I am writing this post as we enjoy our last night at the Le Meridien St Julians Hotel & Spa in beautiful Malta.

More than anything, my mind is always focused on finding the best deal. And even after I have made my decision/purchase I continue to wonder if my choice was the best one. So now that  our time in Malta has come to an end I’ve been thinking about the value of our hotel stay. We’ve had a great trip and we thought that we got a very nice deal on our accommodations but now I am wondering if it could’ve been an even better value.

While looking for a hotel on Malta not too many places caught our attention. Budget hotels didn’t seem to be much of a bargain and a few places that we did consider probably wouldn’t have been good for a 2 year old.

I decided to look into options using points.

The Le Meridien St Julians had availability at a reasonable price, has very good reviews and is in a very good area on the island.

A room at the hotel goes for 7,000 Starwood Points when booking an award (SPG Free Nights) or around $150 (per night) if paying for the stay. I, like many others involved in the points & miles hobby highly value SPG points but I value saving money even more. Staying in a nice room while on Malta, at the right price seemed the way to go so we settled on Le Meridien, booking the room with points.

The Le Meridien St Julians is a Category 3 hotel and qualifies for the 5th Night Free offer when booking. (With this offer, when you redeem five consecutive nights at category 3, 4, 5, 6 or 7 hotel, your fifth night is free.)

To get the best deal you’ll want to book 5 nights since you only pay for 4.

For our stay, we needed 6 nights of accommodations. I knew that this would put a big dent in my SPG points. However, points are earned to be used so I couldn’t see a great reason to keep holding onto them.

Booking 6 nights at Le Merdien should cost 42,000 SPG points or around $917 if you decide to stay here. However with the SPG Free Nights offer, my stay would only cost 35,000 points which comes out to 5,833 points per night on average.

I could’ve lowered the cost of points needed per night by only booking 5 nights at Le Meridien and switching hotels for the first or last night. By only booking 5 nights I’d get my stay for only 28,000 points which averages out to 5,600 per night.

The main issue was- is it really worth switching just to save a couple of hundred miles (on average) per day?

My answer ultimately for this trip was no. If there was another hotel at a fair price, I would’ve liked to have saved my SPG points for another day but this was not the case this time around.

Switching hotels for one night is a bit of a pain, especially when travelling with a toddler. I found the best option in this case to be to stay put, in one location.

What would you do? Stay 6 nights, paying (with points) for 5 or get the best offer of booking 5 nights and only paying for 4 while booking one other night at another hotel?