Hotels & booking
Before talking about platforms, points or discounts, there's a simple question: Where do you want to go? Stay as cheaply as possible — or turn your hotel nights into status with breakfast, lounge and upgrades? The answer depends mainly on one number: how many nights you rack up per year.
Question 1: how many hotel nights do you have per year?
| Nights per year | What it means |
|---|---|
| fewer than 20 | Price, location and hotel quality matter. Forcing status is hardly worth it. |
| 20 to 40 | Borderline. Collecting points doesn't hurt, but don't move a single night just for that. |
| 40 to 70 | From here it's seriously worth asking whether to concentrate your nights in one chain. 40 nights at €70 is €2,800 a year. |
| 70 and more | Full status strategy. At IHG, 70 qualifying nights reach the top regular tier. |
You spend the money on nights either way. The real question is which system gets extra out of it — a travel portal with its own rewards programme, or a hotel chain with status, points and benefits on site.
The threshold around 40 nights is a personal rule of thumb from long experience, not a rule of any programme.
Question 2: which strategy?
| Route A: travel portal (Trip.com) | Route B: hotel chain (e.g. IHG) | |
|---|---|---|
| Choice of hotel | free, any chain and any independent hotel | mainly within the chosen chain |
| Rewards | Trip Coins and portal status for all bookings | points, status nights, Milestone Rewards |
| On site | usually no status benefits at the hotel | depending on status: breakfast, upgrade, lounge, late check-out |
| Overview | hotels, trains, tickets and flights in one app | hotels in the chain's app, everything else separately |
| Suits | few nights, changing destinations, maximum freedom | many nights and destinations where the chain is well represented |
You make the decision once — not again with every booking. You can always compare prices. But if you've chosen a chain, you don't suddenly book elsewhere over a six-euro difference, and if you've picked Trip.com as your platform, you consistently bundle everything there.
Route A: Trip.com — one app for the whole trip
Trip.com belongs to Trip.com Group, which also owns Ctrip — China's largest travel platform. On a trip to China that's a tangible advantage: hotels, train tickets, admission tickets, domestic flights and eSIM in one app — in English or German, with a foreign passport and foreign credit card.
The overview is often underestimated. All bookings are sorted by date in the app: which hotel when, which train at what time, which ticket for which day. Book a four-week trip on five different portals and on site you'll be searching five apps and three inboxes for confirmations.
Then there's the rewards programme. It rewards not hotel nights but the number of completed bookings — a hotel, a train and a ticket count the same:
| Tier | How to reach it | Key benefits |
|---|---|---|
| Silver | create an account | Trip Coins at the base rate |
| Gold | 1 booking | 20 % more Trip Coins — kept for good |
| Platinum | 3 more bookings within a year | 50 % more Trip Coins, 1 lounge pass, eSIM with 1 GB |
| Diamond | 8 more bookings within a year, at least US$1,000 in total | double Trip Coins, 2 lounge passes, eSIM with 3 GB |
| Diamond+ | US$10,000 spend within a year after Diamond | 2.5× Trip Coins, 3 lounge passes, VIP service, one free ticket a year |
| Black Diamond | by invitation only | top tier |
Trip Coins are the rewards currency: for hotels the base rate is about 50 coins per US$100, and 100 coins are worth about US$1 on the next booking. Nobody gets rich from that — the real value lies in bundling a whole trip with very different hotels, trains and excursions in one system.
Diamond in one trip: our four weeks on Hainan include eleven hotel stays, five to six train journeys and many admission tickets. That's more than the twelve bookings from Silver to Diamond, and you reach US$1,000 with the hotels alone. Each order counts separately — so book every hotel, every train journey and every ticket individually, not as a package. Completed bookings count, so a hotel only after the stay. That's why you mainly use the status on your next trip; you'll never drop below Gold again.
Since January 2026 stricter rules apply to lounge passes: name and date of birth in the profile must exactly match the passport, you need a hotel booked via Trip.com in the last twelve months, and they can only be used for a flight also booked via Trip.com.
Route B: hotel chain — the IHG example
If you spend many nights a year in hotels, you can get much more out of the same money: breakfast for two, club lounge access with dinner, upgrades, later check-out and a reward every ten nights. But that only works if you concentrate your nights in one chain — and book directly with the chain.
Torsten has known the IHG One Rewards programme for many years and is Diamond there. That's why IHG serves as the example here — not because IHG is better than Hilton, Marriott or others. The same calculation applies to any chain; what matters is whether it's well represented at your destinations.
| IHG status | Nights | Points bonus | Special |
|---|---|---|---|
| Silver Elite | 10 | 20 % | Entry level |
| Gold Elite | 20 | 40 % | from here a Milestone Reward every 10 nights |
| Platinum Elite | 40 | 60 % | upgrades subject to availability, at 40 nights two rewards, e.g. annual lounge membership |
| Diamond Elite | 70 | 100 % | breakfast for two as a welcome amenity at participating brands |
The biggest catch: bookings via travel portals — including Trip.com — usually don't count at IHG. Then there are usually no points, no status nights and often no status benefits at the hotel either. If you take route B, use portals only to compare prices and then book directly.
Our conclusion
Everyone has to know which route suits their own travel life. A rewards programme should fit your travel habits — not the other way round. For most people who travel once or twice a year, Trip.com is the simplest route: one app, one overview, one rewards programme for everything. If you spend 40 or more nights a year anyway, you should at least once work out what the same nights would be worth in one chain.
And quite openly: if you book via our Trip.com links, it funds this site. Your price stays the same, and it doesn't change our ratings.
How to find a hotel in the Trip.com app, choose the right room and check the booking is described in the Trip.com guide in the Swiss Army knife. Open the guide →
As of September 2026. Rewards programmes change their rules regularly — the current terms are on the Trip.com and IHG websites. The booking links on this page are affiliate links: if you book through them, we earn a commission; your price stays the same.