points hound's 1,000 point 1st booking bonus, but is the double dip feature broken?

1,000 point first booking bonus
posted in a thousand places, but also as an offer delivered to my e-mail, points hound is offering a 1,000 point booking bonus. i described points hound extensively here. this bonus can be applied to one of their various airline partners. in my case, my points were all directed towards my american airline account.

to get this bonus, you could either sign up yourself and book your first night before october 11, 2014, and then allocate this bonus to whichever program you want. or, you could sign up here (this link gives me a 1,000 point referral).

i used to be all about points hound because of its double dip feature. this feature is where you could book hotels and get a reduced number of points hound airline miles (typically 2 points per dollar or so versus 5-6 points per dollar with non-double dip hotels). in exchange for the reduced number of airline points, you would get hotel program points and stay credits. for my stays last july and august, it worked like a charm. as an aside, i had accidentally allocated my 500 mile bonus points to SPG a while back despite them not being a partner but have been unable to change that since. they said they'd credit it to SPG when i e-mailed them in july, but they still haven't.

... but then things changed ...
then recently, i ran into difficulties, and now i'm not as confident about points hound. i had an 8 hotel mattress run planned for december in order to obtain my starwood preferred guest platinum status. i was planning on finishing the year with exactly 25 stays in order to reach its minimum qualifying requirement. in august, i had booked 8 different stays through points hound for december.

in the past, when i booked these double dip stays, the reservation would also appear on my SPG account and in my SPG app. i would know that the stays were registered with starwood and that my account was included in the reservation. but 6 weeks after booking, i became suspicious that they weren't showing up. it was time to investigate.

first, i called starwood. because it was a third party booking, they said that it wouldn't qualify for points anyway. that's fair -- i don't expect all their agents to know about points hound and their double dip feature. they couldn't even look into the booking itself, which is fair. they just knew that there was a reservation for that hotel under my name for the dates i mentioned, but no starwood number was associated with it. red flag #1. they couldn't change anything. i understood this; you can't change third party airline bookings with the airline directly for the same reason.

so concerned, i called the points hound customer service. they person who i was connected to needed several tries to understand my concern. i think she was more interested in repeating to me the dates and location of the hotel, which wasn't very helpful. i kept pressing her about my starwood account number and she insisted that i would have to call a different line to verify the details of my booking. red flag #2.

i called the number that she had given me. this person said that they were only in charge of making bookings on behalf of points hound, and that they knew nothing about their double dip feature or anything associated with it. they also didn't see a starwood number but said that they had no ability to add the number. they wanted me to call the main points hound number again. red flag #3. i was irritated at that point and asked whether they would just talk to one another. she refused.

so perhaps irrationally (although i don't think it was), i opted to ensure that i would get the stays necessary to obtain platinum status. i quickly booked all the hotels on the starwood main site using a link from bigcrumbs.com (2.1% back on all bookings). i then cancelled each and every one of my points hound bookings. it took me an hour to go through this entire book/cancel process, which i strongly disliked.

while i lost out on my ~2 american advantage miles per dollar spent, i did get 2.1% cash back via bigcrumbs. in the end, while american advantage points have the potential to be worth much more than 2.1 cents per mile, it felt much more reassuring to know that i'd have my bookings eligible for stay credits and starwood point accumulation. one hotel night did rise in price by $10, which was unfortunate.

i might try the double dip feature again in the future. but for now, for stays that matter, i'll hold off on points hound. for stays that don't (e.g., independent hotels, wyndham hotel properties), then i may still consider it. i'd still definitely consider it if there was a generous first booking bonus available, but there aren't any hotels that i need to book that don't matter right now.