Good ‘£70 cashback on £200 spend’ Amex hotel offer with Millennium & Copthorne

A generous hotel cashback offer has popped up on many American Express cards from Millennium Hotels & Resorts, which runs the Millennium and Copthorne brands.

You will receive £70 cashback on a £200 spend.

Unlike many current Amex hotel offers, this one has a long validity date – to 31st October.

As usual, you need to check the ‘Offers’ tab on the Amex website or app for each of your cards. You must ‘save’ the offer to activate it before making your purchase.

The offer is restricted to a small group of UK hotels. These are (I have added links to the Central London ones):

• Copthorne Hotel Aberdeen
• Copthorne Hotel Cardiff
• Copthorne Hotel London Gatwick
• Copthorne Hotel Effingham Gatwick
• Millennium Hotel Glasgow
• Millennium & Copthorne Hotels at Chelsea Football Club (next to Fulham Broadway tube)
• Copthorne Tara Hotel London Kensington
• Millennium Gloucester Hotel Kensington (next to Gloucester Road tube)
• Millennium Hotel London Knightsbridge (opposite Harvey Nichols)
• The Bailey’s Hotel London (next to Gloucester Road tube)
• The Chelsea Harbour Hotel London (nowhere near the tube but Imperial Wharf overground station is nearby, picture below)
• Copthorne Hotel Newcastle
• Copthorne Hotel Plymouth
• Copthorne Hotel Slough

With a rebate of 35% if you spend exactly £200, this is a pretty attractive deal if you are looking for a hotel in the capital. The Millennium and Copthorne home page is here.

How does the My Millennium loyalty scheme work?

It is well worth signing up for My Millennium if you are planning on using this offer because you receive a 10% member discount on your bookings. This will stack with the Amex offer.

Click here to sign up.

About Millennium & Copthorne Hotels

Millennium & Copthorne is a hotel chain with a presence across the UK, Asia, North America and New Zealand.

M&C comprises two core brands with some smaller add-ons:

• Millennium Collection, operating under the Millennium, Grand Millennium and M Hotel brands, runs c70 five star and high-end four star properties.  These are concentrated on major business centres.

• Copthorne Collection, operating under the Copthorne, Grand Copthorne and Kingsgate brands, runs c40 midscale properties, mainly in regional centres.  It operates in the UK, New Zealand, Middle East, Malaysia and Singapore.

• M Hotels is a new brand for Millennium’s lifestyle hotels

• Leng’s Collection is a catch-all name for unbranded properties owned by the group, including The Chelsea Harbour Hotel (below), The Bailey’s Hotel in London and the Hard Days Night hotel in Liverpool.

• The group also owns some hotels which are branded by other groups, such as the Grand Hyatt Taipei and the Novotel New York Times Square.

The My Millennium loyalty scheme

The key reason to join My Millennium – even if you are only staying one night – is for the 10% discount.  It is automatic to all scheme members at participating hotels.

You earn 10 My Points for every $1 spent in participating hotels on the room rate.  Food and drink spend does not earn points.

If you stay more than 10 nights at participating properties within a yearly period, your points balance will be doubled, a generous if unusual offer.  This yearly period is calculated from your membership start date.  You also get triple points for all stays during your birthday month, which is a little unusual.

Points expire after 12 months.  This is a hard expiry and there is nothing you can do to extend their life.

What are the membership tiers?

My Millennium does not have membership tiers.  It is more of a membership points program than a tier-based elite status program.

Earning double points after 10 nights (you receive a lump sum bonus after your 10th / 20th / 30th etc night, doubling the points earned on the previous 10 stays) in a year is the nearest it gets to rewarding regular guests.

The more I think about it, the more I find ‘double points’ to be a clever idea.  Anyone with 7-8 nights would have a very big double points carrot dangling in front of them to get to 10.

Redemption options

The scheme is sensibly structured and accepts that a small footprint means that most members will struggle to earn a large number of points.

You cannot see the redemption price list without signing up and logging in.  As well as free nights and room upgrades, M&C also offers club lounge access, food and drinks vouchers, free laundry and spa treatments.

At the earning rate of 10 points per $1 of room spend, you would need to spend $1,200 to get a $50 food and beverage voucher.  Of course, if you manage to spend more than 10 nights yearly in My Millennium properties you get double points, so the cost-benefit calculation changes.

Room redemptions are based directly on the cost of the room you want.  I ran a few examples and it works out at roughly 0.4p per point.

This means that redemption opportunities appear to be more evenly priced, with a 0.4p per point value on food and beverage vouchers as well as free rooms. Given that you get the same financial return, you can choose to spend your points in whichever way you wish without consideration for differing valuations.

If you earn 10 points worth 0.4p each (4p in total) for every $1 spent on your room, you are getting a return of around 5% on your room rate. The rate increases substantially if you spend more than 10 nights a year in M&C hotels, since your points balance is doubled.

This rate of return is comparable to other leading hotel programmes.  However, the Millennium & Copthorne network is considerably smaller and it is much harder to get additional bonuses. M&C does not have a co-branded credit card, so it’s impossible to boost your points balance without ‘heads in beds’.  This means that, in practice, My Millenium point are less valuable because it is much more difficult to both earn and redeem them.

Can you convert points in or out?

No.  It is not possible to convert your points into airline miles.  You also cannot convert any credit card or other points into My Millennium points.

You CAN earn airline miles instead of points – see below.

Can you earn airline miles instead of loyalty points?

Millennium & Copthorne has a number of airline partnerships although they do not work with Avios or Virgin Flying Club.

They do work with United, American Airlines, Japan Air Lines, Air New Zealand and Singapore Airlines. Details of their airline partnerships can be found here.

Conclusion

The ‘£70 cashback on £200 spend’ offer makes it worth considering Millennium & Copthorne for any stays you have before the end of October, particularly if you need a London hotel.

Should you bother with the loyalty scheme? Beyond the 10% discount, it is unlikely that My Millennium will become a key programme for you. 

For occasional stays, you are unlikely to be able to get good value out of your points and are likely to end up with an orphaned balance.  I would recommend taking airline miles instead.

You could even be cheeky and book a ‘pay on departure’ rate via Hotels.com to earn Hotels.com Rewards credit as this would still trigger the cashback, albeit that you wouldn’t get the My Millennium member discount.

The Millennium & Copthorne home page is here.

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Hotel offers update – December 2021:

Want to earn more hotel points?  Click here to see our complete list of promotions from the major hotel chains or use the ‘Hotel Offers’ link in the menu bar at the top of the page.

Want to buy hotel points? There is currently a special offer running with IHG Rewards (80% bonus to 4th January 2022) and World of Hyatt (30% discount, equivalent to a 43% bonus, to 30th December 2021).