Frequent Miler on the Air - Hot Hotel Card Offers | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep264 | 7-19-24

Episode Date: July 19, 2024

There are a bunch of hotel credit card offers that are bigger than usual right now, some of them pretty surprising. That's what we'll discuss in this episode of Frequent Miler on the Air. (01:20) - Booking Hilton stays with a mix of points and a free night award - just watch for a 3 night minimum. (Mail Bag) (05:32) - Read how to find SLH hotels bookable with Hilton points and free night certificates using Rooms.aero here (06:29) - At least TWO FM followers got the Wyndham Hotel Pass! (What Crazy Thing) (09:48) - Marriott Bonvoy promotion for credit card holders (Mattress Running the Numbers) (15:51) - Hertz hurts so good (Award Talk) (19:52) - Virgin Atlantic points can't book Air France / KLM "due to a system issue" (Award Talk) (22:22) - JetBlue to introduce Mini-Mint (regional first class). 2026 (Award Talk) (24:45) - Cancelling SLH stays booked via Hyatt: You have to email (but even though they responded after the deadline, I had no penalty and got points back) (Award Talk) (29:30) - RRVs (Award Talk) (42:10) - Hotel Credit Card Big Offers (46:19) - Sonesta - Read more about the Sonesta card here (49:26) - IHG - Read more about the IHG One Rewards Premier card here (56:07) - Bonvoy Bold - Read more about the Bonvoy Bold card here (57:30) - Find our "Are you eligible for a new Marriott card" chart here (1:00:20) - Hilton offers - Read more about the Hilton Surpass card here, and the fee free Hilton card here  (1:08:13) - Choice - Read more about the Choice card here and the Choice Select card here  (1: 12:06) - How to max amex multi referrals (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, hot hotel card offers. There are a bunch of hotel credit card offers that are bigger than usual right now and some kind of surprisingly so we're going to go over all the current hot hotel card offers and discuss which is best which ones do we like what do we like about them what do we dislike about them because there's some that have some irritating things about them and uh we'll uh let you know what you know we think uh you should be looking for

as you apply for new cards or not. It's coming in hot. All right, so more on that in a little bit, but before we get to that, let me remind you that you can always find the show notes, rather the timestamps in the show notes, so if you'd like to skip ahead to a specific segment or return to a segment later on,

you can always check the show notes for the timestamps. You might have to expand the description box if you're watching on YouTube or listening in podcast format and that out of the way. Oh, don't forget to like wherever you're watching this. Give us a like, leave us some feedback, a review. We always appreciate all those things. All right, Greg, drag out this week's giant mailbag. Today's giant mail comes from Travis. Travis says, I just listened to your most recent Frequent Miler on the Air podcast. I wanted to say that you are able to book Hilton stays with a mix of points and a free night award. I was able to book the SLH property, SLH is Small Luxury Hotels, property Kalala Island for May 2025 when award space became available. There's a three-night minimum. This is

the part that's critical. There's a three-night minimum to booking at Kalala Island. And I was able to call and book three nights total using one free night certificate plus 300,000 points at 150,000 points per night. Yeah, that is the critical part. And that is awesome. That was a great data point to get. We also got another one or two from readers who had also booked properties that only showed up with multiple nights using multiple free night certificates. So that's great. I love that. So, you know, I had talked to an agent not that long ago who said, oh, well, you're using a free night certificate, so it has to be a one night stay. And I'm glad that that person

was wrong. And it goes to show again, you should call more than once if you hit that person that doesn't know what they're doing. Because if I get that person next time, I know, okay, well, I can just hang up and call again. And hopefully I will get whoever it is that Travis talked to, because it can be done. And that's great news. And to be really clear about what the what we what Nick thought the problem was, yeah, is that there are certain hotels that require if you're doing a points booking require like a minimum length of stay, like two or three nights, let's say, at a time. And so it's just seemed like, well, there's no possible way to book these three night stays, let's say, if you're using any of these Hilton free night certificates, but that's not the case. The reps can do that for you. In fact, I just yesterday before recording this, I found some dates that I could stay at the Hermitage Bay Resort in Antigua, which, oh my God, that place looks incredible. I've been getting out my popcorn and reading some reviews of this place. It's just over-the-top luxury. And Hilton has it for 130,000 points per night, which first of all, that surprised me that it's not 150,000, but I was able to use my free night certificates and they do have a minimum

three nights stay or at least the dates I was looking at, they seem to. And no problem. I just got on chat on the desktop. I logged into my Hilton account, went to chat and I got it booked. So using your free nights certificates via chat. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. That's fantastic. Didn't even have to call. And so how did you know that it had, you said they, they have a three minute minimum or seem to have a three night minimum during your dates. Can you explain, like, how do you know that? Because I feel like for a lot of people that have been looking at these, it hasn't been so easy to find them. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's funny as, as I'm, as I'm stepping back, um, I'm thinking there was another place I almost booked the sail rock resort. And that one definitely had three, three night minimum.

I'm not actually sure about this one, but with sail rock resort,, you could tell if you put in a span of three days and the award is available, but you reduce it to two days with the same check-in date as before, and then suddenly it's not available, that kind of proves that at least for that time period, they have a three-day minimum. And I said it that way because some hotels just seem to have a three day minimum across the board for all time. And that seems to be true for Sailrock Resort, as far as I could tell. But other ones, like the Hermitage Bay, appear to have different minimums depending on, I don't know what it's depending on, but across the calendar, it varies. And I can tell that from the tool rooms.aero, which I wrote a post on how to use that to easily

find these hard to find awards. And it'll show you how many stays are available for one night, how many stays are available for two nights, how many stays are available for two nights, how many stays are available for three nights. And if you see the three-night stays being more, there's more three-night stays available than one-night stays, then it seems that there are at least some minimums across the calendar. Yep. Yep. Very good. Excellent. So some of those that may look impossible are not necessarily impossible. Worth noting that the Hilton flexible date calendar has not been useful for the SLH properties so far. It just isn't accurate. So you can't trust it. If it says there's nothing available, it's probably wrong. Or I shouldn't say it's probably wrong. It may well be wrong.

You need to search individual dates or like read Greg's post so that you can use roomstat arrow and save yourself some time. Yeah. Okay. So that wraps up the mailbag. Let's talk about what crazy thing, what crazy thing did frequent miler on the air listeners and blog readers do this week? Yeah. Well, we had talked about in a past episode about the Wyndham hotel pass and it's like this deal where for a fixed price, do you remember what it was? Like less than $500? Yeah, $499. Yep. For 30 days. You'd get 30 days of stays like almost any Wyndham worldwide. And we talked about how insanely good of a deal this would be if you could travel during the allowed dates, which is up through end of September.

And we encourage everyone listening, sign up. Why not? It can't hurt to, you know, because you're not required to spend the $4.99 if you get picked. But only, do you remember how many people would get picked? Yeah, there were only 25, but we had said, you know, there are fewer win and rewards members than there are Marriott members or Hilton members. So, you know, we've heard from, I think, three people. Three. Three. Who received the email from Wyndham saying they were selected. Three out of 25 of these things for, you know, worldwide, so to speak. Out of all the people who entered, at least three were people that are listening to the show or reading the blog so far.

So that's awesome. So, uh, so there are probably a lot, there were probably more than three of our followers, either listeners, readers, whatever, um, that, that got in here and, and maybe didn't post on frequent miler insiders. Maybe they don't even belong to frequent miler insiders. So, um, yeah, if that's you, please let us know, uh, you know, email us, uh, at, uh, our mailbag and let us know all about it and tell us where you're planning on going. Yeah, I want to know where you're going and how it was after you've gone. I'd love to hear from you. Because, I mean, a lot of these Wyndham properties have not been as widely publicized or reviewed or whatever just because there are fewer people, I think, in the blogosphere writing about them.

So I'm always curious to hear if you find a hidden gem. I mean, Wyndham points can be relatively easy to earn. I filled up my gas tank this morning with my Wyndham earner business card, 8X, at the gas station. So that right there was almost 500 points filling up my gas tank this morning. So I earn enough Wyndham points. And I'm always curious about the places out there to use them. I used some just last weekend, actually for a really nice La Quinta Inn, believe it or

not. But, uh, but anyway, point here is I'd love to hear about other good places to potentially use those in the future. So let us know where you're staying with your hotel. Definitely. Oh man. I, I so wanted to win this. I thought it'd be so much fun to like, just travel around the world looking for like,

you know, high-end Wyndham properties where you could stay for, I can't remember. There was like a limit to how long you'd stay in one property. You'd stay up to 10 at one property, but you could also book two rooms in a night and count that as two of your 30 nights. So, I mean, it was a pretty awesome deal

for the 25 people that got it. It really was. So congratulations to everyone who got that nicely done. Nicely done. All right. Let's talk about mattress running the numbers. So this week's mattress running the numbers. We got a promotion out from Marriott Bonvoy for Marriott Bonvoy credit card holders.

Yeah. So the deal is just register for this promo and you get 200 points. So there's no reason not to register if you qualify. It's only for certain card holders. So we'll get into that in a minute. After you register, if you spend $7,000 by September 21st on the card, you get 10,000 bonus points. If you have multiple qualifying Marriott cards,

you can register each of them. And so you'll get the 200 bonus points for each one one and you could spend $7,000 on each one. And with Amex, you have to have been issued the card before April 1st of this year to be eligible. And you're eligible if you have a Bonvoy Brilliant, Bonvoy Bevy, or Bonvoy Business Amex card. With Chase, you are eligible if the card was issued to you on or before June 20th. So they're more lenient that way. And you'll qualify with the boundless, bountiful, or bold card. So in both cases, these are basically the cards that are still available to sign up new versus each. Each of these issuers have cards that are no longer available to sign up new, but some of us have those old cards. So what do you think, Nick?

Is this worth jumping on? Is this exciting? Jumping might be a strong word. Is it not a terrible deal? I mean, maybe not. First of all, if you've got qualifying cards, you might as well register all of them for your free 200 points because that's a no-brainer. There's no sense in not. And if you've got multiple cards, Hey,

you may, you know, get a few points to top off an account. So I would, I would totally take the free points for registering where I spend on them. I mean, so with the extra 10,000 points, you're talking about what an extra 1.3,

1.4. Yeah. So I was doing quick math there. So, so the cards are in two X, most of doing quick math there. So the cards are in 2X. Most of those cards, I think all those cards are in, maybe not the bold, I don't know. Most of those cards are in 2X everywhere. So you're talking about earning 3.4 Marriott points everywhere.

I mean, that's not terrible. It's not great, but it's not terrible. Would I jump on it? No. If I'm not opening another card right now and I don't have a better category bonus on another card, would I use that instead of a cash back card? I mean, maybe if my Marriott points balance were pretty low, then I might consider it in order to build up some more Marriott points. Why not? Yeah. Yeah. The other thing I looked at is if you

are working towards one of the big spend bonuses that the cards have, then this might be very attractive because that means $7,000 of that spend is more rewarding than usual. Right. So I looked through what are the big spend bonuses for these cards. They're brilliant. You get another annual choice award, which I think the best one is the 85K free night certificate, if I remember right. You get that with $60,000 calendar year spend. I wouldn't personally go spending that much, but if you're working on that anyway, then obviously this helps that a little bit.

I think a more common thing would be if anyone is stuck with it. I'm sorry. If anyone has the bonvoy bevy card which you've made poor choices with your life which requires fifteen thousand dollars of uh spend each calendar year to get the 50k free night certificate then hopefully uh you can spend seven thousand dollars of that during this promo period and then it's more rewarding working towards that bonus. It's a less bad deal. Yeah, the Amex business card,

I mean, you get a 35K free night after 60K calendar spend. On Chase side, where it might be interested is those seeking status, because the boundless card gives you an elite night for every 5K spent. So this is like another, you you know you're getting at least one elite knight from the spend in addition to the bonus points so that becomes uh interesting to those that are like on the edge of getting the next level of status they're interested in um and then chase also has a bountiful card which just like the bevy gives you a 50k free

night certificate with 15K calendar spend. So if you're in one of those situations where you're working towards that big spend bonus anyway, then, yeah, this is I guess if you have a lot of spend where you don't have a card that's going to earn a lot better, then this is a better than usual way of earning Bonvoy points on $7,000 worth of spend. Yeah. Maybe I'm discounting that too much because it's hard nowadays to earn hotel points at a reasonable clip, right? I mean, there aren't very many opportunities to use a credit card to earn hotel points at what we consider a reasonable value because most of the hotel credit cards aren't super rewarding for spend. So it's hard, I think, for most people to earn a meaningful number of hotel points outside of new card welcome bonuses. And those can be tough to stack up for Marriott cards.

You have to consult a matrix to even see if you're eligible for a particular card. So from that perspective, this is a reasonable way of earning Marriott points on 7k spend exactly like Greg said. Yeah. All right. Okay. That wraps that right up. Let's talk about award talk.

So this week's award talk, we got Hertz up first. Hertz, Hertz, Hertz, Hertz. So good. Except it doesn't.

It's so well named. Come on, maybe make it hurt. So good. I mean, the latest, the latest round of things shouldn't even, you know, compared to them putting everyone in prison for renting their cards, this is pretty minor.

But Hertz surprised us all by adding, by making their points even less valuable than before, if possible, by making it so that five years after points are earned, there's just no way to keep them alive. They disappear. And also, they made it, I guess, easier to spend those points by making more days of the year peak price. I mean, not just more, but most of the days are peak priced. I mean, not just more, but most of the days. Most of the days. Are peak priced. Right. Depending on which airport, it's either 68% of days or 70% of days. It was just one of those two different things. Either 249 days a year or 256 days a year is peak price.

So it's a very large peak that Hertz is working on here. There's no gradual peaks here. It's like mostly peaks. And what that means is that you'll pay double the rate for an award. The standard awards are not so standard if they're only available less than a third of the year. And instead, you'll pay the any day rate, which is, again, double the price of a standard award. Right, right. And it's so annoying, too, because there's no easy way to top up your Hertz points. So if you're close to an award that I can extend them short of like actually booking a paid rental because I didn't have a need for one. And I couldn't, I couldn't find any good way. And I actually just let them expire. And I felt bad about that at the time. And now Hertz is making

me feel a little better. I think they're going to take them away anyway. I won't wear another something. That's right. Not give you any good value. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I actually have a couple thousand Hertz points and I actually use some Hertz points not that long ago, I think. But that said, like my interest in the Hertz program was already pretty low and this really wipes it out.

So it's one of those things that like I'll continue to earn points if I rent from Hertz and maybe I'll use them and maybe I won't, but I'm not going to like lose sleep over it because it's not worth the effort. I think it's crazy that they're making the points expire after five years because, you know, if you're somebody that rents regularly, like you're a business traveler and you rent, you know, once a week or more or something, figuring out when, which points are going to expire and them being on a rolling basis, essentially moving forward, just like disappearing from your account

where you're not going to notice them. That really just seems like hurts trying to like sweep that right under the rug and be like, oh, no, no, no, no. There's no points over there. Don't look over there. So yeah, it's not very useful. And of course, the award pricing also is kind of nutty

because so you're going to pay double the cost. So an any day award is 950 points. It's 1900 points for, let me take that back, a standard award, rather the cheap award, the saver award is 950 points. The any day award is 1900 points for a single day. But if you want it to be a one way rental, then it bumps up even more from there. It goes up to 3800, I think, for like standard and double the $7,200.

I don't know, something ridiculous for peak. So yeah, just not very useful anymore. Bye-bye, Hertz. Bye, Hertz. At least as far as your rewards program. Yeah, your rewards program. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, National is so much better in terms of the rewards program.

But of course, obviously, you know, if National is three times as expensive, then you may as well collect the useless Hertz points. So right, right. Anyway. All right. That's Hertz. This is more time than Hertz deserves. So Virgin Atlantic is up next. We talked recently about booking Air France and KLM flights with Virgin Atlantic. You wrote a great post about how to book those via chat. Then I went ahead and did it and booked a few via chat, a couple anyway, were a bunch of passengers and wrote a post about my experience doing that. And then like 10 minutes later, the whole thing broke down and they stopped taking bookings via chat or phone. And they started initially telling people that there was a known issue and that bookings will

be back on July 9th. And I think we did get one success report around July 9th from a reader who said, hey, I booked one. And I was like, oh, great, it's back on. And I didn't think twice about it until within 24 hours, we started hearing from a bunch of readers that said that they're being told now that those bookings won't be back until the start of August. And Virgin Atlantic has updated their website to say that they cannot book any Air France or KLM flights, but they are expected to return at the start of August. And Virgin Atlantic has updated their website to say that they cannot book any Air France or KLM flights, but they are expected to return at the start of August. Yeah. And the big thing that changed from the end-usual point of view is the flights no longer show up when you do an award search. Before and when I wrote the post, all these awards were

showing up and you could force, if you got the right agent even well along in in this process if you got the right agent they were able to like push it through somehow um but now since you can't even see it i don't think there's any way to do it until until this uh is fixed and uh nick and i are a little worried about what that fix might be. Is a fix going to be like... I don't know if I'm fixing it too well. No, we don't want new huge surcharges or just like no award availability. There's all kinds of things that they might do to fix it that are not in our best interest. So we'll have to just wait and see. I will say one thing that gives me some glimmer-ish of hope is that a reader said you couldn't even, I didn't actually check this, but assuming the reader is right, that you couldn't even find cash tickets that included Air France or KLM because they have a partnership. So normally if you're searching a cash ticket via the Virgin Atlantic website, you may be able to book a ticket that includes travel on Air France or KLM.

But the reader anyway had said that those don't even show up anymore either. So maybe there is some issue in the connectivity between the things. Maybe it'll come back and it'll be just like before. But yeah, I'm worried about another no notice devaluation or increase in fees. So we'll see what happens. All right. That's all the news that's fit to print on Virgin Atlantic. JetBlue is going to introduce Mini Mint.

What's up with this, Greg? I didn't even see this. Yeah. So JetBlue, on most of their jets, has no business or first class. It's just all economy. But then on their longer haul flights, they have Mint class, which is a very good business class uh product and and uh they're tired of not being able to collect uh extra money for people who want to fly you know regional first class and so they're gonna they're planning to introduce in 2026 something that is being called mini mint and

you can expect it to be like you know american airlines first class regional first class type of thing uh meaning bigger seat maybe a little maybe some more leg room you can also expect that economy which jet blue had best in class like economy leg room the economy seats are going to lose some because they're not planning on giving up any seats on most of these jets or very few seats. So they're going to be squishing economy closer together in order to make the mini mint space, I believe. And here I was about to say this is a breath of fresh air, but no longer mint. No longer mint. Yeah. I mean, I think this makes a lot of sense for JetBlue. They are losing a lot of potential revenue to their competitors for people more and more. Leisure class passengers are more and more

buying first class and JetBlue doesn't have anything to sell them. JetBlue also doesn't have a lot to offer their elite members in terms of upgrades. And so this would give them an upgrade path and make getting Mosaic elite status more, you know, assuming they allow upgrades, I'm sure they will. It'll make Mosaic Elite status more attractive. And therefore, maybe they'll earn more money from, for example, credit card, their co-brand credit cards, where you could earn status through credit card spend. And so that would be good for JetBlue's bottom line.

Yeah, interesting development there. So we'll see what happens with that. All right. Next, we have canceling an SLH stay booked via Hyatt. So I had to cancel a stay just this past week that I had booked with Hyatt Points a long time ago and forgot about having to cancel and realized the day before the cancellation deadline. So I had to call and cancel this. I thought I went to the email that I got from Hyatt long ago when the partnership with SLH was announced to be ending. And that email from Hyatt from, I don't know, earlier this year had said that before May 15th, I can cancel via Hyatt. After May 15th, I'd have to contact SLH and it included a phone number for SLH.

So because I was within 12 hours anyway of the cancellation deadline, I tried to call SLH or maybe it was a little more than 12 hours. Anyway, I tried to call SLH and I just got a recording saying if it's before May 15th to contact Hyatt. And I was like, huh? So I hit zero and it hung up on me. So I was like, oh, that's odd, but maybe they're just closed because it was late at night. I'll try in the morning. And the next morning I tried and the message was different. It didn't tell me the May 15th thing anymore. But now the message just said to email Hyatt reservations at slh.com, which is the email address that was in the Hyatt thing. And I was thinking at that point, I was like, wow, now I'm like five or six hours from the cancellation deadline. And I don't want to lose my points or get charged for the cash rate for a night at this place. So that made me kind of nervous. So there was also a number in the signature line of a different email I got from SLH with the number in the UK. So I said, okay,

you know what? I'm going to call London because I want to make sure I talk to a person and get this canceled. So I called the London number, same thing, just a recording saying, email us, hyattreservations.slh.com. So I was like, all right. So I emailed and they didn't get back to me until after the, well, after the cancellation deadline, but no cancellation fee. And I did get my points back. So apparently emailing is the way to go. even if you're pretty close to the cancellation deadline. Of course, I felt like I was kind of chancing it at that point. And I can't guarantee that they'll accept that.

But I can say that at least in my case, emailing did work. And at least I thought putting it out there that I had to do that, that calling wasn't an option. It didn't seem I thought was important for anybody who's got those bookings that may need to cancel. So you can plan in advance and not be like sweating it five hours before the cancellation deadline,

like I was. Yeah. And you didn't try calling Hyatt to see if they could cancel it for you? Well, the Hyatt, I mean, I know I didn't and maybe I should have, but Hyatt had said all along that they could only service

those bookings until May 15th. But you think maybe still they would have? I don't know, but I would be worried if I was coming up against the deadline like that. And so I think I would have called to try that out, but yeah, well, let us know. It's very good to know that email works. So, so that's great. Yeah. And then finally, I'm going to add one more thing in that I didn't put in the outline for today. And that is just a quick tip for anybody out there who's been doing the cruise status matching stuff, because we've done a whole bunch of it.

And so we've been planning lots of cruises. And in our case, anyway, we've got family members who want to join us on a cruise or two that aren't doing the status matching stuff. So they're paying for it. And I didn't know a lot about paying for cruises. I've heard people say that travel agents are good for cruise bookings. But I, of course, was somewhat skeptical. Does that really make any sense when I could just book directly with the cruise line? Of course, you know, being a frequent hotel and airline traveler

like I am, I'm used to like, you got to book direct in order to get all the best benefits and the best price and blah, blah, blah. So I didn't think it made sense to add a middleman in. But the short version of the story is if you do have people that are going to book cruises with you and you're not familiar with cruises like I was not, then you do want to find a travel agent, it turns out, because they did do some research. And CruiseCompete.com is a website that we don't have any financial relationship with. So there's no sort of affiliate thing here. I'm just telling you about them because I found it to be useful.

CruiseCompete.com is a site where you can pick a cruise and then you'll receive quotes from individual travel agents. And so they just come in via email. You start getting them pretty soon after. And so then you just see what the prices are from those individual travel agents. And I was really surprised at how much cheaper it was. Like one of the cruises was almost $600 cheaper through an agent and included some onboard credit versus going directly with the cruise line. So, so if you are booking paid cruises for other folks that are joining you on your free cruises, then, uh, I would recommend using something like that. Cause everything I read said, Oh, travel agents are better, but find a good reputable travel agent. I'm like, how do I do? I don't use a travel agent. How do I find a good reputable

travel agent? And cruise compete worked out to be pretty good for that. Good to know. All right. All right. Okay. The next part of our award talk is about reasonable redemption values, or we like to call them RRVs for short. But people like to know how much points are worth.

And the truth is there's no set answer because with a few exceptions, usually the value you'll get for your points varies widely based on how you use them and not just whether you use them for like shopping at Amazon or booking a hotel night or an airplane ride, but also within those categories, like if you're using your hotel points to book a hotel, one night you might get great value, another night, even at the same hotel, you might get terrible value. So it's all over the map. So there's no right answer to what our points worth, but we need numbers. And one of the reasons we need numbers is on our website. We show you, for example, for credit card welcome bonuses,

we show you the first year estimated value. And a big part of that is if the welcome bonus offers a lot of points, we have to estimate how much are those points worth to tell you how much value you're gonna get out of that welcome bonus. and so we need a number we need a number to use for those kind of things on our website that's where reasonable redemption values come in what reasonable redemption values are is it's the point at which we think it's reasonable to use your points for that much value or more. So when you're going to book a hotel and it looks like you're going to get,

let's say it's a Hyatt, and it looks like you're going to get a two cents per point value from that booking. And you look at our RV for Hyatt and you see it says 1.7. Oh, that's pretty good. I'm going to get better than that RV. That's great. Anyway, we've been working on updating them all. Most of our hotel, our RVs were, you know, from a year and a half to two years or older. And we've been updating them all. And we have the results that we're going to go through pretty quickly. So there are a couple increased in value from what we had before. One, Wyndham, our latest calculation, 1.01 cents per point. And I guess I should step back and say, how do we do these calculations? How do we figure out these RVs? We look at a number of US cities, US locations. We pick certain dates. We look at a holiday weekend, a midweek stay,

and a weekend stay. We pick three popular hotels in each of those locations to look at the cash cost versus the point cost. And we record all that data across a whole bunch of stays. And then we pick the median, which is the value at which half of the bookings get that much value or worse, and half of them get that much value or better per point. And so with Wyndham, you have a 50-50 chance of getting, let's just call it one cent or better value from your Wyndham points. And that's up from 0.88 before. Yeah, that's great. I'm not surprised to see Wyndham increase because I think, you know, there've just been a lot of opportunities. And keep in mind here that that's the RRV if you're paying the full price for an award. If you have a Wyndham credit card,

you're going to pay 10% less for your award. So you're going to be getting even better value on average. I used Wyndham points last week and the hotel I used them at, I got like 2.6 cents per point. Even if you compare it to like the next best hotel that I would have maybe booked with cash, it was still over two anyway. So, and that's thanks to the 10% discount, it would have been a little bit less without that, but I get a 10% discount because I have a Wyndham credit card. Yep. Yep. Next one that got higher value than before is Sinesta. Now that's a little deceiving because our value before was sort of a finger in the wind because we hadn't done the data collection before with Sinesta, but

we did now and we came up with 1.06 cents per point, which is pretty interesting because other than Hyatt, there's no other hotel point that we track that's worth more than that. Right. That's really, really interesting, isn't it? Because Sonesta is a program that wasn't even an afterthought until they came out with a new splashy credit card offer. And it just goes to show the marketing that comes out of that, right? Because it's a program we totally... Sonesta? What? Who? Where? Do they even have any hotels? I don't know. It was definitely just goes to show the marketing that comes out of that, right? Because it's a program we totally, Celeste, what? Who? Where? Do they even have any hotels? I don't know. It was definitely a program that was just not anywhere near our radars. And now all of a sudden,

not only is it near our radars, but we're like, oh, wow, those hotel points are actually really good. Yeah, absolutely. And then we had two chains where the point values went down. First up, Hyatt. Hyatt was previously at 2.1 cents per point. Now we're seeing 1.7. You might look at that and say, oh, Hyatt points have devalued a lot because that's a pretty big dip. On the other hand, keep in mind that before we measured it at 2.1, I think our previous was like 1.6, something like that. So the 2.1 almost feels like a COVID induced outlier to me, that cash prices were unusually high during the time we did the data collection is what I think happened there. Yeah. I think the last data collection was basically like the first summer of revenge travel as they called it. And so yeah, prices were particularly high.

And yeah, you're right. It was, I think 1.65, maybe something like that. It was less than 1.7 before that big spike in hotel prices. So yeah. and to be clear, the end of the partnership with SLH probably had little to no influence at all on this because we're just looking at U.S. cities and it's basically cities. And if there were any SLH properties in the analysis before, it was like probably one or two. Yeah, I doubt there were any. There are so few SLH properties in the US that participate in this. And so, yeah. The other one that went down was Marriott. I think we talked about this on the show before. The new value is 0.7 cents per point. It's down from 0.76. So a little slippage there. 10% almost, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What's, what's unchanged is what's

surprising is, is that three of the programs barely changed at all. Um, Hilton stayed rock solid at 0.48 cents per point. Um, choice, uh, went from 0.68 down to 0.67. I mean, hardly call that a decrease. It could be a rounding error. IHG, very similar. Went from, it actually went, did I write this down right? Yeah. I think I wrote it down backwards, right? Okay.

Maybe you did, yeah. It doesn't really matter. It said about 0.62 or 0.63 my notes are uh are wrong here but um anyway it it changed by 0 point by 0.01 um now that one so anyway you know one one part of this that's interesting is how stable because this is over like years that right that these median point values have stayed the same, which is to me just really surprising. IHG, though, is particularly surprising because a number of blogs have reported that there seemed to be a big devaluation recently in IHG point value. And we collected our numbers after these blogs reported

that and part of what drove us to do the analysis when we did was because of those reports we're like oh we better go see how bad has it gotten and we're like oh it hasn't actually changed as far as we know um so uh i have some theories about why that might be. All right. Yes. What are your theories? I'm curious what you think about that. Yeah. Well, before I say, do you have any ideas, Nick? What comes to your mind when you see that? No, I don't know if I have a good theory. I think that there's probably some sample bias in terms of which hotels people have picked out and looked at and demonstrated that quote unquote devaluation. And I think it's not surprising to me that two out of the three of the ones that are unchanged

are, and Marriott is, you know, while I said 10% devaluation, it's still only six hundredths of a penny difference. So it's not like a large difference still there either. And it's unsurprising to me that those aren't very different because they're dynamic. The awards are priced dynamically. So of course, some places are going to be, you know, like if you're doing that, then probably in a computer system somewhere, somewhere, someone has programmed in about how much value they generally want you to get out of your points. And so it's not totally surprising that it would be relatively even there. But I'm not sure. What are your theories here?

Well, you mentioned selection bias. I think that's probably a big one. And I think that a lot of people had found IHD properties that were giving them very good value for their points. And those properties probably have been suddenly priced higher in points. And the fact is that would not change the median because the median is the mid value. And so if these that were like way, way high in the point value range get lower, but still only go as low as the median or even slightly above the median, it wouldn't change where the median is. And so that would have no

effect. A lot of the ones people talked about were not within the U.S. We looked only at properties within the U.S., so there could have been a devaluation internationally. There could be season looking at popular summertime travel dates when they saw that their points were worth less, it's possible that they do that. And it's possible they do that intentionally. When hotels are nearly full, they may assign higher point rates to the same hotel.

So there's a lot of possibilities here um to be clear though the analysis that we that we do you include a holiday weekend and a weekend and midweek to try to account for some of that anyway right to to try but it's possible that you know that the particular holiday we chose for this, which was Labor Day weekend, is not as big for travel as some of the other times that happened. Very possible. The majority of points, both hotels and flights from everything that's been reported over the years from loyalty programs and whatnot, the majority are redeemed within the United States. So that's why we try to be conservative.

And rather than look for outlying opportunities abroad that most people are unlikely to go after, we try to be conservative and use, okay, well, this is the way most people are using their points. So this is generally what you can expect if you're a more average traveler. Obviously you can do better than all of these numbers. And you know, I like, I want to, I don't, I never want to redeem for less than these numbers because I know that at least half the time I can redeem better. So I want to be in that top 50%. Yeah. Okay. So that's what's going on with our RVs. So now it's time for this week's main event.

Main event time. Hot hotel credit card offers. So as we were preparing for this show, we noticed that there's a lot of unusually big hotel credit card offers in play as we are recording this show. And we thought it would be fun to go through the biggest of the big ones and talk through the pros and cons and which is best, which ones you should be wary about because there's gotchas to them.

So Nick, do you want to start us off here? All right. So Sonesta, you've got the, we mentioned that they have a hot new offer out, 120,000 points plus an additional 5,000 points for adding an authorized user, I believe. So the 120,000 points after $2,000 spend in the first, I'm pretty sure three months, and then the other five Ks for adding the authorized user also in those first three months. So $2,000 spend can get you 125,000 total Sonesta points when you add an authorized user. That's pretty good when you're talking about points that are worth more than a penny each. So my math is right here.

We're talking about more than $1,250 worth of points on $2,000 spent. That's right. Right. That's right. That's a smoking offer. Next one up, IHG One Rewards Premier. You get five 60,000 point free night certificates, five of them, after 4K spend in, I think, three months. Now, this offer expires uh september 4th so we got some time on that one um we'll we'll talk we'll talk through the pros and cons of that um after we go through all these but uh yeah next up is the bonvoy bold card that one's out with a 60k offer plus a free night certificate worth up to 50,000 points after just $2,000 spend. So 60,000 Marriott points and the 50K free night certificate with $2,000 spend on the Bonvoy Bold. Yep.

This one normally wouldn't have made the huge offer list except for the fact that Bonvoy Bold is the fee-free Marriott card, which usually has a pretty boring and small offer. Next up are two Hilton cards that have very good offers. The Hilton Surpass, 130,000 points plus a free night certificate after a $3,000 spend in six months. So you have six months to do this one, which is pretty notable, I think. And then there's also the Hilton Fee Free card, which gives you 70,000 points plus a free night certificate. And that one requires $2,000 spend in six months. So both of them very easy to achieve that spend, I think. Yeah, I agree. Then we got Choice Privileges out with one of their cards, their fee-free card, I think. The Choice card, is 70,000 points after $1,000 spend, I assume,

in three months. So 70K after 1K, that looks pretty good. And then you got the Choice Select card, the $95 annual fee that's offering 100,000 points after $3,000 spend in, again, I think the first three months. So a little bit more spend, but 30K more points on the Select card. Yeah, yeah. And you know, something, I think it's notable actually across all of these, $4,000 spend is the biggest of all of these that we discussed. That's with the IHG card. Most of them are around $2,000 spend. So, you know, that's just to me notable because when we talk about transferable points cards, which we prefer in general, these days we're often looking at a minimum of $4,000 spend and usually often considerably more than that. So it's kind of refreshing to see lower spend requirements here.

Yeah, these are much more attainable, I think, for a much more average sort of a situation. I mean, $2,000 or $3,000 spend in three months is less than a thousand dollars a month in spend. And I think a lot of people probably spend more than that on just basic regular everyday stuff. Yeah. All right. Let's talk through each of these, each of these cards. So the Sinesta card, first of all, this is the one huge bonus. You can get up to 125,000 points. But Sinestras are not everywhere. I looked at their location page and most of the hotels are in North America and South America. They've got three in Egypt. Interesting. I didn't think they

had any on the other side of the ocean, but there's three. There's three. So if you're traveling in the Americas, it could be pretty attractive, I think. But even then, you'd want to look at exactly where the desirable properties are. I don't have a good sense of that personally yet. And decide if it's worth it for your travel uh, travel, you know, goals, I guess, uh, you know, it should be obvious if you're traveling to Europe all the time, if you're traveling to Asia all the time, this card is not for you.

Right. Right. And I think really Sinesta, the Sinesta card is for you. If you're kind of willing to plan your travel around the good hotel redemption that you found, because these are not good hotel redemption that you found, because these are not like, you know, throw a stone and you'll hit one anywhere. Like you said, you have to just be lucky that one of these is lining up with where you're looking to go, or you'd have to be kind of planning around finding a good one. And like Greg said,

I don't think either one of us has a great handle on where the best of them are. I've heard a number of readers mention properties in the Caribbean. And I know we mentioned that an old Marriott in Kauai became a Sonesta and there are a number of Kemptons that have become Sonestas. So, you know, if you find those places, yeah, then that's interesting. To me, this one seems like a really valuable offer that relies on you being willing to put in the effort to use the points. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, you know, a lot of people, uh, travel mostly within North America. Uh, a lot of people travel mostly within the Americas in the broader sense. And I think if that's one of you, then the chance of this working for you is probably pretty good.

Yeah. So overall good. It's issued by Bank of America. And for any situation that may be good or bad, I hate Bank of America's web interface, but once you get past that, it's not terrible. No, no. Yeah. And I think that I said, if you're willing to put in effort, let me walk that back a notch and say, we found the median to be one cent per point. So it doesn't take much effort if you find a Sinesta property to get incredible value on $2,000 spent. I mean, like I said, $1,250 back on 2K spend. That's pretty good. So if you could even use those at median value

you're doing really well there right right and remember when we when we talked about this card there there's a way to uh get elite status meaningful elite status and keep it uh fairly easily through spend with the card and so um yeah you could do great so yeah for a lot of people that's that's a winner let's talk about now um so 60k 560k certs that sounds awesome right um it does because i can top those off with points right but but but but but you we are told you cannot. What? What? What? What?

A rep from IHG told us these are not top-offable. You know, you can't add points to these. And that's crazy because this card, this is the IHG Premier card, which the annual free night you get each year upon renewal is a 40k cert that's you can add any number of points to it to book a more expensive a hotel that costs more than 40 000 points for the night these 60k certs you can't add points to again that's what we've been told um which makes them way less valuable i mean i i can't stress that enough. Like you, you're going, you know, if, if, if they were top offable, you could, you could stay at a place that's 110,000 points a night and add your points to it at 60 K points, you're, you're going to be hunting for a place that's under, you know, 60 K or less, most of the time it'll be less. So, um, and you don't get to keep the extra if

you book a 40K night. Um, so, so the actual value of this is considerably less than 60K times five, less than the 300,000 theoretical points that it would be worth. Yeah. I mean, or on the other hand, Greg, you can look at it and say, well, this will encourage you to, uh, well, no, but you couldn't even stack them together. I was going to say to not top off your 40K start with more than 20,000 points, but I guess they probably won't even exist at the same time because you don't, do you get the first free night certificate from the IHG card in year one or it's not until after anniversary probably. It's that anniversary.

Yeah. Yeah. Although I guess if you wait to meet the spend, maybe there'll be some overlap and you'd only have to top off your 40K certificate with up to 20,000 points since these are going to limit how you use them. But, you know, it's interesting because if you're somebody who would use these at a place you, you know, five certificates that give you half off an award, it would sound not very exciting. But that's kind of the situation you're in. If you want to use if you would have wanted to have used these at places where you can top off with points. So it's a weird it's a weird offer. The 60K non top offable starts as a weird offer.

So it might be really good if you find a great place that's 60K or less. The problem is you don't know if it's going to be 60K or less when you want to travel because it's dynamic. And so by the time you've earned these, who knows, maybe you'll be able to use them at the property that you'd like, or maybe they'll have increased their price and you won't be able to. And that stinks. Yeah. Yeah. So tread carefully, I guess, with this one. There's other things to consider here. This is issued by Chase. So Chase has the 524 rule, which says if you've opened five or more accounts in the past 24 months, you might not be personal IHG card, even a different type of IHG card, then you're not going to qualify for getting a new one of this. I also want to point out that there's a business card. It doesn't have this same offer, but you might prefer it in general.

It's almost identical to this card, but you can get the business version, even if you have a personal IHD card. So if you want to keep, like if you have the old select card that has that 10% rebate on point redemptions, you might want to keep that. And you might want to get the IHD premier business card, which the current bonus is for points, not these free nights certificates. So there's several reasons you may not be able to get this card and you might not want this card. And then there's that 60K non-toppable restriction, which otherwise, if it wasn't for that, I'd be pretty gung-ho on this offer. You know, and I think the offer is better than we're making it sound. I think that we're both kind of disappointed with the untaffable nature of the certificates. But if you take the 60K certs times five, it's 300,000. We said you shouldn't value it at 300,000 points,

but just for a second, let's say, okay, you could buy 300,000 points for about 1500 bucks when they're on sale because they tend to sell them for half a cent per point on sale now and then. So this has to be worth less because the points are obviously worth more. They're more flexible. You can use them for higher end properties. You can use them for fifth night free or fourth night free rather if you're a card holder, et cetera. So obviously these certs are not worth $300 each. It doesn't matter how you use them. You use them in a much more expensive property. You could have bought these points for no more than $1,500. So you've got to adjust downward there somewhere to some extent. But if you would value the certificates at $200 each, which probably is

not unreasonable, getting five of them is still worth maybe a thousand bucks to you. And that's not a bad return on spend so even though we're kind of ho-hum on this offer and aren't as excited as as we are about some of the other ones it's still a pretty valuable offer sure for a hotel that's pretty good it's valuable but the the chance of breakage meaning where you wouldn't actually even use all the certificates yeah is is uh reasonably high depending on how much you travel. So I really dislike that part. I would take like occasionally they do a bigger points offer like 180,000 points. And I think I'd prefer that personally over this 560K nights.

Unless I had a property in mind that I could see is usually less than 60K a night and can book it. Keeping in mind another thing, you don't get to use, the card offers fourth night free on award stays, but you can't use that when you're using free night certificates. So that also- That's actually a really good point. So 180,000 points could already get you three nights, right? So that'd be enough if you were a cardholder, that 180K points already get you three nights right so that'd be enough if you had if you were a card holder that 180k points would get you four nights at a 60k property right yeah yeah so so this is adding one more than what the 180k offer at best right so actually through that lens i look at and

say yeah i guess that 180k offer that would be far more flexible and probably the better offer. Yeah. Okay. Moving on. Bonvoy Bold. This is the fee-free Marriott card from Chase. What do you think? What do you like about it or dislike about this deal?

I mean, I like it for somebody who's relatively new and doesn't have a lot of spend. I think, you know, particularly for like maybe a college student that doesn't have a ton of expenses and is just looking to kind of build a relationship with Chase, maybe this is a good deal because it does require very little spend and comes with an abnormally large bonus. So if you're not going to be opening more than five cards in the next two years and you don't want the higher annual fees, you don't want an annual fee at all, maybe from your credit card, then this might actually be a pretty good one to open. I mean, it's probably the best from a no, well, maybe not the best. It's a very good no annual fee option for in terms of a hotel card bonus. So I like it

for that. I like it because of course, having any Marriott card open gives you the chance, any chase consumer Marriott card open gives you the chance to potentially upgrade to a Ritz card down the road. If, and when that becomes attractive to you and lots of people like to have that lane open. So nice to have that with no annual fee and a decent bonus. Uh, I don't know where this fits in to the Marriott rules though. Like A, I don't know what cards you may already have that might prevent you from getting it. And B, I don't know what cards this may prevent you from getting in the future. So you tell me, Greg, the frequent miler. I do not know off the top of my head. We have a post about

are you eligible for a new Marriott card? And you can look at the chart there and figure all that out, but it's too complicated for me to keep in my head. Marriott and Chase and Amex work together to make horribly complicated rules for which cards you can get based on what other cards you may have or have smelled. And so, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I could see why this would be attractive to some, as Nick was saying. And so, yeah, if you want to get into...

I think either... I think there's probably two scenarios if you're looking for basically two nights at a mid-tierish uh marriott then the the welcome bonus on this would get you that um and uh and if you're looking like long term you want to eventually be able to upgrade to the ritz card this is a good way to do it because in the meantime you're looking long-term, you want to eventually be able to upgrade to the Ritz card. This is a good way to do it because in the meantime, you're not going to be paying an annual fee because this card has no annual fee. So this could be a good way. If you're not that worried about the annual fee, you might be better off holding off for the next Envoy Boundless card, which is the $95 Chase card, because that periodically

has really good offers. It doesn't have a great offer as we're recording this, but good offers come every few months on that card. Yeah, I don't personally have any interest in this card, A, because I wouldn't be eligible, but B, even if I were, that's why. I would rather get a much better offer, a much more valuable offer on the boundless card. And then just if I don't want to pay the annual fee long-term, downgrade to the bold next year if I don't want to pay the annual

fee again. Personally, I would certainly pay the $95 for the first annual fee for an offer. I think the boundless, we occasionally seen like five 50 K free night certificates. So, you know, getting four more of those for $95, I think is a pretty darn good trade. So I would be more apt to go after an offer like that in the boundless too. I agree. I think that there's a crowd for this, but it's, it's limited. The difference though, is that the bold offer only requires 2k spend. The boundless offers tend

to require a lot more spend than that. So that's something to consider too. I could totally see this being just right for like students or, you know, people just starting out kind of in their career. Okay. Next up, we've got the Hilton cards. So let's start with the fee-free Hilton card. 70,000 points plus a free night certificate after $2,000 spend in six months. So again, we're just talking about like if you're just starting out. I mean, this one's super easy. This one's better, in my opinion. It's super easy.

It gives you plenty of time. And the free night certificate, unlike the Marriott one, is not capped. But you can stay just by any Hilton property anywhere in the world. Now, you may not have enough points for two nights at that place because of the fact that you're not going to earn a ton of points. The 70,000 points that this comes with is not going to get you a second night at the top tier Hilton property, but certainly not bad. And if you do spend on the card for a little bit and accumulate enough points for two free nights at one of those top tier places you could get a

significantly nicer hotel stay out of this than with marriott offer yeah yeah exactly and um you know probably a lot of people who have already stayed at hilton's probably have earned some points might have a might have 20 30 000 points in their account whatever and so this would add to that and then staying you know you might not have enough to stay two nights in like the top of the top kalala island 150 000 points a night property but you might be able to stay in a in a you know very high-end uh conrad Waldorf Astoria hotel pretty much anywhere else in the world, except in the top of the top places. And so that could be really fun. Or even just stay in New York City in a place that's more mid-tier, but the prices are out of control and you'd be able to cover two nights there. Yeah, for sure. For sure. But even more interesting, I would say, is the Hilton Surpass card offer

because that card comes with both the free night certificate and a really useful chunk of points, 130,000 points. Am I wrong? Would you not go for this over the no fee card if you were comparing here? Well, it's funny that you ask because we talked about this on a previous podcast where I was talking about my strategy for jumping into the Hilton ecosystem. And I had started with the idea that I would get the fee-free card. And you argued for the surpass card.

And I thought about it a lot and i i decided you were right um because one of the advantages of the surpass card was that you could not just get a bigger welcome bonus but um you the one of the features of the card is with fifteen thousand dollars spend you get a free night each year. And so the 3K spent to earn the welcome bonus gets you a tiny way towards that 15K spend. And then 12K more gets you another free night. So I had done that, I don't know, a month or so ago. And so now earlier in the show, I mentioned that I booked, uh, this very expensive SLH property with three free night certificates. One was from my, um, Hilton business

card before that no longer offered that. And, uh, two were from signing up for this, uh, surpass card. So, uh, that worked out very well for me. And then you'd have enough points after meeting the welcome bonus spend that you probably could spend a fourth night if you had time for it. So yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's that's that's pretty awesome. Certainly, if you would be able to do the 15K spend. And we talked about this recently and we had a reader call us out on the math on this. We should discuss one one of these days too. But we said if you were to spend it at grocery stores

and restaurants where you're in 6X, then you're also after your 15K spend going to end up with almost enough points for another night too. So really, I think the surpass card has a lot of potential right now. And that offer again expires July 31st. So there's not a lot of time left on that offer. I haven't seen a similarly good offer in a long time. This card every now and then on Hilton Wi-Fi used to offer two free night certificates, but I hadn't seen that in quite a while. And I hadn't seen one quite this good in quite a while either. So 130,000 points and a free night certificate after 3k spend in six months. Again, that's only $500 a month in spend. So it's not a wild spending requirement. And it gives you quite a bit. Now this one does have the highest, I think,

annual fee of any of the hotel cards that we talked about today, right? Because I think this one's $150 a year, which I think is more expensive than any of the other ones so far. So that's something to consider. Is it worth paying $150 for that for you? I mean, I think if you're going to use the free night certificate, well, yes, but it does rely on using the free night certificate well. That's a great point. Now you can get that money back by spending $50 each quarter with the card at Hyatt Properties and they'll give you- Certainly not at Hyatt Properties. Not at Hyatt, at Hilton Properties. You could be at a Hyatt property and send money over to the Hilton somehow.

Good. At Hilton Properties and there's a, because there's a $50 quarterly rebate so you could get, you could actually earn a slight profit over the course of the year by doing that over the annual fee.

But you're right. You have to be willing to put out the $150 a year, which is not that much more than the $95 cards in this group. No, it isn't. But you're right. It's more. Okay.

Yeah, I mean, for that person that's kind of, do I go no annual fee or do I go with a surpass? You have to know that. It is more expensive than most of the hotel cards. But the other thing we should have mentioned, I didn't even think about this before, is that there still is no is more expensive than most hotel cards. But the other thing we should have mentioned, I didn't even think about this before, is that there still is no family language on the Hilton cards. So if you have an Aspire card, you can get the Surpass or the No Fee card. And so that's the other thing to consider. Are you eligible for these different

offers? Yeah, you are potentially anyway, unless you already have one of them or have had it before, in which case you may not be eligible, or you may be. So it usually says you may not be eligible. It might be worth giving it a shot anyway in some cases. Not that I think you're going to get a second surpass if you already have one, but I'm saying if you had one in the past, it might still be worth trying again. Yeah. The nice thing with Amex is if they don't think that you're eligible, you'll get a pop-up as you're trying to apply telling you that you're not going to be eligible for the welcome bonus, but do you want to apply anyway? And you could just say no and cancel out and then there's no harm, no foul. The application doesn't do anything to

your credit at all. And so, yeah, the other thing to know is that Amex says if you already have five credit cards or more, they're not going to approve you for another one. So if you have five credit cards, you would have to cancel one before applying for this to be able to get approved. And by credit cards, he means not the pay over time cards so and we're only talking about amex cards not not cards from other issuers good point so five or more revolving credit limit cards so the way to to kind of know the difference is if your card has the image of the centurion in the middle like the platinum or the gold or the green those don't count towards that five limit but if it has something else in the middle of it the platinum or the gold or the green, those don't count towards that five limit. But if it has something else in the middle of it, then it probably does. That's general. Although I just realized that the blue business plus now has the centurion in the middle too,

doesn't it? So it doesn't work. It used to work. It redesigned that card at some point, no longer works. So I take that back. That's not how you know, platinum, gold, green, those cards do not count towards the five limit. There you go. And then, let's see, lastly, let's talk about the choice cards. So there's the no-fee choice card, which gets you 70,000 points after 1K spend, and the select card, that's a $95 card, that gets you 100K points after 3K spend. These are issued by Wells Fargo. What do you think? Should we go after those? I mean, should we? That's hard to answer, but choice points can be valuable. I think my hesitation here is that you could get the Wells Fargo Autograph Journey or the City Strata Premier and transfer those points one to two to choice. So you could get a better offer if you just want choice points.

You could open one of those transferable currency cards and transfer over and end up with more choice points. But if you've got a good use of choice points and you want to stack those up with the points that you've earned from the Strata premier or the wells fargo autograph journey or whatever then you know maybe these are good offers but not great offers they're not nearly as good as the other ones we've talked about yeah i totally agree um all right so uh boiling it down i think just looking over the things i think we're most most excited about the Hilton Surpass offer of all the ones we talked about. The next might be, what do you think? Is the next one the Sonesta card?

I think so. I think so. Even though it does have to line up with your travel plans, but man, it's a lot of value for very little spend. And if you were to do that in two-player mode, if you're married, two people, two married couple, player one and player two were both to get it, then you're looking at like $2,500. You'd probably spend a better part of a week anyway at a lot of different Sinesta properties with very little spend compared to most hotel card offers that would give you that much. So I think that one's pretty interesting. And it also kind of, I don't know, it gives you some chance for discovery, right? You can discover that hot new Sonesta property that nobody else

knows about. So there's some element of fun in that too. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think most of the properties are 30K points or less per night so you're talking about four nights each and so you're talking about at least at least eight nights at most of the properties uh if you do it in two-player mode so um pretty pretty impressive uh bonus there and i could totally i'm still um thinking about this i haven't pulled the trigger yet uh i know tim has he's he's uh signed up for these this car and i think maybe his wife did too um and i'm tempted like i'm thinking like wow next time i go to hawaii could could we just use these points to stay at that that property in kawaii that used to be a marriott um and you know totally for free. And that would be pretty cool.

Anyway, that's still out there. I may very well pull the trigger on that. I probably won't because I have status with Hyatt and I have status with Marriott. And so seeking out a Sinesta to not be able to use the points and free- freelance certificates and everything that I have with Hyatt and Marriott already seems unnecessary to me. Uh, you know, like it's

interesting and exciting, but I already have Wyndham points too. If I really want to, you know, go off the grid, so to speak, and, and, and to use a program that I don't use often, then I think that's the one I would look to next. So I just don't feel like I need Sinesta at this point. But I think that once you stay at a great one, that's going to, and you write about how awesome it was, then I'm probably going to be jealous and wish that I had gone after the Sinesta offers. So maybe you should do that before September 4th, please. Well, hopefully Tim will do that sooner rather than later. We'll see. Hopefully. All right. I think that wraps up this week's main event and brings us to this week's question of the week. This week's question of the week came in from, I don't know how to pronounce this right. Is it Gershon? Gershon? It came in from a reader via our giant mailbag,

which we always mention at the end is mailbag at frequentmiler.com. You can send us an email if you got an email. But this question came in and said, I'm not sure. I'm sorry, but this is the right way to ask it. Here we go. I have an MX blue business plus, and I added my wife as an authorized user about six months ago. She also has a personal MX platinum card. I would like to transfer her 210,000 MX points to my MX account with her blessing, of course, and thought that I could do so by having her transfer the points from her personal MX Platinum to our combined MX Business Plus, Blue Business Plus account. I've spoken to two MX representatives and they say, they both say she cannot do any transfer from her personal account to the business account. Do you have

any suggestions on how her points can be transferred to mine. So what do you think, Greg? All right. Well, so the reps were right, but it's not because she has a personal account and you have a business account. It's because you're different people and Amex doesn't let you move membership rewards points from one person to another, except for one really dire circumstance.

If a person dies, there's a way to get points to move, but I don't think your wife wants you to take that kind of action in this situation. So what you can do though is since she's an authorized user on one of your cards, that makes you eligible to transfer your points to her frequent flyer programs as needed. Now, if she adds you as an authorized user on her account, and it could be a free authorized user as well, you don't have to do the paid one, then I think it takes like 90 days before this kicks in. But then you'd be able to transfer her points to your frequent flyer programs. And so that way you still get good use out of the points. But yeah, you're not going to move her points to your account.

Yeah. Some issuers make that really easy. But Amex, it's just by social security number. Your points are your points. And so you can, again, transfer them to an authorized user's loyalty accounts, but not to their membership rewards account. So here's the solution. Cause I assume you're asking this because your wife has 210,000 points from the platinum card. And I'm guessing doesn't want to pay them $695 annual fee again. And so like Greg's solution would work if you were keeping that platinum card open. But my guess, since you're looking to move the points

over is that maybe you aren't, maybe you just wanted to move them to your loyalty account, which case Greg's got the right solution. But if you are in that situation anyway, where you don't want to have to pay the annual fee again, what your wife should do is open her own Blue Business Plus or her own Amex Everyday card, because those cards both have no annual fee and allow for transfers to all of the partners. So she could open, for instance, her own Blue Business Plus card and add you as an employee card. And then after 90 days, well, first of all, she can get rid of her Platinum card once she has that Blue Business Plus because her points will all stick in her own membership rewards account. She doesn't need to keep the Platinum card open so long as she has another membership rewards card open before

she cancels the Platinum card. That's the key part. Don't wait until after, you know, cancel it before you have the blue business plus that's going to be a problem. So make sure she gets her blue business plus or her MX everyday card. And, uh, and then you can cancel the platinum and add, she can add you as an authorized user on her no fee MX card, whichever one that is. And then she'd be able to transfer to your loyalty programs, whenever it is that you want to be able to do that. Yeah. Yeah. And, and don't forget to, to, to collect referral bonuses and welcome bonuses along the way. So you can refer her from your blue business plus card. Um, and then she, if she wants the blue business plus great, but if she, if she'd prefer the everyday card, um, there's an option when she opens your link to look for personal cards instead,

and she can find the everyday card if she applies and gets approved. You still get the referral bonus, and she gets the everyday card and can qualify for whatever the welcome bonus is for that. Now she's got more points, you've got more points. And by also adding you as an authorized user to that everyday account, 90 days later, you'll be able to move her points to your frequent flyer programs. Yeah. Yeah. And so if that's a little confusing to you, we have a post. So we'll link to that in the show notes about how to maximize Amex multi-referrals because like Greg said, you can use your Blue Business Plus and ultimately refer her to an everyday card

if she wants a consumer card. If she doesn't want a business card, then you can still refer her from your business card. So we'll link to that post to figure out how to do that. Just for a brief mention of other issuers, Capital One allows you to move your points to anybody. So if this is what Capital One cards, it'd be very easy to move them

from her account to yours or yours to hers, there's no limits or caps on that. If it were Chase, it's very easy for to move them to a household member or a business co owner. So you only can do that with one household member, but it would be easy to combine the points with Chase City, it gets way more complicated, you can move them, but then they expire after a certain amount of time. So that's a little tougher. But those are the major transferable currencies and built doesn't allow any sort of movement of the points.

So you can't do that at all with built. True. Yep. Okay. All right. That brings us, I think, to the end for this week. So if you've enjoyed this episode, you'd like to get more of this stuff

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