Frequent Miler on the Air - Don’t take a siesta on Sonesta | Coffee Break Ep17 | 7-2-24

Episode Date: July 2, 2024

Sonesta is a hotel chain with more than 1100 properties that we haven't paid much attention to until Tim wrote a recent post about the Sonesta Travel Pass, a program that sort of came out of nowhere. In this week's Coffee Break episode, we'll chat more about why you shouldn't siesta on Sonesta! (01:24) - Sonesta Travel Pass Basics (04:04) - Elite Status (06:49) - Shortcuts to elite status (11:22) - Points from paid stays (13:08) - Sonesta Travel Pass credit card Read more about the Sonesta card here. (15:58) - Final thoughts... are we excited about this? Visit frequentmiler.com/subscribe to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media. Music Credit – Beach Walk by Unicorn Heads

Here we go. This is not your typical Frequent Miler on the Air episode. This is a standalone segment we're calling Coffee Break. Each Coffee Break segment will cover a single topic related to miles and points. And each Coffee Break is limited to 20 minutes or your money back. Enjoy. Today's coffee break. Don't take a siesta on Sinesta. Sinesta is a hotel chain that we have not paid a lot of attention to in the past, but that's about to change because there's some interesting stuff going on.

There is. And so we'll talk all about it. Tim wrote a great post this week. And of course, as always, we have the timestamps in the show notes and pertinent links in the show notes. And so if we talk about this and you say, wow, this is interesting, you should totally check out Tim's complete guide to Sinesta Travel Pass because it has all the details in it, even more than what we'll probably get to in the next 20 minutes. So you'll want to make sure you check that out wherever you're watching or listening. Don't forget to like this show, subscribe to our channel, enable notifications, tell

your friends and family. But let's get into Sinesta Travel Pass because this is interesting. I find it most interesting, not even necessarily because I'm in a hurry to stay at Sinesta's, but because it's a program that has really come out of nowhere and that I feel like not many people in this space are talking about, yet maybe we should be. So, Sonesta now has, believe it or not, and this blew my mind, more than 1,100 properties. I mean, that's way more than what I would have guessed if you asked me to guess how many there are. Now, their properties, of course, skew towards the value end of things. Brands like Red Lion and America's Best Value In

and things like that. So, that's, I think, the heavier part of their footprint. But they do have some premium brands and some luxury and lifestyle brands. So these are things like Sinesta ES, Sinesta Simply Suites, Essential Select, Royal Sinesta, the James Hotel. So there are quite a few different brands there that may appeal to premium and luxury travelers as well. They don't have award charts, but that's not necessarily as bad as it sounds because they do have set award levels. So it's not like, you know, price could be anything under the sun. There are set levels between 10 and 50,000 points per night. And the award costs are pretty reasonable.

We've found, Tim found, that the reasonable redemption value of Sonesta points was just over one cent per point. So that puts them among the most valuable hotel points out there. I mean, obviously not quite as valuable as Hyatt, but more valuable than most of the other hotel brand points. So that's kind of interesting. And also interesting is that in some cases, similar to Choice Privileges, if you know that program, in some cases, you can book multiple different room types for the same standard award price. So in some cases, you could book either a standard room or perhaps even a suite for the same number of points. So that's appealing for people who like booking suites. And as a family traveler, I really value that. So that caught my interest. And finally, last thing, and we'll talk

more about all of this stuff is that you can get elite status through credit card spend alone. So that also might make this appealing if you find that elite status benefits are well honored, which is an if, and we'll talk more about that in a few minutes. Yeah. So one of the cool things here is that when you have smaller hotel chains, and they're not tiny by any means now with 1,100 properties, but they're definitely less well-known than your Marriott and Hilton and so on. When you have these smaller ones and they want to compete in the loyalty space, they need to be more generous in order to attract us. And so there's some attractive things here.

And I think a lot of that is because they want to compete and they want to draw eyeballs away from the big guys. And that's what's happening right now. That makes a lot of sense. And that's why a program like Starwood Preferred Guest was so popular for so many years, because they were much smaller. And so they did have to work harder to keep people loyal. And as a result, they had a great loyalty program. I don't know if Sonesta is going to become the next SPG, but at least there are some

things here that you may find appealing. So in terms of elite status, they have four different levels. Bronze is no status at all. And then they have silver, gold and platinum. The free breakfast status, which we'll put in quotation marks. I'll use air quotes on that for those in the video. Free breakfast status is gold or platinum. Either of those come with complimentary continental breakfast with a little bit of an asterisk.

And that is that it's not clear that you'll get it everywhere. It basically says you get it based on availability or like some brands based on brand, but it doesn't tell you which brands get it and which brands don't. So it's kind of hard to know

where you'll get free breakfast, but at least somewhere out there, you'll get free breakfast with gold or platinum. Yeah, gold. Gold requires 20 nights or 20,000 points. Platinum requires 40 nights or 20,000 points. Platinum requires 40 nights or

40,000 points. Those numbers seem relatively normal and reasonable and more or less what you'd expect for elite status with other competing programs. But they're a little bit more interesting than they sound. We'll get into that because points can be earned from either spend in hotels or from credit card spend. And so that's why the number of points may be more interesting to you even than the number of nights required. But the downside, so to speak, is that all meaningful elite benefits are really poorly defined. So like there are things like room upgrades and late checkout and free breakfast, but it's all really murky as to where you're going to get those things or when there's no sort of guarantees and things aren't really spelled out very clearly.

So I think it's going to be very much property dependent as to how well elite benefits are recognized. And like Greg said, maybe they'll be really well recognized because it's a small chain and they have made a number of changes. So maybe one of those is telling their properties to play along and be nice to elites. But we don't know that. So it's really hard to know what you're going to get. Right, right. One poorly defined benefit I'm curious about is I think it's called something like preferred parking that you get at higher

elite levels. And it's unclear, does that mean parking's included or just you get to park closer to the hotel? Or what does that mean? You know, there's a bunch of Hilton properties I've stayed at over the years. Like, I mean, even like Hampton Inn type properties that have diamond member parking. Have you ever seen that? The sign is like for Hilton diamond members. And I'm like, okay, all right. So your car gets an upgrade, but you don't. Right, right, right. Exactly. Always kind of fun, but an odd benefit. Anyway, so yeah, that's exactly it. Who knows what these things really mean until we start staying at these places. And most of us haven't stayed at many Sinesta properties yet. At least when I say most of us, I mean, most of us that are blogging about these things haven't because

I haven't seen many other blogs cover this. And most of us on this team haven't stayed at many or any Sinestas. So we don't have a ton of experience with the program yet, but we do have some readers who have experience and have shared it with us. So we do have a couple of tips coming up in a second here, first of which is under the shortcuts to elite status. So if you get the credit card, the Sonesta credit card, which we'll talk more about in a few minutes, then you automatically get gold status. So free breakfast status just for having the credit card. That's pretty good, right? Yeah. I mean, as long as the breakfast is actually included in the places you stay, that's that's great. Yeah. And so if you have a way of verifying in advance, you can call the

property before you stay, which is probably what I would do is call and see what the benefits are. So if you are able to find out in advance that you're going to save a bunch of money on breakfast, it might be worth getting the credit card just for breakfast at a particularly nice resort or something where breakfast would be expensive. And we're not talking about like a Bonvoy Brilliant or Hilton Aspire really expensive card to get free breakfast, right? We're talking about how much is a Sonesta card? It's $75 annual fee and it's waived the first year. So it's pretty inexpensive. Yeah. Breakfast would pay for itself pretty quickly there, or the card would pay for itself through free breakfast, I guess, pretty quickly if you would like to have breakfast in your hotel. So that's nice. You get gold status just for that,

but you can get top tier platinum status really easily also because platinum status requires, remember we said 40 nights or 40,000 points. Now the credit card has a benefit where if you spend $7,500 in a card member a year, you get a bonus 30,000 points. So if you were to spend $7,500 on the credit card, you would get an extra 30,000 points. And those 30,000 points apparently do count towards the qualifying points for elite status. We've had readers share that. That's incredible. Yeah, that's incredible because even if you're just earning 1x to also on the spend, that means you're only, what, 2,500 points away from platinum status by the time you've spent your 7,500 points. That's right. That's right.

I mean, not the 7,500 dollars. 7,500 dollars. Yeah. Yeah. And so that 7,500 dollar spend is getting the equivalent of 5x between the 1x on the card and 4x essentially for that bonus. So you're getting a decent return on that $7,500 spend in terms of Sinasta points. And yeah, you're awfully close to platinum status. Now the card does have a couple of 2x categories. So if you were to spend $2,500 of your $7,500 in one of those 2x categories, then you could knock out platinum status just

with that spend. So pretty easy to end up there. And apparently you can do even better because if you're familiar with Bank of America, which issues this card, they run a promotion once or twice a year or something, maybe more than that, every now and then where they'll double points. So they'll offer you double rewards for like a day. It'd be a double rewards day. And much to my surprise, we had a reader report that doing the $7,500 spend on that double rewards day also doubled the 30,000 points. That's unbelievable. They ended up with 60K for 7,500 spend. That's incredible.

And presumably the 7,500 spend itself then earned 2x so so presumably yes presumably she got 15 000 from the spend and then 60 000 from that annual bonus yeah that seems i know i wouldn't go into it expecting that always happens like like take that as like a you know hope that it happens but uh because at the very least you should be able to count on getting 2x from the spend so it's worth doing during those double days if you're going to do it anyway um yeah because i mean if you only get the the 30x or the 30 000 points right but you get 2x on your 7500 spend right then you're talking about 45 000 points points. Boom. One day, you knock out Platinum status.

Right. Right. And that's like two nights, too, in a pretty nice Sinesta. Right. And that's a repeatable bonus. We're not talking. That's not the welcome bonus on the credit card. This is just that's an annual benefit that we're talking about there.

We'll talk about the credit card welcome bonus in a couple of minutes here. But so that's that's awesome because that's repeatable every single year. That's a nice return on spend. If you like, send us two points. Obviously, it depends on how you're going to use the points. But that's going to vary from person to person. We talked recently on the podcast on the Frequent Miler on the Air podcast about the fact that quite a few Kempton properties have rebranded as Sinestas and they got some I I think, some Intercontinentals and so and there's some Marriotts that became Sinestas. So they took over a number of other properties, places that you might already be familiar with. And we talked about some of those on our most

recent podcast episode. That was, I think, maybe number 260, episode 260, I believe. So you can check that out if you look at our full podcast feed. In terms of points on paid stays, just quickly to run down that if you have bronze our full podcast feed. In terms of points on paid stays, just quickly to run down that, if you have bronze status, you earn either five or 10 points per dollar, depending on which brand you stay at. It varies a little bit and it's not intuitive. I would have thought you earned fewer points on all of the cheaper brands and more points on all the more expensive brands, but it was actually kind of mixed when I looked at the brands.

So you'll have to check out the post for the full details. So bronze, either five or 10, silver, either seven and a half or 15 X per dollar spent, gold 8.75 or 17 and a half points per dollar spent, and platinum 10 or 20 points per dollar spent. Again, that's on Sonesta spend at hotels. That's based on your elite status, nothing to do with the credit card. So you could also earn status just by spending money at the right properties. Like if you spent $2,000 at a property that offers 20 points per dollar, then you get your 40,000 points on one hotel stay, perhaps. Though note that you can only earn a maximum of 100,000 points from a stay, from a single stay. So that's kind of weird. If you were to spend, if you're a platinum member and you spent $5,000 at a property that offers 20X and that's it, that's a cap. Don't

spend any more money because you're not going to earn any more. So that's the points on that stay. It's kind of weird. That is really weird that they would want to discourage people from doing very expensive stays. Yeah. Yeah. It's weird. And you can earn points on up to three rooms. So if you were treating family members to a stay like in hawaii there's senesta has some properties there i could see where you could very easily spend over five thousand dollars on two or three rooms and and you would only earn up to a hundred thousand points that seems kind of crazy but it's worth knowing anyway if you're in that kind of a boat we do hear from readers now and then that treat family members to trips to hawaii and you'll want to know that you're only that kind of a boat, we do hear from readers now and then that treat family members to trips to Hawaii.

And you'll want to know that you're only going to earn up to 100K on that stay. Right. But we should talk about the credit card before we wrap this up, because the Sonesta Travel Pass credit card is interesting in the sense that we talked about the 30K bonus that comes every year by spending 7,500 points or rather $7,500. But we should talk a little bit about the card and the current welcome bonus. And we'll have a link again in the show notes. But the time of recording, this is an increased offer. We have an increased elevated offer on this Nesta Travel Pass

MasterCard from Bank of America. Right now, when we record this, you can earn 120,000 points after just $2,000 spend in 90 days and another 5,000 points by adding an authorized user within that 90 days. And there's no, you know, the way the annual fee is waived the first year and then it's 75 bucks after that each year. So, I mean, 125,000 points essentially after you spend 2K and you add an authorized user. That's a pretty amazing return when you consider the reasonable redemption value of a little over one cent per point. So you're talking about $1,250 worth of points on just $2,000 spend. That's a pretty incredible bonus. That's a great return on spending. It really is. And keep in mind that the reasonable redemption value is based on the median rate that Tim observed across a whole lot of stays. And so there's a good chance of getting

significantly better than that. Also, Tim made the assumption because he couldn't find documentation one way or another, he made the assumption that you do have to pay resort fees when you are doing these stays on points. But the same person who wrote in about the 30,000 points doubling said that she hasn't been charged resort fees on her stays. So that actually increases the value of points if that's true. And again, we haven't verified that yet. Yeah. So the one cent per point is, like we said, a median value. So about half the time you're going to do better than that without even trying. So if you look around for the cherry-picked stays and if you get those resort fees waived, you may be doing significantly better. I mean, that's just a fantastic return on only $2,000 spend.

The card itself, I mean, it earns 3x at Sinasta, and it earns 2x on airfare car rental and dining again but you know maybe one of those is worth it if you're spending towards the annual 7500 dollar uh bonus because it does come with 30 000 points each year when you spend 7500 dollars in a card member year so you get that bonus if you spend 7500 bucks in your card member year which is probably worth it especially in year one if you're going to spend 2k to earn the a year, which is probably worth it, especially in year one. If you're going to spend two K to earn the initial welcome bonus, you may as well go for the other five thousand five hundred in order to earn an additional thirty thousand points and end up with one hundred and fifty five thousand total points. That's pretty awesome. Yes, it sure is. Yeah. All right. So are you excited about it?

What do you think? I mean, what do you think about Sinesta Travel Pass? Is this a program you're going to dig into? Are you going to start staying at Sinesta's, Greg? I mean, are you going to get out there for the sake of science and tell us whether this is all worth it? Yeah, I totally, I am. I need to do this. At the very least, my wife needs to sign up for it. She's not as close to going over 524 as I am. So I'm hesitant to sign up for it myself because I don't want to lock myself out of upcoming chase bonuses. But with this card, I mean, the value proposition is so strong and the cost to get in is so low that as long as you have a reasonable use for it, it feels to me like a

great opportunity. So I could see us, just as an example, I don't know that this will happen, but I could see us getting the card, trying it out at one of those former Kemptons in Chicago so we could see what it's like using the points and the elite status that comes with the card. And then maybe try the property in Hawaii if it's available and see what it's like for a resort stay. Yeah. Yeah. And I think maybe there's even a couple of properties in Hawaii, but you were probably talking about what was the Marriott, the Kauai Marriott, I think, right? That's now a Royal Sonesta. So yeah, I find this intriguing in the same kind of way that the Club Carlson

card was intriguing years ago. The Club Carlsonson card and this is like going way back before radisson and before radisson became part of choice it was a card that wasn't like i mean i don't think a lot of people were wildly excited about radisson but way back when it used to come with like a buy one get one free hotel night so it was like there was no harm in getting it basically it was like a decent return on spend it was you know decent number of points per dollar spent and everything and it came with a benefit that if you could leverage it each year it might be worthwhile it wasn't going to be your daily driver and probably your primary hotel card but it was a really interesting complimentary piece and i feel like that's what this is even though it's totally different card it fits into that category for me so i don't think i'm gonna

get it right away but man i, I could see getting it. And especially with this bonus, I think with the bonus that's up right now, I'm intrigued. It's certainly on my mind. Yeah. I agree with you totally. Like, I think their footprint is too geographically limited to make it your like only hotel strategy that that would be crazy at this point. Cause I mean, to my knowledge, I don't think they have stuff like that in Europe or Asia. I mean, I just don't know. But to the extent that you're traveling where they do have hotels, it looks like they have a nice mix of hotels. And yeah, it could be a great secondary play here. And that's how I would think of it in my family. What about you?

Are you going to sign up? Are you going to apply? Not yet, but it's certainly something that's on my mind. And Sonesta was not at all on my mind, like a few weeks ago. So that says something. I feel like that's that, that right there is enough for me to say, well, I should give it a little bit more consideration because they never would have been on my mind. Now they are also for the ability to maybe status match it to something else down the road could be useful. So not going to be my, like you said, not going to be my primary hotel play,

but I'm intrigued. Congratulations on that, Sonesta. If you enjoyed this episode, you want to make sure that you join our email list at frequentmiler.com slash subscribe. Check out our full length Frequent Miler on the Air episodes dropping every Friday.

And we will see you guys again soon. Bye everybody.