Hotel programs
Belmond Bellini Club, and the part of it that’s not a hotel
Belmond runs hotels, trains and river journeys, and the Bellini Club reaches all three. The hotel benefits are the ones usually described. The ones that attach to a train or a river journey are a different set of numbers entirely, and they’re the harder half to arrange well.
Here’s what it includes on land and on board, where the published accounts disagree, and what I check before anything is held.
Bring the hotel, or the train, and your dates.
The program
What the Bellini Club is
Belmond’s program for luxury travel advisors. The benefits attach when an advisor with access places the reservation, and they don’t attach if you arrange it yourself.
You can’t join it and you can’t find it as a rate. What it changes is what’s waiting when you arrive.
On land
What it adds to a hotel stay
Daily breakfast for two. A property credit to spend on site. A room upgrade, subject to what’s free when you arrive. Wi-Fi, a welcome amenity, and the hotel knowing who you are before you get there.
There’s no minimum stay, which is worth saying because several of these programs do have one. A single night qualifies.
Belmond doesn’t publish a list of participating properties, so I’m not going to publish one either. It would be out of date within a season.
The trains change the numbers
The trains and the river journeys
The Bellini Club reaches further than the hotels, and that’s the part worth knowing before you choose how to travel.
On a train or a river journey it carries a per-person credit of between forty-five and one hundred dollars, breakfast for two daily, an upgrade subject to availability, and a welcome that has your name on it. That’s a different set of numbers from the hotel side and it applies to a completely different kind of journey.
It matters because on the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express and the Andean Explorer the train is the whole reason for going, and the difference between a well-placed reservation and a badly placed one is a cabin, a sitting and a direction of travel.
There’s also a spend benefit worth knowing about. At ten thousand dollars or more, a five hundred dollar voucher against a future Belmond experience of five thousand or more. On a train journey for two that threshold is closer than it sounds.
The credit
Where the published accounts disagree
The hotel credit is quoted two different ways and I’m not going to pick one and hope.
One published account gives a range of one hundred to two hundred and twenty dollars per room per stay. Another gives it as up to two hundred. Both agree it varies by property, which is the part that’s actually true and the part that decides what you get.
So I confirm the figure against your property and your dates before anything is held.
What you pay
One hundred dollars, and the credit usually covers it
The rate is the rate. It doesn’t go up because I place the reservation, and the credit, the breakfast and the upgrade come from Belmond. There’s a fuller explanation on the hotel programs page.
What you pay me is one hundred dollars to place a stay or a journey that stands on its own. At most Belmond hotels the credit is larger than that, so it’s covered on the first morning. On a train it’s the cabin choice that’s worth the fee, more than the credit.
If it sits inside a route I’m planning, it’s part of that planning investment and I don’t charge it twice.
Where I’m no help
When this isn’t worth doing
If what you want is a property I’ve got no program access to, or a flight on its own, I’m adding nothing. Reserve those yourself and keep the money.
And if you’re looking at a Belmond train, tell me early. The cabins that are worth having go first, and there’s no program benefit that fixes a reservation made too late.
Next
Who you’d be talking to
Jessica Clark. An independent travel advisor just north of Seattle, working with queer and allied travelers on land and on board.
I place these myself, and on a train reservation that matters more than it does on a room. Bring a Belmond property or a route and your dates, and fifteen minutes is enough to establish what applies there and whether it’s worth doing at all.
Complimentary. Bring the route and I’ll tell you what applies.