HolidayCheck.com is a hotel review and booking site (they also allow you to review activities/things to do), similar to tripadvisor. They differ by offering frequent flyer miles for every hotel review you leave (you don’t earn miles for reviewing activities/things to do).
It is the largest hotel booking search engine in Germany, where they were founded and they have since grown to include English language reviews.
Barclay Arrival Travel Community pays 200 miles per review and has less strict requirements for the reviews being accepted.
Participating Rewards Programs:
- Miles & More (100 miles per review)
- airberlin topbonus (150 miles per review, miles are doubled to 300 until the 30th of April, 2014)
- airBaltic BalticMiles (150 miles per review)
- Etihad Guest Miles (150 miles per review)
The Fine Print
- All reviews are checked manually for quality purposes
- Points are posted anywhere from 2-10 weeks after reviews are published (depending on the frequent flyer program)
- Maximum of 10 reviews per month
- Proof may be requested (e.g receipts showing you stayed at the location)
Cashing Out Your Points
It is possible to cash out your points, the easiest way to do this is with Etihad Guest Miles and PointsPay.com. You’ll first need to write your reviews and receive your Eithad miles, then sign up for PointsPay.com. You can then load your points onto a virtual prepaid credit card, $10USD = 1,479 miles (0.68¢ per mile). You also need to pay a fee of 141 miles everytime you reload your virtual prepaid card.
This means that 11 reviews will net you ~$10USD (11 X 150 = 1,650 – 141 = 1,509 = $10.41). Obviously you’ll get much better value when you redeem for flights with any of the frequent flyer programs, but this is one way to cash out your points.
Our Verdict
Using HolidayCheck may be useful if you only need a few more miles to hit a certain award, but you’re going to struggle to earn enough miles for a free flight or hotel stay purely by writing reviews, unless you cash out using pointspay.com. For people who travel regularly and are able to hit the 10 reviews per month, you’ll be able to earn anywhere from 12,000 miles to 36,000 miles per year – but this will pale to the amount of miles/points you’ll be receiving from your actual travel and hotel stays.
If HolidayCheck.com requires receipts to prove you stayed at the location (which seems to vary depending on how many reviews you add and how quickly you add them) then this deal will take up far to much time to be worthwhiled. [Update: HolidayCheck does require proof you stayed at the location]
Personally I’ll keep leaving my reviews on TripAdvisor, as more people use it and it’s easy for my facebook friends to see my reviews when they do searches for activities/hotels. I have left a few reviews on HolidayCheck to see how difficult the process of receiving the points is, writing the reviews themselves only took 1-2 minutes per review. We’ll update this post when the points have posted with more information. [Update: Because HolidayCheck required proof of stay, none of my test reviews were approved as I’ve since lost the receipts/booking confirmation]