Frequent Miler on the Air - Hilton delivers luxury through SLH | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep263 | 7-12-24

Episode Date: July 12, 2024

Hilton has brought on their partner Small Luxury Hotels of the World which has been a bit more exciting than we expected it would be. In today's Frequent Miler on the Air episode we'll discuss more. (01:07) - a note about the alliteration in "pop-up prison" vs "pop-up jail" (Mail Bag) (02:56) - IHG Premier 60K certs (Card Talk) Read more about the IHG Premier 60K cert offer here: https://frequentmiler.com/chase-ihg-premier-card-best-ever-offer-5-60k-free-night-certificates/ (08:37) - Greg booked AA to fly to London and it didn't go very smoothly... (Crazy Thing)  Read about Greg's recent AAdventures (or misadventures) here: https://frequentmiler.com/my-aadventures-aatempting-to-fly-aa-to-london/ (21:38) - Escape lounge on arrival (Award Talk) (26:19) - Digging in to fare class info when booking via Chase (Award Talk) Main Event: Hilton delivers luxury through SLH (32:28) - Overview: ~400 SLH hotels bookable through Hilton (38:09) - Some SLH hotels have suites defined as standard rooms (39:30) - Gold and Diamond members: space-available room upgrades and continental breakfast for up to two guests. (42:01) - Excellent Hilton point value possible through SLH (44:19) - Free night certs & 5th Night Free awards apply to SLH (47:21) - How to get points (1:01:50) - How to get free night certs Read more about the Hilton Aspire card here: https://frequentmiler.com/AmxHiltonAspire/ (1:04:25) - Read more about the Hilton Surpass card here: https://frequentmiler.com/hilton-honors-american-express-surpass-card/ (1:09:08) - How to find SLH award availability (1:12:21) - Visit Rooms.aero here: https://rooms.aero/ (1:20:59) - Does the Chase Freedom Unlimited card double offer calculate even points that were transferred out?  (Question of the week)

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did City do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event. Frequent Miler on the air starts now. Today's main event, Hilton delivers luxury through SLH. We're going to talk about Hilton bringing on their partner,

Small Luxury Hotels of the World, and they brought them on in a big way, bigger than expected. And we're going to talk about how to get great value from the luxury properties that are now in our reach through points. That's right. And soon to be in your grasp after you've listened to those. That was perfect. Like they were within reach. Soon we will help you put them within your grasp. But before we get to all that, don't forget that if you want to jump ahead to a specific segment or you want to return to one, you can always find the timestamps in the show notes. You just need to expand the show description in order to find that. And wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget, subscribe, enable notifications, give us a thumbs up or a like or a bunch of stars, review, leave us a comment.

Let us know what you think. We always love to hear from you. All right. Speaking of hearing from you, let a comment. Let us know what you think. We always love to hear from you. All right. Speaking of hearing from you, let's drag out this week's giant mailbag. All right. In today's giant mail, we have a letter from Whitney. Now, this was in regards to a recent podcast where we talked about how Amex has a pop-up

that sometimes prevents you from getting new welcome bonuses. And I had a little rant that was just in fun saying, I hate it when people call it pop-up jail because we should call it pop-up prison because of the alliteration. So Whitney writes in about that. Greetings, Greg and Nick. Just wanted, just wrapped up listening

to this week's podcast. I can't help but prod Greg a little bit, a poquito joke if you will for Chiquito poke but poke a poquito poke if you will for a chastising us all for referring to amex pop-up jail given the easy alliterative opening for pop-up prison but then himself proceeding to pass on the opportunity to proclaim pathways to prevail over pop-up prison as pop-up parole, which is plainly both alliteratively preferable and perfectly pertinent to its penitentiary partner, pop-up prison. Oh, man, I almost got through that.

Putting my prickly prattle aside, thanks once again for entertaining an informative podcast and all that you do. Your pedantic patron, Whitney. Loved that. Fantastic. Well played, Whitney. Perfectly played, Whitney. Perfectly played. Oh, how did I miss it? Thank you, Craig. Perfectly played. Well done. Yes. So I pop up her role for sure from now on, from now on, Whitney. Perfectly played. Oh, how did I miss it? Thank you, Craig. Perfectly played. Well done. Yes. So I pop up parole for sure from now on, from now on, Whitney. Thank you for coining that term for us.

All right. Let's move on, I suppose, to this week's card talk. The card talk for this week is about the IHG Premier Card and its new 60K certificates. Yeah. premier card and its new 60k certificates yeah so so there's a new welcome bonus for the ishi premier card uh for uh five nights uh five nights five certificates basically each worth up to 60 000 points and you can add additional points to them but the idea is it's you know a total of 300 000 points is the welcome bonus but I don't really want to talk about the new card the new welcome bonus what I want to talk about is the fact that these are 60 K certs which is odd because the card offers an annual 40k certificate as just

part of its benefit every anniversary of having the card. You get a 40K certificate. So I started wondering, is something changing here? And I looked at the language on the website for the credit card, not just the new offer, but the previous offer, the page where they talked about the anniversary free night. It's interesting because the language said you earn a, for each account anniversary year, you get a free night certificate with a current point redemption cap of 40,000 points. It says current, you know, that's very odd language to have in there if they're not intending to change it. right? Am I reading too much into that? You know, the word current, that is interesting.

I'll give you that. So the 60K certs alone, I don't think there's anything interesting there at all. So just the five 60K free night certs, here's why I don't think that's particularly interesting. We've seen the Chase Marriott card offer five 50K free night certs, even though that card only offers a 35k start every year,

hasn't changed anything about the cards 35k start. So I could reasonably see a welcome bonus offering a higher certificate value than what the card ordinarily comes with. So that to me is not necessarily an indicator. But your pickup on the word current seems huge, because that's a word I haven't seen used regarding free night certificates like ever on any other card. So the fact that they added that somebody took the initiative to add that, that's a great catch. I think maybe you're right. Maybe we will see that at some point. Now, will it be 60 K certs? Will it be 50 K certs? Will it be something else? I don't know. What do you think? I mean mean is this going to happen in isolation is it going to affect the card details what are your guesses yeah i mean

you have a good point about how marriott has done that without changing the uh annual free night so that's a really good point but um my my money is on that they're at some point planning to move to 60k certs that they're they're introducing them they're getting you know getting them into the computer system so they can they know what to do with them so that these these now exist as a thing that's going to be in people's accounts so it'll be um also then easier to make it an annual thing um but if they do that, does that mean there will be other changes to the card? Will they keep the current $99 annual fee or will that go up? You know, that's a good question, but here's another possibility. Obviously, we saw Marriott

add a middle tier card with a higher free night certificate those 50k certs that do come with like what is the bevy or whatever's in the middle the 250 cards have a 50k cert will ihg introduce that 60k cert on a more expensive card is this like a precursor to adding a mid-tier card yeah or well or uh yeah or or a higher end yeah yeah so so maybe a card that would offer diamond status as an automatic perk. Because the current IHG Premier and the Premier Business card offer diamond status with 40k spend. I could see them introducing a premium card that would just have diamond status built in. So that's possible. All kinds of possibilities.

We don't have any answers here. We're just, uh, we're just making things up, making things up as we go along. Yeah. I mean, we have not, we don't have any, any advanced info when that kind of thing happens, we don't usually know in advance or if at all, not, not far in advance. So this is totally conjecture here, but I do think that there must be something. That's going to happen, whether that's the's and I think it's a decent guess. You make some sense as to why you think this 40K cert might go up.

I mean, it's also worth mentioning that we've heard from a number of people that the value of IHG points hasn't seemed as strong over the last year, at least anyway. And so maybe it makes sense that they'll increase the value of the free night certificate because those free night certificates have gotten harder to use for the cap value anyway, I think in a lot of ways. But I don't know. I mean, do you do you feel like the value of points has decreased? I mean, I haven't I haven't noticed it one way or another because and it's hard to notice with ihg right because they they don't have an award chart uh their points is their points uh required for hotel stay bounce around i mean and and not just a little bit like you know you could see changes going you could see it going up and down for the exact same dates you're looking at um over time and so yeah it's

really hard yeah it's like i said Yeah, it's hard. Like I said, hard, hard to know. But all right. So maybe we'll see some changes coming. Interesting. Nonetheless, you've got our attention. Let's see what you do with it. Yeah. All right. Be on the lookout. Let's talk about what crazy thing did Greg the frequent miler do this week? Yeah, I did a really crazy thing. I I I I wanted to go to london and i booked uh through american airlines to fly american airlines itself that was the crazy thing i did swing and a miss so why why did you do that and more importantly what happened yeah i mean it's it's funny that we call that crazy but but uh years ago i uh I flew American Airlines quite a bit because I had an opportunity to get top tier executive platinum status.

And then I did a bunch of flying at the time to try to maintain it. And back then, I just had so many bad experiences. I estimated that about 70% of my trips involved a delayed, like significantly delayed or canceled flight. I mean, it was that bad. And so I just gave up. I was like, there's no point in having executive platinum status if flying AA is going to be that unpleasant. But, you know, years later, I started flying AA again and didn't have any trouble. I haven't had any trouble until trying to get to London. So the story is we, meaning my wife and I, went to the airport on Sunday evening to fly. The itinerary was to fly from Detroit to Charlotte and then the late night flight, like 1130 p.m. to London.

And I like those really late night flights to Europe because, you know, you're tired enough that you could go to sleep right away. And if you have a lie flat seat, then, you know, just you say no to dinner and just put it down in bed mode. And then you have enough time to get in some sleep. And because flying to London or anywhere in Europe from the East Coast doesn't take that long. So anyway, it was a great itinerary and it would have been very nice if we had gotten to Charlotte

in order to take that overnight flight that was perfectly timed. But the plane we got on, we actually got on the plane and in Detroit and sat there at the gate and sat there. And finally, a pilot came on and said there was both weather in Charlotte. They like to point that out. Oh, and a minor maintenance issue. So so my issue. Yeah. Like, oh, this is not good. And so I started like looking at other options and I couldn't find any way to get it was too late by then to get an overnight to London or really to anywhere in Europe. And so I found that there was an American Airlines flight the next day where it was a daytime flight. So I could fly Detroit to Chicago, to London and get into London Monday evening. And the cool thing is it was actually fewer miles. And this was business class. It was fewer miles to book this,

uh, than the trip that, uh, we were on. So I, I quickly booked it. And then, um, with the planner, just canceling the one I was on, uh, but you were already on that plane, we're on the plane. So before booking it, I asked the flight attendant, Hey, uh, if I come up with an alternative, can we get off the plane? And he actually said, sure. So that was, that was a, well, not only that. I wouldn't expect that to be that easy. Yeah, that to me was a hint that we were making the right decision to abandon that.

You know, if they're like, please get off the plane, you know, things aren't good. He knows you're not going anywhere, so you may as well get off now. Exactly. You know, they're not even bothering to close the doors. So, yeah. And in fact, that, you know, just jumping ahead to, you know, it was the right decision because I looked up later and that flight to Charlotte didn't take off that night at all. It left at 9 a. 9am the next day. And, uh, but the flight from Charlotte to London left on time. So obviously we wouldn't miss that. So anyway, so you saved it, saved it and save some miles to boot. Right.

So about Greg, this sounds like it all worked out as well. It was all great. So, uh, we, we get to, um, so the next morning we, uh, get to the terminal and you know what clear saved us because the TSA pre-check line was, was like crazy long, uh, clear was empty. And so this is kind of unusual. Usually it's like, it's always a toss up whether clear saves any time at all. Um, but this time it clearly saved a lot of time and, um, and we get to our gate in time, no problem. And then of course our flight is delayed. Um, the flight from Detroit to Chicago. Exactly. And so we're, we're worrying a little bit, but not too bad because we ended up boarding just about the next flight that that was delayed. So the nice thing about American is you could usually count on the second flight being delayed, too.

You can usually count on it not taking off on time. Well, that's good. So, again, once again, you've been saved here. You booked AA knowing that you'd be delayed, but also that the flight to London would probably be delayed. And they came through. And so we did make it to that flight on time, boarded. Well, we boarded. It was late, but we boarded.

And it's beautiful. The 787, these seats are beautiful. They were really comfortable. I was impressed how nice it is. Any indication why that flight was delayed by the way um no but we were a little concerned when when they said it it had just rolled out of the hangar and we were wondering so it wasn't delayed coming to chicago obviously right you know um so it here's that whatever they're doing the hanger they didn't do so well because uh we took off fine and about half an hour later my wife hears a loud thump and suddenly she said the the sound of the engine sounded different

that wasn't good um i had my headphones on, so I didn't hear the thump. But what I did notice was the in-flight entertainment going completely black, the seat controls going completely dark. So I'm partially reclined, and I can't change the position of my seat at all. Oh, no. The flight attendants now are running around. And so they all run up to to the front and they're whispering. And and, you know, we're we're like, OK, clearly this is bad. I'm I had slippers on. I'm putting on my shoes because I know like, you know, right. Whatever happens next. I just I don't want to be caught. You want your shoes anyway. You want your shoes on? I want to be able to run if I have to. I don't know where I'm going to run when I'm on an airplane, but I'm getting ready. Getting all my stuff together. And sure enough, the pilot says we had a slight problem with the right engine. Small maintenance issue, is that?

Small issue. And I'm like, small problem? Like it stopped? Is that the small problem that you had with your whatever? But he said, so we're going back to Chicago and the flight back. It was fine. No, no problem getting back. We landed fine. Yeah. So so so that was that was great. We had a successful American Airlines flight, took off and landed. No problem. Great might not be the first word that comes to mind in that case. We've just now been traveling for like, it felt like we'd been traveling for two days now and hadn't gotten anywhere. I mean, Chicago is really close to Detroit. The beautiful Midwest. I mean, come on. Yeah. I mean, we could have driven to Chicago the night before and been there like overnight. Anyway, so they have everybody like get off the plane before they announce what's going to happen next. And then they say and it's about 10 a.m. in Chicago. They tell us that a new plane will be coming to get us and take us to London.

We it won't be taking off till 530 p.m. Well, I did some mental math and a meeting that my wife had to be to be at the next morning. She wouldn't have made it if we if we even if America were on time, even if it was on time. Right. We needed an earlier flight. There were only two earlier flights. One was a British Airways flight. The other one was United. The British Airways flight was full. I already knew that because I'd done, you know, Google flight searches. The British Airways flight was full. I already knew that because I'd done Google flight searches. The United flight, though, was still selling seats in business class, at least. And so that was good. We were booked in business class.

So we ran to the American Airlines, not the Admirals Club, the flagship lounge. And that's the higher level one that you get into when you're flying international business or first class. And we went to a ticket counter in the lounge, and I asked if they could get us to London sooner than the next flight would go. At first, she said no. And I said, well, what about the United flight? She says, well, United only shows at 9 or no, 1130 p.m., something like that. So I said, well, what about the United flight? She says, well, United only shows at 9 or no, 1130 p.m., something like that. So I said, well, United is letting me I could buy two seats right now through United. So, you know, I pulled it up right then and then showed it to her. So she did some more typing and then magically found that, yes, in fact, there were seats.

I thought. So I was very excited for a moment until she called over her manager to ask if she could book us into that United flight. And the manager said, only if it's not an award flight. And I'm like, dum, dum, dum. What if it is an award flight? Yeah. So I said, well, it is an award flight, but, you know but we've been trying now for two days to get to London on AA, and it's been foiled both times. And so she made an exception. It took a while, but they got us booked into the United flight. That's awesome. At least they did that. We had time to enjoy both the AA flagship lounge and the United Polaris lounge in Chicago, which I don't know how many people can say they went to both of those lounges same day on the same trip, but we did. And United Flight took off on time. Everything was good with United Flight and we arrived in time. my wife got to her meeting on time. So.

Excellent. Well, it's good that United was able to save that. And also I think great takeaway here, despite, you know, the, the laughs that we had along the way is that you really have to help yourself, right? Because if you hadn't already figured out a, the backup plan from the, from the first flight, probably, then you would have been stuck in a line of people. And who knows if you'd have been at the front of that line? And who knows how quick you might have gotten service and whether there would have been any seats left. And then same thing with the second flight. I mean, again, if you didn't take the initiative to know, a that there were seats on United and B, to know that you should and could ask for them to book you on United. I mean, I wonder how many people wouldn't even think that that's an option. Right.

Or just primarily award travelers and would have no idea. I mean, I never would have before I got into this game that that was even something that could possibly happen. Yeah. Yeah. Those are both great things to know. And, you know, and it's not, you know, it's not like the agent. I don't think she was like purposely deceiving me about the United flight. I think she just, you know, in doing a cursory look, all she saw was the later one, you know, and. Yeah. But you're right.

I think most people would have just walked away and been like, yeah, oh, well, you know, trips canceled. Can you fly us? Can you fly us back to Detroit? Because we're not going to make the meeting, you know, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Can you fly us? Can you fly us back to Detroit? Because we're not going to make the meeting, you know, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the other lesson, the other lesson is I was so happy that we we never checked bags, you know. Right. Right. I do not. As much as I trusted American initially going into this flight, I didn't trust them enough to check bags with them. And that was a really good call. That would have been a mess. That would have been a mess. Well, thank goodness for all that.

Thank goodness you made it to London in one piece that you didn't really need the shoes after all. Could have kept the slippers on. We're all glad for that. So. So. All right. Let's move on to this week's award talk.

And so for this week's award talk. First up, I have how my son saved me $ at least the other day so my six-year-old son uh we we were flying we flew from hartford connecticut to myrtle beach and then back to hartford connecticut so hartford connecticut bradley international airport has an escape lounge and so on the outbound portion we went to the escape lounge which is just a very very small escape if you're looking for i think i made the joke on Slack. If anybody's looking for a small escape, then might I suggest the Hartford Bradley International Airport because it's the tiniest little lounge ever just about, but with decent food and nice service. So we were

happy to get a free lunch and coffee and all the rest of that on the outbound. And funny enough, it's directly next to the Spirit Gates. So we were flying Spirit. Who would have thought that you'd put an escape lounge next to the Spirit Gates? But hey, we won't complain. It was right next to the gate we were departing from. And sure enough, we arrived back at that same gate at the end of the trip. And so we walked directly past the escape lounge. And so my six-year-old sees the lounge, recognizes it from the other day and says, Daddy, can we go to the lounge? And my wife jumped in first and she said, no, we're not flying anywhere else today. And then she kind of paused for a second and looked at me and she said, can we?

And, you know, and I said, no, I don't think you can visit it on arrival. I'm pretty sure. No. And so we we continue walking towards Starbucks where we plan to get coffees and milk for the kids and some sort of a snack since we'd gotten on an early morning flight that morning. And so, like I said, probably would have spent like 30 bucks and, and we're on the way. And I'm thinking to myself, well, you know, I don't know for sure whether or not you can access an escape lounge on arrival. I, I'd never tried before. So I gave it a Google and I couldn't really find a conclusive

no when I Googled it. And in fact, I found some responses from specific lounges that said, yes. So I said, well, let's go back and give it a shot because, you know, then we get a snack and some coffee and whatnot. And so sure enough, long story short, we did get into the lounge. Now, excuse me, escape lounges are now on priority pass. So at first I showed the priority pass and I said, you know, are we able to access the lounge on arrival? And I haven't tried before. And, and the agent looked at the priority pass and she kind of looked skeptical and she said, I'm not sure with priority pass. And so I quickly followed and said, oh, well, we're both platinum card holders too. And she said, well, I know you definitely can

with the platinum card. So I didn't have her try with the priority pass. Maybe I should have in hindsight, but I assumed probably no, because the rules for the Priority Pass say that you can access the lounge three hours before your departure. So I'm guessing you can't probably on arrival. But anyway, so I pulled out my platinum card, couldn't find my wife's platinum card. But if you're not aware, you can pull up the MX app. And in the MX app, if you log in under membership, there is a lounge section where you can create a QR code. And so we did that. So those got us into the lounge. So we got a free lunch on arrival back at that airport. And so that was awesome. That was nice. We got our coffees to go because they had to go cups there. So that was a nice little savings that I wouldn't have thought of. So that's tip number one.

Escape lounges can be accessed on arrival with a platinum card. Little did I know. Maybe I should have known that. Did you long know that, Greg? I did not know that. But I want to point out another tip that's sort of buried in there. Maybe you were about to get to this. That, you know, Amex's Centurion lounges, you don't get to have a visitor for free anymore unless you spend $75,000 on the Platinum card.

So, you know, Nick and his wife each having their own Platinum card wouldn't have been enough for the whole family at a Centurion lounge, but other lounges that you could get in with Platinum cards, like the Escape lounges and I can't remember which other ones, but do allow a guest to come in. So I'm assuming you each guested one of your kids in. Yeah, absolutely. Yes.

Although I will say this, interestingly, because that's you are right. I didn't think to make that point that you are supposed to still get guests. Although I thought it was odd when I pulled up the MX app to pull up the QR code for my wife. It actually said no guests for the escape lounge, which surprised me because my understanding is that you do still get two guests. And in fact, we've done that a couple of times. So I didn't expect that to be an issue. And I think maybe it was just something wrong in the app. They didn't say they didn't bat an eye at it and didn't charge us anything, obviously.

I've done guests a number of times. So unless that's changed. Yeah, right. All right. So that's tip number one. Tip number two, which is not really related, but from the same trap. Oh, no, rather. I'm sorry.

A different, different, different tip for number two. Rather, there was something else from that, but I'll hold that for a different day. So the second thing that I want to talk about in a word talk this week is digging into the fare class when you're booking via Chase. So this is something that came to mind because I ran into a situation where I want to talk about in award talk this week is digging into the fare class when you're booking via Chase. So this is something that came to mind because I ran into a situation where I needed to book a flight within Europe, a very short, cheap flight within Europe on a regular full service carrier. And so I went to book it in the Chase portal, the Chase travel portal to use points at one and a half cents per point with my wife, Sapphire Reserve.

But when I went to book it, it wouldn't tell me just that economy class. It didn't say which kind of economy class. And if you've booked a flight within Europe lately, you know that basically every carrier has the equivalent of a basic economy type of an economy ticket, and then more like a full economy type of a ticket. And usually the basic economy tickets don't include a checked bag. Maybe they don't even include a carry on. There's all sorts of economy light fares and then more full faired economies. And Chase only had one economy class fare that the carrier was selling three different economy class fares for. So I didn't know which one it was. It didn't line up exactly with the price. It was a little bit more expensive than the full most expensive economy class fare

through the airline airlines website. But that doesn't necessarily tell me much. I don't know. Maybe Chase didn't have the best price. So what I did was I looked at the fare class, which they'll show usually towards the end of booking. And it was a U fare class. So I said, OK, great. Let me go back to the in this case, it was a lot Polish.

And I went back to a lot Polish website. And I said, OK, let me see which fare class is the one that includes a check bag. Cause we needed that. And of course all three of the economy class fairs were you fairs. They all said fair class you, so that didn't help me at all. So the next step that I did here that worked out, I think is I expanded the fair rule. So usually there's a little link somewhere when you're close to the end of the booking process that says see full fair rules. And that lists all the stuff about whether you can have a stopover and a connection. Do you need a Saturday night stay or whatever?

Blah, blah, blah. It's a lot of stuff that probably won't ever matter to you. But when I expanded that on the lot Polish site, it had a fuller code. It was like you SAV for like saver for the light fare. And then there was a U I can't remember S S T D for standard. And then there was like a flex also. And so there were a few different codes that went with the U. And so I did the same thing, expanded the fair details on the chase side and did a search for just those like S A V andD and FLX, just those three letter combinations.

And sure enough, I only found references to STD and flex in the fair rules on the Chase side. So I took that to mean that it was one of those two that included a checked bag. So that was what I needed. So I went ahead and booked it. And sure enough, yes, it did include the checked bag as I expected with the standard or flex economy, whichever it was. I can't remember the exact case in that situation. But more so the point here was that if you're ever not sure you're booking that kind of thing, expand those those boxes with the full fare rules. And usually you'll find some additional coding information in there that might help you figure out which fare it is. Yeah, that's that's great.

That's really great tip. I've definitely had that happen where I've I've been trying to the same situation where I've been like, I think this is like their main cabin economy, but I don't really know. And it's happened to me more like I think it's more clear maybe when when you're flying like US based airlines,, but when you're booking another airline, because they have all these different, they don't have that, the same terminology. Terminology, right. Like a basic economy versus regular. Economy go and economy, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Just different terminology. Yeah, so it becomes very confusing. That's a great tip. It also reminds me of a reader tip we got recently that said that when booking flights through Chase's travel portal, when they went in with their Sapphire Preferred, they didn't see basic economy as an option for the flights. They just saw the regular. But when they would give you if they're not going to show those fares. I wonder, though, if you could call. You could probably call and get it over the phone, right? You're probably, yeah, they said that they tried that and it didn't work, but, but I, I, um, I, I do question that, like, you know, maybe they didn't get an agent that knew how

to do it or something. What they were doing. Yeah. Yeah. Good point. Good point. All right. Last little piece for a word talk is, is the tail end of that escape lounge story was that

the next thing we went to do is we had to wait for our bags at the spirit and baggage thing. Cause there was nobody manning it, of course. And, and that point, we had wasted a bunch of time in the lounge. So our bag was locked up somewhere. So I went to go get the car from the economy class lot. And for some reason, the battery was completely dead, totally dead, like wouldn't I only got one door to unlock. I couldn't even get the other doors to unlock. It's how dead it was. And so I pulled up AAA on my phone, but before I called AAA, I called my wife because she was still in the airport waiting for the bag. And I asked her to

check at the information desk and see if they have a jumpstart service. I thought I had seen something on the website for Hartford airport. And sure enough, they have a free jumpstart service there. And I bet there's other airports that have that too. So if you ever end up in that situation, it's worth checking. Oh, I can assure you Detroit will do that too. The Detroit airport. I've had that happen a couple of times, actually. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Unfortunately, this is the first time it's happened to me. Also, parking is incredibly cheap at Hartford. $30 for up to two weeks. But yeah, I'm a fan of Hartford airport. You could stay almost one day in the Detroit airport for that. All right. All right.

Let's move forward because this week we've got a juicy one. We're ready airport for that. All right. All right. Let's move forward because this week we've got a juicy one. We're ready for this week's main event. Main event time. Hilton delivers luxury through SLH. We're going to talk all about the small luxury hotels of the world portfolio. So until, I don't know, earlier this year, Hyatt had the relationship with SLH and you were able to book SLH hotels through Hyatt and use Hyatt points to book them. It wasn't all SLH hotels, but it was a number of them. And we likedatt bought Mr. and Mrs. Smith and said goodbye to their relationship with SLH. And we were very disappointed with how Hyatt went about integrating Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which is that they did make all the Mr. and Mrs. Smith properties bookable with points, but at a poor award rate. So you're paying points based on the cost, the cash rate of the hotel, so you're not getting great value from your points.

So then we found out that Hilton had partnered with SLH. And at first we were just cautiously optimistic. We were like, yay, there'll be a new way to book. But the thing is, Hilton has two ways of pricing awards. They have premium room awards, which are outrageously expensive with points and are tied to the cash rate. And then they have standard room awards, where they can be pretty expensive, but each one has a maximum. And so you're not going to pay more than that maximum amount. And so sometimes you could get really good value that way.

And so we were like, well, if they make these available standard rooms, then that should be good. And it turns out. I was skeptical. I was skeptical. I didn't think that was going to happen. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I, I think I tend to look at the bright side, like, you know, so I think I, I was hoping so hard, so I wanted it to be true. So I believed it to be true. And then I met with, um, Hilton and, and they told me in advance that yes, uh, there's going to be standard rooms. You're going to be able to use fifth night free awards. You're going to be able to use free night certificates.

And at the time, there wasn't any SLH bookable through Hilton. So I just had to take their word for it. But now, oh, and they also said that there would be something like 100 SLH properties coming online this year. And boy, they over-delivered on that because they have now hundreds. They have, what it is, they announced that they're bringing on 400 or around 400. As we record this, they have around 300, just short of 300 in the system. And then they're going to be adding the others as they go. But that's fantastic that they all appeared almost overnight. Yeah. I mean, I think that really I've been impressed with Hilton's move to under-promising and over-delivering, which I always think is a smart strategy. I don't know

why more companies don't make it a point to do that. But that's what I think they've done here that they've done really well. Because I think they probably thought that they would get these 400 online this year, but they didn't say that in the beginning to set expectations. And surely it's got to be tough. I mean, you got to recognize that SLH doesn't own and manage the properties. It's like loosely, you know, some sort of a consortium, like an advertising marketing scheme to help these small boutique hotels get people coming in the door. So the computer system integrating that has got to be challenging. So I imagine that that was not something that would be an overnight thing.

And they knew that, but I think they probably had some confidence that they were going to be able to get more than expected and give us a good surprise. And I like that. I'm excited about that. That's great. Yeah. And most of the ones that were in the Hyatt portfolio that I've looked up are in the Hilton portfolio now. Not all of them, but there's also appears to be quite a few that were not in the Hyatt system. So, you know, because I went in thinking, all right, the ones that were in the Hyatt system are the easy ones to get because they already know how to integrate, you know, with a hotel chain. And you have to sell them on the idea, Whereas I imagine you do kind of have to sell

individual properties on the idea of this initially. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Or something. Uh, yeah. So, so I don't know how it works behind the scenes, but I'm impressed with, you know, what they, what they did. Cause if you remember when Hyatt rolled it out, it was, it was very slow. They, the hotels trickled out over time, over a long period of time. So to get even close to 300 so quickly is really, really impressive in my book. Yeah. Although I will say there are some that were bookable via Hyatt that I have not seen yet via Hilton. So they don't seem to have all of those, which is kind of surprising, but equally surprising yet in a good way is that they do, like you said, have properties that I never saw via Hyatt before. So that's kind of made it exciting, too, because there's an opportunity to discover some new places that I didn't even know existed because I had not seen them before through Hyatt. So that's pretty cool, especially because a number of these SLH properties are pretty high end. And that's not all the good news. Obviously, they rolled them out. They have standard rooms at these places. And in some cases, some of them have suites that are classified as standard rooms, right? I don't know how many you've seen, but I found a few anyway that have had junior suites or suites classified as standard rooms. Absolutely. Yeah. And it's not only a properties that only have suites. Obviously, the ones that are only suites, it would make sense. But yeah, I've seen ones where they have lower end rooms

and suites and the suites are available at the standard rates. And that's really surprising. I hope if it's an accident that Hilton's not listening to this. Hilton, if you're listening right now, turn down the volume. Okay. Turn on the volume for a second. So the one place I wrote about, the View Lugano on Lake Lugano in Switzerland, the review I read about the property from Head for Points said that the whole property only has 20 rooms and 18 of them are identical. And there's two suites. One's a junior suite, one's a full suite. So, so again, 20 entire rooms. And I was able to book three of three rooms, three out of the 20, including the junior suite, one of the two suites in the entire place as a standard room award. So I was just amazed that that's possible. Now, will that last with Hilton?

I don't know. Hopefully they still have the volume down and don't go to fix things like that right now. But that's not all the good news. There's still even more good news, right? Yeah, yeah. So if you have a gold or diamond status with Hilton, which by the way, gold status is so easy to get, you should have that. You get space available room upgrades and continental breakfast for up to two guests. Now, in reality, like so it says continental breakfast. In reality, I think in most cases they'll be serving whatever their standard breakfast is, which won't always be limited to continental. But that's the minimum they're requiring, I think. Yeah. And so this is, in some regards, a bit of a downgrade from the Hyatt partnership, because when they were partnered with Hyatt, if you booked through Hyatt, you got free breakfast, whether you had status or not with Hyatt. So now you're going to need to have gold or diamond status officially.

Now, I think that there are probably quite a few SLH properties that just provide breakfast for everyone. So it may not be an issue at all in some cases. But at least in some, maybe you'll need to have your status to get that. Right, right. Yeah, I expect it's very common to have free breakfast in SLH properties. But yeah, at least you can be assured without having to research it ahead of time that you're going to get some form of free breakfast. So that's really good. As long as you have the status, you're right. So what we're

seeing is when a standard room is available at these properties, the point price, the points per night that Hilton charges is going to be a maximum of 150,000 points. And that's for the top of the top end properties. We see others where it's a maximum of 120,000 and some others that are lower than that. That sounds like a lot if you're used to high-end prices. But consider that Hilton points can generally be earned at about three times the rate of high-end points for a variety of reasons. And then you can kind of in your mind like scale down. Okay, 150,000 points would be kind of like paying 50,000 high-end points, which is not that different from the 45,000 that they were charging at the top end before. And, uh, you know, 120,000 is like a 30,000 point, um, uh, spent 40,000, sorry for,

for Hyatt. Yeah. Anyway. So, um, not that different. Yeah. And, and, uh, you know, and we're seeing that like, you can get fantastic value per point this way compared to what Hilton points are usually worth. Now, you did some poking around and you found some good value there, didn't you? Yeah, I found a whole bunch of places. So going back to our most recent reasonable redemption value for Hilton points, we had found them to be worth the median was 0.48 cents per point. So we'll call it half a cent per point. But even more interesting than that is that the 90th percentile in the, you know, the test that we had done was 0.65 cents per point. So what that would tell you is that the vast majority of instances when you're using Hilton points, they're going to be

worth less than 0.65 cents per point. It's pretty rare to get more than that. Yet poking around with SLH, there are many opportunities to get significantly more. I mean, you can certainly get the 0.65 or better. And don't get me wrong. There are some situations where you're only going to get about a half a cent as you would at other Hilton properties. But there are quite a lot of instances where you can get one cent per point. I didn't even include the Maldives properties in that post. And all of those, I think would have been one cent per point or more. And then I included a bunch of different places around the world, some of which were one, 1.1. I think I had one in there that was maybe

1.3 cents per point, because you could book some suite that was significantly more expensive than the cheapest room at that particular property. And some of these places look pretty amazing. I mean, we're talking about places that cost $1,200, $1,300, $1,400, $1,600 a night. So they're pretty incredible looking hotels, not just high prices, but places that get great reviews too. When you Google it, you're looking at places that get 4.6, 4.7, 4.8 stars out of five, which, you know, people are more likely to leave a negative review than a positive review almost all the time. So I always find places that maintain averages that high must be consistently doing a pretty good job. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, it might not sound, people that aren't that familiar with Hilton,

like one cent per point value might not sound exciting. But if you think about that, Hilton points are usually worth about half a cent each. That's the usual value. Then, you know, then you realize we're talking twice that. And so that really is that really is special. And it goes even above that. And you can you can get even more better value because fifth night free awards are allowed through these. So if you're going to stay five nights, you're only going to pay for four. And then that spikes the value up even higher. It does require a lot of points, though. I mean, definitely we're talking about higher end places here.

So if that doesn't appeal to you in general, then using points for these is still not going to appeal to you, even though you could get one cent per point. If you would rather stay at a more economical property, most of these SLH properties are not really going to fit your needs then because you may look at it and say, well, yeah, but for 150,000 points per night, I can get like five nights at a Hilton Garden Inn somewhere or maybe even a full Hilton in some places. So it's a trade-off. I think this will appeal to people who have been looking for a really incredible use of Hilton points in terms of luxury properties that would otherwise be... I look at these places as being kind of untouchable with cash. It's not necessarily that I couldn't scrimp and save and pay for one of them, but I wouldn't. And so that's the, I don't know, the takeaway for me is that if you've been sitting on a lot of Hilton points waiting for a great opportunity, like your

train has come in because these places are that opportunity that you just didn't have with Hilton. And also I said in the post, Hilton has plenty of nice properties. I have long enjoyed Hilton properties, but they don't have a lot of places where you're going to be as excited about the place you're staying as you are about the place you're visiting. And SLH adds some of those types of places where you're going to be like, oh, wow, I can't wait to go there, but I also can't wait to stay there. And so I think that's pretty cool. If you like that type of thing, this is really good news, I think. It really is. I mean, there are some really amazing looking properties, including, you know, ones that we enjoyed before. The hotel that Nick loves in Lake Como, the Eichert's private hotel in Queenstown, New Zealand, which which I loved.

You know, they're there. And and the other cool thing is, let's say you have free night certificates from Hilton. You can use those at these properties. So you could get a few of those free night certificates and get a free stay at one of these properties that typically charge like $2,000 a night or more. I mean, you're talking about some serious luxury at these things. You really are. And I think that the free night certificate angle is something that's likely to appeal to even more people than the points. If you aren't collecting a lot of Hilton points, if you're not somebody who's

staying at Hilton and collecting lots of points for your stays, or you haven't been collecting lots of welcome bonuses, so you're not sitting on a huge balance of Hilton points. The thing is, the free night certificates from the credit cards still make these places accessible. And in exchange for the cost that you're going to incur in terms of collecting those free night certificates from credit cards, I just think that the potential value here, the luxury stays that are possible is just amazing, really. I mean, you could come out with a pretty fantastic vacation for a pretty reasonable cost. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's talk about how to get Hilton points. And then we'll talk about

how to get the free night certificates as a separate thing. And then we'll go on from there. So starting off how to get points. First of all, if you have multiple people in your household or you have a partner that you travel together with, both of you can work together to collect Hilton points and Hilton will let you for free move points from one person to the other. So you can combine points to book great stays that way. Obviously, you can apply for Hilton credit cards and get the welcome bonuses. So that's always a good way to get points. And another one I want to talk about is paid stays. So Hilton, they're actually not the most generous right off the bat.

Like if you aren't using a Hilton credit card and you don't have a lot of elite status and you stay at a Hilton had the Aspire card, then you get the diamond elite bonus, which is really big. And if you stay during the time that Hilton is running one of their double point or even triple point bonuses, then their overall stay can earn an enormous number of points. I mean, it's really like, yeah, sometimes it's like control 40, 40 something or 50 something points per dollar spent. So, you know, if you have paid hotel stays, you can rack up a lot of Hilton points pretty quickly with those paid stays. And that was one of the reasons that I always did like Hilton years ago, because when I was paying for more of my stand, nowadays I use a lot of points, but in the beginning I didn't have as many points. And so I was still paying for a lot of stays and I would often find a Hilton that was within my budget and I would earn a billion points paying

for the stay. And so certainly if you're in that type of a situation, this might be more appealing. Now, I mean, a few weeks ago or months ago or last year, you may have looked at it and said, well, yeah, I could earn a ton of Hilton points, but they aren't worth that much. So maybe I'll stay with Marriott or Hyatt or whatever instead. But now I think if these SLH properties appeal to you, you're going to look at that and say, wow, 40 or 50 points per dollar that I can turn around and maybe use at one cent per point towards a luxury property that I never would have and maybe use at one cent per point towards a luxury property that I never would have thought about staying at before, I think suddenly Hilton probably would appeal to me more anyway. If I were paying for lots of stays,

I'd be more interested in Hilton now than I ever was. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Also, using their credit cards for spend becomes a little bit more interesting to me. Now, the base earning rate for most of the Hilton cards is three points per dollar if there's no. restaurants, U.S. supermarkets, and U.S. gas stations. So for those types of purchases, that can be a decent use of your spend. And the Hilton Business Card will give you 5X on all eligible purchases up to $100,000 per calendar year. And so that could be worthwhile if you're looking to earn more Hilton points through spend. of Hyatt points. And so we were using that number as being like a comparative tool. I think it's worth mentioning why somebody probably shouldn't be considering doing a ton of spend at 3X, especially when we're talking about now maybe getting one cent per point out of it. And the reason for that, at least in my opinion, if you disagree or have another reason, please

share that. But it's because Hilton points are very, very, very frequently on sale for half a cent a point. And so if you were to not use your Hilton card, but instead use a card that earns 2% cash back, and there's tons of those on the market, and then use your cash back to buy Hilton points, every two pennies that you've earned per dollar spent could turn into four Hilton points by buying them when they're on sale. So you're better off with a 2% cash back card and buying points on sale than you are earning three points per dollar on ordinary spend with one of the Hilton cards. Yeah. Yeah. And that's exactly it. And in fact, that gets to our next way of getting lots of Hilton points is you buy them when they're on sale for half a cent each. You can think of it this way,

that one of these top tier properties that usually costs thousands of dollars a night, you could buy 150,000 points for $750. And so you can think of it as like, oh, I'm staying at this multi-thousand dollar a night property for $750 a night by buying the points in advance. And it would be less than that if you do a fifth night free type of redemption. Now, $750, that's a lot to spend for a night at a hotel. But we're talking about some really, really high-end luxury things. So it can be worth it under the right circumstances. Absolutely. Well, and certainly if you're already considering paying the cash rate

at one of these places, you know, like I, and then the first day when this broke, I think in my very first post about this, I mentioned Greg's I-Card Hotel, I-Card's private hotel in Queenstown, New Zealand. And if you had bought the points for it, you'd save about a thousand dollars a night by buying the points instead of paying the cash rate. So it's worth it. The other thing, we frequently have posts about welcome bonuses that are, let's say, $750 welcome bonus or a $750 bank bonus for getting a new bank account or a new investment account kind of thing. You can think of those as being 150,000 point Hilton bonuses if you get that cash bonus and you use it during a sale on Hilton points to buy points at half a cent each. So that's kind of an

interesting, you know, 150,000 points suddenly sounds like a lot, even though it's really just the $750 in a way. Yeah. It's worth a mention here too, though, that Hilton does cap how many points you can buy per year. And then during the sales, they always increase that. So during the current sales, we record this, you can buy up to 240,000 points and then you get a 100% bonus. So you get another 240. So essentially you can buy up to 480,000 points right now for $2,400. But like Greg mentioned earlier, Hilton allows pooling. You can pool with up to 10 people. So you and nine family members could each buy those 480,000 points if you wanted to buy as many as possible. And you could end up having 4.8 million points. So you can buy a very large number of points. And of course, you know, your family members can probably use your card to buy the points and then pull them

together with you. So it's not hard to buy more than whatever the stated limit per person is because of the ability to pull points with friends or family. And of course, with Hilton, it doesn't have to be household members. Any friends or family, excuse me, can pull with you. It's not instant. So that whole process is a little convoluted sometimes, but, uh, but at any rate worth mention that even though there is a limit, you can probably buy the points you need for most days. Yeah. That's, that's good to know. Is there any limit to how many points you could pull together? Like, you know, some other programs have limits to how many you can move around.

That's a good question. I don't believe so. I, I, but now that you say that, I guess I should check that and then maybe get back to get back to you next week with a, either a make question. I don't believe so. But now that you say that, I guess I should check that and maybe get back to you next week with either a May Pulpa if I'm wrong. But I don't believe that there is any cap. I'm sure we'll hear from listeners if there's a limit. That'll be in next week's Giant Mailbag. Watch for it then. All right. So you got some options for earning 6X and some options for earning 5X. And, you know, we mentioned the 6X categories on the Hilton Surpass, but we're going to get to the free night certificates, too, on that in a few minutes. We talked about buying points. You can also transfer points from Amex membership rewards. Is that a good deal?

I mean, so when you transfer points from Amex, they transfer one to two. And so you can certainly get a lot of points quickly that way. And because Amex's membership rewards program has so many ways to earn points quickly with big welcome bonuses, big friend referral bonuses, big category bonuses, like they have the business gold with Forex categories and the personal gold with Forex categories. You know, all these things are the racket and shopping portal. So many ways to earn membership rewards so easily that, you know, you could certainly generate a lot of Hilton points quickly through Amex membership rewards. So why would that not be

a good deal? Well, it gets back to that thing about how often they have the points on sale for half a cent each. So if you're aware of that, and if the sale is on at the time you need the Hilton points, then it feels like you're only getting one cent per point value from your Amex membership rewards points because you could have bought those same points for half a cent each. So you're getting two, remember you're getting two Hilton points per one membership rewards point.

And by the way, if you have ways to cash out your membership rewards points, then you might rather just buy the points than if you really wanted to cash out your points at about one cent each. There are ways to cash out membership rewards points for one cent or even a little bit better than one cent per point. And then just buy the points with a card where you're going to earn a new welcome bonus, or you're going to earn some

return on that spend separately. So, you know, you have the ability to do that. Right, right. Now, of course, if, if at the time you need the points and you see the hotel that you want is available and if there isn't a sale right then, then I'd say go for it because you're probably looking at an award stay where you're getting great value for your Hilton points. And then so the value for your membership rewards would be very good. But the other thing you should look for are transfer bonuses. So transfer bonuses from Amex membership rewards to Hilton, pretty common. We see them two to three times a year, typically around 30%, but it varies what exactly it is. When it is 30%, you're talking about transfer from membership rewards to Hilton of one to 2.6. And, um, so that makes your, uh, even, even when points are on sale for half a cent each, that, that makes it, uh, your membership awards worth 1.3 cents per

point, which again, isn't extraordinary, but it's, it's not so bad that I would feel bad about doing that under that circumstance. Yeah. Particularly if it's a redemption you're very excited about and, uh, uh and or you're topping off a certain amount you don't necessarily need to transfer the whole bit there's certainly plenty of situations even if you're transferring over the whole amount where that might feel good anyway or not feel bad so i could see that the trend with a transfer bonus and in the past i was pretty anti-transferring to hilton even during a transfer bonus. But I think that this really does open up a lot more opportunities to get far better than average value. So I would probably say, yeah, go ahead and do it like Greg did here. But those aren't the only ways. Of course,

you can, as Greg mentioned before, you can earn your membership rewards points in lots of different ways. We said welcome bonuses and spending on your cards and referral bonuses and Rakuten, which you mentioned briefly, but for anybody not familiar, Rakuten is a shopping portal and you have the option to either earn cash back or connect it to your membership rewards account and earn membership rewards points.

So when you see 10% cash back, you could instead be earning 10 membership rewards points per dollar spent, for instance. And so I think it's worth earning membership rewards points over pennies through Rakuten if you have an Amex account. So that's certainly worth keeping in mind. And then, of course, there are Amex cards with bonus categories, 3X, 4X, 5X in different

categories. And so then if you double those effectively going to Hilton or you do even better than that by transferring during a transfer bonus, then those spending categories look better than the Hilton card spending categories in many cases. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And finally, I guess I should mention also that if you have a really good cashback card, like we've talked in the past about Bank of America, how if you have their top tier platinum preferred honors, you get a 75% bump in the value or in the rewards earned on certain Bank of America credit cards. And that can turn a cash back card into a card that earns 2.62% everywhere, starting from 1.5%. It moves it up to 2.62%. And if you have one of those, then that's better than earning 5x Hilton points with the business Hilton card, because you can use 2.5% of the

rewards to buy Hilton points when they're on sale for half a cent each to get five points per dollar. And then you still have some money left over to pay for lunch. So you get your lunch at your Hilton hotel. That's right. So you can get that free lunch after all. Yeah. And again, if you pursued that strategy, then you're not locked into having to use that specific card to buy the points either. Keep in mind that again, if you're going to buy $ to use that specific card to buy the points either. You know, keep in mind that, again, if you're going to buy twenty four hundred dollars worth of points, you could earn a welcome bonus on a new credit card, probably buying those twenty four hundred dollars worth of points and then just pay yourself back out of the cash back that you've earned at two point six two percent back or whatever on the Bank of America card.

So. So, yeah, I like that strategy for earning better than five Hilton points per dollar spent. So that's all nice. There's lots of ways to earn points there then. What about free night certificates? Yeah. Um, so first up the Hilton aspire card, that's the high end ultra premium card that, that is offered through Amex. Um, we'll give you a free you a free night each year. So starting from when you first are approved for the card, you'll get your cert, what, about eight weeks later, I think it is, and then every year upon renewal. So that's a great benefit to that card.

And these free nights are uncapped. So you can use them at these properties that cost 150,000 points. You can only use them for when a standard room is available. If you only see premium room awards available, you're not going to use your free night certificate. But if there's a standard room available, then you can book that. That card also gives you additional free night awards after $30,000 and $60,000 of spend in a calendar year. Now, it's debatable whether it's worth spending that much with the Aspire card, especially the Aspire card's bonus categories aren't as widely useful as the Surpass card's bonus categories. So you'll have to look at that yourself, whether it's worth doing. I would argue it's maybe worth considering if you're spending a lot

on Hilton stays. I mean, maybe you're somebody who travels a lot for work and you're able to use your own card and get reimbursed. So, I mean, if you're already spending 10 or 15 or $20,000 a year on hotel stays that are getting reimbursed. And you're going to put those Hilton stays on your Aspire card to earn your 14 points per dollar. You're getting relatively close then. Hey, yeah, it's worth bridging the gap in order to get both points and the free night certificate. You would have so many Hilton points too. You were doing that, right? I mean, just $10,000 of spend with all those multipliers because you're getting what I think 14x with the Aspire card. You're getting 10x base, 100% bonus for elite status.

Right. So you're 20. So it's 34 with no promotions going on. And then they're running double base points. You're at 44 triple points. You're at 54. Yeah. I mean, a lot.

You'd have a lot of Hilton points. A lot of Hilton points a lot of hilton points um okay yes yes uh there there's definitely circumstances where it can make sense to get to that 30k um or maybe even the 60k spend depending on your situation but for most of us that's not i don't look at that like i don't look at it personally and say i'm gonna do that agreed um what about that so the hilton surpass card that's the uh that's the mid-tier card um this one offers you a free night award after you spend fifteen thousand dollars within a calendar year on the card so that's a reasonable amount of spend and it has those nice spend categories like U.S. grocery stores, U.S. restaurants, and U.S. gas stations. Now, grocery stores are probably the one that categories, you're going to have a lot of

Hilton points, plus you're going to have the free night certificate after just $15,000 spend. Yeah. I think if you can do all or most of the $15,000 spend in the 6X bonus categories, it's almost a no-brainer. And if you don't believe me on that, let's talk some math for a second. Let's imagine that you did the $15,000 spend on things that have no category bonus. So three points per dollar, which we already said is generally not a good play for your Hilton points. You have other ways to generate more. But let's say you did the $15,000 spend at just 3X. You'd have 45,000 Hilton points.

Now, you could have bought those Hilton points on sale for half a cent each. So that's about $225. So if you will use your free night certificate at one of these higher end SLH properties, let's say just to have an easy number that you valued the free night certificate at $500. So between the 500 and the 225 worth of points, you're at $725 back on $15,000 spend. That's like a return on spend of 4.8%. So even if you were doing that spend at a no bonus category, if you value your free night certificate at $500, which, you know, that's totally reasonable.

I think it's reasonable, but, you know, obviously it'll vary according to what you think, then you're getting almost 5% back on the card. So if you're actually doing it in a category where you get double the number of points, because you get six x in US supermarkets and restaurants and gas stations, then you're talking about, I think, a real no brainer, because, you know, then you're talking about almost 1000, just under $1,000 worth of value on 15 K spend. And, and that, then you're looking at obviously very, very good return on your spend. That'd be like almost what more than six and a half percent, uh, back, which is excellent return. Now that's only true if you spend the 15,000 and get the free night certificate and you value the free night certificate that highly. But if you do, then, you know, I think that's a good plan. Right, right. And there's some really nice high end Hilton properties that cost ninety five thousand points per night. And so you would earn ninety thousand points that way with that spend. If I did the math in my head correctly.

So, you know, that tag on the five thousand points from somewhere else and you're talking about two free nights uh after the fifteen thousand dollar spend because of the free night certificate plus the points and so that's that's really good yep um and keep in mind if you have the capacity to do the spend you do that in two-player mode you know if you have a partner that you're playing the game with husband wife boyfriend girlfriend sister cousin whatever if you both get the card and you're both able to meet the spend you know then you're talking about game with husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, sister, cousin, whatever. If you both get the card and you're both able to meet the spend, then you're talking about two free night certificates and enough points for almost two more nights. So with those two cards and 15K spend on each, you'd be looking at darn near four nights at most of the Hilton properties. So that's pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. The other Hilton cards cards like the no fee hilton card and the hilton business

card no long they they don't offer free nights through spend or as an anniversary bonus or anything like that but sometimes they they have special promotional welcome bonuses that that have that so you could be on the lookout for you know applying for the the either one of those cards when there's a free night as part of the welcome bonus and that could be another way to get a free night certificate very good and every now and then we see offers for the cards i haven't seen this in a while but when you're actually at a hilton property and connect to the wi-fi you may see a different offer. I remember for years, the welcome bonuses were just points on the surpass card. But for a long time, I don't think this is the case right

now. But for a long time, you get two free night certificates if you're applying on the Wi-Fi at a Hilton property instead. So it's worth checking that out if you're staying in a Hilton property and seeing does it show me a different offer for the card. If you value the free night certificates, it might be worth checking for that now and then if you're not looking to do this like right now but keeping this in mind for the future all right so you could earn a bunch of free night certificates you can earn a bunch of hilton points we've talked about now so once you have your free night certificates and you have your hilton points the next step is how do i find availability at these places yeah so some of them um some of them are widely available but but a number of them, if you go and just pick a specific set of dates and look for your free nights, you are not going to find them because a lot of them are small properties.

They only have so many rooms designated as standard rooms. I think there's some that probably only have one room in the whole place that's designated as standard rooms. I think there's some that probably only have one room in the whole place that's designated as standard room. And so the chance of finding availability on just one set of dates can be hard. Now, luckily, Hilton does let you search in the calendar to see when free nights are available. But now tell us about this, Nick. You said that, I think I had a tick there. I was like, yeah, tell us about this and tell us how it varies from desktop to app. Well, I have to assume that this might be somewhat glitchy.

So this piece of advice may not age well over the long haul because maybe they'll get this all fixed. But at least as of the first few days after the launch, the calendar function just is not working on the SLH properties. So if you're used to using that availability calendar with a flexible date search to look just page month after month and see, you need to drop that habit for the SLH properties for now anyway, because it's just going to say they're not available. And so if that's all you did, then you may have missed the availability that was there. Also on desktop, I have found that lots of properties have shown not available, even though they are available if you search in the app. And I think

that there is some perhaps variance in this where some might show up on the desktop and not on the app and some in the app and not the desktop. So I think the takeaway is search in both because, again, I found places that I thought weren't available at all because I had been looking at the desktop and then I happened to look on my phone and they were or actually when I started writing the post about it, everything was available. And then people were commenting, saying things weren't available. And I was like, what are you talking about? I pulled out my phone. I looked at it.

I'm like, that property is available. I'm looking at it right now. And so then I thought to myself, oh, I wonder if they're searching on desktop. Let me just look and see what it says there. And that's, I think when I stumbled on the fact that, oh yeah, desktop, it says it's not, but in the app it is. And I knew they were available because I was able to book a few of them. So, so it's worth checking both. Also, some properties seem to have a minimum night requirement. So like that sail rock property that looks amazing in Turks and Caicos, I think it has a three night minimum because I haven't found it available for anything fewer than three

nights. And even when I find a three night stretch available, it's not available for one or two nights. So that's another tip. Right, right. And in fact, I'm going to talk about that exact property in a moment because if you strike out finding nights available with the Hilton app or the desktop or both, another option is to use various tools that exist. And one of them is called rooms.aero. That's rooms.a-e-r-o. It's free unless you want to do alerts. You could use it completely for free.

Go to that site, click the menu that says hotels and pick Hilton. And then search. You need to already know the name of the SLH property you're looking for, but search for it by name by clicking. And yeah, once you find it by searching by name, there's a button that says find rooms. So you click that and it'll show you a list of all of the nights that are available and how much they cost. Now, it's going to show you even the premium room rewards, which you'll remember we mentioned earlier aren't good value for your Hilton points, and you wouldn't be able to use free night certificates at those. So what you could do is you can, if that happens, you can filter in rooms.area. You could filter to points less than

150K or there's various thresholds, but picking points less than 150,000 actually means less than or equal to. And that way that'll eliminate most of that noise of all those premium room awards. Thank you. And here's what I love about this tool. And I saw this by looking specifically at that Sailrock Hotel, which is what in Turks and Turks and Caicos is that where it is? Caicos I don't know how you pronounce it and it actually rooms.ero actually showed me a message like I didn't see any rooms when I clicked

into it any nights available let's put it that way but there was a message at the top that said this hotel appears to release more award availability for multi-night stays likely via a minimum night requirement if you only need a shorter stay consider booking a longer stay and attempting to shorten it so all I had to do was I check there's a night's drop down at first I change it to two and still nothing changes toanges to three instantly. Hundreds of results show up.

This hotel, at least this morning before we recorded this, was wide open for bookings. Widely, widely available. And that's astounding because this is a very expensive resort. Yeah, it looks amazing. And a lot of people said, oh, I can't find it. I can't find it. And yet, like you said, widely available for three night stays, surprisingly. And I found that to be the case for other SLH properties too, where I was like, wow, I'm surprised at how available these places are. I don't know if that'll last, but enjoy it while you can.

Yeah, exactly. So boy, so that's great news. news and i was just i was also just astounded by rooms.air how easy it made it now you're not going to see you're not going to see it in calendar view so it's a little awkward looking at a list of dates instead of you know at a calendar but given how easy easy and fast it is to search for availability. I'm loving it. And the fact that it's free to do as much as I just said is terrific. There are some features that I don't know what all the features are where you need a pro account. Now, the pro account is that this tool is built by the same people who make seats.arrow. And so you need that pro account with seats.arrow to get the expanded abilities also with rooms.arrow. One of the things you could do, I believe it's a pro feature, is you could create alerts.

So if the dates you're interested in aren't available or maybe nothing's available and you just want to be alerted whenever something's available, you can create an alert and ask rooms.arrow to send you an alert when that happens. So that's really cool. There's other tools like MaxMyPoint that can do similar things. I don't know that they've rolled out as many of the SLH properties as I'm recording this, as Rooms.Aero has, but that's another place where you can get similar functionality. And there are other tools as well, but those two are my go-to right now for hotel things. awesome that seats.arrow is giving you the tip, like tipping you off to the fact that a multi-night stay is more likely to have availability because you just, I didn't know when I was searching places to write the post, I was just trying different things to see, oh, wow, I'm not, I was searching individual dates initially and I wasn't finding anything

available at some places. And I was like, oh man, is there really nothing available? And then it just dawned on me that I know some hotels will do that. And so I started searching two nights and three or five nights, maybe I started at, and then I started trimming it back to see, you know, when does the availability disappear? And so nice to have that tip that this place you're looking at has a minimum stay, because, you know, if you were looking for a two night stay and, you know, you're looking over and over again, you're like, wow, this place is never available. It'd be really helpful to have that tip that maybe I just need to increase by one more night. It really would. Now, Hilton, this time, if you're listening, I hope you are because you should put that right in your interface when that happens. I mean, all hotel chains that have

online award searches, it would be really helpful to see that up front. But in the meantime, Rooms at Arrow does that for you. And that's fantastic. Now, Hilton, if you're listening, my other piece of advice is to go to Hyatt.com and check out their Pay My Way option to be able to mix points and free night certificates, because that's going to be my gripe here, is that I don't know as though it's possible to book a place like Sailrock, for instance, with a free night certificate because it has that three night minimum. And I don't think that you can pull that off even over the phone. I don't know for sure,

I guess, but I believe from a past attempt to do this, I wasn't able to stack multiple. You think so? I'm pretty sure that i booked a uh curio collection hotel once that had a three night minimum in fact yeah no i know this and and uh you i had to i had to call you know hilton which you have to do anyway with their free night certificates yeah and uh they were able to i was able to it, whether it was all free night certificates or was partly with points. I don't remember for sure, but I know there was at least one or two free night certificates involved. So you're going to have to work on that and report back with your results in terms of your experiments for that. Because I know I ran into a situation once where I wasn't able to do it,

but I don't know that I had an agent that knew what they were doing. Because we often say with these kinds of things that phone agents just don't always know. Like we said earlier, you were talking about the American Airlines agent that missed availability on a United flight. It wasn't necessarily malicious. She just didn't probably know it was there. And so the same thing might have happened to me when I tried to put together multiple free night certificates for a situation like that. So worth a call. And if you do try, let us know in the comments, whether it works for you on a property like sail rock that requires three nights in order to book an award to begin with. Are you

able to do that with three free night certificates? I'd love to hear from you. Yeah. And also if you were able to, uh, and it was recent enough that you could remember exactly what you did, which it was too long ago for me to remember the details. That'd be great to hear those details. What I thought you were going to say, if Hilton is listening, is make the free nights certificates available to book online. I mean, yes, yes, Hyatt's Pay My Way is great that you can mix and match points and free nights. But you can't even, you know, do an all free night certificate stay online with Hilton. So they really need to get that fixed. They do. They do. I don't understand.

Well, I mean, I guess I understand why it's the way it is so that there can be some more breakage. But man, I really wish that I could book them online. That's definitely a gripe. I should have aired there. So thank you for bringing that up. All right. I think that more or less ties us up on S.L.H. and ends our main event and brings us to this week's question of the week, which is totally different.

Not about any of this at all. So we'll throw you a different question altogether, Craig. This one comes in from Amy. So Amy says, hi, I'm wondering if you can help answer my question. I got the Chase Freedom Unlimited card in October, 2023. And at the time they were offering double points for the first year. Now to be clear, that offer was expired a long time ago, but that was the offer under which she applied for the card. I called to verify the offer and they confirmed that after I have the card for a year, my account will be credited with the same number of points that I earned in that first year,

effectively doubling my balance. So again, that double offer was to double all the points you earned at the end of the first year. So she goes on to say, but I'd like to go ahead and transfer over the points I've earned so far on the Freedom Unlimited to my Chase Sapphire Reserve account, because of course, Chase allows you to combine points so that I can use them to book travel in the next month. I'm worried that if I pull the points out of my Chase Freedom Unlimited account, they won't be there at the end of my first year, and I might not get full credit for the double. Do you know if the points have to be in the Freedom Unlimited account on my first year anniversary in order to receive the credit or will all the points that I earned on that card be doubled regardless of whether they're there or have been transferred out? Thank you so much for

the amazing service you provide and for answering my question. All the best, Amy. So Greg, does Amy need to keep her points in her Freedom Unlimited account? No, she does not. You should get the doubling regardless of what you do with the points, whether you keep them there or use them all or or move them over. You should be good to go. And the only reason I'm putting should in there is because anytime there's there's any kind of bonus involved, there's always the chance of a computer error. But that has nothing to do with whether you use the points, whether you whether you'll receive the doubling. You will receive them. Yeah. 99% guaranteed. Agreed. Yeah. Chase is tracking how much you're spending and they're going to double the points based on how much you've spent. And you can very easily look at how much you spent all of last calendar year and so far this calendar year and see how many points, figure out how many points you should be getting probably. So yeah, you don't have to worry about that. Bank Computer is tracking that. I wanted to bring this

up because this is also a question that often comes up with the Southwest Companion Pass. And since we've seen new offers lately for lots of Southwest points, I thought it was worth a mention for this because the question comes up often, do I need to have all of the points in my account? You need to earn 135,000 Southwest points in a single calendar year to get the companion pass. Or if you have one of the credit cards, you only need 125,000. And people often ask, do I need to make sure I have all 125,000 in there at once? Or can I start spending them? And the answer is you can start spending them. You just need to have earned them in the calendar year. They don't need to sit there and wait special. And that's the

same with other issuers to like discover and some of their cards offers a double cash back at the end of the first year. Same thing. You can use the cash back as you go. You don't have to wait until the end of the year. And they're not going to like look at your cash back balance and be like, oh, that's how much we need to double the computer system hopefully is keeping track of all that. So I thought it was worth a mention because it's something applicable in other situations too. Absolutely. All right. Thank you guys very much for listening today. If you enjoyed this show and you'd like to get more of our stuff in your email inbox each day or each week, you want to go to frequent miler.com slash subscribe to join our email list,

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