Frequent Miler on the Air - Extreme Hotel Savings | Ep162 | 8-6-22

Episode Date: August 6, 2022

Friends don't let friends pay full price for hotels. Here are some of the tools we use to slice and dice the price of lodging. 00:44 Giant Mailbag: Pop-up averted over the phone 4:14 3 Cards, 3 Continents, 3 Updates https://frequentmiler.com/frequent-milers-2022-team-challenge-3-cards-3-continents/ 15:34 What crazy thing....did Marriott Bonvoy do this week? When it says you can't use suite night awards, maybe that's not true . . . 23:45 Mattress running the numbers: Buying IHG points for 0.5c each https://frequentmiler.com/buy-ihg-points/ 28:53 Main Event: Extreme hotel savings 29:40 Buying points on sale 36:45 Specialty rates 40:46 Card-linked offers (Chase Offers, Amex Offers, SimplyMiles, etc) https://frequentmiler.com/card-linked-programs-the-networks-they-run-on-aka-which-programs-stack/ 43:44 Portals 49:14 Membership sites (Capital One Spring, Greyhound, etc) https://frequentmiler.com/capital-one-spring-priceline-save-hotels/ 52:25 Hotels.com stacking 54:25 Best Rate Guarantees 1:01:16 Mastercard Travel & Lifestyle 1:03:48 Wyndham business to Caesars to Free room 1:05:12 Follow sites for deeply discounted prices 1:07:20 Question of the Week: Do you have an update on American Airlines Loyalty Points? https://frequentmiler.com/american-airlines-loyalty-points-game-update-halfway-through-whos-in-front/ Join our email list: https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ Music credit: Annie Yoder

let's get into the giant mailbag what crazy thing did city this week it's time for mattress running the numbers ready for the main event the main event frequent miler on the air starts now today's main event extreme hotel savings sometimes you got to pay for hotels and we're going to tell you how to do it cheaper you don't want to pay a lot for hotels, right? You don't want to. Yet these days you almost have to because hotel rates have been skyrocketing. And so we've got sort of a grab bag of tips and tricks to help ease that burden with extreme hotel savings. First, of course, we have the giant mailbag. Today's giant

mail comes from Pete. So Pete has a story, which I'm going to mostly paraphrase, which is he wanted to sign up for the Delta Reserve card when it had a promotional offer. And he got the pop-up telling him basically, you know, there's two types of pop-ups from Amex that say, basically you won't get the welcome bonus if you sign up. One of the pop-ups is where you've had the card before. And it tells you that the other pop-up is I've referred to as the, we don't like you pop-up because it's very vague about why it popped up. And that's what he got. Specifically, it says, based on your history with credit card balance transfers, American Express welcome offers, introductory APR offers, or the number of cards you've opened and closed, you are not eligible to receive the welcome offer. So he got this, but he was very confused because this is only the second amex card he's ever

applied for he applied for the first one he said um about two years ago he still has it open has spent a lot on it hasn't done any fishy stuff in with it um so he couldn't figure out why he would get this thing. And he, he chatted with Amex online. They weren't able to help him. No surprise there, uh, to identify why he got the pop-up, but what was interesting and why the reason I wanted to bring this, uh, giant mail to the front here is that he called the Amex platinum, uhinum line to talk with a rep. And he doesn't actually have a Platinum card, but he's an AU on his wife's Platinum card. And he asked them if they could help him apply for the card that he wanted, which again was the Delta Reserve card. They, I guess, walked him

through the application over the phone and he was approved and got the bonus. Well, for Pete's sake, that's great. How long were you waiting to jump in with that one? A long time. A long time. It's at the beginning. You are now certified as a proper dad with that dad joke. Okay. But it worked. It worked. For Pete's sake. Oh, boy. I'm happy for you, Pete.

I'm happy for you. No, that's a great tip. That worked. I mean, I wouldn't have known. I wouldn't have thought to do that or thought that it would have had a better result. But very interesting. Do you think it mattered that it was a platinum card rep?

I don't think it probably mattered about that part, but just throwing it in case it did matter. You know what? He originally applied both with a referral offer, like a friend referral. And he also tried by logging into his account and applying that way both times he got the pop-up. And I'm just bringing that up because in the past, we've seen sometimes where people get the pop-up with one or the other, but not both. And then they're able to apply the other way. But he had tried those two ways.

So anyway, here's a third way you can try to get approved if you're getting pop-ups and you don't expect to, I think is the key here. That's a, that's a great, great story. Thank you very much, Pete. Well, speaking of third ways to do things, let's talk about another three related topic, three cards, three continents, three updates. So let's find out what's going on with this week's three cards, three continents, three

updates. Now, before Greg tells us his update, I'll just remind those who are not yet familiar with it, that three cards, three continents is the competition that we're doing. Greg and Steven Pepper and I, where we're each taking the credit card bonuses from three cards, the signup bonuses from three cards and using those bonuses and a thousand dollars to travel on the most incredible trip that we can to at least three continents. And that's coming soon. Next month is when it's planned to be coming up. So we're gearing up and now we have our updates as to what's happened this week.

So, Craig, any updates? Yes. So first update is from Steven. He tells us, so nothing's changed about his plans. His plans are all apparently all tied up and wrapped with a bow and everything. So lucky guy. I'm not quite there yet. His update is just a little hint about what's happening with his plans.

He says he's going to be traveling all the way around the world. So, you know, I thought I was doing something special, but... Not special, Greg. Maybe we're all special in that same way. So in case you're wondering, we've as a team sort of defined going around the world as crossing both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and, you know, ending up back in the United States. We don't define it as necessarily ending in the same airport as you started with, though, as long as you start and end in the United States, that fits the bill. I don't know. You don't have to go around the world for this, right?

No, no, you don't have to. Three continents. We originally, before we settled on what we were going to do, we had talked about that idea, but then decided on the three continents thing, but here, Greg and Steven both planning on still going after the entire round the world trip so far. Right. Right. That doesn't mean he booked a round the world award though. Right. You know, I think he probably booked multiple different awards because he had American airlines miles and, um, and membership rewards. So I, yeah, I don't think he did that, but he is going around the world, which you might be too, for all I know. For all you know, I did, I did lay out in a post how that

easy that would be because I, with the one way award on aeroplan that I laid out in the post, I showed how I could end up in Asia or Australia. And from there I would have enough American airlines miles to return home in business class. So certainly around the world would be possible for me too. For sure. For sure. Okay. Why don't you do your update and then I'll end with mine. I got big updates this week.

So I had been agonizing over the trip over the weekend and I started to feel a lot of anxiety. I was getting really anxious because I was like drilling down on the numbers in the budget. And I thought I had a great plan. And then one little piece of it fell apart. And then all of a sudden, everything started falling apart and it just wasn't going to work. And so I kept trying to rework budget numbers and different starting points and ending points and blah, blah, blah, to make the really the second half of my trip work the way I

wanted it to. And I had gotten pretty discouraged and like was pulling out my hair hours and hours of looking at this stuff. And finally, finally, yesterday, I said, okay, you know what? I had an award booked that wasn't going to work. I had determined that that wasn't going to work for what I wanted, but I wanted one of the segments. And so I had called American Airlines last week, trying to see if I could change the ticket. It would have been a significant change with an American Airlines award because it would have been changing the region of the destination. And I just wanted to keep one segment of it without losing it talked to couldn't see award availability on the additional segment or segments that I needed. Despite the fact that a.com was showing plenty of seats, they couldn't see any like on a number of different days was weird. But anyway, so I wasn't getting anywhere. And so I spent hours and hours devising a backup plan. So,

okay, well, I'm going to cancel the award I have because that's not going to work. And I really hope that that first segment goes back into award inventory, but I was not at all confident. Eventually when I write about this, I'll write about why I wasn't. I thought I was pretty sure it wouldn't. The phone agent told me it definitely would not go back into inventory. Very confidently said, no, it's definitely not going to go back into inventory. So I spent hours devising this plan to get around it, to get to another airport, to get a flight I needed. And I had all the numbers done, all the math. And I went ahead and I canceled my flight, figuring I was going to have to book everything else and stretch it down to the penny. And wouldn't you know it, that first segment went right back into award availability immediately. So I was able to rebook exactly what I wanted,

save myself a bunch of money on all the budget crunching I had done. So now I'm sitting in a really comfortable position. Flights are basically done and hotels are mostly decided. Although I'm going to buy some IHG points this week and I haven't decided how many yet. And part of the reason I haven't decided how many is because I want to do some of the shenanigans we're going to talk about today and see how that works out first before I buy the points. Specifically, we'll talk about best rate guarantees and that's what I'm going to be looking into. So that's my update. I'm really excited. I'm sitting in a good position, Greg. I'm ready to fight. That's pretty exciting.

That's pretty exciting. So speaking of awards going back into inventory, I had a similar situation. This one was, you know, I'm booking two of us around the world. I have a mystery travel companion who's going to be coming with me. And the initial bookings, I had to book us each separately because she's starting from a different starting airport. And because of that, there was sort of a cascade of things that caused several things to be different about our trips and, and a big, uh, award flight, uh, seat opened up an important part of, of the trip opened up, um, on a flight I was taking that I'd be able to add her to. So, um, so that was great. So, but the problem is, you know, I booked all this with ANA, uh, ANA miles and ANA, ANA miles. And ANA will let you make very small changes as in like for free, as in like you could change the time of a flight or the date even of a flight, as long as it's exact same route

and exact same carrier. I wanted to change the carrier here. And so, um, the only option you can't change an existing round the world award to do that. You have to pay a 3000 point cancellation fee to get all the miles back and your taxes and fees back and then rebook. And there was, there were a few flights later on in the trip that we were both booked on. I wanted to keep them. Um, and there was no way to hold onto them. Uh, so, so I took a gamble that canceling her thing that the award would go back into inventory and we could just book her on those those uh segments and it didn't happen days later it still has not happened um so so rather than um you know give up i i uh put her on like flights that were the same carrier, same route, but different time and date.

And I actually moved mine to match her new ones. So depending on how it all works out, it might actually end up being a good thing that for the trip overall. But it was extremely nerve wracking the whole, you know, the whole situation. Cause I hadn't, I hadn't thought through what the plan would look like, you know, with moving it this way. And so I didn't know if it would be possible, but I think it's going to be good in the, in the end. So, yeah. Yeah. You know, there's a, I totally feel your anxiety there because that's the issue, right? You move something and then it, it changes three other things. And if you haven't thought through the three other things, then it can really be challenging, but you don't necessarily have the time, especially with the way award availability

is right now. If you find something that fits your needs, you kind of have to snap it right up. Right. Right. Not, not take chances that it's going on. Even like, as soon as I canceled, I saw the seat back in inventory and I was nervous still, somebody was going to get it before I did. Somebody set an alert on this on expert flyer. I know, and they're going to get an email right now. I got to get this book. So, uh, yeah, there's a lot of, a lot of that anxiety. I totally hear and feel that. I'm sorry that your flights didn't go back in inventory. And that's a question we get from time to time from people. If I cancel something, will it go back in inventory? And I think the bottom line is nobody ever really knows, right? I mean, you're always just kind of hoping

sometimes it'll go right back in, snap right back in. Like it did for me. Sometimes it won't at all. Like it didn't for Greg. Sometimes it'll take a few hours or a few days. So, uh, yeah, you really have no idea. And it's too bad. Sometimes you're like, man, I have a seat on that flight. Why do I have to give it up? There was just one seat available book on Turkish bookable with United Airlines miles. And that was significant because I could cancel that for free. And so I booked it and the, you know, the idea was I would see whether that one seat comes back in the inventory after I cancel. The problem with my experiment was that the one seat never went away. Like after it was booked and confirmed, there was still one seat.

So, so apparently for that flight, you know, maybe they had a rule to allow one seat available until certain number of them get booked up or something. I don't know. But so I wasn't able to, you know, complete that experiment. You know, I don't know. But, um, so I wasn't able to, you know, complete that experiment. You know, I, I don't know that it would have necessarily been meaningful because the airline that I canceled and my, my seat came back in inventory. I found distinct data points on both sides saying sometimes it goes back in sometimes it doesn't. So, uh, so I think it, it can vary somewhat too. So it, you know, it may have given you an idea if it was possible. Which airline was this?

It was the one that I'm going to fly. So you're not going to share. Not going to share yet. No, not yet. But later, later down the road. I mean, the exciting thing is that this trip is going to hop off here, you know, in not that long. So we said September.

And so it's not too far out and things are starting to feel kind of real there. So that's exciting. All right. We'll talk more about that coming up. I'm sure. But let's move on to what crazy thing did Marriott Rewards or Marriott Bonvoy do? Yeah. So this is this is all all your experience here. So I can't wait to hear this story told. I've seen it in writing, but you had some crazy experience with Marriott Sweet Night Awards. What's going on there? I did. So I booked a residence in to stay in this weekend, not a particularly exciting property, but I was looking at options. I have to go to a birthday party with my family, with my wife and kids. And so I picked a residence in that wasn't too far away from where we have to go because in part, as I was looking at it, I saw that they had a bunch of two bedroom suites. And I wondered whether I'd be able to use a suite night award because I have some suite night awards in my account. And so I thought, oh, well, if I can book the standard room

and use a Suite Night Award to upgrade to a two-bedroom suite, great. That would be awesome. You know, it would be very sweet, right? So, but of course, you know, with Marriott, there's no way to know, A, whether you can apply a Suite Night Award, or B, which rooms are eligible for Suite Night Award until you book it. And so I didn't want to book it for the weekend yet. What I normally do in this situation is I book a dummy booking. I pick some date way in the future

and make a booking and then see what options there are for Sweet Night Awards just to get an idea whether it's possible before I decide how I want to book the hotel for real. So I picked a date sometime out in September, booked a cash rate that was totally flexible. And so as soon as I booked it in the app, it showed me the ability to apply one of my suite night awards to apply one of my upgrades. So I clicked it and I looked at the various room types. There were several different two bedroom suites, including the ones that were available for cash rates anyway, this weekend, but on my dummy booking. So my dummy booking was in September and it showed me several different two bedroom suites that I could use the Sweet Night Award to upgrade to. Now, if you're not familiar with Marriott Sweet Night Awards,

you pick the rooms you're willing to take as an upgrade, and then they start looking for upgrade ability five days before arrival. So it's not a guarantee you're going to get that, but you can pick, okay, this is the minimum that I want to take if I'm going to use one of my suite night awards. So, okay, great. Two bedroom suites are eligible. Awesome. So I go back and I book the hotel for this weekend, this residence and for this weekend for the night, on the desktop. I had been looking in the app before, but I did it on desktop. I go into the reservation on desktop and there's no place to click to apply a suite night award. And I thought that's kind of weird. I've always seen the like, take your upgrade button in there somewhere, or even right after you book usually on the confirmation page or so, you know, you've earned it, you know, apply one of your upgrades now. And that wasn't there. So I was a little confused. So I pull up the reservation in the app for this Saturday night and it says, where's my suite upgrades? Sorry, your suite upgrades aren't eligible for this booking. And I'm like, what do you mean they aren't eligible for this

booking? I booked the same room that I did for my dummy booking. And so I would expect to see the same suite night awards, but I thought, well, you know, maybe they're just not allowing them this weekend or something. So maybe that's the issue. Like, that seems a little crazy, a little strange to me, but maybe that's it. So like, you know what, let me go back to that dummy booking because I haven't canceled that yet. The dummy booking in September. Let me see again, just check which rooms are available for upgrade or that the Sweet Night Awards do work for that day. So I bring up that reservation again, the dummy booking that just three minutes ago I had been looking at the upgrade options for.

And now suddenly that button to apply one of my sweet upgrades instead says, sorry, this reservation isn't eligible for a Sweet Night Award upgrade. Like, what are you talking about? Literally like three minutes ago, I was looking at the options. I know it was eligible when I booked it a few minutes ago. How is it not eligible now? Didn't make any sense to me. I thought, like, what's going on here? Am I living in the twilight zone? I start typing to Greg and Steven and Tim complaining about how I'm getting Bonvoy.

And then like a little while later, I pull up the reservation in the app again, intending to cancel it because meanwhile, I booked something somewhere else. And wouldn't you know it, the button to apply my suite night awards is there again. And I'm able to pick one of the two bedroom suites. In fact, two different types of two bedroom suites out of the options I want to get upgraded to. And sure enough, my upgrade has gotten confirmed. I got the two bedroom suite. So I'm all set with that. That went through. So the moral of the story here is I often make those dummy bookings in order to see whether or not I can even apply a suite night award because a lot of hotels just won't take them. And so if I see that message that says, sorry, your suite night award isn't eligible here. I just assume that the hotel doesn't take them. But apparently that might not be true.

I wonder how many places I've missed that maybe I could have used one. Maybe I just needed to wait an hour. I don't know. Yeah. Marriott's IT is so bad with respect to this kind of stuff. This came as a big surprise to me and it shouldn't have because if anyone has done marriott um flexible date searches on their website search you know click the box to search flexible dates to look for an award um once you've been browsing marriott a bit and you click that and search you get like nothing is available ever and And you might just walk away thinking, oh, that hotel is totally booked up. There's no standard rooms available. So there's no forever. But go into an incognito window, pull it up again, and suddenly there's

a word space. And so this sounds so similar to that, that it's just, it's just strange. And, and that it's like, it gets tired of you browsing on its app and no, you try to apply one of those sweet night awards and you didn't do it. So we're not going to show you anymore. Yeah. Like, I don't know. It's just ticked off at you. You're not appreciative. You weren't willing to take one of our two bedroom suites, no more sweet upgrades for you, mister. Yeah. So that was totally, totally weird. I mean, what a crazy odd situation. I'm glad I was able to apply it. I'm glad that I took some time booking something else and then came back to the app to see that I could indeed use that upgrade because the two bedroom suite will be much more convenient than booking two separate rooms at the Hyatt Regency

where I would have stayed otherwise. So I'm happy enough with the end result. And just for the record, anyone wondering how do you get Sweet Night Awards, you have to get to 50 nights of Marriott stays within a calendar year. And then it's a choice benefit you could select to stay at five of these Sweet Night Awards. You can get up to 30 nights automatically every year by having both a personal and a business Marriott card, and then you automatically get 30 nights. So for many of us, it just means just means, uh, 20 nights in Marriott hotels to get sweet night awards. Um, that said we've complained before that, I mean, Nick had some good luck here, but

we we've had lots of bad luck trying to use these in the past. And so I wouldn't spend 20 nights in Marriott hotels just to try to get these. Definitely not. That would not be a reasonable use of your nights. It's a win when one of these goes through. And I've been lucky a couple of times this year. I had a great upgrade at the St. Pancras Renaissance in London, and I was able to use one in Malta. But yeah, overall, I've had horrible luck trying to use these things. I don't think they're worth much of anything. It's really kind of luck. And

I feel like when you look at other programs like Hyatt, I don't really have to rely on luck with Hyatt because I can just book the suite or use one of my suite upgrades at booking or book through Hyatt purvey and book the category one below a suite and get upgraded to. So there's so many different ways to make sure I get into a suite that I don't, I could just wait until I get to check in and ask for one too. And that's basically almost as good with Marriott. It seems almost, almost. That's true. All right. All right. Now it's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Today, we're going to be talking about IHG. So IHG has their very regular sale where you can buy IHG points for half a cent each. And what do you think? Is this like, it's not really a mattress run we're talking about, but is it worth prospectively

buying these IHG points? Like maybe you don't have an immediate need for them, but you have an inkling that you can do pretty well with them. What do you think? I mean, I think it's possible. My IHG balance was really low. And so I need some because I just don't have enough ever really to book anything now, now that I've booked a few things anyway in the last few weeks, months here. So I don't have very many, so I'm going to buy some.

But the thing is, so there's a couple of pieces to this. First of all, it's 100% bonus on the number of points you buy when you buy 5,000 or more points, but it doesn't actually get to half a cent per point until you buy 26,000 plus 26,000 bonus. So you really have to buy 52,000 points in order to get the half a cent rate. If you only buy, for example, 5,000 bonus. So you really have to buy 52,000 points in order to get the half a cent rate. If you only buy, for example, 5,000 points, then it ends up being 0.675 cents a point, which is less exciting. So you got to buy at least the 52,000 for $260, and then you can obviously go more up to 150,000 plus 150,000 bonus. So you can get 300,000 for $1,500. Now I wouldn't buy 300,000 for $1,500 unless I had a specific use in mind where I'm going to use them. However, I

decided that I think I'm going to probably buy myself a hundred thousand for $500 because I'm sure that I will come up with a need for those in the next year or so, more or less, and situations where I can use them to good value. I wrote a post this week about how there's a lot of IHG properties now that have these special offers where I found opportunities to save half or more on the cost of a hotel using points. I gave one great example in the post of a hotel that was about $160 for the night, or you could buy $50 worth of points if you're buying them at half a cent each and book the same hotel. And I found that in quite a number of different places, similar things anyway, maybe

not quite as much half off instead of three quarters off or so as that was, but some really good deals. So I've been pretty surprised at how valuable IHG points can be. Now, of course, they're not going to be that valuable in all situations, but enough that I'd buy some points if I were low and I am low. So I'm going to, what about you? Are you going to buy some? Yeah. I'm not going to buy any because I have over 300,000 sitting my account, but I would otherwise. And even without the recent findings that you published about how IHE points are often worth closer to a penny, it looked like you were showing. Or even more. Even when I just did like very rare to get less than about, you know, 0.6 cents per point value.

So, you know, by buying at 0.5 cents, I feel like you're very unlikely to be losing out and there's a chance of doing pretty well. That's a great point because that's not true with most hotel points, right? There are situations where you're going to definitely lose in some sale. If you buy Hilton points or Marriott points, there are situations where you can win, but there are definitely clearly situations where you will come out behind. Whereas with IHG, that just doesn't seem to be the case. That's right. So, you know, with Hilton's a really great example because they sell their points also

that when they have sales for half cent each, but the average value when using points, when I looked was closer to 0.4 cents each. So, and that's the average. So there's things pulling that down. That's right. And if, so if you're not cherry picking the best awards, you are going to be losing out by buying your Hilton points in advance. And so I'm not saying you can't do very well. You can, but it just seems like with IHG, it's not automatic, but as close as you're going to get when you're talking about prospectively buying points. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I would limit how much I would get invested. Like Greg said, he's already got over 300,000. So I wouldn't buy any more because

he's got enough to cover his needs for the foreseeable future. And IHG puts these on sale pretty often. So it's not like this is the only time you're going to see this sale. But if you're really low on IHG points, it could be worth stocking up a little bit because you may run into these situations like I did where you're like, oh, wow. Well, I could book that Crowne Plaza or Holiday Inn or Intercontinental for less than it would cost me to stay anywhere else. Right, right. And at the high end too, if you're actually thinking of staying in a $1,000 or $2,000 a night type of resort, Six Senses, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, whatever, check the point price because I bet you that it'll often be significantly cheaper to buy the points and

book it that way. So that's a good lead in to our main event today, which is extreme hotel savings. What can you do to save a lot on hotels? You've been thinking about saving on hotels lately, right? Not you, right? Because you get your 50 K certs, right? What are you doing thinking about saving on hotels? So, so I do have, uh, for the three cards, three continents challenge, I have five 50 K Marriott certificates. Um, I'm going to be spending more than five nights in lodging, uh, outside of the United States. And so, um, so I have been thinking a lot about it and all of these things are on the table for me. I haven't decided exactly what I'm doing yet, but let's get into our sort of grab bag of tips and tricks. And since we started with points, I think

we might as well continue talking about the benefits of buying points when they're on sale so that you can get a better deal than you would have if you just paid cash for the best rate you could find. Right. And we just talked about IHG and how you can certainly come out ahead. And what I've left out of that conversation is I gave that one example today or this week in the post about one specific hotel that, like I said, was about $160 with tax, or you can buy the points for about 50 bucks. Now, if you were to book a four night stay and you've got the IHG Traveler card or IHG Premier card, you get the fourth night free, then you're paying even less. So for five nights, you pay what? 40,000 points or no, I'm sorry, for four

nights, you pay 30,000 points. So $150. So like less than $40 a night for a $160 property potentially. So I, and you're not going to run into quite that much savings every time, but points can certainly be worthwhile. So you got to look at what the points price is and ask yourself, should I buy points? Do I need to? And the same can be true with Hilton and with Marriott. There are situations where buying those points, especially when they're on sale can make sense for specific hotel bookings. And you should definitely check that before you book a cash rate. Right, right. So, you know, you mentioned IHG is fourth night free, both Marriott and Hilton have their variations on fifth night free. And so in both those cases, you might find like, let's say just for example, let's say you find that the price for buying points when they're on sale is a little bit less, then the equation might totally change. And you might say, oh, wow, that's over a 20%

discount off for what I'm doing. Don't forget to include taxes and fees in those calculations because you usually don't pay them when you're booking with points, or sometimes there's tiny little fees that you pay when you're paying with points, or sometimes there's tiny little fees that you book, that you pay when you're paying with points, but that can be significant. So you have to include that piece of it when comparing your points price to your cash price. It sure can be very significant and definitely you should calculate that, but go ahead. What's your however on that? Well, there's one type of fee that is sometimes on point prices, which is resort fees or destination fees. And like places like Marriott and IHG, you're still going to pay those resort fees, even if you pay with points. But with Hyatt, with Hilton, and with Wyndham, you don't pay those

resort fees. And so in those cases, especially when you're talking about some really big resort fees, which we've seen some really exorbitant ones at some properties, the savings could be really extreme in those situations, especially if you have both like fourth or fifth night free and you're not paying the resort fee. That's a great combination. It sure is. And that was something that was popping into my mind just before you said it, that that is, I think, a key piece of calculating the difference, A, considering resort fees and B, taxes. Because if you just look at the rate you see in search results, that usually is not including all of those extra fees and those taxes and fees, especially with the high resort fees

in some places, and then also high taxes on top of that, really the cash rate you see in search results might not be even all that close to the final actual end result. I was looking at several this morning where I was like, wow, that is much more expensive once you add in tax. And I was looking at it specifically with IHG because I keep seeing places

that look like they're about a half a cent in value with IHG points until you figure in all of those fees. And then you're like, oh, wow, using IHG points there is really worth more like a penny because this property

adds so much in extra fees. So yeah, you don't necessarily pay on an award stay. And I say necessarily in various situations. And one thing to look for with chains like Marriott and IHG where they do pass on resort fees is there's one type of resort fee they don't pass on. And that's where the resort fee is a percentage of the room cost. So when you book with points, the room cost is zero. So any percentage, 10 or 20% of that room cost is still zero. So you don't pay that resort fee. So that's the one sort of exception where they're just as good as the Hyatt and Hilton and Wyndham because of that situation. I've run into that with both of those chains. So that increases your point value and the

value of buying points in order to book something. Finally, I do think it's worth mentioning you're getting a fully refundable booking when you book with points. And that's often not the case if you just look at what the cash rate is, the best cash rate you could find is. So it's better to compare to the best refundable cash rate you can find when you're doing that kind of math. And I think it's worth mentioning that, you know, so why, why do you want the refundable rate? Cause there are some people who are like, I just want the cheapest rate. I'm willing to book the advanced purchase rate. And Hey, if you are, you are then compared to that. But I hate to book non-refundable rates. A obviously plans can change. And so I just want to be flexible B I can miss a flight or something and being able to cancel is great.

But see, these days I want to be able to keep an eye out to see if I see another incredible deal. If I see some sort of a mistake hotel fare somewhere, great. Then I want to be able to pounce on that and take advantage of it and not be like, oh, man, I've got this nonrefundable booking. So I guess I can't do that. So points become much more valuable to me for that. Or along those same lines, the same hotel you booked might go down in point price and you can rebook with, if you booked with points or if you booked with cash with a refundable rate, you can rebook in that situation. You can't, if you did a prepaid thing, a prepaid non-refundable thing. So those are both good reasons not to do that. But yeah, as Nick said, if you're going to book, if you were planning to book a non-refundable anyway,

then yeah, you should compare it to that price. But keep in mind that if you do the point option, you're getting something more than you were before. You're getting that sort of peace of mind that you can change it if you want to. Right. And with dynamic award pricing, what Greg said about being able to rebook is a valuable thing. I can't tell you how many reservations I have rebooked this year because prices have decreased on the bookings. I mean, hotel prices are still crazy, but they have fluctuated. And so I keep saving points by rebooking things. So I like that flexibility. All right. So absolutely. Five points. Good idea there. What else can we do to save money on hotel bookings? Okay. This is sort of a, I don't know,

I think of this as kind of a boring thing that everybody probably knows about to some degree, but you might not know how far it can go. Specialty rates. All the hotel chains now have member rates that as long as you're logged in, you'll see those member rates that are five to 10% type of discount. AAA rates. We've talked about that sometimes that sometimes those can be really, really good. And it's just always worth checking that if you have AAA. If you're doing a big expensive trip, it could be worth paying for AAA to get those savings. And if you're a T-Mobile customer, you can get it for free for a year right now. Or get a free extension of a year on your existing if you have it. So worth Googling that if you're a AAA or if you're a T-Mobile customer.

Right, right. Government rates. Almost all the hotel chains have an option to search for government rates. And you might not think that you qualify, but a lot of people who work for state governments, even in an indirect way, like maybe you work for a state university or you work for not a state government, but a regional government. You work for a public school. There's a lot of government employees that might not really think of themselves as government employees that technically probably do qualify. You will have to check with what the rules are for whatever hotel you're booking, if they have specific rules about which type of IDs qualify. But I've seen some extraordinary rates. You're not going to find good government rates in like Hawaii or Key West, but you will find them in cities. And

sometimes they just are so much better than anything else. Yeah, true. True. Good point. Yep. All right. And of course, corporate codes too. If you work for a large company, then Google what might be available to you or other organizations you might belong to or places you may be an alum of that perhaps have deals worked out for their alumni. So I think that there are a number of those types of things. And probably you have somewhat of an idea of which of those things you qualify for. But like Greg said, it might be worth looking into what else you can join cheaply. I mean, AARP is super cheap to join like $12 for the first two years or something usually. And not all chains have an AARP discount, but if you happen to be staying in one that has one, it's worth taking a look into it.

And you don't have to be old to join AARP. I know people 20 years old that are joined. So you could totally do that. And one of the great things about these codes is in most cases, if you're booking with a chain, you'll still earn hotel points for your stay. You'll still get elite benefits, earn elite credits, all that kind of stuff. So if you're paying a cash rate, there's really no downside that I can think of to using one of these codes or special rates, unless you don't qualify for it. Because there are some hotels that will check, ask for your government ID when you check in, for example. So be careful about that. The only other downside, I guess, to mention is that we'll talk about portals in a few minutes, clicking through a portal. And sometimes some of these specialty rates will not be eligible

for portal rewards. So you may have to consider, okay, if there's a huge portal payout, if there's a 10% back or 12% back or something from a portal, then you may have to say, okay, am I saving enough by using the AAA discount to counterbalance that to be worth more than going through a portal and knowing that I get my 12% back or whatever it might be. Right, right, right, right. And then you have to also do the mental calculation of like, they say that it doesn't count, but the portal rewards will probably come in anyway. Right. So exactly. So how much risk is there? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. True, true. All right. So those are your specialty rates. What about card linked offers? There's lots of card linked offers out there to say for sure. and you look at your offers that are tied to each of your cards and look for things like 15% off of this chain or that chain or the other, and you just click the button to make sure your card

is linked to that offer. Amex has almost the exact same thing. Citi has a little different, but similar type of idea. And basically, as long as you pay for your stay with that card within the period of time that is allowed by the offer, you'll get back whatever the offer deems you qualified for. Yep. Yep. And so it's probably worth mentioning with that, that oftentimes, if it's a chain that sells gift cards at the front desk, you may be able to buy gift cards at the front desk and trigger the offer. Offer terms usually prohibit that. So there's always the chance that you won't get it. But for the most part, if you buy them at the front desk, not in a gift shop or something, but at the front desk, those usually trigger those

offers. And so that's also a way to lock in that savings for future rates. Now, that can be difficult and it varies one chain to another, which ones actually sell gift cards and where they sell gift cards and whether or not you can find an employee that knows how to sell you a gift card. But that's a possibility anyway for locking in future savings. Right. Absolutely. And with these card-linked offers, just like the specialty rates we were talking about, and actually even more so, these will work with portals. Portals don't know anything about these kind of discounts you're getting. It will work with all your elite benefits, with your earning hotel points. And the nice thing is you'll earn all of those things, the portal rewards, your hotel points based on the original

rate, not the discount after the, after the cashback from a card linked offer. So you're actually getting more rewards, um, than your final, you know, how much you paid. Yeah. And so, and did we mention in there with card linked offers? I don't know whether or not we did simply miles because simply miles is another one to look at. If we didn't mention it, uh, that's another card linked offer platform. So I think Greg mentioned MX offers and chase offers. And so simply miles is a master cards

only, but maybe if you've got a chase card with a chase offer and you find a simply miles offer that you can link to your master card, well then great. You can save even a little bit more or get some miles back in that case. Yeah. Yeah, no, that's true. And there are other miscellaneous ones as well that same type of thing you can link. We actually have a resource page somewhere that talks about which card linked offers can all be stacked together. And so that's worth checking out. Very good. All right. Let's talk more about portals. So, you know, portals are where you, shopping portals are where you start your browsing from a shopping portal, which offers rewards of some kind. There are many cashback portals and there's many portals that offer like airline miles as rewards, that sort of thing. And the basic idea is when you

log into your portal and click through to, let's say, IHG hotels, all they're doing is transferring you to the IHG website. You can then search for your room and book it directly with ihg apply your promo codes and whatever um now that might not work to get the portal rewards but you can still do it um and he means the promo codes promo codes might run into an issue but at any rate you click through you go to the ihg site you book and you and you get rewards from the portal once the site you went to confirms with the portal that you finished your transaction, basically. And with hotels, usually finishing a transaction means actually completing the stay. And then you get rewarded. So, you know, portals aren't usually going to be a huge, huge rebate on your stays. We're pretty excited with IHG. It's not

unusual though to see up to 10% back kind of thing. But I do want to talk about Capital One portal. They have this toolbar, which if you install, what it does is it's a shopping portal toolbar. And there's lots of these that will basically watch where you're browsing and make you offers. Like you'll get 5% back if you complete a purchase at that place you're shopping now. But what's notable about Capital One is because they're watching where you're shopping, they'll email you even better offers every now and then. And I keep getting these 18% back offers for various hotel chains because I've been browsing hotels with the browser that has my Capital One toolbar on there. And so that's significant. Now, the Capital One portal, unfortunately, it's not real cashback. It's sort of pseudo cashback that you'd use to redeem for gift cards, but they have enough variety of gift cards.

That's still very useful. It is. Yeah, that's great. That's awesome. The 18% back on various hotel chains. That's a terrific return if you're able to get it. And also then if you're able to stack it with a card linked offer, like an Amex offer or Chase offer, because again, you're going to earn those rebates plus the percentage from

the portal based on the full cost, right? The full before tax cost on your stay. So you're just stacking extra money on top of extra money there. So that's a great deal. And it bears repeating. I've talked about it before, but I'm going to mention it again because there's always new people listening. When you click through Shopping Portal to book your hotel stay, you do not need to book an advanced purchase rate. You don't have to pay right away. You can book a flexible rate that you pay later at the hotel. You don't get the cash back from the portal usually, like Greg said, until usually after you've completed your stay. But you could book a stay if perhaps you see a portal today offering 12% cash back and you click through and you book a stay for next February, then theoretically,

at least after you complete your stay in February, you should see that 12% because it'll track initially. You'll see it in your cashback account. Usually on most of these shopping portal sites, it'll probably track at zero initially, but you'll know that they have the record of it. And then after your stay, the cashback should post. Now, obviously sometimes there are issues with portals. They can be inconsistent now and then on payouts. But for the most part, I've had really good luck with most shopping portals. So overall, I'm well ahead with shopping portals. Most things track the way I expect them to. The exception there is sometimes if I use a AAA code, I've found sometimes I don't get the cashback. I do sometimes also, depending on the portal and the situation,

but that can vary a little bit. So if you use a promo code, maybe it won't track, but it's probably still worth clicking through the portal. Though in that 18% situation, I probably wouldn't even try the AAA discount. I'd be happy with my 18%. Know that I get the 18%. I would try it still. And potentially give up 18%.

Oh, I don't know. I would. I believe that it's going to track anyway. I don't think it's... It's probably a safe bet with Capital One actually. But anyway, all right. So you earn all your regular rewards, get all your benefits, shopping portals. There's no downside.

You should definitely, I'd say, be clicking through a shopping portal before you make cash booking, like almost unequivocally. And that's true for all online shopping, not just, not just hotels, but yeah. And, and cashback monitor is a great tool to use to find which portals have the best rates for where you want to shop, but it's not going to find these kinds of deals. Like I was describing with Capital One Shopping, where it emails you a special deal just for you, that's not going to happen. All right. So another category of ways of getting discounts are these sites that advertise great hotel rates, but you have to be a member of the site. And it's free to join.

It's just that these sort of club discount sites are allowed to offer you better rates because they're not public. And if they're public, the hotels wouldn't allow them, wouldn't want them to advertise cheaper rates than what, you know, the hotel itself is offering. They don't want to be losing business sort of directly, but once you're in this club, you can go. And there's two I want to mention because we've talked about them before, either on the blog or in the podcast. One is called Capital One Spring. And that's a, it's sort of like

advertises as business like savings, but you don't really have to have a business and you don't have to have a Capital One account of any kind to join Capital One Spring. It's free to join. And one of the things in there, it advertises up to 50% off, not you know, he found real savings through there. And in fact, he said he found better than 50% in some cases. So it's real significant savings. Very, very similarly, Greyhound. Yes, the bus company. They have something called Greyhound Road Rewards, which is their rewards program. Join that. And then once you log in, you click to book a hotel and that also advertises savings of

up to 50%. And I found out this morning that website is exactly the same as Capital One's website, Capital One Spring for those hotel savings. So you could do either one of them. You don't have to do both. Oh, Greyhound, leave the book into us. Doing both from one browser seemed to break the other one. Oh boy. Well, my experiences with Greyhound

are any indication. Things break a lot. So I'm not surprised. Yeah, it's worth saying these are prepaid non-refundable rates though. When you see these great deals, they are really good deals, but you're going to have to pay and you're not going to get your money back. So only do it if you're a hundred percent sure you're going to be doing it or it's so cheap that you don't care if you end up losing the money.

But there are, yeah, really, really significant savings there. Yeah, there you go. All right. So those are a couple. And there are lots of other little opaque things like apps and things that you can use. But those are definitely, I think, two that are worth highlighting because they are so easy and free to join. So good picks there. All right. So speaking of these different sites for booking hotels, Hotels.com is one that we should talk about because there's a lot of ways to stack deals on Hotels.com. And certainly this has been something at the front of my mind lately. I've looked at Hotels.com quite a bit because there are a number of different stacking components.

You can often click through a shopping portal. You can participate in the Hot hotels.com welcome rewards, or maybe they renamed it, but essentially it's like one night free after every 10 nights. So 10% ish back. And then of course you could buy discounted hotels.com gift cards and use that as part of the stack with both of those two previous things, shopping portals and the welcome rewards. So, and we sometimes see opportunities to buy those gift cards on sale straight up where we'll see perhaps a discount on the cards directly from hotels.com, or we've seen Amex offers for like

$10 back on 50 occasionally, or we've seen the ability to buy those gift cards through Amazon. When Amazon runs their various use one point and save 20% or 30% or 40%, you can buy yourself a gift card. And in fact, that's what I did with one membership rewards point. I bought a hotels.com gift card and use my 40% off to get a hundred dollar gift card for $60. So I will be leveraging that in our three cards, three continents competition. Yeah. Yeah. Very nice. Now, have you found when you go to use it, I feel like not all hotels on hotels.com are, are available to use the gift card with.

No, that is true. Yeah. That seems to be true. Although I don't know if there's rhyme or reason to, to that, but that's certainly worth mentioning that you may not be able to book every hotel using a gift card. So make sure it's one that accepts gift cards before you buy a gift card, aiming to do that. Also worth mentioning too about hotels.com gift cards is that they can be combined online. So if you have a few of them lying around, you can combine them together into one for one specific booking. Right. That's a really nice feature. All right. So another really great thing, if you can find it, is that many hotel chains have best rate guarantees where they'll,

if you manage to find a better price for the exact same hotel, exact same room type, et cetera, at a lower price elsewhere than directly with the hotel chain, they'll usually do something like match it and take an additional 25% off, something along those lines. They vary on what the deal is, but tell me about what's available that way. Yeah. So they definitely do vary. I wouldn't use the word usually in that sentence. There are so many of the hotel best rate guarantees only match, but that still can be useful because sometimes you can find a site where you wouldn't have wanted to book because you wouldn't get elite benefits. Right. So maybe you find a great deal through

hotels dot com, for instance, and it's a better price than what you're seeing through Hyatt or Marriott or Hilton. And you'd like to pay that lower hotels.com price, but you still want to get your elite benefits and elite credit. So submitting a best rate guarantee claim can certainly be a smart tool to be able to still get your hotel points and to still use a card that has a card linked offer on it and also get the best rate. So that's certainly worth considering. But you are right that some chains do offer 25% off. And unless Hilton has changed it, Hilton at least used to offer that 25%, an additional 25% off. If you find a better rate, not only will they match it, they will take an additional 25% off of the better rate. Hyatt handles it a little bit

differently. They give you a coupon for $50 off of a future stay, but I think it can only be used on the standard rate. So it's kind of a, I don't know, a crummy coupon in my opinion. But IHG has got something like this. Marriott's got something like this. So it's worth looking at what the best rate guarantee policy is for the chain and then searching around for the shadiest little hotel booking website you can. But the things you have to remember are a, they're not going to match anything.

Any of these opaque sites like the Greyhound deals or capital one spring, anything where you need to sign up and join in order to see the price. Right. They're not going to match that. They're not going to match any kind of a AAA code, something that requires membership of any sort. They're not going to match it if it doesn't match up in terms of the same room description and cancellation policy. Now on the cancellation policy end, sometimes there's a little variance there because you do usually get a human being reviewing these and humans make human errors. So if the cancellation policies are close, then they may

not notice a difference. But if there's like, you know, one is cancelable up to three days in advance and the other one is cancelable up to, you know, the same day of arrival, they probably aren't going to approve that if the cancellation policies vary by a significant amount. And usually they won't give you a best rate guarantee if the difference is like less than 1%. It's usually got to be more than 1% in order to be able to match. However, if you look through the rules, you can still find some of these. I've submitted several of these successfully myself with Hilton and in fact, Hilton Marriott

and Hyatt and Hyatt. I even did one. I took a chance and I did one on an advanced purchase rate. And I booked the advanced purchase rate with Hyatt crossing my fingers that they would honor the, uh, the better rate that I found elsewhere for an advanced purchase rate. And sure enough, they did. And they refunded me the difference paid. So, yeah. So, so how do you find these shady little, uh, alternate sites? You know, I, so I I've certainly used big comparison sites like kayak and there's hotels combined.com is one that has a lot of different online travel agencies that you may not use as often. So hotels combined could be a good one to look at, but also if you comb through flyer talk,

people are not particularly forthcoming with where they have found better prices, but you will occasionally find references that will help you help lead you to the websites where you'll find better prices. So there are a number of other ones like that, like hotels combined. So if you just search for other aggregators that draw in lots of different data points, the other thing to check is sometimes the foreign country websites. So for example, if you go to Expedia's Mexico website or hotels.com's Bulgaria website, I don't know if they really have one. I'm just making that up. But if you go to a foreign version of the site, sometimes the prices will be

significantly different. And most of these best rate guarantee sites will be okay with converting currencies. So you have to, again, look at the rules, but you can still, if you find something that's significantly cheaper, where it's clearly not just a currency conversion thing, then you can still potentially do that. And in fact, I did that with the Mexican version of hotels.com at one point where this price was, in fact, that was my Hyatt situation. I was booking the Hyatt all uh, all inclusive in Los Cabos there. And it was much cheaper on the Mexican version of hotels.com and sure enough, Hyatt matched it. So that's great. Yeah. Yeah. So those are worth looking at because you can save money. You can still earn

your points, still earn your elite credit, still use your card linked offers. The one thing you're going to probably lose out on is portal rewards, because, you know, even if you book it and then submit your best rate guarantee, probably when somebody manually adjusts the price, it's probably going to somehow invalidate your portal rewards. However, if you get it 25% off of the cheap hotelsoftheworld.com or whatever price, then you're probably winning overall. Right, right. So, so, so a trick for getting a better rate is kind of hidden in the, in that whole best rate guarantee discussion, which is to look at these foreign versions of, of these hotel websites, right? So sometimes those will show better rates. And even

if you're not hunting for a best rate guarantee, that might just be straight up a better way to go. That's true. That's true. Yeah. And certainly always worth looking at that kind of thing. I don't know that you'll always find it. In fact, I just saw a question on Facebook. I don't know if it was an art group or another group asking about using foreign airline websites to get better prices. And we've occasionally seen situations where that works too with airlines. So I don't usually look for a foreign version of the hotel chain site. I don't, I haven't even tried to see if that exists in most cases. I don't know whether or not it does, but certainly it has worked in some cases with airlines in the past, even happened with me once

years and years ago with a flight I booked online where it was much cheaper on the Spanish language version of the site than on the English language version of the site. So, you know, it's not the kind of thing that's common, but it's worth looking at now and then if you're trying to find a way to save a buck. Right. Right. Yeah. That's great. Okay. And now the next thing we have is probably actually belong to when we're talking about those club discounts where you have to join a program, but MasterCard, they have their travel and lifestyle website where to join, you just have to like put in a MasterCard, like credit card number that you have to, and it will verify whether you're eligible based on that. And then you have, now you can log in and search for hotels there.

If I understand right, what happens there is they have, just like Greyhound's website in Caliber One Spring, they have some hotels where they have like special rates available. But unlike those other ones, they will also give you extra perks at some hotels as well. So you get both. You can, in some cases, get both a better price and extra perks that you wouldn't get just going directly. And when you say extra perks, you mean things like sometimes free breakfast, sometimes hotel credits of $25 or $50 dollars, uh, depending on the place you're booking. So there can be a number of different components there that make it a better

deal. So I haven't found personally many situations where this has worked out to be great, but I've heard others say that sometimes it works out to be really good. So it's worth checking that one. I've completely struck out every time I've looked for these as well. I mostly have to. So, I mean, I, I tend to have more luck with things like fine hotels and resorts, although even there you're probably paying an inflated rate in order to get your other benefits. So you have to consider whether or not that's worth it. A MasterCard travel and luxury lifestyle stuff, whatever services, whatever they call it, is presumably somewhat similar.

But again, there's some variance. So it's probably worth taking a look at that. I want to back up real quick to the best rate guarantee because there was something I should have mentioned and didn't. And that is keep in mind that you're not limited to a standard room for your best rate guarantees. So if you would like a suite and you find a great price on a suite somewhere else, you can file best rate guarantees on upgraded rooms. So that's worth looking at too, because I think sometimes there's more variance in the different room types than you might see in the standard room type in terms of prices.

Yeah. Important caveat. Thanks. Yep. Okay. So, all right. So MasterCard, take a look at that. What about, you know, something that I tossed on the list for

discussion today, just for a brief mention anyway, is if you have the Wyndham business card, you get Wyndham diamond status and you can match that over to Caesars diamond status. And that can be worthwhile if you're going to be going someplace with Caesars properties, because as a Caesars diamond member, number one, you won't pay resort fees at Caesars properties, which can save you a nice little chunk over a course of a few days stay, save you a couple hundred bucks probably. So that's a nice first piece of it. But the second piece of it is that sometimes you'll see really deeply discounted rooms and even free rooms, completely free rooms. And I mean, people that don't even gamble. Sometimes we'll see rooms that are totally free in Las Vegas and other places.

Now, you're probably not going to get Caesar's Palace for free. You're probably going to get a place that's not as nice for free, but you may get a great rate on Caesar's Palace, or you may be fine with the places that are free. I know, for example, I've stayed at Link, and Link is a sort of center strip in Las Vegas. I've stayed there in the past.

I stayed there when it was Imperial Palace before they converted it to Link, and it's fine. I'd stay for free again in a heartbeat, no problem. So I've seen that go for free. I've seen Rio, of course, which is an all suites property go for free and a whole bunch of others, Harrah's and Valley's and stuff like that. So sometimes you'll see $0 rates and be able to book nights again, totally for free or for 20 bucks or 30 bucks. And again, no resort fee. So, you know, that can be a way to save a few bucks. Oh yeah, for sure. All right.

And then there's, of course, some websites or even like Twitter, you know, handles and things that broadcast great deals when they find them. And so those are worth watching. Do you have any favorites of those that you think are worth like subscribing to? So you get alerted when, when there's a, you know, noteworthy hotel deal.

I got something that caught my throat right now. Hopefully I'm not going to cough when I do this secret flying sometimes sends out hotel rate. I don't know if you would call them mistakes or deals. So that can be one extreme hotel deals used to do this, but I don't know if they exist anymore. Do you? No, I don't know. I used to be signed up for them too.

And I don't know. I haven't seen anything from them for a long time. So maybe not. Yeah, I don't know. But so secret flying and the flight deal sometimes will have hotel deals also. But I don't know. I'd be curious if any readers have good suggestions about Twitter handles to follow that post great hotel deals, because sometimes you do see these really

nice hotels priced really well. A few years back, that Extreme Hotel Deals Twitter account used to tweet out some great ones. And there was one, it was a rate at a Four Seasons outside of San Jose, and it was like, I don't know, $40 a night or something. And I remember thinking to myself, Ooh, if it's available $40 a night through four seasons, I bet it's available $40 a night through fine hotels and resorts. And sure enough, it was, and I booked it through there. Unfortunately, I didn't end up getting to stay. I had to cancel, which is too bad because they were honoring it for 40 bucks.

And I get the a hundred dollar credit or whatever it was, a spot credit at maybe at that place and free breakfast. I would love to have done it. But, um, but so, and that's like a tip within a tip that sometimes when you see these great rates or things like that, you may try to book through a different channel than everybody else is to increase your odds of perhaps getting it honored or to increase your benefits you might be able to get. So that's worth looking at. But again, if readers have suggestions about places to find hotel specific deals, I'm all ears. I'd love to hear more places to find those things. All right. All right. Well, you know what? I mean, there's tons of other like, you know, little niche things you can do to save, but I think we've hit most of the big ones

here. So I think we're ready to move on. All right. So let's talk about this week's question of the week. And so the question of the week came in via email from Jackson. Jackson says, Hey, guys, love the show and appreciate all the new segments you've incorporated lately. Just wondering if you have an update for us on your American Airlines loyalty point earning. I know I've really slowed things down the last couple of months. Not sure if it's because I've picked all the low hanging fruit or just hit like a rut in the game. Looking forward to hearing how your earnings going. So Greg, where are you at?

Yeah. Yeah. First, let me say, I believe Tim is going to be putting out a sort of summary of where we're at pretty soon. Maybe even by the time this time this is released. I don't know. But I slowed down too. I started off, I think it was January or maybe February with doing a lot really quickly, but slowed way down. So why is that? I mean, I feel like a lot of us are in that boat. I feel like that's the general consensus I've gotten from readers also. Why have we slowed down? Have we just picked off a little hanging fruit or are you just not interested in the status? What's going on? I spent a lot of time looking for these overlapping deals, like where you can, for example, click through the American Airlines shopping portal and link your card to Simply Miles to get, you know, two sources of American Airlines miles, both of which give you loyalty points. And so you can earn

elite status through American that way. And I just, I haven't done that since that, that initial, you know, burst of, of, uh, excitement. Um, I did earn a lot of miles during that time. I I'm a little over 50,000 now, which, um, is way, way behind. I know where Tim is, Tim has done really well. So he'll report on that soon. But, you know, the other thing is, I don't know, maybe we just haven't seen, you know, as many of the sort of seasonal big deals lately. And I'd be surprised if we don't see a bunch of them as we get into the fall. Yeah. I mean, I'm looking forward to that and expecting to see that too. I, you know, I'm a little disappointed in myself that I haven't done the gift cards.com orders because that would just be such an easy 6,000 loyalty points every month because

the portal has been offering three X American airlines miles on gift cards.com orders. And you can usually earn portal rewards on up to $2,000 a month in purchases. So I could easily pick up 6,000 every month. And so between now, so it's August now, and what this is going to end in February, right? So August, September, October, November, December, January, February. So if that three X maintains over the next seven months, so 6,000 a month times seven months, that's 42, thousand points right there that are pretty low hanging fruit. If you have anything you can do with the gift cards. So so that's that's something I probably should have been doing for the last six months also. Although it's a little shaky because like Capital One has had six percent back at gift cards dot com.

So how much am I giving up if I go through American Airlines instead of taking six percent cash back? That's kind of an expensive proposition. Pretty, pretty expensive. That's right. Yeah. So so I think that's been part of it, too, where like I've been stuck in this like inertia because I'm looking at things where I'm like, well, that's not really good enough for me to get excited about doing it. And so I am not doing anything because I'm like, well, that's not really good enough for me to get excited about doing it. And so I ended up not doing anything because I'm like, oh, well, it's kind of expensive because I could go through Capital One, but then I don't go through Capital One. So I should have probably just gone through American Airlines and gotten it done.

But yeah, so there's been a lot of that. Although I will say the one deal I did relatively recently was the Verizon business one. I finally tried that out, signed up for a voice line. And the reason I did it was because it was about $75 a month. And then there was a 45 day minimum requirement in order to get the miles it said. So that'd be $150. And the mileage payout has been, I don't know if it still is, but it has been 14,900 miles. So that's a good number of miles, a good number of loyalty points, obviously same thing. So that was half of it. And the other half was that there was an Amex offer for 75 back on

150 at Verizon business. So I thought, okay, great. If they $75 and end up with 15,000 miles and loyalty points, that's a good enough price for me. So I went ahead and went through the process to sign up and went to pick the card that I was going to use and realized, oh, no, I didn't sync it. And now it's gone on all my cards. I guess it must have filled up. So I don't have the ability to sync it. So I was disappointed in myself, but I was like, ah, you know what? I'm like most of the way through this order.

I'm just going to finish it up and go ahead. So I did. But the thing is, it's postpaid. So it didn't, you know, it didn't charge me right away and I haven't activated the SIM card. So I haven't gotten charged for the postpaid line, but the miles posted to my account. So nice. I don't know. I mean, I assume that that would get clawed back if I don't ever pay, but I've been really dragging my feet,

hoping that maybe this is one of those Amex offers that's going to pop back up. And so I've been waiting to activate the SIM card and pay, hoping to come back again. And it hasn't, but the miles haven't gone away either. So good deal. All right. So that's the end of our question of the week. That brings us to the end of today's episode. If you've enjoyed what you've been hearing about, you'd like to get this stuff in your

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