NH Rewards Guide 2020

Points and Miles / By

NH Rewards Guide

NH Rewards is not of major interest to UK-based travellers, but you may find yourself in one on occasion. They have quite a few airport hotels in Europe and Mexico, including Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Munich, Brussels. Madrid, Milan, Geneva, Luxembourg, Mexico City and Cancun.

It’s revenue based. Earn points as a percentage of spend, and each point is worth €1 off a future hotel booking.

For occasional stayers, it is possible to collect Avios.

One interesting feature of NH Hotels is their “City Connection” benefit. If you’re staying in any NH hotel in a city, then you have access to all the other NH hotels in that city.

This gives you access to common areas in the lobby, free wifi, water and fruit, luggage storage and business services, that you can make use of while you’re sight-seeing. Quite a nice idea.

NH Hotels

NH Hotels covers 362 hotels in 29 countries across the Americas and Europe:

  • NH Hotels – 3 or 4 star urban
  • NH Collection – Premium, capital cities
  • Nhow – Design hotels
  • Tivoli
  • Anantara
  • Avani
  • Elewana
  • Oaks

Only NH, NH Collection, and nhow are in the NH Rewards scheme.

In the UK we have the NH London Kensington and the newly opened nhow London near Silicon Roundabout.

Tiers and benefits

Tiers are based on the number of nights stayed, and upgrades happen as soon as you reach the threshold.

  • Blue – entry level
  • Silver – 6 nights
  • Gold – 21 nights
  • Platinum – 40 nights

The only real difference between the lower levels is very slightly higher earning rates. All members get access to Regular 10% discount on selection of hotels.

Only Gold offers upgrades, late check-out, priority check-in. Platinum adds premium wifi.

Earning NH rewards points

Earn points as a percentage of spend on the room and other hotel services. Blue earns 5.5%, Silver gets 6%, Gold gets 6.5%, Platinum 7%.

Earn 5 extra points for booking online. No points earned for 3rd party bookings.

A rather unusual feature is that on your first stay you earn a flat 5 points, regardless of the invoice amount. Also unusual is that those 5 points, worth €5, expire after 3 months, so you need to stay again within 3 months in order to use them.

In fact, because you can only redeem a minimum of 10 points, you’d have to stay twice in those 3 months. Once to earn another 5 points, and again to redeem them before expiry.

I can see how that has been designed to encourage repeat business, but it just feels stingy.

Spending NH rewards points

Redeem for discount (full or part) against any room at any time. If room is available for cash, you can redeem. Can also use against F&B, Wifi, minibar.

Effectively this is a free night after 10. Spending €100 per stay would earn 5.5 points plus 5 points bonus. After 10 stays, those 105 points would be worth €105.

The minimum redemption is 10 points.

Transferring NH Rewards points

You can transfer to other members but no outward transfers to other programs.

Earn Avios at NH Hotels

Because you’re unlikely to stay often enough to earn many points, it’s better to earn Avios instead. You can earn Avios through Iberia by giving your membership number at check-in. You won’t earn NH points.

You can also credit stays to SkyTeam with Alitalia, Air Europa, or Aeromexico.

The Avios you earn with Iberia are based on the brand and the star rating:

  • 3 star NH = 200
  • 4 star NH, NH Collection, nhow = 350
  • 5 star NH Collection, nhow = 450
Once these arrive in your Iberia account, you can use the “combine my Avios” function to transfer them across to BA Executive Club.
 
You could also spend 28000 Iberia Avios on an NH Collection room for a night by calling the NH Hotels booking centre, but that would have to be a pricy room to make it a good deal.

NH Rewards points expiry

NH rewards has some quite annoying expiry rules. Base points have an 18 month expiry which is reset every time you earn or redeem, and that’s fine.

The problem is that the 5 bonus points you get for booking online expire after 6 months, and points earned through promotions expire after 3 months.

That means you’d have to be a regular stayer to not be caught out. The upside is that you can redeem once you have 10 points.

NH Rewards status match

May be possible but often refused.

There was a promo matching from GHA in June 2019, now ended. There are a few reports of matching from Hilton Diamond to Gold, and reports that matching to Platinum is not possible.

NH Rewards promos

There are occasional promos for bonus points or bonus airline miles.

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