Velocity Hotels (powered by Kaligo)

[HeavyElectricity]

Let Kaligo take care of your next stay

With over 465,000 hotels across 200 countries, Kaligo offers incredible choice and value. Now you can redeem your Velocity Points on every hotel stay and save your extra travel funds for the trip^.

Not enough Points? You can use Points + Pay to get exclusive access to Kaligo Velocity hotel deals if you don’t have all the Points needed for your stay. You’ll earn 3 Points per $1 spent on the Pay portion of your redemption.

You’ll be relaxing on the beach before you know it.

Just received this email - looks like Velocity have a new hotels site and partner:
https://hotels.velocityfrequentflyer.com/

The prices for the hotel I quickly searched for were ok, but it looks like there was no money-only booking option - there were always some points required for booking.

 

[andy2015]

Rydges Sydney Airport:
Direct: $193
VFF Hotels Points only: 30,700 pts
VFF Hotels Min Points + Pay: 4,000 pts + $173. Will get 519 pts for booking.

Nahhh I think I'm good.

 

[Scarlett]

Same.

Had a quick look and didn't really see anything of benefit. Also had a look at the Kaligo home page and there are some top quality outlandish claims (stay ten nights get a free business class flight...perhaps if you stayed in the penthouse suite in NY overlooking Central Park...). Maybe when I have more time I'll compare the VA offer and the direct through Kaligo offer, if that's even a viable option.

 

[dec540]

Slightly OT, but AFF recently sent an e-mail regarding Agoda PointsMax and a 10% discount code (AGODAAFF). I did a booking yesterday, Agoda's price was $1100 which was similar to other sites. With the 10% discount it was the cheapest I could find and they threw in 2600 SQ Miles (which I know aren't VA points, but a good portion of us transfer from VA to SQ anyway, so it's basically ~3500 VA points for a lot of readers here).

 

[Ausbt]

I've been looking at accom in Sydney on Valentines Day, so I'm well familiar with the current price offerings across all providers. So how does Kaligo stack up? Allow me to enlighten you: the prices are identical but with the nasty little addition of the cost of 4,000 Velocity points as well. Kaligo, be gone with you. Velocity, stop screwing with us please.

 

[grubbidok]

Pretty clear to me that VA have viewed the hotel partnership as a revenue opportunity and thrown it out to whichever s**tty website offered them the most cash, rather than choose a partner on the merits of their usefulness for members.

 

[Pleb Status]

From a quick review of various hotels in SIN, the VFF hotels site (Kaligo) requires ~2.5% less VFF points than booking the same hotel through the QF hotels site using QFF points.

VFF points are converted at ~0.645c/pt. So not great value considering you can get the same hotels for less than what Kaligo/QF are selling them for.

Although VA and Agoda have divorced, there are still some very good VFF deals to be had that earn somewhere between 4pt/$ and 10pt/$ (without paying the additional PointsMax premium). One hotel I was looking at on Agoda was ~20% cheaper with member pricing than the QF hotels site (when including the 10% Amex Connect discount) and was paying 9.2pts/$. Slightly cheaper than the Expedia group websites when including all coupons/rebates as well.