Almost every program that sees out-of-town patients ends up with a handful of corporate codes and a page of hotel links. It is the obvious first step and it is not a mistake. But the codes tend to decay in ways nobody notices, because the only person who finds out is a patient standing at a front desk, and they do not call to tell you.
The thing most people mean is an LNR, a locally negotiated rate: an agreement between your organisation and one hotel, set up through that property's sales manager, priced off the volume you expect to send and reviewed on an annual cycle. Some are a rate code typed at booking, some are a private booking link, and a few are nothing more formal than an instruction to say your program's name at check-in.
What you are agreeing is a price. You are not reserving rooms, you are not buying availability, and in most cases you are not agreeing anything about what happens if the hotel is full.
None of these are hypothetical. They are the failure modes you find whenever you sit down and actually test a program's own list of properties, one at a time, as a patient would.
The last one deserves its own paragraph, because it is the reason the other six survive so long. A corporate code produces no record. The booking happens between the patient and the hotel, and your program is not a party to it.
So a code that expired in March looks exactly like a code that is working, from your side of the desk, until somebody complains. One program we looked at had thirty-five properties across eight different discount mechanisms, two of them printing the same wrong phone number, and one where the discount was simply mentioning the program's name to whoever answered. Nobody there was careless. There was just no way to see it.
This is not an argument that negotiated rates are bad. A well-maintained code at a hotel across the road from your building, in a city that is not busy, is a good deal for a patient and costs you nothing per booking.
The honest comparison is not about price at all. A negotiated code can absolutely be the cheapest room a patient will find, and sometimes it is. What it cannot do is cover every property a patient might need, stay current without somebody tending it, or tell you afterwards what happened.
If you do nothing else, run the test that finds most of the decay. Pick three properties off your own page, in a week two months out, and try to book each one exactly as a patient would, using only what your page tells them.
No. If a code is current and the hotel is close, it is a good option for a patient and it costs you nothing. The problem is not that codes are bad, it is that a list of them is not a program: it decays silently, covers only the properties you negotiated, and tells you nothing about what happened.
At minimum whenever the agreement renews, which for most is annually. In practice the useful cadence is quarterly, and the useful test is booking one as a patient rather than emailing the sales manager to ask if it still works.
Sometimes, and sometimes not. It depends on the property, the week and how aggressively the public rate is being discounted at that moment. Anyone who tells you a single answer to this without looking at your specific properties is guessing.
Probably, for now. Two properties on one site is a maintainable list. The point at which it stops being maintainable is usually a second location, or the first time a patient tells you a hotel on the list has closed.