With enough space to fit the whole family, this is a great option to use points in Big Bear if you can find the availability.

Note: this stay occurred in September 2022

Booking

The Club at Big Bear Village can be booked using Choice Privileges points. For this particular stay, my sister in law made the booking using her stash of points. Free nights under the Choice program aren’t firmly tied to a particular award price, but can fluctuate between 8,000 and 35,000 points at most hotels. This stay cost 30,000 points per night. The one interesting thing I’ve found with Choice is that most rooms tend to be bookable at the same price, all the way up to the best room at the property. In our case, we were lucky to get a four-bedroom suite over Labor Day 2022 for no additional charge over the smallest rooms at the property.

While Choice is not one of the sexier programs out there, they offer great value if you are bringing along a big crew and need extra space. Just note there can be a lot of competition out there for the best rooms at the property and you need to be quick to book roughly 100 days out. This particular property appears to only show award nights on stays at least two nights long.

Earning Choice Points

Given the potential for big value with multiple rooms, Choice is one of the programs where I’m comfortable purchasing points when they go on sale. Roughly once a year, Daily Getaways offers the ability to purchase Choice points at a deep discount. In 2022, they made Choice points available at only 0.52 cents per point. That would make a hotel that costs 30,000 points per night as cheap as $156. However, it is a bit tough to buy those points — the better deals end up being a raffle, and if you’re a few minutes late purchasing the points after the deal goes live, consider your goose cooked.

Choice does sell points on sale several times a year. The better promotions tend to cost roughly 0.7 cents each point, making a hotel costing 30,000 points per night about $210. That’s still a deal and definitely worth considering. Many of Choice’s hotel brands are on the value end of the spectrum, but they do possess some properties that are worthy of a look. I feel this hotel is one of them.

Arrival

Access into the property is controlled by a motorized gate. If you’re just arriving to check in, there is an intercom to chat with the front desk. After that, you just need to enter a simple code to bypass the gate. They do ask for the names of the other adults and children during the check in process, up to 10 names total, but I find the hotel likely doesn’t have a good process to keep track of everyone coming in and out. The hotel also doesn’t seem to mind the number of cars that are parked here overnight (there is no fee for parking). We had three cars but did provide the license plate numbers for each.

The front office definitely has a cabin feel to it. The bear theme is found throughout the property, including an impressive wood carving of a bear just outside the lobby. The inside of the lobby itself is nicely decorated and felt consistent with how the rooms appeared.

The Room

Our room for this trip was #17, adjacent to the lobby. The room has its own two-car garage, making it very convenient when packing and unpacking the car and for trips into town. Once you enter the front door, it’s a simple walk up the stairs to get to where all the rooms are located.

Once making it to the top of the stairs, I was immediately impressed by the large dining table, perfect for eating meals together as a family. While the table normally only seats eight, we had no problem fitting more chairs around the table to fit us all. Just to the left of the dining room is an equally-impressive kitchen with plenty of room for multiple people to prepare food at the same time. However, there was one problem we encountered during our stay: the dishwasher broke. Someone came out to take a look at it but it ended up not getting fixed during our stay. A minor inconvenience but the front desk provided paper plates when we raised the issue to them.

Next to the kitchen is a large living area with built-in fireplace. This served as our normal hang-out place. The least impressive aspect of the living room was perhaps the size of the TV, but it tended not to be used much during our stay.

Found in the hallway just past the living room is a fully-functioning laundry unit. As found in the picture below, the hotel provides some basic cleaning supplies here, as well as laundry detergent and dryer sheets good enough for two loads. The machine is a little on the loud side, as most washing machines are, but simply closing the closet door does the trick to keep noise at a minimum.

As I mentioned earlier, this particular room booked was a four-bedroom suite. Each bedroom was fairly similar in design, but I did manage to take pictures of each. Every bedroom had access to a bathroom. We stayed in the first bedroom shown below, which had plenty of natural lighting. Similar to the living room, the TVs in each bedroom tended to be on the smaller side, making me notice how bare the walls were. Our bedroom also had its own fireplace, creating a cozy atmosphere in the room every night.

The final room was perhaps the most different of the bedrooms, which had two full size beds instead of a king bed. In total, we had five beds for our family to stretch out on.

The bathroom attached to our room had both a tub and a shower. The hotel provided plenty of amenities in each bathroom.

Attached to the living room is a nice lanai with views of the area. The hotel immediately across the street is the Holiday Inn. I haven’t yet been inside that hotel but the exterior looks nicer than the average Holiday Inn.

Out the backdoor just past the dining room, is a small table with a grill. We did barbeque up some meats out here. You don’t need to bring your own gas since they have the unit hooked up to a gas line.

Pool and Recreation Center

Just in our backyard was an opening where a couple of pools and a hot tub were located. The swimming pools aren’t heated, and there were a few bees hanging out by the trash cans, but it was still nice to have a place for the kids to splash around. The pool towels weren’t replenished during our visit and it took some time to track down replacements.

In the lobby just short of the recreation room, there is a coffee machine where you can load up on your caffeine for the day.

And then tucked in the back is the rec room. They have a foosball table, a billiards table, and table tennis. It’s a good place to spend some time while the kids are relaxing elsewhere. One place the kids might be is the kids room across the hallway, which has bean bags and a small selection of kids activities. Since we were out exploring the city most of the time, we didn’t get a chance to use this room on our trip.

Location

As I mentioned earlier, the hotel is located right across the street from the Holiday Inn. These two hotels are easily walkable to Pine Knot Ave, which seems to be the happening place to go in Big Bear. Plenty of restaurants and cute shops to go check out. It’s also a short drive to a couple of grocery stores where you can go stock up for the stay.

At the end of Pine Knot Ave is a short walking path to the lake. Unfortunately, there was some higher algae levels and we couldn’t go near the water. But there is a small playground here which the kids loved.

One extra treat for our stay was the fireworks show for Labor Day. The patio in our room faced the lake and so we were able to watch the magic from the comfort of our room. I don’t think all rooms face the lake but it’s awesome we were lucky to avoid the crowds by the lake.

Recommendation: Yes for Families

I find great value in the hotel. You’re getting the space you typically find in a cabin but using points to get a great deal. I feel this hotel’s best value comes when bringing extended family or friends and making it a big event. The location is also perfect and close to everything we wanted to see in town.

If I came here with just the kids, I might be tempted to try out the Holiday Inn across the street, but I haven’t had a chance to stay there just yet so my opinion might change if I do go there.

Have you been to Big Bear? Where have you stayed when you went?