is why this is the only currency on the index whose floor and ceiling are the same number. The mechanic is community-established (TechnoFino) rather than read off a published tariff; The Postcard Hotel publishes no programme document we have found. Nothing is claimed here beyond the model.
Marriott Bonvoy no chart — dynamic
Fully dynamic since March 2025 — the category chart is gone and Marriott publishes no replacement. What it DOES publish are two structural rules that survive dynamic pricing, and they are the only fixed facts left: the fifth night of an award stay is free (a flat 20% off whatever the algorithm demands), and the HDFC co-brand's Free Night Award redeems at 15,000 points with a 25,000-point top-up. Everything else is an estimate, including our own ₹0.65 house mark.
the programme's own page · read 2026-07-10
Club ITC published fixed rate
ITC publishes fixed rates for everything EXCEPT the thing a reader wants — the room. Gift cards, vouchers and the Culinaire membership all carry a printed rupee rate; the stay redemption is described only as "redeem your Club ITC Green Points online at ITC Hotels Website or App", with no points-per-night anywhere on the page. So the published floor under a Green Point is ₹0.80 and the stay upside above it is unpriced by ITC itself. The same page also prints the Bonvoy exit — 2 Green Points = 3 Bonvoy points — which is exactly the 2:3 ratio data/partner-transfers.yaml carries.
the programme's own page · read 2026-08-29
Shangri-La Circle published fixed rate
The EARN side is a published peg — 15 points per US$1 — and that is what the ₹6.35 house mark is computed from. The REDEMPTION side is a different document and it was not read: Shangri-La's site is a client-rendered single-page app, which data/currencies.yaml's own header already records as unfetchable. Pricing is marked fixed on the strength of the earn peg alone.
Jumeirah One no chart — dynamic
Revenue-based Dubai luxury with no published tariff; the ≈₹1 mark is the midpoint of two community estimates (Head for Points near 0.5p, Wingtips near 1.5p), which is why the floor-to-ceiling band is the widest on the hotel index. Treat it as a stay discount, not a chart.
Taj Reward Points not established
Not established. Taj's programme is reached only by holding its own co-branded card — no transfer route on this desk feeds it and no hop lands in it — so it has never been on a pricing pass. The gap is real and it is named here rather than filled.
World of Hyatt published category chart
The best hotel chart in the world and the one no Indian card can reach: nothing on this desk transfers into Hyatt, and the single graph route in (Aeroplan → Hyatt 2:1) is Aeroplan-Elite-gated, so the router refuses it. Read from a 15 July 2026 Wayback capture of Hyatt's own Free Nights & Upgrades page, because world.hyatt.com answers every live fetch with a 403/429 — the archived capture is the same published document, retrieved from a different shelf, and the date above is the CAPTURE day, not the day the desk looked. THE CHART MOVED ON 20 MAY 2026 and this row was a version behind until 29 August 2026: the old three-column off-peak/standard/peak grid (category 1 at 3,500/5,000/6,500, category 8 at 35,000/40,000/45,000) became five levels — Lowest, Low, Moderate, Upper, Top. Categories still run 1–8. The bottom got cheaper and the top got 67% more expensive, which is why the five anchors above quote both corners rather than an average. Full standard-room chart, per night: cat 1 3,000/4,500/6,000/7,500/9,000 · cat 2 6,000/7,500/10,000/12,000/15,000 · cat 3 8,000/12,000/15,000/17,500/20,000 · cat 4 12,000/15,000/20,000/22,500/25,000 · cat 5 15,000/20,000/25,000/30,000/35,000 · cat 6 20,000/25,000/30,000/35,000/40,000 · cat 7 25,000/30,000/35,000/45,000/55,000 · cat 8 35,000/45,000/55,000/65,000/75,000. Club, standard-suite and premium-suite charts sit alongside it and are not carried here. The realistic Indian door is Aeroplan itself, which books Hyatt category 1–4 nights directly.
the programme's own page · read 2026-07-15
Per-night award prices on the dynamic chains are not a document, they are a query against a logged-in search endpoint that returns a different number per property, per date and per member. Scripting it is the ToS line this desk does not cross, and quarterly hand-sampling was scoped and then NOT started. What HAS changed is that the two chains which publish a chart no longer have to be guessed at: Hyatt's and Wyndham's own pages were read out of the Internet Archive on 2026-08-29 and their numbers are above, each carrying the capture date rather than today's. That is a published chart honestly dated, not a sampled band — an archived price is still only a price on the day it was captured, and this desk gives one 120 days before it stops counting. The hand-sampling protocol is written down anyway, so the day someone samples by hand it is mechanical: see docs/research/hotel-award-sampling.md. Until then /hotels shows what the programmes publish and says plainly where that is nothing.
Last attempted 2026-08-29: world.hyatt.com 403/429 live to a full browser-UA curl. CLEARED via the archive: the chart lives at /rewards/free-nights-upgrades.html and its 2026-07-15 capture carries the whole category 1–8 grid. · wyndhamhotels.com 301 then 404 live, to a browser-UA curl. CLEARED via the archive: the live path is /wyndham-rewards/redeem and its 2026-08-20 capture prints the three tiers verbatim. · ihg.com 403 live. CLEARED via the archive: /redeem-rewards, captured 2026-08-21, publishes the 10,000-point floor. · hilton.com 403 live, and NOT cleared: the newest archived Hilton Honors points page is 222 days old and names no nightly price.
The whole graph, chain by chain, ordered inside each chain by what a point costs to acquire. "Retains" is what the transfer does to the money: above 1.00 it multiplies, below it destroys. A hop is a second leg out of another programme and pays a second haircut, so it is listed apart and marked when nothing on this desk feeds its source.
Accor Live Limitless (ALL) ₹2.15 a point · 44 cards reach it
IHG One Rewards ₹0.55 a point · 40 cards reach it
Wyndham Rewards ₹0.65 a point · 40 cards reach it
Radisson Rewards ₹0.22 a point · 33 cards reach it
Hilton Honors ₹0.40 a point · 33 cards reach it
Orchid Rewards ₹1.00 a point · 30 cards reach it
The Postcard Sunshine Club ₹1.00 a point · 27 cards reach it
Marriott Bonvoy ₹0.65 a point · 21 cards reach it
Club ITC ₹1.00 a point · 12 cards reach it
Shangri-La Circle ₹6.35 a point · 10 cards reach it
Jumeirah One ₹1.00 a point · 3 cards reach it
Taj Reward Points ₹0.85 a point · 1 cards reach it
No transfer route in. The only door is the co-brand card itself: HSBC Taj.
World of Hyatt ₹1.50 a point · 0 cards reach it
No Indian card transfers into this programme, and no co-brand earns it.
The acquisition cost of one hotel point is the house value of the bank points you give up to land it: the source currency's ₹/point divided by how many hotel points one of its points becomes. Amex Membership Rewards move into Bonvoy at 1:1 and we mark an MR point at ₹0.50, so a Bonvoy point costs ₹0.50 of Membership Rewards. It is not rupees of spend — that is the separate, plainer number in the last column of the board, which is what you actually have to swipe on the best card for that chain. The two are never mixed in one sentence, because only the first can be compared to a cash price.
Two comparisons, both computed: the sale's price per point against our house mark on that point, and against the cheapest Indian route's acquisition cost. A sale that beats both is a buy before you have picked a hotel. A sale that beats only the routes is worth it against an award you have already priced. A sale that beats neither loses to points you already own. Where several routes tie at the same cost — five do, into IHG — the sentence says so rather than presenting a tie-break as a preference.
A program-to-program hop pays a second haircut and is never folded into "the cheapest way in". Hops are priced on their base ratio, with any volume bonus shown beside it as its own block — those bonuses land only at whole multiples, so spreading one across a rate invents points that never arrive. And a hop gated behind foreign elite status is not a route: the only door into World of Hyatt in this entire graph needs Aeroplan Elite, which is why Hyatt reads here as unreachable from India.
No scraped award prices, no guessed bands, no invented nightly rates. Hotel award pricing on the dynamic chains is a query against a logged-in search endpoint, not a document — the same line this desk holds on airline availability. Where a programme publishes a chart we read the chart; where it does not, the page says nothing. The attempt log for the chains that DO publish and still refused every fetch is on this page, dated, above.
4 Indian bank currencies transfer into Bonvoy — Amex Membership Rewards at 1:1, HSBC Reward Points at 1:1, HDFC Reward Points at 2:1, Kotak Air Miles at 3:1 — and 21 cards on this desk can feed one of them. The cheapest is Amex Membership Rewards: at 1:1 a Bonvoy point costs you ₹0.50 of points you already hold, against our ₹0.65 mark on the Bonvoy point itself. There is also one co-brand card that earns Bonvoy points outright, and 10 program-to-program hops in.
On acquisition cost, Accor Live Limitless (ALL). HSBC Reward Points moves into it at 1:1, so ₹1.00 of bank points becomes ₹2.15 of hotel value — the only transfer on this desk that more than doubles the money. Every other hotel route on the board loses value on the way across, which is the honest headline: hotel transfers are usually a way to reach a redemption, not a way to make one.
Sometimes, and it is arithmetic rather than opinion. A transfer is not free — the bank points you move had a value — so the comparison is the cash price of one hotel point against the rupee value of the bank points the cheapest Indian route spends to land the same point. On the 13 sales we track, 2 clear that bar, 4 only make sense against an award you have already priced, and 7 lose to a transfer you can already make. The verdict on every one is on this page.
Mostly not, and the pattern is uncomfortable: 7 of 13 programmes we price publish any price for a stay, and the four with the widest Indian transfer access — Marriott, IHG, Hilton, Radisson — publish nothing at all. Accor is the exception with real reach: its own page states 1,000 points = €20 off any participating stay. Reach and predictability run in opposite directions here, so a reader moving bank points into Bonvoy is buying a number nobody has promised them.