Frequent Miler on the Air - Doing Hawaii with points | Ep195 | 3-25-23

Episode Date: March 25, 2023

Instead of saving money for years to visit Hawaii, save your money and get your flights and hotels covered with just two new credit cards. This week, we talk about how to scratch Hawaii off your bucket list with ease and your best options to make it happen. Join our email list: https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ 00:00 Intro 00:56 Giant Mailbag: IHG Suite Upgrade Clarification 04:36 Frequent Miler Challenge Update https://frequentmiler.com/party-of-5-frequent-milers-2023-team-challenge/ 13:46 Card Talk: Wyndham credit cards https://frequentmiler.com/wyndhamearner/ https://frequentmiler.com/wyndhamearnerplus/ https://frequentmiler.com/wyndhamearnerbiz/ 29:00 What crazy thing....did Citi do this week? 32:51 Mattress running the numbers: Wyndham portal promotion https://frequentmiler.com/wyndham-shopping-portal-math-strikes-again/ 39:08 Wyndham points on sale https://frequentmiler.com/buy-wyndham-points/ 43:02 Award Talk: A multi-night stay on Hyatt free night certificates 45:21 Award Talk: Marriott bookings before the gloves come off 50:28 Main Event: Doing Hawaii with points https://frequentmiler.com/hawaii-vacation-book-flights-and-hotels-with-credit-card-points/ 56:38 How to get award flights to Hawaii https://frequentmiler.com/best-ways-to-fly-to-hawaii-from-the-us-mainland/ 56:37 Book with miles directly with the operating airline (AA Web Specials, Delta and United flash sales) 1:03:03 Partner awards: United via Turkish Miles & Smiles https://frequentmiler.com/how-to-book-united-flights-using-turkish-miles-smiles/ 1:07:55 Partner awards: British Airways for Alaska or American 1:08:10 Partner awards: Air France and Virgin Atlantic for Delta 1:08:48 Tools for searching for award flights https://frequentmiler.com/which-award-search-tool-is-best/ 1:11:21 Hawaiian miles to upgrade from economy to business class 1:12:38 Lodging 1:13:23 Wyndham 1:13:45 Book Vacasa rentals with Wyndham points https://frequentmiler.com/wyndham-vacasa/ 1:17:04 Wyndham points for Wyndham timeshare properties 1:21:46 Hyatt points for Hawaiian accommodations 1:23:35 StayWithPoints 1:28:50 Is Hilton worth it? What about Marriott? 1:34:23 Timeshare deals 1:38:49 Question of the Week: Why is Greg's wallet so full of Citibank cards? Music credit: Annie Yoder

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did City do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event. Frequent Miler on the air starts now. Today's main event, doing Hawaii with points. We're going to get into how to do Hawaii using your award points

so that you can travel for free-ish. For free-ish. I like it. I like it. Get a little ukulele music going. Let's see if I can add a little ukulele music to the pie. So if you just heard that, that was me. That was my time.

Nick likes to add extra tasks for himself when he edits these things later. If I can find it. If you didn't hear it, then that means I didn't find a clip I could use. Right. Or maybe you just ran out of time. You might have gotten backed up and had too much to do. We'll see. All right.

Let's get into the giant mailbag. Today's giant mail comes from our very own Steven Pepper. In reaction to our podcast where we discussed the best hotel loyalty programs. And in that podcast, we talked about how good the IHG suite upgrades were, I mean, compared to Marriott. But, you know, we'd like the Hyatt ones even better. But still, he had a reaction to our discussion about the IHG certificates. And he says, a big drawback with IHG's suite upgrades is that you can currently only use them on paid stays, not award stays. Yeah, as an aside, IHG has said that they'll eventually make them available to award stays. But to my knowledge, that hasn't happened yet.

So hopefully it will i mean they've they've been good about most of their all of maybe their promises about the new program so i i hope that this will indeed happen but anyway currently that that is a big down downside to it he says also just fyi you can pick one suite upgrade at 20 nights, one at 40 nights, and up to two at 70 nights. So that's just to clarify some of the, I guess, guesswork we had. We knew you got one at 20, but then we couldn't quite figure out when you got them after that. That shows how often we've stayed at IHGs in the last year, because really, this is a relatively new thing. And so and Steven was the person to ask about this, we should we should have asked Steven before we talked about it, because surely he stays at enough IHG properties. So yeah, that's a big bummer to me

that it's only that they can only be used right now on paid stays, because ideally, you want to be able to use these suite upgrades when you're staying someplace fancy that you probably don't want to pay for with your cash. So so that's a bummer. But like you said, IHG has actually done really well at revamping the program. So I'm sure eventually they will be, but it stinks that it's eventually still because they've already had these sweet upgrades out now, gosh, about a year, right? So at this point, I wouldn't want to be collecting them and waiting around for when they're going to finally, you know, make them applicable to award stays. So that's kind of a bummer, in my opinion. Yeah, although I will say something in IHG's defense.

They seem to be working very hard to roll out these new things once they're really ready, as opposed to kind of rushing them out and then facing a bunch of complaints. Because, you know, let's say the call center agents have no idea how to apply them or whatever. I get part of that idea from what happened with the, there's choice benefits where you could get food awards, like 25 bucks or whatever it is towards food at hotels. And they didn't roll that out until it was supposedly, I haven't tested this, but completely automated so that it's not up to the hotel's discretion or the knowledge of a front desk agent, whether or not you can actually use this award for a, let's say, in-room dining or something like that. It's supposed to be all automated now.

And I give them credit for that, trying to trying to do it right. So hopefully that's what's going on here is that the delay is probably because they have technical issues that they want to get over before trying to rush it out. So, yeah, well, hopefully, hopefully their tech people work faster than Hyatt's tech people. So, you know, we can we can hope because Hyatt's tech is notoriously not particularly good. So hopefully IHGs will be better. All right.

So that is the mailbag. Let's talk about our challenge update, because this week you posted about Party of Five. So what's up? What's the update? What's going on? What is this Party of Five business? Yeah. So as you know, every year we do some sort of challenge within our within the frequent miler team where what we do is try to we we make it a game and try to design the game so that we'll be incentivized to push the boundaries on what's possible with points and miles and other types of rewards. And the idea is that it's both fun, it's fun to follow along

with these things, but it's also educational. People learn from what we do about what's possible and we learn new things that then we can share with the audience. And all of those things have happened with pretty much every challenge we've done. And so hopefully this will be no exception to that. This year's challenge is all about traveling with a party of five. So we stole that name from a- No, no, we borrowed the name. Careful with your wording here.

The legal department is jumping in to say uh no we just came up with that idea greg we just came up with that name uh there were there's no nev campbell had nothing to do with it whatsoever and and uh the the the idea is that you know we've talked about before that when award space popped open for five, we found five people on ANA first class from Japan to San Francisco, that it just happened to be during the dates that we had set aside for our team challenge. And so we jumped on it and just booked all five of us to,

to fly in that first class the suite, I think it's called. And then said, we'll figure out the challenge later. We know this is going to be part of it, but we'll figure it out later. And then about a week later, Japan Airlines business class award space opened up from San Francisco to Tokyo. And so I snagged that using American Airlines miles. And so we now had the outline of our challenge, which was basically based on the dates we had set aside. We know that at the beginning of the challenge, we're flying to Japan. Midway through the challenge, we're flying back from Japan to the US and we had to figure out a challenge around that. So what we decided is, and unlike what we've talked about before,

we are going to have two teams competing against each other to design an amazing four-day adventure. One team is going to cover the Asia part part the where you start in tokyo and you could go anywhere within asia in those four days the other team is going to do the americas part start in san francisco could go anywhere in the americas in those four days and um it will be uh carrie and steven uh doing the, who are Team Tokyo. They're the ones starting in Tokyo and designing the four days of adventure there. And Nick and Tim will be Team San Francisco designing that part of the trip. And I'm going to be the tag along. So all five of us are going to go on all these adventures.

And I'm going to be the judge, juror, executor. Thank you for modifying that. I was getting nervous. I think it's an apt word there because I'm going to be using my points and my ish. Frequent miler, the business's money to pay for anything that we need to pay for. And, you know, I'm going to be awarding out points, sort of like whose line is it anyway, where the points don't matter, and I just make them up. But I'm gonna be awarding points for things like, how good of a deal did they get for each part of the travel? How unique is what it is we're doing? And also, I have some things like

soon to be expiring free night certificates. And so if the teams find good values for those things that I want to get rid of like that, then they get extra points for that sort of thing. So that's the game. It starts our travel starts early June, and we will not tell people in advance or each other what we're actually doing. It's all going to unfold as we go. Yeah, you know, it's interesting because I know that Stephen and Carrie have been like meeting because I've you know, they've mentioned,

oh, we're going to get together on Zoom, blah, blah, blah. So I know they've been like meeting and preparing and getting ready. And Tim and I have done some talking, but we have no idea. You know, I have no idea what Tim and and or rather what Carrie and Stephen have planned so far, just that they've planned some things. I don't know if they have the whole thing planned or part of it or what. So yeah, I think the whole challenge is exciting and interesting because as we've mentioned before,

that jumping on the first class availability was sort of the catalyst to trying to figure this out. And it was a great example because it's exactly what you have to do. When you see something like that available, even though we could only book one way at the time, we jumped on it because we knew that we would just have to keep hunting it out until we found the other direction and figured out the rest of the details, which is so typical of the way that I generally tend to book travel for my family. So, so I think that was a great

beginning. And now I think we have a pretty good handle on, you know, on the parameters. So it'll be exciting to see how this all shakes out. I think it'll be pretty cool and special that we're able to do it all together, that five of us, you know, the whole team, we've only been together all of us at once, one time so far, right? You know, we spent a couple of days together. So we haven't, we certainly haven't traveled together and this will be the most time we've spent together as a group ever. So that'll be a lot of fun also. Yeah, absolutely. I can't wait.

And this will be the first time we do a challenge where there will be a number of people traveling together. And so our hope is that we uncover some deals, opportunities, ways of doing things so that you can get good deals, even if you need to, you know, stuff five people into a hotel booking, for example, how do you do that? You know, both economically and, and, and, and also with comfort, you know, that that's going to be part of how I judge things too. And, you know, it's fine if, if someone saves a lot of points to get us all into an EconoLodge where we are all sleeping, where half of us are sleeping on the floor of one room, but you're going to not win any points for that. I have to throw that idea away. I can't use that, but what if it's in a really cool place? You know, you might, you might enjoy it. Maybe.

Never know. Well, I'm just hoping that after? You know, you might enjoy it. Maybe. I don't ever know. Well, I'm just hoping that after, you know, like seven or eight days altogether traveling, that Greg remains the judge, the jury, and the executor rather than the executioner. So we can hope for that, that that goes smoothly. But I'm sure it's going to. I'm looking forward to it. It's going to be exciting. And hopefully there's going to be some good finds. I know that I'm motivated to find something interesting.

So I've definitely already been looking at some things and Tim and I have talked about some things. So, so I'm excited to uncover something new, hopefully. Yeah. Well, you've got it. You've got to step it up and start finding stuff because I know when Carrie wrote in our Slack channel the other day, and this is a private Slack channel, by the way, for our team, that your team is going down.

You know, you can pretty much guess they found something really good that they're excited about. I thought so. She definitely seemed pretty confident. So I'm excited to see what they put in. You know, the nice thing is that even if you lose, it will probably be pretty good

because I imagine both teams are going to work pretty hard to have an impressive little trip. So I can't wait. It's going to be exciting. It'll be fun to watch. Last thing I have to shout out to Carrie for the artwork she designed for Party of Five Challenge.

Check out my post. And there's a number of drawings in there that are really fun. So put a link. Yes, I will. I will. And to be clear, part of the reason for this challenge for five is to show that it can be done with a family that, you know, word travel, oftentimes people think is difficult. And it's certainly not as easy for five people as it is for one or two. But hopefully we're going to find some good ways to make that happen. And when the challenge comes closer, we'll let you know, of course, and you'll be able to follow along on Instagram. That'll be the best place probably to follow along. And we'll certainly

have updates on the blog also. But when the challenge actually happens, following us on Instagram probably makes the most sense. So you can follow along with our stories as they develop. So that's just a shout out for our Instagram channel there. All right, let's move on next then to card talk. And this week's card talk is going to mesh really nicely with today's main event discussion when we get there, because today we're going to talk about the Wyndham cards. So there are a few different Wyndham cards out there. Can we talk through this? What's up with the various Wyndham cards out there? Can we talk through this? What's up with the various Wyndham cards?

Yeah, absolutely. Let me first say, though, just real general, what Wyndham points are good for, and which is that Wyndham itself, if you're going to say a Wyndham property, most hotels charge either 15,000 points per night or 30,000 points per night. And in timeshare-like properties, which Wyndham owns, then it would be like 15,000 or 30,000 points per bedroom per night. And the other thing you could do with them, which can be really, really valuable is use them for Vacasa vacation rentals, which are like timeshare rentals, which are like, no, I'm sorry. They're more like Airbnb rentals where you pay 15,000 points per bedroom per night. And all of those can offer great value at times. And so they all have,

they also are really good in Hawaii. And as Nick said, we're going to talk more about that in the main event today, but I just want to say that Wyndham points are potentially the best points to have if you're planning a trip to Hawaii. So yeah. And I go ahead, go ahead.

Yeah. I just wanted that background because I feel like you need to understand why we care about these Wyndham cards at all before we jump in. That's important because if you're familiar with hotel chains, then you may know that Wyndham, you may picture brands like Days Inn and Econolodge. And those aren't the properties we're talking about

using Wyndham points for. Not that there's anything wrong with cramming eight people in the Econolodge. Greg sounded excited about it just a few minutes ago. But that's not what we're talking about collecting Wyndham points for. There are some potentially really high value uses for these other things that we're going to talk about. So yeah, that's an important piece of context because we're not talking about collecting these to stay at the day's end. We're talking about

collecting them because they can be great for vacation rental type places and some quite nice hotels in certain areas. So all right, Wyndham cards. So there's a few different Wyndham credit cards issued by Barclays, right? Right, right. They all go into the brand name Wyndham earner cards. And all three of them will give you just for having the card a 10% award discount. So those prices I mentioned before, like, you know, if something's 15,000 points per night, it becomes 13,500 points per night because of that 10% discount just automatically, which is really nice feature, gives you a discount on paid stays. And they all have no foreign transaction fees, which is kind of remarkable to me. That's a nice, nice feature as well. All right. So the three cards, there's the fee-free

earner card, which if you sign up, there's a bonus 30,000 points after $1,000 spend. And that card earns five points per dollar for Wyndham properties and for guest stations. And then a little less interesting interesting two points per dollar for restaurants and grocery um also you can earn uh 7500 points each year if you made 15 000 spend on the card which wouldn't necessarily recommend unless you're spending a lot of guest stations but um you know before we go on other cards i'd say i find this card interesting mainly because it's a fee-free way to, first of all, get a nice little welcome bonus, but also just to have and hold that card forever, just in case you're going to book a Wyndham Award and get that 10% discount. So that's pretty good right there. Next up, the earner plus card, excuse me, is $75 a year. This one has a better

signup bonus. It's 45,000 points after $1,000 spend, and it has better bonus categories. So instead of five points per dollar for Wyndham and guests, you get six points per dollar for Wyndham properties and guest stations and six points per dollar for Wyndham properties and guest stations, and four points per dollar for restaurants and grocery. So suddenly, you know, four points per dollar for restaurants and grocery makes it a pretty decent card for those categories, I think. It's not the best in them available, but pretty decent. And the other thing this card gives you is every year 7500 points automatically upon renewal of the card so you know each year after your first year you pay the 75 and you get 7500 points you're basically buying points every year automatically for one

cent each which is a decent price for windhamham points, I think. And, you know, and then you get the extra, you know, category bonuses that this card offers over and above the fee free card. I think this card, I want to jump in. I think this card doesn't get much attention, at least not for me, because I think the business version that Greg will talk about in a second is a far better card. However, I think it's worth mentioning, like Greg said, this is actually quite a good card for the price point in terms of the return. If you're not going to get the business card, which I think is short-sighted, I think the business card is well worth pursuing. But if you're not going to do that or you can't for some reason,

this is pretty solid in terms of Wyndham earnings on regular categories that you're going to spend on gas and grocery and dining. I mean, those are categories most people are going to spend quite a bit on. And like Greg said, it's not necessarily like category leading. If you look at our best category bonuses page, which I'll put a link to in the description, then you'll see there are some cards that are a better return on those purchases. But in general, not for the $75 a year price point. That's quite a low annual fee for a card that offers that kind of return on those purchases. So I wouldn't have this card. If you get the business card, I don't think it's necessarily worth having this card also, unless you're going to use it a lot in those categories. But if you're not going to get the business card for some reason, I think this is totally

worth the 75 bucks a year over the no annual fee version. I totally agree. Totally agree. And the nice thing is you probably, if you ever decide, oh, I don't want to be spending $75 a year anymore, you could probably downgrade, I would guess, to the fee-free version. Then the third card is the Wyndham Earner Business Card. As Nick mentioned, this one is $20 more than the Plus card. So this one's $95 a year. And it has a similar welcome bonus of 45,000 points, but it requires $2,000 spend instead of 1,000. So it's a little

bit more onerous to get that bonus. As an aside, if you're not in a hurry to get it, you might want to wait because every now and then they offer something like double the points for this card. And so you might want to wait until that's available, but it's a very good value and very good bonus on its own. And what this card gives you with point earnings is eight points per dollar at Wyndham Hotels and Gas Stations, eight points per dollar, and five points per dollar for marketing, advertising, and utilities. By the way, on all these cards, if I didn't mention what the bonus is, it's one point per dollar everywhere else for all three of these cards. This card also gives you 15,000 points every year that you renew just automatically so you pay 95 and get 15 000 points each year after the first year that's a that's a great bargain right there um and this card gives you Wyndham Diamond status which will give you they'll roll out the red carpet for you, right? At all Wyndham properties. That's right. They'll give you both bottles of water. On property, it's probably not going to get you very much,

but Wyndham Diamond status matches the Caesars Diamond. And if you've been listening to the show for a while, you know we've talked about how you can turn Caesars Diamond into, well, we did an entire show about how to turn that into four free cruises. But since then, I've added a couple more. So now you're looking at at least six i think if you if you did all of the matches so i said that's what for one person so so caesar's diamond can be useful so that makes wyndham diamond useful otherwise wyndham diamond probably isn't going to be very consequential for you uh however again i think alone you know when you look at just the fact that this

card costs $95 a year and comes with 15,000 points, that's a rate at which I would be like a speculative buyer of Wyndham points. Probably I would absolutely buy if I could, I would buy, you know, more points at that rate. So I think it's totally worthwhile. It's a great trade. Even if you only wanted the 15,000 points per year, that's a good trade because that can get you a one bedroom unit, a one bedroom of a casa vacation rental that costs in some cases, three, four or $500 for a night with all the fees for 15,000 points. And essentially you've paid $95 for it. So that's a solid trade on its own. The 8X gas stations is also super useful. A gas is expensive. So obviously you'll earn some points on gas, but gas stations also sell lots of gift cards. So you could buy gift cards to lots of other places and effectively earn 8X on other

types of spend too. So that makes this really easy. Well, it's a great earner. It's well-named. It is. It really is. It's a great earner. It's well named. It's a great earner. And, you know, all three of the cards are actually great earners at gas stations. Even the free, free one starts at 5x. But yeah, this one is just really exceptional. And so yeah, we highly recommend this. And my wife and I both have this card. So we're, you know, we're doubling the amount of points we're buying each year for 95 bucks. And, and I was very pleased to find recently when I booked a vacasification rental through Wyndham that I was able to use points for like two or three nights with, with one account

and one of the nights with the other account, but it all went into one reservation. So we didn't have to break it up or anything like that. Yeah, that's awesome. That's really nice because most, most hotel chains don't let you do that kind of thing with their points. Usually you'd have to have completely separate reservations or pay a bunch of money to move your points to the other account first or something like that. It can be kind of a pain, but okay.

Since this is a business card, there was a question that came in this week, and that will lend itself well to explaining this in general. So Nick wrote in, and this is not question of the week, but it was question of the week material. It just seemed to fit better here. So Nick said he's interested in a business card after he learned that he may be eligible, but he's trying to find the answer to this. He says, first, could you confirm I actually have a business? My business is that my full-time engineering job, on my full-time engineering job, I'll sometimes go to on-site visits for my employer a few times a year, and I'll pay, and my employer reimburses me later on. Is that a business?

And then what category of business would I put on my business credit card application? I'm a freelance worker. What is it? So is that a business? What is a business? Who qualifies for a business card? We've talked about this before, but I think it's worth repeating for someone who has a business. It is. That was an interesting question. So by IRS standards, that's not a business. You're said, you probably are doing other things that are by IRS standards of business. Things like selling stuff on eBay or having a yard sale occasionally.

Maybe you're starting a blog and think someday you're going to add ads to it and make some money that way. Pretty much anything you do that is either currently earning money outside of your employment or has the potential to make money in the future, you're writing a novel. Those kinds of things can all be considered businesses. And there, you can easily sign up for a card under any of those types of businesses, call yourself, the type of business is sole proprietor. There's no, there's no tax implications for doing it. Any earnings you make are still, you know, that's's that has nothing to do with whether or not you're signing for a business card whether you have to pay taxes on those earnings um and um

uh the the if you some banks require some sort of proof of your that you set up your you're doing business as your dba if you use a name other than your own, um, for like signing up for a business card or bank account. Um, so I recommend just say your business is your name and then you don't have that requirement at all. So, you know, my, uh, my name is Greg Davis Keene. My business is Greg Davis Keene, for example. And, and, uh, boom, you've got a nice, easy business and easy way to sign up for cards. Yep. Yep. Very simple process with most issuers. Now, Barclays can be a little bit more, I don't know, they can be slower to approve and or can be a little bit

more difficult sometimes than other issuers. I think that's worth mentioning. I don't always hear of instant approvals with Barclays. Every and then. They want to see some sort of proof of your home address or something. But most people seem to have success when they submit whatever it time, Barclays isn't going to be impossible to get a business card approved, even if you've got a very new business that doesn't make much of anything yet or hasn't made anything yet, potentially. So like Greg said, if you're just writing a blog and you hope to someday sell ads when you have enough people reading, then that could be considered a business and you can get approved for cards that way. So all right, that's enough about that. I think anyway, hopefully that makes that clear. So Wyndham cards could be interesting and we'll talk more about Vacasa and leveraging those points in a little bit. I think the business card is a no brainer and I think the plus card is also potentially quite good. But Greg made arguments for why even the no annual fee card is worth a look, but all of them have bonuses right

now that aren't the best ever. So I think it's also important to repeat one more time that if you're not in a hurry then wait a little bit because we'll eventually see them increase again i imagine i expect that though it seems likely yeah yeah yeah all right so that brings us then quickly to what crazy thing did city do this week i haven't gotten to say that in a long time what crazy yeah yeah uh so city city is back baby um so ryan writes them he recently was approved for the city advantage executive card and he he was kind of in a hurry to get his card because he had some big spend to put on it. And so after two weeks, he didn't get his card yet. He called Citibank to ask them when the card would arrive.

And the first rep told him there was an issue with a vendor that makes the cards, but it should be mailed shortly. And the agent said that he was not the only one that this happened to. So apparently something's going on where whoever makes the actual physical cards for Citi is having trouble. He called Citi again a couple days later to ask again, try to get more information. And he says, the lady I spoke with said the same thing. The vendor who makes their cards cannot make or ship them at the moment. And all they have been told is that people affected by this

will get a letter or email soon explaining the problem. And they will adjust the start date for the bonus spend at some point. I asked if this was going to be a few days or if it could be longer and was told that they have no idea when cards will be able to be sent again because the vendor does not know. What? So, okay. So that's the background.

So guess what happened the very next day after he made that call? Card arrived. Card arrived in the mail. So it had already been shipped. Love you, city. It had been in the mail for days already at that point. They figured it out. They figured it out real quick at the card production plant. So I love that story because it just goes to illustrate a point we've made lots of times before, and that's that the average

customer service person that you speak to on the phone has no idea the answers to your questions. So if you don't know the answers, you're like shooting in the dark asking a customer service rep because they're going to give you an answer. But whether or not that answer is rooted in truth is totally a gamble. Maybe it will be. Maybe it won't. That could be something they heard from someone. I don't necessarily think they were intentionally misleading Ryan. Maybe someone told them that. But again, they clearly didn't know what was going on. Right. And maybe that's happening with some other cards. They just didn't bother to actually check the records for his account. That's what it is.oggling part. You'd think that they'd be able to see the record that, okay, no, this one has been shipped out, right? You'd think that Citi would know.

They should know, right, that your card is in the mail somewhere, that the credit card with a limit of however much is out there, you know, in the ether. So you'd think they would know. It wouldn't surprise me at all, though, if that's a different department. And so whoever the call center agent he got just has no access to that particular information. Right. It's not easy for them to access. They don't know how to access. There's all kinds of possibilities.

Right. That makes sense. Thank you, City, for another good crazy thing story. Customer service rep isn't in touch with the credit card factory, right? So I guess that makes sense. Right. Just kind of reminded, when you were reading it, it reminded me of Diners Club. Because years ago, Diners Club was around forever ago, I guess.

And then they disappeared for many years. And then they came back for a hot minute. of diners club because years ago diners well diners club was around forever ago i guess and then they disappeared for many years then they came back for a hot minute and they had a pretty desirable interesting card and then all of a sudden they started saying they ran out of plastic and they just like they took it down applications and they ran out of plastic they were going to bring them back up when they you know got their plastic back and they never did so they ran out of it permanently i guess so i think the card still exists for people who got it but anyway uh all that out of the way let's talk about uh mattress running the numbers okay i got lost for a second mattress running the numbers real quick return to windham so windham this week

is out with a shopping portal promotion you gotta lovendham shopping portal promotions, right? I mean, these are a lot of fun because Wyndham stinks at math. They're so bad. It's so funny that they haven't learned to, they keep coming back and back to us with this 5X promo where you get five times as many points, except you don't. No, no, you don't. You get some amount of points and it's probably more than usual. And that's about all, you know, for sure. Yeah, exactly. So it's just crazy, but they do. So when they do these shopping portal promotions, they offer more points than usual at lots of merchants. These are Wyndham points that you earn for clicking through from the portal to these places, Macy's or whatever,

Macy's.com, for example. And by buying something in those stores, you get Wyndham points. And during this period, which lasts for about a month, you get more points than usual. Where they get this five times thing, I don't know. Stephen went through the entire catalog of merchants and found one, just one where the amount of points you get is five times what was offered before or as a base amount. Yeah. Yeah. So who knows how many points you, I mean, you do know sort of the show a multiplier in terms of how many points you're going to earn. So if you're not familiar with shopping portals real quick, a shopping portal is just a website you click through to go to Macy's or to go to wherever, what other other sites it is that you shop from, Dick's Sporting Goods or Dell or wherever else,

and you earn some sort of a return. They take a commission and you go to buy whatever it is you're going to buy at Dell and the Wyndham Shopping Portal gets a commission and they pass on some points to you. That's the way a shopping portal works. We've done episodes about that before. And so the Wyndham Portal, I mean, usually the rates are so-so, but when they do these promos, they have some really good returns sometimes. The odd thing is that you never get exactly the number of points that you think you'd get. Like if it says 20X and you spend $100, you'd think you'd get 2,000 points. But really, you're going to get something like 1,972 points or 2,187. It's going to be some weird number that doesn't quite correspond to what they're advertising,

but it's usually good enough or a little better than you expected. So it just goes along with their bad math. Like they have this calculator that just doesn't work. and no one's thought to buy them a new calculator. And that's kind of odd. But we haven't complained. Like we joke about it, but we haven't complained about it because it usually still works out being pretty good, right? Yes, exactly. Exactly.

So Stephen in his post about this deal highlighted one opportunity to indirectly buy Wyndham points. So the idea is that the Nord VPN is on the portal at 120 points per dollar. And when you click through to Nord VPN, you see that you can get a two-year subscription for $161 and change. And Steven says that if the 120X is correct, you'd get over 19,000 points by doing so and that it'd be essentially buying points for 0.83 cents per point. So what do you think? Is that sort of mattress run worthy? Should you buy NordVPN just for those, for over 19,000 points? It's a no from me, Doug. No. Why is that? And right now they're on sale for 0.93 cents per point. So you'd theoretically save a tenth of a cent per point.

But on the flip side, you've got the risk of you don't really know how many points Wyndham is going to post when you buy that subscription. It might be the right number. It might not be the right number. It's just not worth the headache to me for an amount that I could already buy them for. Unless I really want more, I'm already buying the max and I really want more. I don't know that I would do that. If it was something I wanted, like there's an offer for Blue Apron. I think it's 9,000 points for signing up for Blue Apron. And so we've signed up with a new account for Blue Apron here and there over the years. And so I would sign up for

a new account with Blue Apron and take my 9,000 points and get dinner because I'm going to get dinner either way. And so in that case, I would probably do000 points and get dinner because I'm going to get dinner either way. And so in that case, I would probably do that one. This one, I'm like, not worth the hassle to maybe save a tenth of a cent per point and maybe get ripped off. Although I should mention also maybe get way more points than you intended. I had a Dell purchase last year that I ended up getting like 33 points per dollar and the rate was supposed to be like 17 or 20 or so. It was like some weird amount that i got way more points than what i was supposed to so who knows i mean maybe you'll get lucky and get tons of windham points on this but uh yeah i wouldn't what about you yeah similar to you i i feel very uh unconfident about the windham portal

i feel like they sometimes uh track and sometimes don't, and their customer service seems very, very slow and spotty. So I wouldn't normally do it. I'm tempted actually to just do it as an experiment for the podcast so I can report back later what happened. So I might do that. I think that one kind of neat thing is that with NordVPN, I can legitimately call it a business expense. And so there's some tax advantage to doing it that way. So it costs me a little bit less. A little bit less. Yeah. Yeah. The title mounts. That's a good point. I. I'll play with it. Why not? And then we'll we'll know whether it's worth doing the next time a 5x opportunity comes along like this. You know,

I didn't plan to do this, but now I'm kind of tempted to do it just to see if we get the same number of points because I'm not at all confident that we will. Yeah, yeah. That's such a good idea. All right, Lynn, let's talk about the other. You mentioned Wyndham points are on sale right now for 0.93 cents per point. I think that's like a 40% discount on their normal rate. That's a little bit better than. So when they have sales the the sale price is usually very very close to one cent not that this isn't but it's usually more like 0.98 cents per point

something in that range i think um so this a little bit better uh what do you think is is it time to buy i mean obviously you should buy if you need the points now now and can and can get a good deal with it. But what if you don't? What if you just want to stock up on your points because someday you might go to Hawaii? I mean, because someday you might go to Hawaii. No, I wouldn't. When you worded that way. No, because when the points expire after four years period, they expire after 18 months of inactivity. But then also after four years, period. They expire after 18 months of inactivity, but then also after four years, they expire altogether. Now, there's a trick to keep them alive where you move them over

to Caesar's Rewards and then move them back from Caesar's Rewards, but there's a maximum number of points you can do that with per year, and that gets a little complicated. So is it worth buying them with no short-term plans? I'd hesitate because of the four-year expiration and the pain in the butt in terms of keeping them alive. However, that said, if you're reasonably confident that a vacation rental would be in your next year worth of travel, well, then now all of a sudden I feel a little bit better about it. And in my case with the family, I feel like vacation rentals are potentially quite useful. So I think there's a decent shot that I would use a vacation rental in the next year. So I would be tempted by the less than one cent per point, especially if I

had a near term. Obviously, if you have a near term use, you can do really well at one cent per point. I mean, 150 bucks, less than 150 bucks per night for some of these Vacasa rentals can be a slamming deal. So there's certainly great deals to be had if you've got a near-term use. If it's speculative, though, you really have to ask yourself, am I pretty confident I'll use this in the next year? I'd like to go back to Pigeon Forge. I used points to get a great cabin with a gorgeous view there a couple of years ago. I'd like to go back. So I would be tempted to buy them if I didn't have the business card that earns eight points per dollar at gas stations and a healthy stash of Wyndham points right now. But since I have the eight points per dollar gas

stations and I have a healthy stash of Wyndham points between my wife and I right now, I'm not going to probably buy in this sale unless something comes up. But do you feel differently about any of that than I do? No, I mean, I think you're exactly right about all of that. When I recently spent a bunch of my Wyndham points or most of my Wyndham points, I did buy speculatively in the last sale. And I'm thinking of topping up some more, but it's because I think there's a pretty good chance, you know, that I will use them within the next year or so. So I'm not too worried about that.

But, yeah, if it's just like guessing, you know, maybe I'll use it someday. I wouldn't buy points speculatively for that. Right. Because they do put them on sale from time to time. So it's probably not the only time this year that we'll see them. Yeah, they come up usually every few months. So you'll probably have another opportunity to buy. But I think they did increase the limit, right? You can buy 120,000. I don't know if that's just the sale or per year. I'm pretty sure. Yeah. So that's more. I mean,

a couple of years ago, you can only buy 45,000 per year. Then I think they increased it to 60. And I don't know if it's just this sale or something for the year. You'll have to check the post that I'll have linked in the description. But I remember it being 120, at least for the sale. So you can buy more and that can be potentially useful for people that are going to book a longer vacation rental or a multi-bedroom vacation rental, perhaps. Okay. So that's, I think, Mattress Running the Numbers. I think, oh, quick award talk. I forgot about that. My goodness. We are going to be long by the time we get to the main event today. It's going to be a long show, a long show, but whoever it is, it's got to mow the lawn. Hopefully there's snow is off of your lawn and you're going to have to hopefully you've got about three acres to do. Right. Right. At

least. All right. So award talk, tell us what, uh, what you got for award talk this week, Greg. All right. So I recently booked a Hyatt awards day, multiple nights, and I used free night certificates for one reservation. And I'm stressing that because if you do, let's say you have multiple free night certificates with Hyatt and you do a search for, let's say, two nights and you go to then book that awards day. It's not going to show you the free night certificate option at all. But there's easy workaround, which is to look at the cash rates and click a little link, if it appears, that's book my way. Pay my way. Pay my way. Pay my way. You click pay my way. So you're looking at the paid rates. You click pay my way and up will pop a little chart where you can, for each day, say, am I going to pay cash

points or free night certificates? If you have them, those will light up. So I was able to pick free night certificates for each day. So even though I started off doing a paid search, I booked entirely free with free night certificates. So nice little workaround. At some point, I need to do a little video showing people how to do that. There is, I found, a downside of that, which is if you want to cancel that stay, it won't let you do it online. So you can call Hyatt and get it canceled. Or in my case, I emailed my Hyatt concierge, which is something I get as a globalist with Hyatt, and she canceled it for me. So a little tip there for about how to do Hyatt free night awards with multiple nights.

That's worth knowing. Very good. All right. Other piece of award talk today is that this week I booked several reservations using Marriott free night certificates. And the reason I did that is because we expect that any day now the gloves will come off and Marriott will go to fully dynamic pricing. We don't have a specific date for that, but in the past hotels have changed categories in March. And so there's something changing, you know, I think within the next couple of days here where they're killing points advance within the next week, you'll not no longer be able to use points advance. And so we kind of figured that that's probably around when they're going to

kill off the value or at least the way that hotels work now. So you might remember that when Marriott announced that they're going to get rid of award charts entirely, they gave a heads up on that. And they said that temporarily for 2022, hotels would still, most hotels would still price within their old off-peak to peak pricing bands, wherever they were on the award chart when the award chart existed. There were a limited number of exceptions that were able to increase price by more points beyond where they previously were. But most hotels have been forced to stay within the award band where they were on the award chart for 2022. And that's continued into 2023. But we expect that someday here that's going to change and hotels will be completely dynamically

priced. Some hotels won't be anywhere near where they used to be on the award chart. Now, it's worth mentioning that both Greg and I are pretty optimistic that Marriott points are still going to be pretty valuable when this happens. I don't think they're going to devalue. The sky is going to fall. I don't think they're going to devalue massively immediately anyway. But I do think that some of the top tier properties, some of those properties that are like constantly pricing at the peak range of wherever they were, where you can use a free night certificate, either a 35K free night certificate plus points or an 85,000 point free night certificate plus points. I think it makes some sense to lock in some of those

opportunities now, because I doubt that some of those properties will continue to be bookable in the future with those free night certificates. So I wanted to make a few of those properties will continue to be bookable in the future with those free night certificates. So I wanted to make a few of those bookings now because again, I think by the end of this month, it's very likely that some of those properties will no longer be within range of my free night certificates. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, it's a good idea in general to if there's properties you've been meaning to do, book them now. You can always cancel it later. I mean, pay attention to what the cancellation policy is for whatever you book, but it can't hurt to lock in that award price now by booking now if you have the points or free

night certificates to do that. And then what I'm hoping will happen, but we'll see, is that one of the benefits of dynamic pricing could be that we might see properties that are less expensive cash-wise also becoming less point expensive. And so, for example, one hotel I was looking at, which I'm sure it's often much more expensive than this, it was available for the dates I was looking at for around $200 a night, but the sort of caps come off, it also comes off at the bottom end and that they'll dynamically price this down to, you know, something more reasonable, like 25,000 points per night for that example. Yeah, that's a great point. That's a great point. Yeah, because I've seen some places where I've been tempted to book cash stays or I have booked cash days instead of awards days because of that exact problem. So that would be interesting if that works out well. So we'll have our eyes on it and

keep an eye on the blog because if and when things change, we'll certainly be looking to report it as soon as possible. So if you haven't seen us report that yet, that means you probably still have some time to put those free night certificates or points to use to make those speculative bookings. Like Greg said, do check the cancellation policy because some of those really high end properties tend to have some wacky long cancellation policies. And the thing to know if you're not familiar is that with some of those really high end places, like I'm thinking like the Maldives top end places or the ski resorts in Colorado. Some of them have cancellation policies like 30 or 45 days in advance. And if you cancel within the cancellation window,

you might think, oh, well, the cancellation deadline passed. I guess I'm going to forfeit my points. But that's not the way Marriott operates. If you cancel within that window, you know, if you cancel too late, then technically they charge you the cash rate for the hotel that you had booked, which I mean, could be many thousands of dollars. Now, I don't know if you might be able to fight it and get them to give you your money back, but it's going to be an uphill battle. We've heard stories of troubles with that before. So make sure you cancel in advance. Keep an eye on those cancellation deadlines. Absolutely. All right.

Okay. So I think then it's time for this week's main event. Main event, doing Hawaii with points. So we all love Hawaii, right? At least Nick and I do. Sure. Both big fans of vacationing. What's there not to love?

Yeah. And Nick wrote a great post this past week about how a beginner into the miles and points thing could could get to Hawaii for with like two credit card welcome bonuses. So what we're going to talk about is is how to use your points today to fly there and how to use your points to stay somewhere nice when you're there. And so even though the title is about doing with points, we have to first cover the fact that with flights anyway, sometimes paid flights are actually your best option. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's especially important with this too, because when we talk about award bookings to Hawaii, it's almost impossible to book business class awards to Hawaii. Really, really tough and very limited options where that's even going to be particularly appealing because there aren't very many flatbed flights to Hawaii to begin with. So I think of Hawaii often as a location where you're looking

at economy class flights. And especially if you're a beginner to this game, then I assume likely you've been flying economy class. And so that's probably what you'd be looking to spend your points on anyway. So, uh, so I think that Google flights is certainly a tool you're going to want to use to find good deals. And you have done a lot with Google flights in terms of figuring out how to get the best deals, right? Yeah. And then the nice thing is if you're just starting your planning and you haven't like picked a particular island yet that, that you're, you know, um, gonna stay at, then with Google flights, you can, you can put in your home airport and then just type in Hawaii as your destination and it'll search, uh, across all the airports in Hawaii. Um, so that's really convenient really convenient. And, you know, check out our

posts about how to use Google Flights to good effect to find the best deals. There's lots of great ways to do that. So recently, we're going to be meeting some friends in Hawaii. And so recently, I looked up for them, you know, what they could do with points to get there or what they could do with cash to get there. And I found $400 round trip using Google flights, I found it, but on American Airlines for them. And it was just so much easier to just say, you know what, just book this. It's a great rate. And we didn't deal with points for that example. Yeah, well, and that's worth mentioning though that as I wrote in the post this week,

if you're a newcomer and you're looking to do that, you can book that with points. There are ways to book a paid stay using your points. For instance, if you have ultimate rewards points, yeah, your paid flight, yeah. So if you have Chase ultimate rewards points and you've got the Sapphire Preferred, those points are worth 1.25 cents per point towards paid travel like flights.

So with Sapphire Preferred, that $400 flight, you'd be looking at, what, 30 something thousand, a little over 30,000 points in order to book that $400 flight. Or if you've got the Sapphire Reserve, then it's one and a half cents per point. And then you're talking about like 27,000 points in order to book that $400 flight. Or if you've got the Sapphire Reserve, then it's one and a half cents per point. And then you're talking about like 27,000 points in order to book that flight. So you could book those paid flights even still with Chase Ultimate Rewards points and get a couple of round trips out of one welcome bonus if you're looking at prices like $400 round trip. So very easily with one card welcome bonus, you could pay for those paid flights. And that'd be really simple. You don't even have to look for award availability. You don't have to jump too far in the weeds in terms of, you know, award booking. Just get those

covered right off the bat. Yeah. Yeah. And to sort of quickly mention some other tips for getting cheaper paid fares. Since since since today's topic isn't really all about paid fares, let's go over this pretty quickly. Alaska Airlines has their companion fare. So if you have a Alaska Airlines credit card, it either probably comes with every year or after a certain amount of spend every year, a companion ticket that's, I guess, $99 before taxes, something like that. So it comes out to around $120-something. But the idea is you can just book a cash booking on Alaska for the first person and tag on your companion really cheaply for that round trip.

And so it would cover the entire round trip for that little bit of money. So that's a great way to save on flights to Hawaii. Southwest Companion Pass, that's a whole big topic, but Southwest does fly to Hawaii. So if you can get a Southwest Companion Pass, you can book the first person with points or cash and add the second person for free. Third cash-based tip that I have, and my experience is really old about this, I have to admit, but I used to book trips to Hawaii using vacation packages. So like Delta vacations, Expedia vacations, whatever. I often found that they had better flight prices. So I would book the flight plus car rental deal and find that the total price for the

whole package was less than the best price I could find for airfare alone. And so that is potentially a great way. And, you know, I caveated that that has been a while since I've done that. So whether or not that's still a great deal, I don't know. But but something to look at a way that you can look at to potentially hack it a little bit. So those are all some options to use for paid flights. And if you want to use a war, you know, award points or credit card points, I mentioned the Chase Sapphire Preferred, but you could also consider a cash back card and cover those expenses by earning a cash back bonus on a cash back card. So there's certainly ways to handle that part with credit

card rewards. But since we're kind of miles and points guys, frequent miler, let's talk about how to get award flights to Hawaii. So what tips do we have for award flights? Where do you start? Yeah. So the best deals are probably directly with the airlines that fly there these days. So for example, American Airlines has these web special awards where if you're lucky, they have great rates. And Delta sometimes has these flash sales. Those are kind of mysterious. They come and go without announcing them. When they do announce them, they're usually not the best deals that they're announcing. It's very confusing. But anyway, the point is that within these airlines, if you want to use their miles, it's usually when they have some kind of special.

And one great way to search across all of the domestic airlines is to use a tool like Rome.travel. That's R-O-A-M-E. .travel is the URL for it. It's a free tool that will search across all the domestic carriers and a few foreign ones as well. And you just put in your start and end and it'll do the search across all of them if you don't want to log in each one to do them separately.

Yeah, so those are certainly ways to book and they may be the best way. I don't, you know, you said something about them being the best deals in a lot of cases. And I don't know if I would agree 100% with that. They're going to be the easiest ways to book and they're going to be the most available ways to book. So oftentimes, a very good caveat for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there are ways you may be able to get those flights for fewer points if they're available to partners, but that's the big if. So these days, the major carriers are not releasing nearly as much award space to their partner airlines as they used to. So it can be a lot harder to book partner awards. And a partner award for somebody new is when you use a different airlines miles. So for instance, American Airlines is partners with British Airways. And so it's possible to use British Airways miles to fly on American Airlines, but only when American Airlines decides that they want to make seats on a flight available to their partner airlines. And that used to be really easy. And most flights had economy class

availability, at least, but that's not really been the case for the last few years. So that's why we say easiest way to book these is going to be to use your American Airlines miles to fly in American, to use your Delta miles to fly in Delta, use United miles to fly in United. And that's not the advice we would have historically given for booking awards. And it's not generally the advice that I give for booking awards. But for Hawaii in particular, it may be the best advice in a lot of cases, especially like Greg said, if you find a web specials or flash sales. So that's one. Southwest, on the other hand, of course, every seat is available as an award with Southwest. So that can be an attractive program for booking awards to Hawaii if you live somewhere from which you

can book awards to Hawaii because they won't book anything with an overnight connection. So booking from the East coast, I'm not even sure if it's possible still. But if you, if you live somewhere on the middle of the country or further West, then you can book flights to Hawaii with your Southwest points. And if you live in the East coast, like I do,

you'll just end up needing to book separate flights is all I think in order to be able to get to Hawaii. But the nice thing is every single seat's available. And when they run a sale like they did this week, you might find flights for really reasonable prices to get to Hawaii. And of course, Southwest points are worth, I don't know, 1.3 cents ish towards paid fares. So if you get lucky and you find a fare that's, you know, two or $300, then it's going to be very few points to book that using your Southwest points. So that can potentially be a very good deal. And the nice thing there is two bags for free. And if you're flying to Hawaii, I'm going to bet a lot of people are not flying carry on only on a trip

like that. So two free check bags can be a nice deal because you're not going to get that with all the legacy carriers, unless you have the credit card or elite status. So that's potentially a good play. Plus, they have flights across the Hawaiian islands that are really cheap. Now, Hawaiian Airlines also has really cheap flights across the islands, but Southwest gives you free bags, which Hawaiian doesn't. So that's pretty important because most people I know go to Hawaii with a lot of stuff, and you can't necessarily count on just having a carry on. So, right. Good point. Good point. All right. So those are some of the sort of easy ways in terms of booking award flights, using your miles from that particular airline to fly on said airline and uh and probably your do you have a sense for what the best price is from

any of those airlines in terms of awards like you know where could you expect an award to price if you get lucky and catch one of the good sales not not so hard these days yeah we've seen we've seen them uh at some points during these like flash sales, like really, really cheap. Um, I just, I can't remember exactly off the top of my head what, what it is. United go 12,500 miles each way. Delta, when I've done searches recently, been around 23,000 in American around 22, five, but like Greg said, like it may throw out, we saw a flash sale at one point to New Zealand on American Airlines, whether or not it was intentional. I don't know. But it was like five thousand, six thousand miles each way. Right.

So you never know. As when he says, you know, no, you really never know what you're going to get. So so that's there was a Delta one not that long ago that I feel like it went as low as about nine thousand points one way. But yeah, that sounds that sounds familiar from the West Coast. That was probably for basic economy. So that's one thing Delta does, which when you're booking with points, you can get booked into their basic economy, which means you get no seat assignment in advance is the main downside of that. But you also can't make free changes as you can with all the others. So I don't usually book those if I can avoid it. But American's version of those web specials aren't changeable,

but they are freely cancelable. So I don't mind booking those, but I do mind booking the Delta's basic economy. All right, there you go. All right, so what if you were advanced? What can you do? Let's say you get lucky and you find that one of the domestic carriers to Hawaii has partner award space. What can you do? Well, so you don't necessarily even need to get lucky. You just need to use the right tools. And so, for instance, we've talked in the past about SeatSpy.

And if you read my post this week about the trip to Hawaii, you know that I gave an example with flights from Boston to Hawaii that were available round trip for a very few points. I'll get into what that is exactly in a second. But I found a word availability by backtracking through SeatSpy and looking at nonstop routes and finding where the availability was. So SeatSpy is a tool where you can look at a year of availability in both directions on any nonstop route. So you can put in, you know, and they don't fly, by the way, nonstop from Boston. So that's the example I use. But I started with Newark and I found nonstop flights in January from Newark to Honolulu.

And so I knew that those flights that Seat Spice showed would be available to partners. So that was the easy way to very quickly look at a year of availability and find flights that should at least theoretically be available to partner airlines on United. And so that means you can use a variety of different Star Alliance miles to fly on United. The best price of those is going to be using Turkish miles and Smiles miles. And we've talked about that quite a bit. So Turkish miles and smiles charges just 7,500 miles each way in economy class for domestic flights, including all the way to Hawaii. So I showed in the post this week that you could fly from Boston to Honolulu and back

for or I think it was it was yeah, it was Honolulu for 15,000 miles and $11.20 round trip per passenger. And I showed availability for like four people. So yeah, yeah, that is an incredible deal. And Turkish miles are easy to get because Capital One transfers to Turkish one-to-one, Citibank transfers to Turkish one-to-one, Built Rewards transfers to Turkish one-to-one. So if you have any of those types of points, again, 7,500 miles each way when you find availability. The trouble is that, for instance, I found those flights nonstop from Newark to Honolulu through Seatspy. But when I went to the Turkish Airlines website, surprise, surprise, they didn't show up because the Turkish Airlines website kind of stinks and doesn't always show

flights that should be there. So I ended up stumbling on Boston because I was looking for other places that I thought might connect through Newark on that nonstop flight. And of course, the examples I gave from Boston were connecting in San Francisco because that's what the tool seemed to want to show me was connections in San Francisco. So the flights I really wanted out of Newark didn't show up on the Turkish Airlines website. Theoretically, I could email and do an email booking, and I bet it would probably work with Turkish miles and smiles. But that's a little bit more complicated. You have to email ticket offices. I always recommend emailing a few ticket offices, just copy and paste the same email until somebody gets back to you.

So Turkish to fly United is far and away the best award deal that's regularly available to and from Hawaii. But I put like an asterisk next to regularly available because United's so bad at releasing availability. Before you go on to other options, I just want to say too, if you want to check Turkish's website for whether it's possible to find those awards on Turkish's website,

you need to look up Nick's post about how to do do that because if you try to do it on your own you're gonna think you're searching the right place but you're not and and even knowing that ahead of time when i go in to like try to find the right place like i know i know the place that it should be is not the right one um i have to go back to next post to find out because like turkish not intuitive liberally hit it in the most you know convoluted place obscure place yeah yeah no it's definitely it's that's definitely an advanced play that requires a little bit of study but you know i and there are some reasons not to do that because in cases of irregular operations turkish customer service is horrible and some people will give you horror stories about why they'll never book with Turkish again. On the flip side, we had lots of readers

who've reached out and been really excited about the trips to Hawaii. They've booked with this sweet spot. I booked trips to Hawaii with a sweet spot. So it's definitely doable and can be an amazing deal that isn't really as hard as I make it sound. It's just not nearly as easy as everybody else. So that's the that's the problem there. Now, you do have other options to fly United. You could use Singapore Airlines miles to fly on United. It'll cost you $19,500 each way. Certainly from the East Coast, from the West Coast, it's going to be, I think, a little bit less, particularly if you fly in Alaska. I think it can be, I want to say, as low as $11,000 and change, but I don't have that award chart memorized.

Somewhere in that range, yeah, $11,000 or $12,000 and change, but I don't have that award chart memorized. Somewhere in that range. Yeah. 11 or 12,000, I think. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, so Singapore miles to fly on either United or Alaska is another possibility. What else do you have, Greg? Uh, well, so if you could find partner award availability on American Airlines or Alaska, that's, um, nonstop from the West coast of Hawaii.

Um, British Airways has good pricing for those flights. If a miracle occurs and you find Delta award availability that's available to partners, then Air France and Virgin Atlantic are two that are worth checking the prices for. They both have sort of, well, Virgin has a distance-based award chart. So if you're going from the West Coast, it's definitely worth checking Virgin. Air France has a mixture of sort of distance-based slash chart-based slash make up the price of the day base. So just check it and

see what the price of the day is from Air France, and you might get lucky and get a great price. Now, when we say check it, the easiest way, especially if you're new at this, to check it is to use a tool like AwardLogic or Point.me in order to search for award flights. Now, those are both tools that are, excuse me, paid tools, excuse me. But if you are a Built Rewards member, which is free to join, and you participate a little bit in their rewards program, you can use the free version of point.me in their app, in the Built Rewards app. So just to like check it out and see and get an idea as to what's available. I think that's a great place to start anyway, to look at what's available. Because with something like that, I used Point.me when I was looking at award pricing for the post that I wrote this week, because I can pick a day in an airport

and see the prices on Delta and American and United and through their partners all in one shot in one search. It's a little slow. There are some downsides. We've talked extensively before about award logic and point.me and those types of tools. But it's useful in terms of seeing how many points it would cost on a number of different airlines in one search. And that's, I think, a good starting reference point for somebody who's new at this to kind of visually put it together and see, okay, this is how many points I'll need to use on this airline or that airline. And the nice thing about award logic and point.me is that they're up to date. I know a lot of people that have been in the game a long time talk about award hacker, which was a great tool for a long, long time, but it hasn't been updated. And so a lot

of the rates in award hacker are out of date. And so I prefer using something like point.me or award logic that is up to date. Yeah. And, and award hacker and other tools like that just tell you what they think the award will cost if it's available, not whether it's available, whereas these tools show you what's available. Also the, the free tool I mentioned earlier, Rome.travel also checks Virgin Atlantic and Air France. And it's quick. What I can't tell you for sure, I haven't tested it thoroughly to know, will it find, like if a Delta award is available to partners, will it find that option through Air France or Virgin Atlantic? I need to check. Well, I'll test that because I have a date in mind where I know that the Delta flights were available to Virgin Atlantic and to to Air France because I ran across that.

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome thing to check. Yep. Yep. OK, very good. So those are different ways, advanced ways, so to speak, to book award flights. You only have so many options because there's only so many carriers from the United States. Now, one we didn't actually have in mind, but just popped into my mind is that I recently included in a Saturday selection post that one last option is Hawaiian miles. Now, Hawaiian miles isn't always a great option because they charge more miles than most other carriers for their award flights. However, we recently learned that if you book an economy class paid ticket, it can actually be pretty reasonable to upgrade to business class on Hawaiian Airlines using your miles, which is not generally the case. A lot of times people ask about upgrading with miles. And in many cases, it's pretty

restrictive. You need to have booked an expensive fare class, and it's usually not a particularly good deal. So I don't generally recommend trying to upgrade with miles. But this was an exception where there are some good deals. And Hawaiian Fly is a pretty nice flatbed product from the mainland. So that's another potential option. I don't think we have an entire post on that. So one of these days we'll have to put one of those out. That's why you should subscribe to emails at frequentmiler.com slash subscribe so that

you get that in your inbox whenever we do write it. So those are some options for award flights. Yeah. So those are great. But the real value, well, let me just not say the real value, but the more likely good value you'll get from points is with lodging in Hawaii, I think, because cash rates are just through the roof. They are. My goodness, they've gone up so much. One particular property that Hyatt is increasing the award rate on come March 28th, the Hyatt Regency Maui. I remember just a couple of years ago looking at that place and it was like 20,000 points per night, but it was often like 250 or 350 a night. So it didn't seem like a great value. But man, I was looking at cash rates today and they were like 650. It was incredible how much it has increased in price and not just that property, but properties in general in Hawaii. So if you're paying five or $600 a night, a trip to Hawaii could get expensive

really quickly. But of course, if you're using award points, it doesn't have to be expensive at all. That's right. That's right. And I think that this is one place where, surprisingly, Wyndham points really have an edge over almost every other currency. So we're going to talk about Wyndham-Vacasa, but also Wyndham itself, Wyndham's own property. So why don't you tell us about the Vacasa angle, and then I'll jump into Wyndham. So we have a post on Vacasa. The title is Vacasa, Great Value is Real, I think. And I'll have a link in the show notes that explains how to book Vacasa rentals with Wyndham

points. But in a nutshell, Wyndham Rewards has a partnership with Vacasa. Vacasa is a vacation rental company. Think like an Airbnb, VRBO-type competitor. There's probably some differences in the business model and the way they manage the rentals. But at the end of the day, that's the type of thing it is. You're booking vacation rentals through Vacasa that are owned by various individuals. So the nice thing here is that because of this partnership, you can use your Wyndham Rewards

points and it'll cost you 15,000 points per bedroom for vacation rentals. And so if you book a one bedroom vacation rental, one bedroom condo somewhere in Hawaii, it's going to cost you 15,000 points per night. Now there's a cap in terms of how much the night could cost. And we think that it's about $500 per night, including all of the taxes and fees. So that's a pretty amazingly high cap. You can book a place that would cost three or four or maybe pretty close to $500 per night using just 15,000 Wyndham points. And if you have one of those Wyndham credit cards we talked about earlier, it only costs you 13,500 points. Now, if you want to book a two bedroom or a three bedroom,

you can do that for additional points per bedroom and travel to Hawaii with the whole family and get yourself a vacation home with a few bedrooms. Now, the Vicasa properties in Hawaii range, some of them are like one bedroom condos, which you would imagine is a general beachfront condo somewhere. Some are entire houses. So you might be able to get an entire house somewhere with a great view with a couple of bedrooms. And keep in mind that V Casa properties that have one bedroom often sleep more people than you might expect when you hear one bedroom. Now, that's not always the case in Hawaii, but it is at least in some of them where they'll

have another sleeping space that is effectively like another bedroom. But because it doesn't have a closet or whatever, it's not considered a bedroom. And so you can sometimes find places that are quite large that'll accommodate, you know, at least four, sometimes six or eight or even 10 people with only one bedroom. So, uh, so they can be a phenomenal value and there are some really nice looking ones in Hawaii. So, you know, especially if you want to get to some of the, you know, sort of remote areas and the little beach towns, you can have some awesome options in Hawaii. Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely. Now, with Vacasa, you know, they don't own these properties. Vacasa is a they manage the rentals and each, you know, each local Vacasa management or manager is different. And so with Vacasa, unlike booking through a chain that owns their hotels or whatever, you don't know what you're going to get. I mean, you could get a great property. You could get one that's terrible or a great property that's terribly managed. There's all kinds of possibilities.

You can try reading the reviews that are on the Vacasa website, but often there just won't be very many reviews because it's a specific unit, not like a whole apartment complex, for example, or hotel building. So luckily, if you want to use your Wyndham points for great value in Hawaii, that's not the only option. Wyndham also has its own properties, and most of them are like timeshare type of condos, which is not necessarily a bad thing if you're against timeshares because we're not talking about selling you a timeshare. What we're talking about is that these are managed basically like condos. So every unit has at least a bedroom and a living room, and some are multiple bedrooms. And Wyndham prices them sort of like Vacasa. Sometimes it's 15,000 points per bedroom per night, but some of their properties are 30,000 points per bedroom per night. And in Hawaii, they have a lot of these, the Club Wyndham properties and Shell Vacations properties, which are a mix, 15,000 or 30,000.

The few I've looked at seem to have good reviews, like about four and a half stars on Google or TripAdvisor. And if you think about, let me explain why I think this is such a great deal. So think about this, 15,000 points per bedroom per night. Let's start with a one bedroom unit. You can often buy Wyndham points for a little bit less than one cent each when they're on sale. So let's just say you buy them for one cent each. 15,000 points per bedroom means $150 per night. That's after taxes and fees. Right. You don't pay any of the taxes and fees, right? There's no, you know, that's true with Vacasa or with the Club Wyndham properties. You don't pay any cleaning fees or

taxes. It's just the 15,000 points per bedroom. Exactly. Exactly. And with Wyndham, you don't pay a resort fee either. So when you use points. So think about that. So you're not going to find a hotel with one bedroom for $150 per night in Hawaii. And even if you did, after taxes, it would be much, much more than that. And it would be like a room, not a one bedroom. Like we're talking about a suite. That's right. We're talking about booking a suite for $150. They're all going to have a complete living room. They're going to have a complete kitchen and they're going to have a complete bedroom. And so you get all that. And even if it's 30,000 points per night for one of these, compare that to $300 per night all in after taxes.

You're not going to see that at a nice property in Hawaii. So it's just a smoking deal. And Wyndham points are, I think, and it's so surprising to me because normally we talk about Hyatt and Marriott and IHG and stuff like that. But Wyndham is the program to probably start with if you're looking for an extended stay in Hawaii. All right. Let's back up in a second. That's enough about Wyndham. Let's talk about Rome.Travel again for a second, because that was a tool we brought up a few minutes ago when we were talking about flights and searching for award flights. And you wondered whether they would show pricing with Virgin Atlantic miles or with Air France miles. And we had a chance to look at it real quick. So what did you find? Yeah. So what we found is that on a complicated itinerary where point.me was able to find

those flights, Rome.travel didn't. However, on a simpler itinerary, it did find the flights to Hawaii and it showed prices for booking through Virgin Atlantic and Air France. And in that case from Boston, I think. So there's a long distance one. It actually turned out that Virgin Atlantic was the cheapest option among the three programs, Air France, Virgin Atlantic and Delta. It's all for flying Delta. Virgin Atlantic was only 30,000 points one way, whereas Delta was 45,000 and Air France 36,000. You know, well, we should mention that may have been the case for that specific flight, but there were Delta flights on that day that were fewer points. There were 23,000 flights. So, and that's an oddity points. There were 23,000 flights.

So, and that's an oddity with Delta, right? Sometimes the flights that are available to partners are not necessarily the cheapest Delta flights. So you do still have to compare against what Delta is charging for other itineraries that may or may not work for you, depending on situation. So, all right. So Rome.travel could certainly still be a useful tool and even more useful tool than we mentioned a few minutes ago, because you can potentially find some of that partner availability anyway through that free tool. So that's nice. All right. Now, speaking of free, we talked about flying there. We talked about staying for free with Wyndham using your Wyndham points.

But that's not the only game in town. Hyatt has quite a presence in Hawaii as well. They sure do. They sure do. So they have your beloved Grand Hyatt Kauai. I do, yeah. Unfortunately, that's going up in price, right? Yeah, that's the downside. What do you think?

Is that still worth going to with the new Hyatt prices? Yes, it's a beautiful property. It costs far more than, you know, the cash rates are high enough to justify moving it up in category. I'm disappointed that it's going up in category, but the cash rates do justify it. The problem is now finding availability and maybe that will change when it increases in category.

But for instance, I spent some time looking for rooms at that property and I had a really hard time finding any standard rooms. You get club rooms, which costs a little bit more than a standard room, but I couldn't find any standard room availability. So that's going to be your roadblock. When it goes up to category seven, that'll be 30,000 points standard. Help me out here. Off-peak, what's that? 27? I don't know off the top of my head. I don't remember. So the standard awards will be 30 and a little bit more, a little bit less if it's peak or off-peak.

But right now, as we speak, right, for a few more days, a standard award would cost 25,000. But the cheapest I'm finding are club access rooms, which are 33,000. So we'll see whether you can find rooms at the 30K level when they move up or whether you'll still be stuck with club access rooms that are going to cost even more. So. Yeah. And let me jump in with, if you're struggling to find award availability at a Hyatt or Marriott or Hilton, there's a tool called stay with points that I've written about. And it will show for some properties, it will show award availability across the entire year. But one thing to note about that is that display is only checking one night at a time, which is not going to show you availability if a hotel has a minimum stay requirement for points.

However, the tool is still useful for that. So let's say you want to travel to Hawaii in December. You can set up a alert that says, show me any time this property is available for three consecutive nights in December. And then you'll get an email pretty quickly that shows you which dates in December you can book for three nights in a row. And so that's a good way instead of checking

night by night with Hyatt's website, which is such a pain because Hyatt does not have an award calendar. They have a calendar and it shows you award pricing, but it doesn't show you award availability. Yeah, yeah. It's not the best in the world. And we should mention here. So, OK, let's first cover the fact that Hyatt is probably your best value hotel chain after Wyndham in the sense that they have a wide range of properties in Hawaii. And the pricing is very fair in terms of the number of points for the places that you'll get and the cash rates of those places can be quite high. So that's why we're talking about Hyatt in general. We mentioned the Grand Hyatt Kauai. So we got to mention a trick for finding availability also is that

Greg just mentioned some properties have a minimum stay requirement. So you may not find award rooms for two or three nights. You may only find them when you search for a seven night stay, for instance. But there's a trick to that because Greg mentioned earlier that whole pay my way thing where you could potentially find one of those seven night chunks and then switch to some of them being paid and some of them being award nights. Or if you have enough points in your account, you could potentially book the seven night stay that's required. Either way, after you've booked, it's often been possible, whether or not it'll always be, I don't know, but often

been possible to call and change your check-in or check-out date to trim that down to the nights you really want. So that's kind of a trick for getting around the minimum stay requirements at some of those properties, which aren't published. You don't know what the minimum stay is until you suddenly happen to put in enough nights to find award availability. So that can be if you're having trouble with availability, which is particularly an issue at the Grand Hyatt, Kauai,

and even more so at the Andes, Maui. Those tend to be the ones that are really hard to find availability. But there are a whole bunch of these destination residences in Hawaii that look pretty nice, right? Yeah, yeah. So sort of a very similar thing to what's available with Wyndham, where you can book these condos with points. And, you know, I'd say on average, what you're getting is very good value, but not as good as with Wyndham. But I think that Hyatt has, well, I don't actually know if this is true. I was going to say that they have more of them, but I'm not actually sure about that.

But I would look at both and see which ones meet your needs better if you have both kinds of points. It's just that Wyndham, you could generally buy the points you need. If you don't have enough points, you can buy them for about a penny each and you're good to go. Whereas with Hyatt, if you don't have enough points, Hyatt points are pretty expensive.

So they're tough. Yeah. So they're not, I was going to say they're tough to get. They're not necessarily tough to get because Chase Ultimate Rewards points can transfer one-to-one to Hyatt if you've got the Sapphire Preferred or the Chase Inc. Business Preferred or the Sapphire Reserve.

But yeah, you can't just buy them cheaply like you can with the Wyndham points. And you know, when we talked about what a slamming deal that was with Wyndham, we left out the fact that if you have one of those Wyndham credit cards we talked about earlier, you pay 10% less. So you're only paying 13,500 points per night, which I know we mentioned that part, but we didn't drive home the fact that that means if you're buying points for less than a penny a point, talking $135 per bedroom per night, like it's getting even better

than what we were saying already. So it's hard to beat that. It's just so hard how cheap it is. It really is. I know we've hit that hard, but it's worth mentioning. I mean, right now you buy 120,000 points for less than $1,200.

And if you've got the business card, that's almost nine nights for $1,200, which most of these places you get a night or two for $1,200. You know, most other properties in Hawaii, you know, maybe three or four, depending on the place you pick, but not as many. That's for sure. So Hyatt, though, has good options. And the nice thing about the Grand High Kauai and is now you're going to get elite benefits if you have elite status. With Hyatt though, I don't think you get any sort of elite benefits of the destination residences properties, right? There's no breakfast. Yeah. I don't think you get anything special. Maybe if you pay with cash, I guess you get the earn bonus as far as you earn more points than you would otherwise, but I don't think you're going to get much, if anything, elite-wise.

So, yeah, so Hyatt's a great option. What about Hilton? So would you use your Hilton points to stay in Hawaii? Maybe, you know. So somebody commented on my post about that this week, and the person who commented I know lived in Hawaii for a long time so and and he had said that you know you shouldn't ignore Hilton altogether because for instance there's a Hilton Waikoloa Village on the Big Island I've stayed there before it's a

nice property he said he's seeing generally at 75,000 points per night because membership rewards points transfer to Hilton at two to one. You could theoretically transfer over some membership rewards points. And if you get a transfer bonus, it could be attractive. But, you know, 75,000 points per night, if you're earning those on your Hilton credit card, that's a lot of spend required to generate those points. I don't know. And the thing with Hilton is that you don't know how many points it's going to be. So if you're starting from zero, you don't know it's going to be 75,000 points a night when you go. And certainly if you want to stay at the Waldorf there or whatever it is, the Grand Wiley,

or I can't remember what it's the one in Maui that everybody rants and raves about, you know, it's going to be, I think, 120,000 points per night, if I remember correctly. And so that's a lot of Hilton points per night. Even if you're buying those points at half a cent a piece, you're talking 600 bucks a night, then if that's the case. So I get less excited about Hilton as an option, but the Aspire card comes with an annual free night certificate. So you could use that to great value in Hawaii. And if you opened up the Aspire card, you would have enough points for at least one additional night at any Hilton property that's got standard award availability there anyway. So, I mean, you could get yourself two free nights with the Aspire card welcome bonus.

Maybe you'd end up having enough points for a third free night if you just get lucky and find the right price property, maybe. And then you can spend your way to additional free night certificates, which again, can be worthwhile if you're otherwise thinking about paying the cash rate at one of the more expensive Hilton properties. It's not as exciting to me as the other options we've talked about. Yeah. Yeah. Totally agree. I will mention again, I don't have any financial reason for you to use stay with points, but if I was trying to use my free night certificate at that Hilton, it's very hard to find the standard room award availability at places like that. I would totally use a tool like Stay With Points to try to find that because trying to find it on your own could be a pain. So you set an alert and wait till the number of nights you need or open up and book it with your free night certificates. What about Marriott? So Marriott has quite a few properties around the Hawaiian Islands. They are almost all, at least the

things stand today, like in my opinion, way overpriced with points. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't disagree with you. I think they're all overpriced in points. I've stated a couple of them and they're just general run of the mill resorts, which is fine. I mean, I like a run of the mill resort now and then, but they're not they're not particularly special. And so the points price, considering the fact that I haven't been to one anyway, I mean, I've been to a handful, you know, even the Ritz Carlton on Maui. I mean, the property itself is lovely looking, but it's not really on a usable beach. And it's kind of isolated in the middle of nowhere.

I don't really like the location. It's really windy up there. It's kind of quiet. But, you know, so even like the top end place, so to speak, I'm not that excited about in Hawaii and then, you know, so even like the top end place, so to speak, I'm not that excited about in Hawaii. And then, you know, other places, I just I don't think they're worth the number of points that Marriott's charging. If they were charging fewer points or cash rates are better, I'd be more interested. But it's just not a great opportunity for outsized value in Hawaii with Marriott.

Yeah, there's not a lot going on there. The best sort of I can't even call it a deal, but if you're trying to use your free night certificates, you might find a well-reviewed residence in or one of those other sort of like mid-tier brands that, you know, check the reviews. Some of them get very, very good reviews. And so it could be a good solid way to use those free nights. I still, in those cases, like the point prices tend to be inflated to where if you look at how much value you're getting per point, it's much less than you'll get in most places with Marriott points. So it's just, yeah, it's just a shame. Not a great use of things today. And I think maybe the conversation would be different if Vacasa and Wyndham and Hyatt didn't exist.

But in a world where those options are out there, the Marriott options just aren't competitive, in my opinion. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And just around it, I'm not aware of any good opportunities or resorts with IHG or Radisson or any of the other things that we haven't mentioned yet. Right, right, right. Correct. All right. So, which actually, now that you said that, I wonder, are there any preferred hotels properties in Hawaii

that you could use choice properties? There's only, there's a couple in Honolulu itself, which look nice, but they're not really like resorty as far as I can tell. They're sort of like stylish hotels. Yeah, I see. Which, you know, it has its benefits. So if you want that kind of thing,

using your choice points to book a preferred hotel could be a nice way to get into for a couple nights or something a, you know, pretty high end, nice place. Yep. All right. And then finally, last but not least, there's timeshare deals. And so timeshare deals there. I wrote recently about sitting through a blue green vacations timeshare presentation to get some choice points and a gift card and whatnot.

And they run deals like that for Hawaii also. And blue green vacations does it. Wyndham, their timeshare properties do it. Their Hilton Grand Vacations Club, I'm pretty sure Marriott probably also does with their vacations. They do, like their Westin and stuff. Yeah. That's right. So you can sit through a vacation, you know, ownership sort of a presentation to buy a timeshare and they're going to try to convince you to spend a whole lot of money on something you probably shouldn't. And I say probably shouldn't. For some people, it works out.

But yeah, I wouldn't anyway. So yeah. But if you're good at saying no anyway, then sometimes you'll get a very good rate. It's not as good as the deals within the mainland US. You're not going to get something like the $279 that I paid. There are always going to be more in Hawaii, but reasonable for what you get potentially. Hilton Grand Vacations Club ran one that, gosh, I can't remember the numbers now, but they ran one on Maui where it was quite good compared to the cash rates,

but not compared to the other things we've talked about. Yeah, yeah. And those salespeople are really, really good at convincing you that what they're telling you is a great deal and they'll keep making the deal better to where you like you, if you're in the moment, it just sounds like a spectacular deal. Even if you're armed with the knowledge that you can get it for probably far less than half price on the secondary market. So just, just remember what we said. No, it's not a good deal. Nope. It's not a good deal.

What they just, what they just said to you afterwards, still not a good deal. Play this clip to them. No, no, sir. Not a good deal. No, ma'am. Not a good deal. You're better off buying some Wyndham points, I think. Well, and you know, and the thing with the timeshare is that I think it doesn't get talked about a lot. And I, I haven't spent much time thinking about, cause I've never thought about buying one, but is the way you're like locked into paying that maintenance fee, like in perpetuity, like forever. Yeah. Yeah.

Getting out of that, you got to find somebody else who's willing to pay that maintenance fee year in and year out. It's not easy. I've known people stuck for years. Yeah. And I should say before I piss off a lot of people right people can do really well with with timeshares um and you you have to be you know you really want to go back to that same place every year at the same time or be be willing to really like learn the ins and

outs of the whole uh way of trading them in these different markets and getting good deals that way. And ideally, you're in a place that has a low annual maintenance fee so that you're not paying a lot each year for the privilege of keeping this thing. But regardless of all that, let's say you're good at all of that, I bet you anything that you're going to be paying too much if you buy it in person at a sales deal where you're getting it there versus looking through resale sites and get one on the secondary market. There's so many people looking to offload their timeshare. So you could do really well that way.

That's not my game, but if it is yours, great. I mean, like I said, there's ways of making it work. Yeah, there certainly are people who are happy timeshare owners. So I think it's important to recognize that it does work for some people. And the model has changed significantly where in most of these programs now you're not buying a week at a specific place anymore. You're buying a number of points that you get every year. I think that's the way Hilton Grand Vacations works. I know that's the way Blue Green works. And I'm pretty sure Marriott runs on the same thing. So it's a little bit different than in the old days. However, and the sales pitch from Blue Green was that they'd never

increase the prices of their properties, which if they stick to that promise, great, though you don't know what the new properties are going to cost when they come in. But again, like Greg said, I heard from plenty of people that are happy timeshare owners. So I think it's possible to do well, but certainly not your best bet to buy one the day of. So they'll try and convince you that. Yes, they will. But anyway, that's another option. Okay. We have droned on today about this.

So I would be half tempted to skip over the question of the week just in the interest of time. But I'm only half tempted. And the other half of me says, oh, we're going to do it. So there was a quick question that came in that I think is probably an easy answer for you about last week's episode where we talked about what's in our wallets. Reader named Kelly noticed that in that segment, Greg largely had Citibank cards in his wallet. And Kelly said, I've always thought that thank you points were more or less ranked behind ultimate rewards and membership rewards and probably even Capital One points. Is there a specific reason why you would want to accumulate so many of those? Do you just have so many ultimate rewards and membership rewards that you want to move into a different ecosystem?

How many is enough that you want to do that? And what's your strategy to replenish the points you use on our challenge? I think that's a good topic for another week. Why so many thank you points? Yeah, there's a lot there that could make up a whole show almost in that. So I'll just briefly say that, and I've talked many times before, I'm high on city points these days because of the ability to transfer one to two to choice privileges. And there's lots of like sort of sneaky opportunities to use points for great value with choice. But the bigger story is about how I replenish my points and miles. And with Amex, I'm getting tons and tons of points through new welcome bonuses and referrals. And with Chase, I'm getting tons and tons of points

through 5X spend at office supply stores with my in-cash card or direct spend even on my Hyatt cards. Cause mostly what I use my chase points for is Hyatt. Um, so, uh, uh, you know, I want to earn, I want to spend 15,000 each year to get the category one to four certificate, for example. Um, and also a three X with my Sapphire reserve card for all my travel spend. So that's how I replenish my, um, chase points. And then, so I don't have other than this, like what's in my wallet spend. I don't have a good way to replenish my city points. And that's how I do it is by using it for dining, use it for the categories where I get a high, uh, high number of points per dollar. That makes a lot of sense. Cause there aren't nearly as many welcome bonuses on city cards.

There's no sort of referral points for referring people to new city cards for the most part. I think I've seen a referral bonus once or twice, but it's usually targeted and not enough to replenish those points. So I think that's a really good point that they're hard to earn. They're harder to earn than other points. So you got to carry them around if you're going to want to earn those points. All right. Very good. good. Well, unfortunately we are out of time for this week and I'm sure a few of you are relieved because it's been so long, but thank you for hanging out with us. We hope you enjoyed today's show. And if you did, and you'd like to get these posts in your email inbox, you want to go to frequent miler.com slash subscribe. Again,

that's frequent miler.com slash subscribe. Join our email list, follow us on all the various social media, join our frequent miler insiders, subscribe. Join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media. Join our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group. And if you've got a question or comment that you'd like to be considered for a future Giant Mailbag or question of the week, you want to send that to? Send it to mailbag at frequentmiler.com. Bye, everybody..