Frequent Miler on the Air - Citi's transfer bonus to Leading Hotels of the World | Coffee Break Ep27 | 9-24-24

Episode Date: September 24, 2024

Leading Hotels of the World is a hotel loyalty program with loose affiliation to 400 luxury hotels around the world. You may recognize the name from Greg's recent post about the best points-bookable hotels in the world here. (00:07) - What is Leading Hotels of the World Read Greg's recent post about the best points-bookable hotels in the world here. (01:35) - Citi standard Transfer to Leading Hotels of the World (02:35) - Leading Hotels of the World Details (and "Leader's Club" points) (04:05) - Greg's experience sampling Leading Hotels of the World using Citi ThankYou Rewards Read about Greg's experience with Leading Hotels of the World here. (06:41) - Learn more about the Citi transfer bonus to Leading Hotels of the World here. (07:41) - Who do we think this Citi transfer bonus is (and isn't) for? Visit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media. Music Credit – Beach Walk by Unicorn Heads

Here we go. This is not your typical Frequent Miler on the Air episode. This is a standalone segment we're calling Coffee Break. Each Coffee Break segment will cover a single topic related to miles and points. And each Coffee Break is limited to 20 minutes or your money back. Enjoy. Today's coffee break, Citi's transfer bonus to Leading Hotels of the World. What's this all about, Nick? Well, Leading Hotels of the World is a loyalty program that is a loose affiliation of apparently over 400 luxury hotels around the world. So if you're familiar with small luxury

hotels of the world, SLH, and I know many listeners will be because of SLH's affiliation with Hyatt previously, and now their affiliation with Hilton. If you're familiar with SLH and what that is, Leaders Club, or rather leading hotels of the world rather, is essentially a very similar thing. So it's more of like a loose marketing partnership than a brand identity, perhaps. Leaders Club, I mentioned a second ago, is the name of the loyalty program for leading hotels in the world. Most but not all leading hotels in the world are bookable with Leaders Club points. And Greg has written about the best points bookable hotels in the world for 2024. And if I remember correctly, the program with the most hotel booking options out of all the ones you searched,

the list of 100 best hotels in the world, Leaders Club had more than anybody else bookable with points, right? There were 10 of them. True story. Yep. 10 out of the 28 that were bookable with points where you could potentially get outsized value for your points. So I wasn't including things like Mr. and Mrs. Smith, where you get poor value for your Hyatt points. There you go. So obviously the moral of the story here is that there are some highly desirable leading hotels of the world properties that might make for a good use of points. So let's talk about using your points. So if you have city thank you points, you can transfer your city thank you points to leading hotels of the world, and they transfer

five city points to one leaders club point. So again, you're going from five to one, which might sound bad on the surface, but it's not really because we find that leading hotels of the world points are worth about $0.08 per point. So this works out to be about $0.16 per point in value for city thank you points during a normal period. Again, that's just the regular transfer ratio of five city thank you points to one leaders club point. Again, you're getting about $0.16 per city point in value, which is good. I mean, that's better than our reasonable redemption value for city points. Obviously, you can transfer to some airlines and fly in premium cabins and

potentially get even more, but that's a pretty good floor value. 1.6 cents per point is better than most options for using city points apart from a fancy premium cabin flight, right? Yeah, yeah. And before we talk about the transfer bonus, let's talk a little bit more about Leaders Club and their points. So Leaders Club points do expire after two years of inactivity, but simply earning more points or using your points resets the clock. So just transferring a few more points from Citi, for example, will reset the clock for another two years. There is a scary gotcha, which is when you first have activity, like if you look the same day at your account, it looks like the expiration hasn't been extended at all. But if you log back in the next day, it should reflect that. So that works out good. So obviously, in order to transfer points from Citi to Leaders Club, you have to join Leaders Club. That's the rewards program. It doesn't cost anything to join.

And it gives you some perks just by being a member and booking these leading hotels in the world through Leaders Club. And these are perks you get whether you pay with points or with cash. You get upgrade priority upon arrival. You get daily continental breakfast for two and early check-in and late checkout considerations. So they're not guaranteeing anything with that bill consideration. I mean, that's a nice way to put it. Instead of writing based on availability, they're not even promising that. They're like, well, it's available, but we're going to consider. Right, right. You look like someone we want to hear early or not. And I was not expecting much in terms of benefits from Leaders Club because other than the daily continental breakfast for two, none of these things are guaranteed.

Like upgrade priority upon arrival, that sounds a lot like, well, consider it to me. It does. It does. Yeah. Now, I didn't need early check-in or late check-out, so I didn't get to test those out, but I got more than I expected. Now, I have to caution. I have no idea which of the things I got are available to all guests versus Leaders Club guests, but they did hand me a Leaders Club card suggesting that some of the things I was getting were Leaders Club. So like one thing, for example, I got a welcome gift in my room and I don't think that's Leaders Club specific, but I really don't

know. But I did get a suite upgrade. And so I booked a regular room, got an upgrade to a big suite. That was totally unexpected. Very welcome. And the breakfast uh instead of continental breakfast they offered us full american breakfast for two which was like a predefined menu thing american breakfast right that's eggs and whatever or forty dollars off whatever you order from the menu daily and so i thought that was nice because it gives you you know the flexibility to order other things and they have. And the place I happened to go had a fantastic restaurant, so we were happy to try other things as well. Very good. Yeah. So that all turned out to be a good deal. I was pleasantly surprised by how good the Leaders Club benefits turned out to be. Yeah. Well, and it's nice because it's interesting when you see these places that are just sort of like a loose association because you don't necessarily go in with the same level

of confidence that you do when it's a program like Hyatt or Marriott where there's relatively defined benefits. It's a little bit looser here, but great to see that, sure enough, this is a really nice type of a chain or type of an association. So you may get better benefits than what you might ordinarily expect with other chains. And of course, caution is that, as Nick said earlier, this is a very loose affiliation. So just because the hotel I happen to go to treated me well does not mean others have that policy. But it was a good indicator anyway that you might. There you go. All right.

So right now, as we record this, there is a transfer bonus from City Thank You Points to Leaders Club. So you can get a 25% transfer bonus when you transfer between before we started publishing this, before this publishes, through October 19th, 2024. So if you transfer by October 19th of 2024, you'll get 25% more leaders club points. So the transfer ratio changes from five to one, that's five city thank you points to one leaders club point to become four city thank you points become one leaders club point. So it'll cost you a few less points. So essentially, instead of getting 1.6 cents per city point, you're going to get two cents per city point in value when you transfer over to Leaders Club. So two cents per point, that's a good value for your city thank you points. That's nicely ahead of our reasonable redemption value. So should we all be transferring

all of our points to Leaders Club, Greg? Should I clear out the city thank you points, send them over to Leaders Club while I can, since I can get two cents per point in value? Who should do it? Who shouldn't do it? What do you think? Yeah. It's a really cool opportunity for those who are interested in the hotels that are available through Leading Hotels of the World. I think that if you have the city points and you're interested in that type of redemption that you're interested in in spending a lot of points for luxury hotels then it's it's a really special opportunity now i do need to stress so it's we're talking about a lot of points like like a a really nice uh hotel might you know you might be spending a spending 10,000 leaders club points per night at a really nice hotel.

And that would be 40,000 city points each night. Which, you know, I mean, that compares well to other programs if you're talking about booking top tier hotels. But still, it translates to a lot of points. So I think you need to be interested in staying at top tier luxury hotels and have a lot of city points to make it worth it. So that's my like high level advice there. And if you do fit in the both of those,

I'd say, yeah, go for it. But Nick, what about you? Are you doing this? I'm not doing it because I've poured time and effort into earning elite status with other programs. And so I want to enjoy the benefits that I put my time and effort into with the other chains and I have points in other chains. So I'm not doing this right now. However, I said that and that's why I'm not doing it. However, I find Leaders Club intriguing because

you can book any room type. And so, you know, Greg found the points are worth about the 8 cents per point. So, the 10,000 point example he gave was like an $800 room. Again, this is just an example for 40,000 city thank you points. And the nice thing is that you could book like you book a suite. And so, if you want a suite, you can book a suite and use your leaders club points and get the same type of value out of the leaders club points. And so that's intriguing because I travel with a family and we like the extra space. So I could see that being really appealing in a scenario where I need a suite. And especially if I didn't have access to booking a suite easily with other programs, maybe there's not a Hyatt

in the place that I want to go at all. So I can't book a Hyatt suite. And Hilton wants a bajillion points for a suite at their hotel. And so this could be a way to use points to get that extra space. So if I were in that scenario, I probably would consider it. I'm not going to speculatively transfer to Leaders Club. And at this point, I don't have any hotel needs in my near future where I think Leaders Club would fit in. But I think that for the crowd of people like Greg said, who have a

lot of city thank you points and either A, want to stay at luxury hotels or B, want to be able to book that room with extra space that they have available and still get good value for your points, then I think this transfer bonus could certainly make sense. And even when there's not a transfer bonus, leading hotels of the world might make sense as a booking option. Yeah. And for me, there were two considerations. I was definitely going to do it. This is a great opportunity. I am very interested in using my city points for top luxury hotels. And as I said earlier, I enjoyed the one stay I did. And in that one in particular, it wasn't particularly the hotel was that great. It was more like I was really impressed with how the Leaders Club thing turned out.

And so I definitely want to do it. I had two considerations. One, and this, I should have thought of both of them together, but I didn't. But the first one was this, that I have a rewards plus card that's pulled together. My thank you account is pulled together with my other thank you points.

And so what that means is I can redeem up to 100,000 points per year and get 10,000 points back. That's the maximum. So I do want to ideally redeem 100,000 points every year to get the full rebate on that. So I thought I hadn't actually redeemed any this year. So I went ahead and transferred 100,000 to Leaders Club. And I got 8,500 points back because I had done a smaller transfer earlier, which I had forgotten about. But then I remembered I had lent a friend 80,000 city points for a EVA Airways Award last year or sometime.

It was time to collect. It was time to collect. So I was like, oh, I should have thought of that earlier. But anyway, I decided I'm sure I can use more Leaders Club points. So I asked them for those points back. And as you know, when points are transferred, you have to use them within, I think it's 90 days before they expire. So that's why I didn't ask for them back until I knew what I was going to do with them. And then- Let's just clarify there, city points. When you transfer city points from one person to another, they have to be used within 90 days.

Your leaders club points don't need to be used within 90 days. Greg was talking about the friend transferring 80,000 points, city thank you points to Greg's city thank you points account. Then those city thank you points have to be used within 90 days. Very good clarification. So I knew I was going to transfer them during this transfer bonus. And so I did. So yeah, so I've transferred 180,000 points over. Wow. So you've got a nice little stash of leaders club points. Do you have a use in mind or did you do this speculatively, Greg? You know what? I did it completely speculatively. I have some ideas in mind, but nothing solid enough to really talk it through here.

Greg is a crazy man. But it makes sense in your situation probably more than it would for a listener in most cases, I think, to consider. Yeah. Well, plus, because I'm not traveling with kids and I like doing the luxury hotel thing, it gives me more options when I'm traveling, like with my wife as to where to stay. And because they don't have a hard expiry after two years, if there was a hard expiry, I would just forget about it. But because it's easy to extend them, I feel confident that I'll get good use of these. Very good. Very good.

So some people should consider it. It represents a good chance to get good value out of your city thank you points. And so if you're not using your city thank you points for airline redemptions already, or if you're using them in for airline redemptions, but use like luxury hotels too, this could certainly be a good one to consider before it expires. Again, the transfer bonus expires October 19th, and then ongoing, it still represents a pretty good way to get good value out of your city. Thank you, points. It does indeed. If you've enjoyed this and you'd like to get on our email list, you want to go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list,

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