EXCUTIVE TRAVEL : After a Decade of Frequent-Stay Plans, Hotels Have Big Bills, Very Little Loyalty : Accommodations: ‘Double-dipping’ for airline and room credits has nearly disappeared.

When you drop this line to a client over lunch or use it in your next sales meeting, make sure you give credit to Mike Ribero, senior vice president of marketing at Hilton Hotels.

“Next to the U.S. dollar,” Ribero said last week, “frequent-flier miles have become the currency of choice in America.”

Ribero’s theory isn’t hard to prove. Everybody traffics in frequent-flier miles these days. Business travelers earn them from long-distance companies, credit card marketers, restaurants, flower delivery firms, parking lots, shirt makers, car manufacturers and magazine publishers.

Even hotels give business travelers frequent-flier miles--and therein lies the rub, at least as far as the leading hotel chains are concerned.

Hoteliers have spent a decade trying to build loyalty with proprietary frequent-stay programs similar to airline frequent-flier programs. But all they’ve gotten for their efforts are huge marketing bills and precious little loyalty attributable to frequent-stay plans.

“Business travelers couldn’t care less about frequent-stay programs,” said Charles E. Brownfield III, vice president of sales and marketing of Inter-Continental Hotels. “We dropped ours in the late 1980s because it was clear that the only way to motivate business travelers to change hotels was by giving them what they wanted--frequent-flier miles.”

Radisson Hotels came to the same conclusion as Inter-Continental. It switched to awarding airline frequent-flier miles at about the same time.

The emphasis of frequent-flier miles over frequent-stay points began to sweep the hotel industry earlier this year. The Sheraton and Holiday Inn chains revamped their frequent-stay plans to emphasize the fact that business travelers could earn airline miles whenever they stayed at a participating hotel. Both chains also changed the name of their program’s “currency” to miles rather than points.

Marriott Hotels, which operates the Honored Guest Awards program--by industry consensus the hotel field’s only consistently successful frequent-stay plan--went so far as to introduce a second loyalty program, Marriott Miles. That plan offers guests frequent-flier miles rather than free hotel stays, the main benefit of the Honored Guest Award program.

The switch from frequent-stay points to frequent-flier miles doesn’t necessarily have a happy ending, however.

Business travelers want not only frequent-flier miles, hoteliers say. They want free hotel stays, too. And one thing frequent-flier miles can’t buy is free hotel stays. They are available only in the frequent-stay programs that hotels are de-emphasizing in favor of frequent-flier miles.

“There may not be a monolithic market that just wants airline miles,” said Nan Moss, assistant vice president of marketing programs for Hyatt, which operates the Gold Passport frequent-stay plan. “Miles are increasingly popular as the currency, but frequent-stay plans are the only place where business travelers can earn free hotel stays.”

Ralph Giannola, vice president of marketing for Marriott, agreed.

“We had very little defection from Marriott Honored Guest when we introduced Marriott Miles,” he said. “That’s because truly frequent travelers know Honored Guest is where you get the free hotel stays.

“You can have all the frequent-flier miles in the world, but you’ve got to be in a frequent-stay program to win a free vacation.”

The miles-versus-points conundrum has been exacerbated in recent years because hotel frequent-stay programs largely eliminated a practice called double-dipping.

Hotel chains once routinely allowed business travelers to double their earnings by offering frequent-flier miles and frequent-stay program points for each stay.

Now, however, frequent-stay programs usually require a choice between airline miles and frequent-stay points.

In fact, when Hyatt drops double-dipping from its Gold Passport program next Jan. 1, Hilton Hotels will be the last major company allowing business travelers to earn frequent-flier miles and at the same time accrue points in Hilton HHonors, the chain’s frequent-stay program.

“Marriott basically got the franchise for frequent-stay programs when they launched Honored Guest in 1983,” Hilton’s Ribero said. “Hilton was the last hotel chain to launch (a frequent-stay program), so I’ve been swimming upstream for years.

“But now, I got something to sell. I’m the only guy out there still offering a double dip,” Ribero said.

“Essentially, I’m selling two for the price of one, when everyone else is selling one for the price of one.”