Points and miles get all the glory, but the unsung hero of smart travel planning is what happens when things go wrong - a cancelled flight, a lost bag, a sudden illness abroad.
Booking a luxury stay used to mean accepting whatever cancellation terms a hotel handed you, but loyalty tiers have quietly rewritten those rules.
When elite status and stacks of points fail to deliver, what actually separates a great hotel loyalty program from a mediocre one is how its people treat you when things go sideways.