Frequent Miler on the Air - Elite Status Hyatt Hacks | Ep165 | 8-27-22

Episode Date: August 27, 2022

Hyatt's top-tier Globalist elite status is easy to want, but it seems difficult to get. This week, we talk hacks to get you there faster. 1:14 Giant Mailbag 4:30 3 Cards, 3 Continents, 3 Updates https://frequentmiler.com/frequent-milers-2022-team-challenge-3-cards-3-continents/ 14:22 What crazy thing....did IHG do this week? 18:39 What crazy thing...did Nick do this week? 25:30 Awards we booked this week 29:46 Mattress running the numbers: Buying Hyatt points for 1.68c per point 33:38 Main Event: Elite status Hyatt Hacks https://frequentmiler.com/shortcuts-to-hyatt-elite-status/ 38:30 World of Hyatt Credit Cards 43:56 Promotions (Current promo = double elite nights with new business card and current Bonus Journeys) 49:40 Challenges 56:50 Partnerships (SLH, MGM) 1:02:58 Hosting meetings 1:04:32 Mattress runs 1:09:37 Friends & Family 1:14:01 Is it worth going after Globalist status given Guest of Honor, ways to book suites, and Hyatt Prive? https://frequentmiler.com/how-to-get-top-tier-hyatt-elite-benefits-without-status/ https://frequentmiler.com/getting-the-elite-experience-without-elite-status-via-luxury-partner-programs/ 1:25:23 Question of the Week: Are nonrefundable rates more attractive if using a card with good travel protections?

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 Liler on the air starts now. Today's main event, Elite Status, Hyatt Hacks. I'm going to tell you how to get to Hyatt Elite Status

without having to actually spend the 60 nights required for their top tier globalist status without having to actually spend the 60 nights required for their top tier globalist status. And if you're the sound effect, I was like hacking something off there. I was doing like a chop over here. So Nick is our official sound effect maker. And unfortunately his sound effects need explanation. So he's still working on that. Right. Not that good. Not that good. I won't quit the day job. Don't worry. It was getting there. So we love and adore high-end elite status, especially globalist status.

So we should really qualify that because explorer status, which is the next level down, is meh. But when you get to top tier, it's pretty great. And so getting there though can be hard if you don't do some shortcuts along the way. So we're going to talk through some hacks to get you that elite status. First, of course, we have giant mailbag. Today's giant mailbag comes from me. I really just have some feedback on a Wink Wine promo. And so Wink Wines, we've published a post about how you can stack multiple deals to get for net cost of about 10 bucks. You get four bottles of wine and 2,500 American Airlines miles, which also count as loyalty points towards elite status.

And so I did this. I couldn't get the wine delivered to Michigan where I live. But we have a rental property in North Carolina, and my son is going to be there soon. And so about two weeks before he was going to be there, I signed up thinking it would take a while for the wine shipment to come. And like a few seconds later, they said, your wine has been shipped. And I was like, uh-oh. So it's sitting on a porch somewhere.

Well, no, no. They require signatures. Oh, right, right, right. Through FedEx. And so first, the email that said it shipped did say you can manage your shipment through FedEx here. I gave a link. I went in there and I was able to redirect the shipment to go to a Walgreens nearby. And I would just tell my son, go pick it up there. But then once it was, once that was done, I was told I only had five business days to pick it up before it gets sent back to the shipper, which would be Wink Wine. And my son's not going to be there in the five days required and it's

in his name. So I can't ask someone else to pick it up um so I contacted wink wine about it they have an easy you know button for you know contact us and and I just emailed them and within like minutes they replied saying uh basically don't worry about it when if it gets shipped back to us we will ship it back to you, no fee at all. Wow. And I was just so impressed. I actually had a little more back and forth with them, but got quick responses and great answers, like really great customer service answers each time. So I have to say that, you know, I sign up for these things like Wink Wine, not intending to ever keep those services.

You have to sign up for a subscription to get that $30 deal, but you just make a note to yourself to cancel it and you're done. And in this case, I can't keep it because I can't have wine shipped to North Carolina over and over. But, you know, if Michigan was a possibility, I would be considering, like, do I maybe want this service? Because it's so rare these days, I feel like, to get such great customer service. It sure is. So it was worth a shout out to them, I think. Very good.

Excellent. Way to go, Wink Wine. Yeah. Way to go, Wink. Love the alliteration, Wink. All right. Yeah. So, all right. So that's a good mailbag item.

And then next up, we've got, let's see, what's the next one, Greg? Let's do three cards, three continents, three updates. Thank you. I didn't want to get it out of order again. I keep doing that, putting them out of order. Three cards, three continents, three updates. So if you're not familiar with our three cards, three continents challenge, that's the challenge where Greg and Steven Pepper and I are each taking the points earned from three credit card bonuses and $1,000 cash to plan the most incredible trip we can to at least three continents. So that's coming up, coming to a blog near you soon, very soon, in

fact. So that's exciting. But we have a couple of updates in terms of where we are in the process, right? So what do we have this week? We do. We do. Stephen chimes in with just a little tiny nugget of info about his trip, which is that he's both starting at JFK Airport in New York and ending at JFK Airport in New York. So as a reminder, there was no requirement in this challenge to start or end from any particular airport in the US, unlike what we did last time. And it's perfectly okay to start at one airport and end at another as long as within the lower 48 states was the rules of the challenge. But Stephen's doing a true round trip trip.

Yep, absolutely. So that's exciting. So good, good news there. I will be interested in seeing what Stephen does. My own update this week. So this week I have been, I mentioned, I think previously that I installed the Capital One Shopping Toolbar because Greg has reported these incredible targeted offers and some other readers and people we know have

reported incredible targeted offers that they've gotten after installing the toolbar and doing some browsing around. So I installed the toolbar and I browsed around on hotels.com and Priceline and Travelocity and all the online travel agencies, and I got nothing. So I didn't get any targeted offers at all, which later didn't surprise me when I mentioned that. And Craig said, oh, yeah, he didn't get any from any of those booking sites either. It was all from like chain hotels, IHG or perhaps Marriott or whatever the chain hotels that offer cash back are, which for me wasn't terribly useful because the hotel I'm really looking for a nice score and points on is not affiliated with a chain. So I was hoping for our big cashback scores, what I was hoping for there, but nothing going on there. So I was very happy to see this week when Amazon came back with their use one point, get this time I was targeted for 20% off

up to $25. So I haven't done it yet, but I'm leaning towards probably by the end of this weekend, using that promotion to buy another hotels.com gift card and try to stack that into a discount. But a little wrench in my plans, specific property that I have been wanting to book, but waiting to find cheaper and was available for the night that I need it is now requiring a three night minimum. So that changed all of a sudden in the last week. I have been checking every day just to see if the price changed, if there hadn't been as much demand or something. Sometimes these things fluctuate and all of a sudden it wasn't available on the first site I checked. And I was like, that doesn't make any sense. It's been available

every single day. There's no indication of tons of different site I checked. And I was like, that doesn't make any sense. It's been available every single day. There's no indication. There are tons of different room types too. So I was like, the place can't be entirely sold out. All of a sudden, what's going on? So I searched all the different online travel agencies and I was like, this doesn't make any sense. I went directly to the hotel's website and that's where I found that it required

a three night minimum stay during my dates. And I was like, oh, I should have booked that while I could have and just sucked up the fact that it was going to cost me more than I wanted. So I found someplace else in between so that I'll hopefully also be happy with, but I was really disappointed on that one. And the other thing you found is something better than the cement slab outside of the airport in Hawaii. Hopefully we'll see. I don't know. Story's still out. So we'll find out. But moral of the story is book it when you can. Although in my case, I saw it and it was only available as a non-refundable booking,

was not available as a flexible booking. And that's the reason why I continued to drag my heels hoping to find a better way to book it. But unfortunately now it's not an option at all. So there you have it. You lose, you lose. Yeah. So for my trip, there's a hotel where I'm accounting for the stay by using a free night certificate from my Three Cards, Three Continents card signup bonuses. But it's not expensive enough for me to really want to use a free night certificate or even points for that stay. So I've been kind of doing similar things to what you're describing to look for good deals for booking it. Right now, I have it booked as a refundable rate, just sort of the standard way of booking it. And I found much better deals that are non-refundable. But even though I'm 100% sure I'm going to do it, it really pains me to book a non-refundable rate.

So I'm kind of waiting. I think I'll wait maybe a week before if it's still available at a much better deal. Maybe then I'll cancel my refundable booking and rebook it that way. I don't know. I'm glad you brought that up. We'll talk more about that later. Okay. So it was a good update. I'm in the same boat on another reservation also right now.

So all right. Very good. Well, I have one more update about... Sorry about that. So that wasn't my update. That was just my reaction to your update. Um, my update is that there are, um, there's one very, very short flight and, uh, one hotel stay where me and my, uh, travel companion are not booked on the same things. So we're currently booked on a separate flight from a particular city. And we're also booked in two separate hotels in a particular city.

Now that part, because she's not really on my budget, I could just pay the cash rate for another room in my hotel, but I don't want to. This one's very expensive. Or we could go to two hotels that are near each other. It's not a big deal. But what I more wanted to bring this up because there are two tools that I'm using to try to find award space in these cases. One, most listeners have probably heard of, or many listeners have heard of expert flyer, which lets you set award alerts on a whole slew of different airlines. And, and in this case, it's really important to use expert flyer as opposed to the airline that I'm looking for awards on because that airline has award space for its own members,

but not for partners. And I need a partner award space availability to do this. And ExpertFlyer lets me set up an alert specifically for partner award availability. And so I've had that running for a while now. And every morning, like I look for an alert email and haven't gotten it yet. Good luck on that. Thank you. Now, the other one, the hotel one, this is something I think fewer people will know about is that most hotel chains make all base rooms available as awards. But base rooms are like the rooms that don't have anything extra, like a view of the parking lot.

So, so, you know, depending on the hotel, base rooms could be better or worse, but the point is the reason I can't find a second room in the hotel I want is because all of the, what they consider base rooms are sold out for that night. And so a tool called open hotel alert lets me set up a alert and it's free. Expert Flyer charges a monthly fee, but this one is free, open hotel alert.

And you just tell it which room types to alert you for. And so I just found, it actually lists all the room types for that hotel. And I just pick like the bottom ones that it's kind of clear which ones must be base rooms. Pick them and just sit back and wait for an email theoretically. Now, to be honest, I am still checking both of these every day myself as well in case the alerts aren't working. But I just think a lot of people have this situation of, oh, the hotel I want isn't available for awards day. What else do I do? Here's a tool that you can use. Very interesting. I feel like I had heard of that at some point in the past, but I had totally forgotten about it. Do you know if it's a new tool or has it been around?

No, it's not that new. If you look in Frequent Milers, the tools we use post, it's listed in there under hotel awards. And I had to, I couldn't remember the name of this tool. So I had to go back to that post to find it. And there it is. There you go. Very good. So if you pay attention to the resources page, there are all sorts of great resources on

there where you can find stuff like this that, I mean, we all forget about sometimes. So yeah. And the tools we use post is particularly useful because it's just a slew of different tools like the two I just mentioned. Very good. All right. So let's talk about what crazy thing now, Greg doesn't know this cause I didn't mention it before the show, but we're going to do a double header here, but we'll start off with the one that we planned here. So what crazy thing did IHG do this week? IHG has been getting crazy the last couple of weekends. What happened this weekend? They have. So early Sunday

morning, they decided that the last day of the schedule where you can book award nights, just for that last day, they would make many, most, I'm not sure, somewhere between many and most IHD properties available for only 16,000 points per night. So you had to go way out to August 5th, book only one night. Now, luckily it's a Saturday night, so it could work well for a sort of staycation type thing or to build around a larger trip. But these are hotels that many of which normally charge 60,000 points, 70, 80, 90, 100,000 points a night. And these were available for only 16,000 points. Incredible deal. Crazy. That's insane. If you bought IHG points in the most recent sale, that's $80 worth of points

when they run them for half a cent each. And they just did that earlier this month. So $80 worth of points. And in many cases, you could have booked a hotel that normally costs upwards of $1,000 a night. Yeah, exactly. Crazy, crazy craziness. And so that's interesting, A, because it was a great deal and B, because I think it's the second time recently that we've seen I make sure we report quickly if we see something like this again, because it had only lasted a few hours the first time that we saw a crazy flash sale. And so here again, we saw a different flash sale this time in that it was a

specific day, the last day of the booking calendar, but sure enough, it came around on a Sunday morning for a second time and it was gone within hours for a second time. This time around, we did get the alert out there while it was still alive. So if you're subscribed to our instant emails or you follow us on social media, hopefully you were awake early on Sunday morning and you caught this one. And if not, set your alarm Sunday morning. I don't know that anything's going to happen, but I know I'm going to look at IHG this Sunday. Right, right. And for those on the West Coast or Hawaii, those kind of time zones, I would be looking Saturday night, you know, very late Saturday night, because presumably this IHG stuff is happening East Coast time zone-ish morning.

So maybe you'll find something that, you know, you can get in before everybody else. So definitely worth checking it out. It sure is. And I'm going to look Sunday morning and Sunday afternoon, just in case they throw a bone for the West coast people and say, okay, you know what? We're going to wait a few hours. Cause I don't know, maybe that would happen. I really don't know. And I don't understand why IHG isn't sending out an alert if this is intentional. And the fact that it's happened twice now, it was a different sale, but similarly crazy sale for just a few hours leads me to think this is intentional. I'm just surprised they wouldn't take credit for it. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what's going on there.

It reminds me how Delta does flash sales without telling anyone about them as well. Yeah. This one though. So the last one would have been easy to stumble upon yourself if you were just searching for awards because it was like many, many hotels across states were available for what, about half the usual rate or something like that. And I stumbled upon one just randomly myself. This case, I don't know how anyone would stumble upon it. It was just like one day out of the whole year. Yeah. And the last day at that. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. And I, and I, I don't know how anybody would stumble upon it either, which leads me to believe that it was a intentional and be somebody got a heads up that it was happening. Right. So it was for that, for that to even get out, like, what are the chances that it was happening. Right. So it was for that, for that to even get out.

Like what are the chances that it just got found accidentally? I don't know. So I, I'm not sure what's going on, but set your alarms for Sunday morning and hopefully we'll see. So that was the first part of the double header. Second part of the double header is what crazy thing did Nick do last week?

And so Greg knows this story. I'm going to tell the truncated version of the story, but I thought it was a story that was kind of fun and worth telling. So I stayed at a Vacasa property just recently. So I checked in on the 17th and checked out earlier this week. So I stayed at a Vacasa property and I booked it in Myrtle Beach. So I was in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I booked an ocean Myrtle beach. So I was in Myrtle beach, South Carolina, booked an oceanfront property. And I, you know, I know I'm familiar with Myrtle beach, pretty familiar with it. And I know that downtown, uh, that places, the condo places just aren't all super nice. Some of them are fine. Some of them are okay. Some of them are pretty good. And some of them are not so great. And I knew that going in. So we spent a lot of time pouring through pictures

on the Casa, trying to pick exactly the rental we wanted, right? They had to look the right way, have the right stuff, blah, blah, blah. And my wife tends to have issues with allergies. So with that kind of thing, she definitely wanted to make sure that we got a place that wasn't carpeted, that had some sort of a hard floor, which totally made sense to me. It's right by the beach and you get all the sand, blah, blah, blah. So we booked this place that looked great in the pictures, looked better than all the other rentals in the same building that were managed by Vacasa. And we get there for check-in and they give us a lot of complicated stuff. So there was a code for the parking garage for the car that you had to type in. There was the room number.

There were tickets for breakfast because that was happening at a restaurant. It was kind of cool. Actually, this Vacasa rental, a whole bunch of the Vacasa rentals in Myrtle Beach include free breakfast at a buffet restaurant, which isn't particularly good, but it is different. Yeah. And they include free mini golfing at a place downtown right by all the rentals. They include free water park tickets for a couple of different water parks in Myrtle Beach. So there's a whole bunch of different inclusions that are pretty cool.

Yeah, exactly. So I was kind of like, wow, that's actually pretty decent, right? So anyway, but they're handing us all these different cards for, you know, here's the card for the breakfast and here's the discount. You can, you know, show at this place and that's what you do for the water park. And so, and it was nighttime, kids were bouncing off the walls a little bit. It was time to go to bed. So it was a little hard to follow the whole story. And, and the woman pointed to a number and said, here's your floor and here's your room number. And this is the code for the elevator, right? So we go to the elevator code doesn't work. And the person behind us in line says, oh no,

that's not the code for the elevator. That's the code for the parking garage. He tells us the right code for the elevator that nobody had ever told us. And he says, that other number, that's your room number, right? So, okay. So he's not remembering. He said, that other number is the one you use for your room. And so, you know, we go up in the elevator, we get off the floor that we think is the

right floor. We go to the room that we think is the right room. I'm in the hallway. My wife is up there at the room and it's a keypad. So she types in the room number. She types in the number that the guy said, that's for your room. He pointed to it. And this is just some random gas. She types that in on the keypad door opens. We go in, we bring our stuff in horrible, horrible. It's like the it's carpet peeling up all over the place. It's kind of dirty. And I mean, it looks like nobody's staying in there, but the carpet looks like

it's been in there since 1972 and has been peeling since like 1983 and, uh, and, and it smells funky and whatnot. And so we're like, Oh my goodness, this is not at all. It doesn't match the pictures. It's not what we expected. We go back down to the desk. So we say, okay, we're going out. We go out, close the room, hit the lock button on the keypad, go to the front desk. We're like, this doesn't match the pictures. They're like, it should. And so we're going back and forth and getting annoyed because at first they say they don't have any other rooms. Then they say, well, we'll have to go check and see if they're carpeted or not. And they're going on, giving us the runaround. And so meanwhile, I tweet, we got to this Vacasa property and it doesn't match the pictures at all. And I got some people that responded to the tweet,

Vacasa among them, but some readers too. And so I'm like, oh, total bait and switch. I'm annoyed. We're not getting this figured out. Kids are bouncing off the walls. Short version of this long story is after about an hour and change of that, come to find out that she had pointed at the wrong number when she told us the floor. She said, come to find out that she had pointed at the wrong number when she told us the floor. She said, this is your floor. She had pointed at the code that turned out to be for the parking garage. And the room number was a different floor entirely. So the room we had gone to, this room with the peeled up carpet, wasn't our room. We were just in the wrong room. Once we got to the right room, it was fine. The floors were hard floors that we expected. It matched the pictures more or less. The rental was

a-okay. But now comes the problem because we went up to that first room, brought all of our stuff in, went back down to the desk, and I hit the lock button on the way out. Come to find out, Vicasa doesn't manage that rental. And all your stuff's inside. And all your stuff's inside. And all our stuff is inside. Including your kids. Well, no, the kids were with us. Thankfully, and also not.

The kids were with us, bouncing off the walls. It's past bedtime, and they tell me all my stuff is locked in and they have no way to access it. And that made me nervous, it. And, and so, and, and that made me nervous a, because of course, you know, we got our clothes, got our computer, got our credit cards B because Lowe's had a gift card deal that week. And so, you know, we wrote about the Lowe's gift card deal. And so I had been to Lowe's several times that week and had quite a bit and gift cards that were in a bag in the room that they tell me they don't

manage that was unlocked and just waiting for somebody to walk into it, apparently, because we came to find out, obviously, when she typed in the code, the door just had been already unlocked. It's not that the code unlocked it. Yeah, it didn't work. It had already been left unlocked. And so so the moral of the story here is if you find a room with a keypad, check and see if the door opens before you type anything. All right. Make sure that the door is locked. That's the moral code opens the door because you don't want to lock it with all of your stuff inside. You don't know that you got the code that opens the door. So there's my Vicasa takeaway. And somehow you got back in just to end the story. We did. To end the story, we did. We got back in, got my stuff. Everything's all

that ends well. And my tweet about Vicasa was incorrect. It wasn't a bait and switch. It was totally fine. So I deleted the tweet. But if you saw the tweet and you wondered, where did that go? What happened? Blah, blah, blah. Why is it gone? It's gone because it all worked out fine. And I should probably put out another tweet that was like, oh yeah, about that Vicasa rental. It was fine. It was just this lady that gave us confusing instructions. Yeah. Which I mean, at the end of the day, mistakes happen and silly me for not making sure we could open the door. So be careful if you're in one of these big places with lots of Vicasa rentals, careful out there. There's probably a lesson about what to do with your gift cards as well.

Let's keep going. Let's move on to mattress running the numbers. So this week's match. No, I'm sorry. Awards we booked this week. Awards we booked this week. So Greg, I know you must have some IHG properties to share in the awards that you booked this week because we had that crazy flash sale, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Last time I was in California, I had been eyeing a Kempton. There's a Kempton Canary Hotel in Santa Barbara, California. I had wanted to book it. I can't remember if it just wasn't available at the time, but regardless, I didn't end up booking it during that trip, but I wanted to. Here was an opportunity to book it for 16,000 points. This property usually costs over 90,000 points, at least in the summertime. The day right before and right after are each around 100,000 points around the Saturday. So I'm not sure if we actually stay there, if we're going to also stay there on the day before or after.

But at least we have that Saturday and I'm hoping we can make a go of it. But because these are fully refundable, cancelable award bookings, I booked a couple others for the same day. Intercontinental in Geneva looked very nice. That was available, 16,000 points. And a bit closer to home for me, the Kempton St. George hotel in Toronto. That's that was, you know, I don't know how great of a deal that is, you know, probably is usually more like, I don't know, 45,000 points, something in that range, but it's still a great deal. And it's, I booked it because the chance of us, you know, using that is actually fairly high compared to the other ones. That makes sense.

That certainly makes sense. Yeah. And I'm sure that's still a great deal. And that's the thing with these flash sales. Even if you don't get like the headline deal, you can still get a great deal. Kempton in any big city for 80 bucks, like all in. That's right. That's a deal, right?

Dirty. Yeah. Yeah yeah so i say all and i guess kimpton might have a resort fee or destination fee right so maybe you'll have to because with ihg you still have to pay that so there might be a little bit more but any at any rate great deal great i was jealous i couldn't book any of those awards so i was looking and finding things that would work out but then I didn't have enough points. I tied up my point, the flash sale the weekend before I tied up my points. So, and I didn't really want to cancel the reservations I had from that weekend. Although in hindsight, I should have checked and seen if those specific properties had dropped in price because maybe I could have gotten some money back on those.

But, but anyway, I, so I didn't book anything new with the IHG flash sale. However, I did book a hotel separate from Three Cards, Three Continents for my return. And I'm excited about it because I am also returning to JFK Airport. I didn't include that in the update this week, but I'm also returning to JFK Airport. So I booked the Hyatt Regency at Resorts World for my return from the trip. And again, it's separate from the trip. It's not part of the three cards trip. But I'm excited because I've been curious about checking this out. Resorts World is the one casino in New York City that opened up, I don't know, sometime in the last couple of years here, but I haven't been down. I think they only have machines. I'm not terribly excited about slot machines, but I'll be curious to see what the Hyatt

Regency that's attached to it is like, because it doesn't look like typical Hyatt Regency to me in the pictures. It looks pretty nice. And the value is terrific. 12,000 points a night and the cash rate, I think, was starting around $325 a night before taxes and everything else. So a great deal on points to book that place. So I'm excited to try that out at the end of the trip.

Yeah. No, that sounds really good. Is that close to JFK? It is. It's actually called Highett Regency Resorts World JFK. So it's a couple miles away from the airport. And they have a shuttle? I don't think they have a shuttle, actually.

I don't think so. But it's relatively close. Uber shouldn't be too expensive from shuttle. I don't think they have a shuttle actually, but I don't think so. But, uh, but it's relatively close to Uber. Shouldn't be too expensive from there. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, I'm looking forward to hearing all about that. All right.

So that brings us then to mattress running the numbers. And that makes sense. Cause I just talked about booking this Hyatt property. That's 12,000 points per night for a room that would normally cost more than $300. So we should talk for Mattress Running the Numbers about buying Hyatt points because World of Hyatt points are on sale right now. They are.

They are. Until September 30th, you can buy Hyatt points with a 30% bonus. And that makes the points cost 1.68 cents each, which is not, you know, like, I guess an amazing price, you know, but so many hotels, especially these days when we've seen hotel rates soar, so many hotels are going to be way, way cheaper. If you, let's say you don't have the Hyatt points and you buy them in order to book an awards day instead of paying the cash rate.

I think you can save a ton of money at a lot of hotels these days. It's so true. I mean, just that example that I just gave, that Hyatt Regency at Resorts World. So again, not far from JFK Airport. And at 12,000 points, if I had bought those points at 1.68 cents each, that's $201.60. Now, I'm not necessarily interested in paying $200, but if I were thinking about paying 325 plus tax, I'd be much happier with 200. That's almost half off. Yeah. And don't forget that when you book a Hyatt stay with points,

you don't get charged a resort fee. And a lot of hotels in places like New York City charge destination fees, which also you won't be charged if you pay with points. And of course, go anywhere like in Florida or Hawaii, whatever, you're gonna have big resort fees and you're not gonna have to pay those if you do this. So the savings can actually be a lot bigger than it looks at first blush. Yeah, I mean,

cause that wasn't a cherry picked example by any stretch. And by the time you add whatever the destination fee is and the tax, that's darn near half off by buying the points on one hotel that again, wasn't cherry picked for great value. There's tons of properties out there where you could do really well with this sale. I'm probably not going to buy any Hyatt points because they're pretty easy to generate via chase ultimate rewards. Thanks to, you know, I have an ink plus card and an ink cash card. And of course, we've seen lots of great sales on Visa gift cards lately from Staples and OfficeMax. So I've been generating enough points that I'm not a buyer myself. But if I were looking at booking a cash stay and a vacation right now, I would certainly be checking out the points prices and seeing if I could save money that way.

Oh, definitely. I think anyone who doesn't have the Hyatt points looking for a stay somewhere, it's definitely worth check out the award prices for Hyatt, do the math, multiply the point price by 1.68 to see how many pennies it would cost you to stay there and compare that to the cash rates. And I bet you in many, many, many cases these days, there's going to be significant savings and it's worth doing. Really true. And Greg's saying these days, because if you haven't been traveling much, my goodness, hotel prices have just gotten so expensive for not even just for like obviously the super high-end hotels are expensive but i'm talking they're getting expensive for the mid-tier

and low-end hotels yeah yeah and it just depends on destinations like yeah i still see some places where hotel rates are what they used to be but just some you know places that um seem to be especially desirable these days and i don't even know necessarily why um yeah where you see things like a hyatt house that is sort of a lower end hyatt for like 700 a night yeah yeah and you just go what's going on here that's true it's true i've seen that and and meanwhile the award prices of, since Hyatt still has an award chart, follow the award chart. So when there's standard rooms, you can get a smoking deal using points versus those cash rates. So worth taking a look at that. All right. I think that brings us to the main event. It does. It flows right into the main event. Elite status, Hyatt hacks.

Let's talk about how to get top tier Hyatt elite status. Top tier elite status is called globalist status. It includes free breakfast at all Hyatt hotels. It includes free parking on awards days. Huge in New York, by the way, folks. Huge in New York. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Save you like almost a hundred bucks a night. Cities in California, you could save a lot of money. It gives you the opportunity to get upgraded to a suite anywhere. What are some of your other favorites? 4 p.m. late checkout. That can be super convenient if you've got plans in the morning or want to be able to have plans. If you have a late flight, 4 p.m. checkout can be terrific. I mean, that's

actually going to play into a piece of my three cards trip. Now, I know we're not supposed to use our elite status benefits, and it's not required that I have this elite status benefit, but it's going to be convenient that I have a 4 p.m. checkout. So, you know, those benefits can be really helpful in the right situations where you have, again, one of those late flights out, or you can spend a little extra time. Lounge access, of course, Greg mentioned breakfast, but if a property has a club lounge, you get club lounge access. And then one of my favorite pieces of having globalist status is the ability to make guest of honor bookings for other people, to hook up friends and family with your globalist benefits on their awards days. I think that's one of the great things about having globalist status.

It really is. And it's made it so nice to provide these great gifts to family members of a stay. And I gifted my sister recently a stay in Florida, a future stay, not for the summer. I gifted a lot of different stays to different family members as like, you know, here's a here's your birthday present or whatever. And it just makes all the difference in the world because they get treated just like a top tier elite for the stay to get the free breakfast, the free parking. All that stuff is just amazing. How about how about Explorist status, which is the next tier down or Discoverist? Do you think it's worth, you know, going out of your way to get status in either of those? bit more that you learn on paid stays. The one benefit of Explorer status that I still have found useful is the late checkout because you get a 2 p.m. late checkout as an Explorist, which obviously isn't as good as 4 p.m., but is much better than checking out at 11 or noon when you have something planned and want to be able to come back to the room. Even if you just

want to go to the pool or the beach or wherever you may be and come back and shower and stuff before you go off to the airport, having that extra couple of hours, I think can be really nice, but not nice enough to go out of your way just to get that benefit. Well, not only that, I believe bottom tier discoverer status has that as well. And you get that automatically with the Hyatt credit card. So there you go. It doesn't make much sense to go out of your way to get Explorer status, I think. Now, the way that Hyatt wants us to get globalist status is by spending 60 nights at Hyatt hotels

each year. And those can be paid stays or award stays. As long as you book through Hyatt, your stage should count. 60 nights will get you global status and you get to keep it each year by doing another 60 nights each calendar year. So should people just do that and be done? I mean, if you need 60 nights, yeah. Why not? If you're already planning on staying, if you travel a lot for work and you have the discretion to pick Hyatt and they are in the locations you need to, and you can easily do 60 nights, I mean, that would be the first chain I would be looking to earn elite status with. And that's going to vary a little bit depending on your needs because Hyatt isn't everywhere you want to be. So maybe they don't

have properties where you need to be either A, for work or B, where you want to go on vacation. So I don't want to say everybody ought to do that. But I think that if you're interested in high elite status and you have the ability to do 60 nights, sure, that's the simplest path. However, most of us aren't actually or many of us, I don't know if it's most or not, many of us are not actually going to do 60 nights. And most of us listening to this podcast want to know, how can I get global status without paying for 60 nights of hotels? Right, right. So the most obvious hacks, and I don't even know if they qualify as hacks, but is to get one or two Hyatt credit cards. So

there's the World of Hyatt consumer credit card, and there's a business version of the credit card and you can have both. The personal card gives you five elite qualifying nights every year just automatically, just by having the card. So boom, you get the card, you're down to only needing 55 nights a year, which is still a lot. But for every $ five thousand dollars you spend on the card you get two more elite qualifying nights and this card gives you um a free night when you spend fifteen thousand dollars in a calendar year so if you have the card at all it makes sense to try to spend fifteen thousand dollars on the card because you'll get the free night and points that you would normally get from spend. But you also get a total of six additional elite qualifying nights because of spending 5K three times, basically.

So in total, if you spend $15,000 a year on your World of Hyatt credit card, that'll be 11 elite nights you'll have each year from the card and uh so you'll need only 49 additional nights um you know with with stays and of course you can yeah it's quite a bit of course you can you can spend a lot more than 15,000 in order to get additional Elite Nights, but the additional spend doesn't give you other bonuses the way the first $15,000 does until we talk about milestone rewards. So milestone rewards are a Hyatt benefit that it's not tied one-to-one to elite status. What it is, is when you get to 20 elite nights, you get some perks. And then every 10 elite nights after that, within a calendar

year, you get some more perks. And so at 30 nights, you get, I think, a free night certificate, right? So in that way, spending more will get you these other perks, but so would staying more at Hyatt Hotel. So it's kind of independent from how you get the nights to get those extra perks, but it's worth mentioning. The Hyatt Business Card will give you five elite qualifying nights with each 10K of spend. So that's a little bit more than the World of Hyatt consumer card gives you, but they don't give you the five elite nights to begin with automatically. So for most people, if it was one or the other card, you're better off with the personal card. If you intend to spend your way entirely to top tier status, which I'm not necessarily recommending, but I'm saying if you are, actually having the combination is kind of ideal, I

think, because spend $15,000 on the consumer card and then spend the rest in 10K increments on the business card. And that'll be the ideal combination to get you to your 60 nights. Yeah. And so doing that, if you spent, let's say 30 on the business card and the 15 on the consumer cards, I was trying to think of 50, but that brings you to 45,000 spend. So that would give you what? 5, 10, 15, and 11 is 26. You'd be almost halfway to globalist status with just the cards. Yeah, 15, 11. I had to do the math again. So you're almost halfway to globalist status just with spend. And then obviously, if you're spending your way towards globalist status, hopefully it's because you're staying some nights in hotels, too. So hopefully, you're staying enough to bridge the gap or at least get close to it. So that could be a viable strategy. Obviously, if you have capacity to spend more, you could spend more. There is some trade-off there, of course. Remember, if you're spending on a Hyatt card, you're earning one point per dollar. And Hyatt points are particularly valuable, but one point per dollar spent is not the best return on everyday spend. And in fact, it's not even the best way to earn Hyatt points

on unbonused spend when you could have a Freedom Unlimited card and be transferring those over to Hyatt. So there's some considerations there, but it certainly does shorten the path and reduce the path. And for those who are able to leverage globalist benefits and travel enough to make that worthwhile, it certainly can be worth it. I mean, free breakfast alone at a nice resort can really add up or even just at some of the nicer hotels. I just recently stayed at the Hyatt Thompson Central Park and breakfast check for my wife and I came to like $156 and we didn't pay it because we have globalist status. But it just goes to show that that benefit could... That was a one night stay. You're staying a few nights, that can really add

up. And so the savings could be significant if you're able to leverage them enough to make it worth accepting some spend at suboptimal, slightly suboptimal return. Yeah. I'm willing to bet though, if you didn't have globalist status, you would not have spent $156 at breakfast, but you know, it does go to show that you can really live it up and not have to worry about it at certain heights. So that's really nice. Yep. All right. Let's talk about promos. So every now and then Hyatt brings out promotions that make it easier to get elite status. And since I was just talking about the World of Hyatt business card, it's worth talking about the promo that just came out with that card, which is if you sign up now, if you apply before or by October 6th and you're approved, then you'll get double nights,

double elite qualifying nights for every night you spend at a Hyatt hotel through the end of the year. So, you know, suddenly if you have like, let's say you have 10 nights, you're going to, you're going to spend in Hyatt hotels, just signing up for that Hyatt business card before then will get you, you know, 20 elite nights out of those 10 nights of stays. So that's a pretty darn good promotion. Yeah, it really is. It's a great promotion because now if you're looking at, if you have the personal card and you get the business card and you're going to do something like what I just said, I gave that example of the 45K spend. So that would give you 26 nights. And so now if you had 20 nights planned

the rest of this year, you would be over the top, right? You'd have more than enough nights to be a globalist. So that would certainly pump things up and accelerate your path. Or even if you're not doing all the spend that we talked about, but you just have another 20 or 30 nights booked this year, then getting that business talked about, but you just have another 20 or 30 nights booked this year, right? Then getting that business card now, even if you're not going to spend heavily on it, can certainly be worth it. That'll pump you right up. And those milestone rewards, you will qualify for those with those nights. So that's going to help you get the milestone rewards. And a lot of people that perhaps were familiar with Hyatt years ago might associate things like guaranteed suite upgrades

with globalist status, but those are actually milestone benefits. So you still need to get the elite nights in order to get those milestone benefits. So if you want things like suite upgrade certificates, you need to get elite nights. So this can be a great way to accelerate your path towards those. Right. The best milestone benefits are at 50 nights and 60 nights. And so that ties in nicely to going after globalist status in this way. I should mention that the double elite nights is only for actual stays. Your spend to get elite nights is not doubled. So you don't get 10 elite nights for every 10K spend because you sign up for the card now. Also, if you already had the business card before this promo went live, sorry, you

don't get double elite nights. This is a promo to try to entice people to sign up now. Yep. And if we didn't mention it, worth mentioning that both paid and awards days count for this. So that's kind of intriguing, right? Because a category one off-peak that's 3,500 points per night, if you're able to book a bunch of those, getting two elite nights for every 3,500 points, like 1,750 points per night, that starts to become pretty intriguing to book some mattress runs. It sure is. And you could get a long way towards your globalist by using the welcome bonus, which I think is 60,000 points with the business card to book these stays. And there you go. So the other, um, doubling of elite nights promotion that's out is, I believe

it's once again called bonus journeys, which is Hyatt's favorite name for their promotions. Unfortunately, um, this time what they're doing is they're giving you double elite nights at a large selection of what they call inclusive collection hotels. So these are the all-inclusive hotels that many of them are in Caribbean or Mexico. And as long as you stay between September 15th and December 20th, you'll get double elite qualifying nights for those stays at those properties. Of course, you have to register for that promotion first. So don't forget to register.

Always register for these promotions because you never know when plans might change and you might be able to take advantage of one. I don't know. So you're going to randomly get stuck at the Cancun airport or wherever it is where you find one of these inclusive collection properties and need an all-inclusive all of a sudden, but stranger things have happened. So it's worth registering now just in case you never know. Absolutely. And it's worth noting that the business card doubling promo and the bonus journeys promo stack. So if you have both you will get three elite qualifying nights for every one night you spend at at one of these uh all-inclusive hotels so wow wait you get three or three extra

you get three total so you get the one base night you get one bonus night because of the business card and one bonus night because of the uh bonus and one bonus night because of the bonus journeys promotion i see so three and elite nights so 20 all-inclusive nights uh would get you all the way to global status if you had both of those promos running that is a long all-inclusive stay but if you've got one of those all the more power to you let us know how that right turned out for 20 nights and i don't say that with any knowledge but any of the all-inclusives i just feel like 20 nights of it might get old but uh but if you i mean if you have a five or seven or ten nights stay it's still like you know it's getting you a lot of way there yeah exactly yeah absolutely all right so those are two good promos what about challenges because I know Hyatt is running a number of different Hyatt elite status challenges, and there must be some ways to kind of hack that. Explorist status for 90 days. And if you complete 10 nights during that time, you get to keep

Explorist status for all of next year until February of the year after that. But if you do 20, depending on whether you qualify for this part or not, you'll get Globalist status for, again, for that period of time. Basically, if you sign up now, it means getting globalist status till the end of February of 2024. So with just 20 nights in So that's a huge reduction in what's required. The promos we just talked about do not help. So you can't stay 10 nights at an all-inclusive and say, well, it's getting doubled, so that's 20 nights, so it should count. That's not how they do this. Only the base nights count towards the 20 required for the challenge.

There are at least three ways to sign up for these challenges that I'm aware of. One is what just came out is a challenge specifically for American Airlines elite members. And unfortunately, you have to have Platinum Pro elite status or higher in order to qualify for the globalist part of that challenge. So unless you have Platinum Pro or higher, I just I wouldn't sign up through that challenge. So unless you have platinum pro or higher, I just, I wouldn't sign up through that path. Right. I wouldn't either, but you said, unfortunately, but, but fortunately, I'm sure that we have some readers who are there or close to there anyway, thanks to all of the ways to hack your way to American Airlines elite status to share from home with simply miles and the shopping portal and all the things that we've written about in terms of the shortcuts to American Airlines elite status. Some of you might already have Platinum Pro, so you may have easy access to a shortcut path. I

mean, especially if you've been doing spend on the cards, you've actually flown some, et cetera. Right, right. Ironically, when we've written about the ability to earn American Airlines status through what we're calling the loyalty game of shopping through portals and all that stuff, some people have asked, well, why would you do this if you're not really going to be using the American Airlines elite perks that much? And one of the answers is, besides, hey, it's a fun challenge, is the ability to status match to other airlines usually. But here's a case where you're sort of status matching to a hotel chain. So that's another twist on that reason to go for high level status. Another way of enrolling in this is if you work for a corporation that Hyatt cares about, I don't know, Hyatt has a challenge for businesses. And if you have an email address from one of a number of large businesses that Hyatt accepts, then you could register online for the challenge as I

described it. And that one one everyone would be eligible for the globalist part of that. Third way is that we've heard through at least one member of our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group that it is sometimes possible to just message Twitter, message Hyatt, either on Facebook Messenger or like Twitter direct message and basically ask them if they could sign you up for a challenge. a large number of hotel stays coming up. I'm thinking of maybe moving my preference from Marriott or Hilton to Hyatt. Is there any way that I can get a fast track to Hyatt elite status as part of this and see if they're willing to sign you up for this challenge? It doesn't work for everybody, but it's worked for some. Yeah. Yeah. I, that's, I think awesome. If you're able to take advantage of it, it's really nice to be able to get that elite status though. It's worth mentioning again, that if you take one of these fast tracks and you get your way to globalist status, you do not get the milestone rewards. You don't get credit for

60 elite nights. You get credit for whatever you stay. So if you stay your 20 nights, you're going to get 20 nights of credit. Now that said, if you, I guess if you stay 20 nights at an all inclusive, like we talked about a minute ago, you are going to get 40 elite nights. You'll need to spend 20 in a hotel in order to meet the challenge. Uh, but you'll still get yourself closer to some of those milestone benefits, but the milestone rewards you really want are 50 nights. Cause you get two sweet night upgrades at 50 nights and then at, or maybe you can choose, right. Or 60, where do you get to choose? Is it 40, 40? You get to choose, isn't it? I'm getting confused. I think 50 is the 40, 40. You don't get upgrades, but you do get to choose.

There's where the choice benefit. So 50 nights, you get the two suite upgrade awards that you can use to confirm a suite at booking for a stay of up to seven nights each. Those confirm right away, unlike Marriott, where you got to wait until five days before the stay. So these Hyatt suite upgrades can be incredibly valuable. Then at 60 nights, you get two more of those suite upgrades and a category one to seven free night certificate. So that's an incredible benefit at 60 nights. So the 50 and 60 night milestone rewards are worth going after if you can. But even if you don't care as much about those, obviously the fast track can be worth it. I just hope to combo those things if you can. If you can't, like we said, globalist benefits are still very good.

Just know that you're not going to get those milestone rewards unless you get the elite packs. Right, right. And actually, I think the timing is really nice for those who are interested in Hyatt spend as a way in the future to help get you to status. Then you could get that globalist status now with 20 nights with one of these challenges, and then start your spend on, on one or more credit cards in January so that you can work your way towards between regular stays and the credit card spend to get 60 nights so that your status will last another year past February of 2024. Yeah.

That's certainly something to keep in mind on challenges in general, right? That if you time them right, you're doing it now gives you status for all of next year. And so maybe you aren't going to spend 60 nights this year, but next year you anticipate having more travel. Well, great time to do a challenge now that lasts through all of next year. So when you're doing those 60 nights, they're a lot more comfortable. So if you're able to meet the terms of the challenge now with the 20 nights, then that might make it a lot easier to reach those milestone benefits next year.

Right, right. All right. So moving on, partnerships. So staying at Hyatt's is not the only way to earn elite qualifying nights from your stays. For example, Hyatt has a great partnership with SLH, Small Luxury Hotels of the World. And as long as you book a stay at an SLH property through Hyatt, and you can book with points or with cash, then the night spent at that SLH property will count just like a Hyatt stay. Yeah, that's great because a lot of SLH properties are really nice. When this partnership formed, I was not super excited about it. I don't typically prefer boutique hotels. I like the cookie cutter experience where I know what cookie I'm going to eat.

So you like the Doubletree hotels? I love Doubletree. I love that free cookie. But as the cookie crumbles, I've had a couple of SLH days now and they've been terrific. So I would be very happy to do another SLH stay in the future. And so it's nice that those count towards high elite status, whether they're paid or award stays. Most of the SLH properties seem to be fairly expensive. However, I've seen some that are really inexpensive with cash that you may be happy to book with

cash and get a great stay at a nice place and pick up Hyatt Elite Nights. Now, they're not the only place where you can pay with cash and pick up Hyatt Elite Nights, where you can pay maybe just a little bit with cash, a very cheap rate with cash and get Hyatt Elite Nights. Of course, if you're going to Las Vegas anytime soon, or one of the other places where MGM has properties, Hyatt has a partnership with MGM. And so when you stay at an MGM resort, if you make sure, first of all, if you book directly either through Hyatt or I think if you book directly through your MGM account, my experience is anyway,

you can add your Hyatt number, make sure it's added at check-in and check-out. I always check both times because sometimes they tell me, yes, it is. And then I get to check out and they say, no, they didn't attach it right. I always check it both, check in and check out to make sure that my Hyatt number is attached to the stay. And then you should get elite credit for those MGM stays. And that's pretty nice because there are some really inexpensive MGM properties. Yes. And you can get them cheaper if you have elite status with MGM, right?

Yeah, because if you have MGM Gold status, which if you currently have Hyatt Explorer status, you can match over to MGM Gold. If you have elite status in some other casino programs, you may be able to match to MGM Gold in person also. But if you have MGM Gold, you don't pay a resort fee. And so that suddenly makes things really interesting because obviously MGM has some nice places. So if you're interested in San Pelagio or, you know, Aria or some of their nicer spots, great. You can enjoy those days and credit them to Hyatt.

But if you're looking for really cheap elite nights, Luxor and Excalibur can be incredibly inexpensive. Like we're talking sometimes 20 or $30 a night. Now, when you were paying a 30 or $40 resort fee on top, that didn't seem so cheap. But if you've got MGM Gold and you're not paying a resort fee, suddenly $20 or $30 a night for elite qualifying nights is looking really good. Yeah, yeah, it really is. And unlike SLH, you mentioned that you can book directly through MGM to get these great

rates and get elite qualifying nights with Hyatt, which is not true of SLH, you mentioned that you can book directly through MGM to get these great rates and get elite qualifying nights with Hyatt, which is not true of SLH. In some cases, you can book SLH properties cheaper by going directly. But if you do that, there's no way of getting Hyatt elite qualifying nights for those. So this partnership is pretty special and has some nice bonuses to it. All right. The final partnership I want to mention is Lindblad, which they have cruises. And those cruises count, well, if you book them through Hyatt, again, either with points or cash. So it's a lot like SLH booking, but however many nights you spend on your cruise, those count as elite qualifying

nights. Now here's a case we haven't even mentioned that there is another way of getting Hyatt globalist status with points instead of nights. And that's like the amount of spend you do at Hyatt hotels. You get five base points per night. And if you get 100,000 base points in a calendar year, you get global status that way. I don't apply to that. So that's a lot of spend. So most people don't earn high global status that way. But if you're going to be booking an expensive cruise, you might just get global status with one expensive cruise, really. Yeah. I mean, because they do some of those.

I think they do like Antarctic cruises and things like that, right? And those certainly can be enough that you may be able to earn global status with just your cruise. Yeah. And so if you're thinking of booking, I mean, I would price out the cruise both directly and through Hyatt, make sure it's not more expensive through Hyatt, but also booking through Hyatt gives you a few other little benefits. So it's worth checking that out as well. But yeah, if it's similar priced, I think it'd be crazy not to book through Hyatt and get your globalist status as a perk of spending that much money.

Right. Now the nights aren't going to do you any good, though, because you aren't going to get any actual nights with Hyatt in that case. You can earn it by the points, by the spend, but then you would be at zero in terms of getting to any sort of milestone benefits. No, no. If it's a 10-night cruise, you get 10 nights. Okay, that's all right.

Okay. But yeah, you still, like a 10-night cruise might get you globalist status for the spend, but only 10 nights. Okay. That's all right. Okay. But, but yeah, it, it, you still like a 10 night cruise might get you global status for the spend, but only 10 nights. You're nowhere near, you know, getting a milestone benefit with, with just that. So it is kind of interesting that way. Yeah. Okay. So those are some interesting partnerships.

Are there any other ways, any other shortcuts to picking up more elite nights? Sure. We're not done. If you host meetings, at Hyatt hotels, you can get global status by hosting 20 meetings in a year. That's a lot. That's a lot of me. I mean, it's almost two a month, right? That's a lot of meetings. Brian Kardell, Yeah, I mean, so you come back to the

corporate world that as your job, I think. And you can't do, it used to be possible to do sort of like meetings and quotes, like with Marriott, for example, where it's not really a meeting, but you get the benefits anyway. In this case, you have to have 10 paid guest rooms as part of your meeting or have rented out event space and purchase catered food as part of your meeting or have rented out event space and purchased catered food as part of your meeting. So regardless of how you qualify it as a meeting, it's not going to be a cheap meeting. And so these are real meetings and probably don't apply to most listeners, I would guess. Probably not.

But if you have to book a meeting or two, it certainly could make sense to look at doing this to see what you can pick up in terms of any. So do you get now the question here is, do you get elite nights or do you just get status with X number of meetings? You just get status. It doesn't stack with any other approach. Yeah. Right. Right. And you wouldn't get any milestone rewards. It really is not a great way to do it again, unless you're doing these meetings anyway. Right. Right. The another thing we kind of alluded to is mattress runs that you can find the cheapest Hyatt hotels to book and hopefully stack other promotions.

You know, there's various promotions going on all the time, or you get a thousand bonus points here, or maybe there's a card-linked offer like with Amex where you get, you know, $50 back from a $250 stay and things like that. And so you could pile on those things together to make your mattress runs cheaper. And a mattress run is where you book a hotel, not because you actually have a stay that you want, but rather so you can check in and just earn the elite qualifying nights and any points that come with it. Yeah. And those can make sense in different situations. So obviously Greg's talking about Amex offers and card linked offers and things like that, that make a stay cheaper, but you know, your category one off peak properties

at 3,500 points per night, when you can find them could make sense for a mattress run. I mean, let's say you're at 50 elite nights then, and you don't have any other stays planned and you can book a 10 night stay at 3,500 points per night. It's going to cost you 35,000 points. And when you hit 60 elite nights, the milestone benefits are a free category one to seven free night cert. So that's something that's already worth somewhere in that range, right? Not quite that many because it's a certificate, not points and expires and blah, blah, blah. But that comes close to reimbursing, so to speak, your 35,000 points plus the two suite night upgrades. And those to me, I mean, I would pay some points for those suite night upgrades because I know I'm going to use them on a stay where they're

going to save me a significant amount. I tend to use my suite night upgrades on properties that cost at least 25,000 points per night where they're saving me thousands of extra points per night over booking a suite directly. So pretty easy for me to get again, close to that 35,000 points in value or more out of the two suite upgrades alone. So the combination of the two suite night upgrades and the free night certificate could certainly be worth dumping 35,000 points into a category one off near you and dates when it is off peak price and 10 of them in a row at that. So there's a lot of different variables, but it might be worth it. And we should mention here that the way this worked in the past, and so the way I expect it will continue to work, if you're booking something near the end of the year, remember what we learned before is that if you check in before the end of the year, doesn't matter what day your checkout date is, those elite nights will post with the new year, right? Am I right about that? I hit that one on the head.

So I think so. Yeah. So yeah, go ahead. Yeah. So you'd want to, if you want them to count for this year, you'd want to check out on the 31st and then check back in right away if, you know, but make sure you, the hotel officially checks you out so that you get credit for whatever nights were this year, if that happens. Now, by the same token, if you would rather earn those nights for next year, because December is cheap

and you want to get a head start on elite nights for next year for some reason, then you want to make sure that your check out date is in January, because as long as your check out date is in January, because as long as your check out date is in January, those December nights are going to count towards next year's status. So there's a couple of different ways to play that, but it's worth being aware that stays that are going to credit in the year that you check out of the hotel. Yeah. That's a really great point because I'm remembering about those challenges that the two special ones that are going on, the American Airlines elite one and the business one, both of them require registering by November 30th to register, then if you have 90 days to complete the 20 elite nights.

So if you sort of rig it, so all those 20 nights count towards next year instead of this year, which wouldn't be very hard to do, then there's a big advantage to that because those 20 elite nights will then will count for re-upping your status for the year after that. So that would be a really nice combination way to do it. So it wouldn't stack with those double elite night promos, but the challenge doesn't anyway. Yeah. And so if you timed it right and you opted in, like Greg said, as close to November 30th as possible,

and then you have, let's say, a 20-night stay that spans from December into January and you check out in January, then you're going to get globalist status that'll be good for all of next year. And you'll be one third of the way to the 60 nights you need for next year, also at the same time, that's what he's saying.

So that can be a strategy that can be worthwhile and you're going to have to run the numbers and consider it yourself as to what makes the most sense. But it's worth being aware of that when you're planning any mattress runs near the end of the year. Yep. Okay. All right. Great. One last thing I should mention is that because of the guest of honor benefit, the ability to book your friends and family as like globalists, basically through this guest of honor thing, it means that if you travel often with friends or family, or there's people that, that, um, travel separately from you, but, but want to help you out, um, you could theoretically when they could theoretically, when they have travel that includes Hyatt stays, you could theoretically book it in your own name, but add a note to the reservation to allow them to check in

and that way you would get elite night credit for their stay. And they may or may not during that stay get to benefit from your globalist status. It depends on the hotel, how they feel about it. Sometimes they will require that the globalist member be there. But that's one way to get extra elite nights. And you're helping those people who are helping you indirectly because you're promising, oh, well, I'll book you guest of honor stays in the future as a reward for this, basically. You might want to mention there's some downsides to that. Yeah. So I was wondering if you were going to get to those.

So it's a little risky and it's risky for a number of reasons. A, because the hotel certainly could demand that the member whose name is on the reservation show up in person. So if you're not going to be there, there's a possibility at check-in that they're going to say, no, you can't do this. And now you've got to pay the walk-up rate or whatever the case may be. So that's not terribly common in the United States. But if you're going to try and pull that trick overseas, that's a little risky business. You want to know that the person checking in is prepared with a backup plan if things go south. So careful with that.

That's a really good point. I want to mention two experiences I've had with this type of thing. One was in Chicago. I had booked a stay under my name, but my son went to check in. I messaged them through. So I checked in through the Hyatt app the day he was going there. And then I messaged the hotel within the app to say, oh, hey, my son will be there before me. Please let him check in. And of course, I gave his name.

And the reply back was, that's fine, but he won't get the globalist benefits until you check in or something like that. In reality, he did. So your mileage may vary on that. He did get free parking. He did get free breakfast. So that all worked out well. Another time this wasn't with Hyatt, but with the platinum perks that I would get. And so they actually just asked for her Marriott number, which she had gold status. And they actually gave her a room upgrade, but not the free access to the lounge, which she would have gotten if they had allowed my full status. So those are two cases where it all worked out great, but not exactly how we intended. Right, right.

And that's the thing. I mean, frankly, I've done this plenty of times without a problem for people, but there are times when it doesn't work out. And so I'm always careful about who I'm going to do that for because they need to be prepared that it may not work the right way. So, yeah. And let me say to do not like look for people on the Internet who are willing to check in for you for like twenty dollar stays in Mexico or wherever.

Hyatt is aware of people doing that. They do not like it. You're probably get your account shut down. I only do this with like close friends or family. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And that's, that's certainly an issue that we've seen warnings go out for and probably account shutdowns eventually over that type of activity. So careful out there. It's a jungle out there. Careful. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the last topic I think we need to discuss is like, is it worth getting globalist at all when there's fairly easy ways to get the same perks

without doing it? Yeah. I mean, that's a great question that has been on my mind because I, I'm not going to get 60 nights this year. I don't think anyway, I'm borrowing something really unexpected or a great mattress run opportunity. I don't know this Hyatt business card thing has me sort of intrigued if I'm able to book off peak category ones. But anyway, I don't need the status necessarily yet for next year. I could look at booking something early next year to sort of start to earn it back. But the big hesitation for me has been, do I really need it? Because I'm lucky enough to know

Greg, the frequent miler, and he's got globalist status. So he'll probably hook me up with a guest of honor stay if I need one. And if not, I know Steven Pepper and I know some other people that are in my circle that can probably help me and been nice to me in the past and help me with guest of honor stays. So do I need it? And of course, what I'm saying there is because as we mentioned before, if you know somebody who has globalist status, they can book a room for you and you get the globalist benefits, the free breakfast, the free parking, the 4pm late checkout. You can't get a confirmed in advance suite upgrade, but you still can get upgraded to a suite at check-in. And it's happened to me plenty of times before. So it's a really great program.

If you know somebody else who's got elite status, you may not feel the need to qualify with 60 nights. And I think that's legit. And of course we should also add with that, you can transfer points for free to anybody who's got global status. Yes. So the way it works is like Nick would reach out to me and say, Hey, I want to stay at Ventana Big Sur. It's costs 90,000 points for two nights or something. And do you mind booking a guest of honor stay for me? I would go ahead and book it. If I had enough points in my account, I would just go ahead and book it knowing that he's going to send me the points and it's going to take a little while to get them. If I don't already have the

points, I would probably contact Hyatt to say, so one benefit of Globalist, they can book award stays even when you don't have enough points. So I'd probably do that because that particular property sells out quickly and then wait until Nick transfers the needed points to my account and then apply those points to the stay to confirm it. And it would be, because I book it as a guest of honor, it'd be a next name. He doesn't have to do any funny business. He just shows up. He gets the elite nights for the stay and gets treated just like a globalist. So that's a really good point, Nick, that, you know, if you have a friend with Hyatt globalists, why do you need it? You probably don't.

Well, now one thing we should mention here with all that though, is that Hyatt does limit you to transferring points in or out to once per 30 days. So if Greg does that for me today and I transfer in points today, I can't transfer points to anybody else for 30 days and Greg can't transfer points in or out of his account for 30 days either. So don't everybody go emailing Greg asking for guests of honors days because you can't do that. You can't keep transferring the points. And so, you know, you're going to be limited to doing that for actual friends and family, you know, cause you got to make that those transfers happen and they take a little bit, like Greg said, they're not usually done in a single day. Usually takes,

I don't know, a few days a week. I've had it sometimes take even longer for the points to transfer over. So that process can be a little bit slow. So there are a couple of hangups there, but generally speaking, if you have a friend who is a globalist member, and if you don't, you should make friends in this game because that can be really valuable. Then you may not need to pursue globalist status. You may want it for your own purposes, but that's certainly one reason why you might not do it. Another reason is because if what you really want is suites, you don't need somebody with globalist status. You just need some more points. Yeah.

Not all properties have suite upgrades with points readily available, but many do. You can book a cheap regular room and pay 6,000 points for an upgrade to a suite or 9,000 points per night for an upgrade to a premium suite. I did that in Arizona. One hotel, it was kind of interesting. They didn't have any base rooms left. So all they had was very, very expensive suites, but they still let me, and this was all bookable online. They let me book the base room rate plus 9,000 points for a premium suite, which was fantastic.

And I mean, I happen to have global status, but I didn't need it to do that. Yeah, yeah, that is terrific. And you can book, we've written about a number, but I didn't need it to do that. Yeah. Yeah. That is terrific. And you can book, we've written about a number of different ways to book suites with Hyatt. So there's a lot of different ways to do this. You might be able to book a really cheap cash rate and a base level room and upgrade like that. You may be able to just outright book a standard or premium suite totally with points without

the upgrade at all. And in those cases, the amount varies a little bit. The premium suites are what double the cost of a standard room. So if you want one of the biggest, best suites, you can often do that. Now, like Greg said, not every property has these available or doesn't have them available all the time, but there are plenty of properties where they do, and you can get an awesome room using just points and skip the whole globalist thing altogether. If what matters most to you is a big room with extra space. Right. And I think it's really worth stressing. This is so unique to Hyatt's program that the

other programs, some of them will sometimes make suites available to pre-book with points in some way, but Hyatt just has it a standard part of their program. And so it's much more widely available and, and much more often a good deal than you'll find. Like with Marriott, you'll randomly find situations where, uh, just when you search for room types that they might say, oh, you could get in the suite for this much plus this many points. It just varies from hotel to hotel, whether that's a good deal. Sometimes it's a horrible deal.

So with Hyatt, it's fixed. You know, it's part of the reward chart. So it's great stuff. Sure is, sure is. So, okay. So guest of honor stays, if you know somebody else who's got elite status, booking either suites with points

or upgrades with points, if you value those things. The other thing we should have mentioned there is you can also book club upgrades. It was a cost 3,000 points a night, I think for a club upgrade. So if you're staying at a property, that's got a club lounge, you can pay a small premium in points to get club lounge access. If you pay the cash rate, or if you're on an award stay again, you can potentially book a club access room with points. So. Right. Make sure the club lounge is open before you do that.

True. True. There's many that haven't reopened with the pandemic. Good point. Yeah. So what's the, what's the lesson? Let's say, let's say there's a height you want to stay at. It has good cash rates. So you're thinking of paying cash. You don't have globalist status. What should you do? Well, then you should be looking at Hyatt Purvey because Hyatt Purvey is a booking platform very similar to Amex Fine Hotels and Resorts or the Chase Luxury Hotel Collection or Virtuoso,

if you're familiar with any of those. Hyatt has their own in-house program for booking, I'm going to say luxury hotels, but in a second, I'll explain that it's not only luxury hotels with increased benefits. And so for instance, if you want to book an Andes or a Park Hyatt, you found a great cash rate at one of those places, you can book a single one night stay through Hyatt Pervet, obviously longer also, but you can book as few as one night and you can get incredible upgrade or incredible benefits. First of all, you get a one category upgrade at booking, confirmed within a day of booking anyway. So if you want a suite, you book one category below a suite and get upgraded to a suite. And the cash difference in that type of scenario can be really big in some cases. So that alone can be a great benefit that makes it worth booking Hyatt Purvey. The second piece of it that makes it worthwhile is

you'll get free breakfast for two. And then the third piece is you get a non-property amenity, like $100 credit usually. And that's going to vary by which tier brand, but I'm talking Andes and Park Hyatt right now, you get $100 credit. And so you might find a place that's $150 or $200 and be able to get your free breakfast,

your 4 p.m. late checkout, your suite upgrade. And most of the benefits you would get with globalist status apart from free parking anyway can be yours with a Hyatt Pervet booking. And then of course, there are different tiers of that. So if you're going to stay at a grand Hyatt, I think they have a two night minimum stay, or maybe there's some Hyatt Regency properties. If you take a look on Frequent Miler for elite status or elite benefits without the status for hotels, you'll find our post about this that outlines all of the various ways to do this. But Hyatt Preve is probably the best because when you book through a Hyatt Preve agent, you know you're going to get your Hyatt Elite

status benefits. If you have any, you know you're going to get elite credit, you're going to earn Hyatt points, and you're going to get this suite of benefits that we're talking about. And again, this applies not only at those Andes and Park Hyatt properties. I think it's a two night minimum at all the Grand Hyatt. And I think there are some participating Regency properties. And there are quite a few properties outside of those two brands also that participate. There's a long list of Hyatt properties where you can take advantage of this. You do have to book through a Prevay agent. So you got to find one of those. We have an affiliate deal with one of the Hyatt Prevay agents, Travel Zork, who we've worked with and been happy with. So that's one you can use, but there are lots of other Hyatt Prevay agents out there. So feel free to find the one that works best for you. I've been happy with Travel Zork so far. And so that's maybe the challenge in terms of you can't just do this online yourself. You have to go through somebody to book it. And then of course, you'll be stuck with the standard rate, not the member rate, but whatever the standard rate for the hotel is. So you're probably going to pay a little bit more than what the cheapest possible rate is,

but in many cases it can be worthwhile. Yeah. Yeah. So Hyatt has sort of a contradiction here in that it has the most valuable elite status of all the major hotel chains, while at the same time, making it super easy in many ways for non-elites to get some of these great benefits. And so it's sort of the chain where you least need the elite status for yourself, but at the same time, the elite status is super valuable. So we'll just leave you with that contradiction without solving that puzzle. Well, the thing is though, like with Hyatt Pervet, that's going to be really useful when rates are cheap, but if the place you want to stay is a thousand dollars a night and you're not the type to spend a thousand dollars a night,

then Pervet isn't going to help you as much. So the utility of each of these varies depending on the situation. But yeah, I mean, Hyatt, Hyatt, it can be a lot of fun and there's a lot of ways. It's really incredible to look at how much we've talked about here in terms of ways to get great benefits on your Hyatt stays. Absolutely. Yep. All right. So that I think brings us to the question of the week and the question of the week I alluded to slightly earlier in the podcast, because you talked about really not wanting to book those non-refundable rates. You said you have a hotel booked and you could book a cheaper non-refundable rate, but you can't bring yourself to do it. Well, question came in this week at the mailbag at frequent miler.net email address where we take our dot com. Okay,

there you go. Mailbag at frequentmiler.com where we take our email submissions. Andrew wrote in and said, Hello, FM team. I listened to the recent podcast on extreme hotel savings and noted the general reluctance to book non-refundable rates. Given that many credit cards offer trip protection and the many sites are offering travel insurance as part of the booking process. Is there an opportunity here to choose the right card or pay a small insurance fee to protect yourself from the unforeseen? This, of course, assumes the reason for not traveling is covered. Sickness, death in the family, travel issues, etc. Or perhaps there's a particular elective insurance that would cover nearly everything.

Is this potentially a way to have your cake and eat it too, especially if you're talking an expensive hotel stay and significant savings with a non-refundable rate? Thanks in advance. Andrew, what do you think? Yeah, I think that's a great topic to talk about. In my case, my cake is not about having, you know, missing out on a stay because of illness or canceled flights or whatever. That's not my main hesitation in booking non-refundable stays. If it was,

I think he's got a really good point that by using a credit card that has built in, you know, cancellation, trip cancellation insurance, you might, um, get, uh, that refunded. Of course it'd be work. You have to file a claim and everything to get that back. But, um, for me, I don't know. It's more about, I, I hate, uh, getting rid of the, the freedom to jump on something else. If something better comes along or if the price drops at the hotel I'm booking, I want to be able to rebook at the lower price, things like that. So what about you?

Does that change the equation for you? No, that's exactly it. So for me, it's the inflexibility to jump on a better deal. And those are two great examples. And this IHG flash sale business that we've been seeing is a really tangible example of why I don't want to lock myself into a non-refundable rate because maybe IHG is going to

put the Intercontinental on sale for 5,000 points a night. And I want to be able to book that if that comes up and booking the non-refundable rate takes away my ability to do that. Now, I think the thing that Greg and I share is that we're deal hunters. And so I'm not happy with getting a good deal. I want a great deal. And once I have a great deal, I want a better deal. And so I, you know, I'm constantly looking at things, even, you know, silly things, reservations for the future that I have for trips that I don't even know if I'm going to take. I'm constantly pulling up the different hotel apps and saying, Oh, well, has this changed at all? If I'm waiting in line, standing somewhere, not doing anything for a minute, I'm usually looking for awards or better prices or something like that on my phone. That's just what I do in my free time.

So I feel like there's a good chance I can do better than whatever the non-refundable rate is in almost every case. I've only, I think, once ever booked a non-refundable rate, and I only booked it because I was going to submit a best rate guarantee claim, and I was going to write about the outcome. So I figured, okay, I'm going to give this a shot and try and see if it works. And it did. So thank goodness for that. If it hadn't, then I would have had a story about how it didn't. And so either way, I stood to win, so to speak, and then I got some useful content out of the deal. But otherwise, I'm way too hesitant to ever book these non-refundable rates because I just want to be able to find an even better deal. And I might not. So maybe it's irrational. Is this

silly? Is this stupid? Should we just be booking those? Yeah. I mean, I think that was the whole reason. I bet you if you somehow magically were able to add up all the savings you gave up by booking refundable rates compared to all the savings you got because of this freedom to rebook, I bet you're actually losing out over the long run. But for me, it's not just about the deal hunting. It's also about I'm very uncomfortable with locking in anything. Preston Pyshko, I totally hear you. I understand. with locking in anything. No, I totally hear you.

I understand. I just like the freedom to change if for whatever reason I need to. And in some cases, I do think it's irrational. Like with the upcoming Three Cards, Three Continents trip, I know exactly what I'm doing and when. There's no rational reason really for me to say I need my options open to do something else on this day, but, um, but there you go. It's still there. No, I mean, I hear you loud and

clear. And of course there's all of those other things that you mentioned, you know, in terms of getting sick or, you know, having to cancel or flight, you know, delayed or whatever, missed, blah, blah, blah, all those things come into play, but you're right that with the right credit card, those things can probably be covered probably because like he alluded to, there are often exclusions. And so you got to look at the fine print and know what's included in covered and what's not. And so I hate to count on all of that stuff because I know it's going to be a battle. I like to have it. So I definitely want to have it in case of an emergency, but I don't want to create an emergency for myself either. So yeah, I get uncomfortable with the non-refundable hotels. Like you said, maybe it's irrational. Maybe we should be booking non-refundable more often, but

I'm not willing to do it. And part of the thing, with this three cards trap coming up, I have something booked in a place and I think I know what I want to do. But if all of a sudden tomorrow I read about something great going on, I'm like, oh, I'd rather do that. And this hotel would be more convenient. Gosh, I want to be able to change my plans and do that. So it fits in exactly with what you said. So we're both in that boat, Andrew. If your team non-refundable rate, go you. You've probably saved more money over the long run than we will. But that's where we stand on it. And that's one of the things I love about award travel, that it gives me so much flexibility. That's one of the things I love about booking with points in general, rather than booking paid rates, is that

it gives me that flexibility without any guilt. Yes, yes, exactly. All right. That brings us to the end. If you've enjoyed today's show and you'd like to get our shows in your inbox each day, each or rather our posts in your inbox each day, each week, et cetera, 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, wherever you're listening to this show or watching it.

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