Frequent Miler on the Air - Hotel Loyalty Wars | Ep 66 | 10/3/20

Episode Date: October 3, 2020

Hotel Loyalty Wars Hyatt and Marriott battle while Hilton and IHG stand back. Will Marriott follow-up with a huge Bonvoy Brilliant offer?  Will Hyatt improve their credit card offer?  How will Hilton and IHG respond? 00:21 Giant mailbag 02:02 What Crazy Thing Did Citi Do This Week? 05:52 Mattress Running the Numbers Wyndham is out with 3 new credit cards. And, guess what? The business card is surprisingly strong! Wyndham card review: https://frequentmiler.boardingarea.com/new-wyndham-earner-credit-cards-review-surprisingly-strong/ 14:26 Main Event Hotel Loyalty Wars: Hyatt and Marriott battle while Hilton and IHG stand back Analysis of the 5 night Marriott offer: https://frequentmiler.boardingarea.com/marriott-bonvoy-boundless-5-free-nights-should-you-go-for-it/ Register now for Hyatt's Bonus Journeys promo: https://frequentmiler.boardingarea.com/hyatt-launching-excellent-new-promo-3x-4x-points-plus-double-elite-nights-but-in-an-unexpected-way/ 40:35 Question of the Week No Post Roast this week, but please read about last week's post roast here: https://frequentmiler.boardingarea.com/the-great-debate-hyatt-vs-marriott/  

frequent miler on the air starts now today's main event hotel loyalty wars hyatt and marriott are battling it out while hilton and ihd are kind of standing back let's get into that soon but first of course we have the giant mailbag to pull out. Drag it out. Let's drag it out. Here it comes. Okay, and? No sound effects this time. I'm always interested to see what sound effects you use for dragging out the giant mailbag. Well, that's okay. The audio editor is going to put in some sound effects this week, I think. That's what I heard. Right.

Well, except that our official audio editor is still on paternity leave this week. So maybe next week we'll get double sound effects we'll see so all right this week's feedback uh comes from several readers who listened to last week's show last week you'll remember that we talked about making the show quicker we did uh or getting done uh a bit quicker and we got several bits of feedback i'm gonna just read a couple couple of them uh larry k says no need to rush in my view i like one hour and uh jeff says more greg and Nick equals better life. The secret, the secret to life and happiness right there. Exactly.

So I don't know. It's good to hear that people like more Greg and Nick. So we're going to try to do a 24-hour show today. 24 hours. Sounds good. More Greg and Nick. Greg and Nick all the time. Exactly. Make it a reality show.

Let's make it a reality show. Come on. We can do this. Hopefully it won't be that long, but we won't rush as much as we sort of tried to last week. Yeah. Sounds good.

So that then, I guess, that brings us into the next segment, which I'm slowly getting into because I don't want to rush ahead. I want to make sure that Larry – Don't crawl now. Everybody gets what they came for. Okay, so here we go. What crazy thing did Citi do this week?

Citi did something crazy finally, right? They finally got around to it. Not Citi this time. Their partner, same difference. American Airlines is not Citi. And this actually has nothing to do with Citi, even though they are partners with the credit cards. No, but they did do something that we've seen. I think Citi has done similar things before, but I do remember others doing similar things. But this one comes from an email that American Airlines sent out promoting a transfer bonus from hotel programs.

They're offering right now, once you register, a 25% transfer bonus from, I think it's just Hyatt and IHG. I think so, yeah. And that's nice, but they gave an example in the email, and the example was if you transfer 25,000 points, you'll end up with 25% more, so 25,000 miles. As Stephen pointed this out to us, 20,000 hotel points does not, in the best of days, equal 20,000 American Airlines miles, so a 25% transfer bonus is not going to result in 25,000 American Airlines miles, no matter what hotel points you use. I did look up Hyatt's transfer

ratio to American Airlines, just to see if this is interesting. And the reality is with Hyatt, when you transfer 50,000 Hyatt points, you get more miles that way. So typically 50,000 points transferred from Hyatt become 25,000 American Airlines miles. So with this bonus, you get an additional 6,250 miles. And so it's better than the usual two-to-one transfer ratio, but I still don't, for most people, recommend transferring Hyatt or IHD points to American Airlines.

Definitely not. Definitely. So American just totally whiffed there, and whoever was writing the email just obviously didn't know how the transfers work with American. So, which, you know, mistakes happen, but that'd be totally misleading. If you didn't know better, it'd be a totally misleading email, huh? I mean, you could have been totally sucked into making a transfer that wouldn't have been a very good deal. Exactly. I will point out that just because I like thinking about this, I like when there are deals that make possible things that aren't usually possible. And so

normally you can't, well, you can't ever directly transfer Chase Ultimate Rewards points to American Airlines. But through Hyatt, you could transfer two to one to Ultimate Rewards to one American Airlines mile by going through Hyatt first, but now the transfer ratio is better than two to one. So it's sort of, to me, academically or nerdily interesting, not something I'd recommend. Right, right, right. So all right. So that was the crazy thing that American Airlines did this week. And like I said, they're partners with Citi. So it really kind of makes sense that that kind of thing would be contagious, sending things out the wrong way or sending an email that doesn't make sense months after the fact and that sort of thing. So it really does fit into what crazy things that he did this week.

So now that we've got that through, we're going to move on to our next regular segment, which is mattress running the numbers. And this week it's kind of interesting because Wyndham is out with some brand new credit cards. I should say Barclays, I guess, is out with new Wyndham credit cards. There's three new cards, but specifically the one that's by far, I would say the most interesting is the Wyndham business credit card. So what's interesting about it? Why might we want to get it? How does this fit into mattress running the numbers?

Right. Okay. So first let me, let me just say all three of the new cards offer a 10% discount on Wyndham rewards on free night rewards. So the nice thing is even if you get the free card, offer a 10% discount on Wyndham rewards, on free night rewards. So the nice thing is even if you get the free card, your Wyndham points become worth more towards free nights.

So they're all kind of good in that respect. The business card though is especially good because it, I think, easily more than pays for itself. So it is $95 a year, but right off the bat, you get 15,000 bonus points every year. So if you value those points anywhere near where we do with the reasonable redemption value, then those 15,000 points are worth more than the annual fee. So you're doing well right there. And then you have Wyndham Diamond status as an automatic benefit.

And you'll remember that Wyndham and Caesars are partners. And so when you match from Wyndham Diamond to Caesars, you get Caesars rewards diamond status, which you know a lot more about that than I do. So I want to ask you some questions about that in a minute. But I do want to point out that a few months back, people might have said, well, that's no big deal because you could easily match Marriott or IHG status to Wyndham Diamond and then to Caesars Diamond, but you can't anymore. They stopped allowing those matches, at least for now. So if you didn't get on that match merry-go-round that you've written about before, which I didn't, then this credit card is a good way to jump on. Yeah. So I just want to point that out.

And then the card's also actually surprisingly strong for earning on spend. So it has some bonus categories where it earns eight points per dollar. I mean, that's an unusual number in itself. I can't remember ever seeing an eight points per dollar for pretty much anything. But you're getting eight points per dollar at Wyndham Properties, obviously, but also for gas and utilities. And utilities includes things like telecom. So it's pretty broad and a very strong earner. And obviously people who manufacture spend at gas stations might have some interest in that.

And then another play, which we don't know yet if it'll work, but Stephen pointed this out to us, is that Visa Savings Edge. It's a program for enrolling Visa business cards and getting automatic, basically, statement credits for different types of purchases. And Visa Savings Edge has 4% to 5% back at Wyndham Properties, and I think it's 2% back at Chevron, which is gas right so uh if you can enroll and that's the big if if you can enroll this card into visa savings edge then you're not only getting the 8x rewards for both of those categories but you're getting at window properties an additional four to five percent four to five percent cash back and at chevron you're getting an additional two percent cash back. And so that's an awesome return on your spend for, you know, especially, you know, if you have Chevron gas stations around. Wow.

So I was very surprised as I dug into this. I thought I was going to write a ho-hum post, you know, like, nope, there's no Wyndham cards out. If you're a Wyndham loyalist, you might be interested. Which you're saying half tongue in cheek, like, you know, like, oh, there's no Wyndham cards out. If you're a Wyndham loyalist, you might be interested. But what you're saying, half tongue in cheek, like, you know, who's really a Wyndham loyalist, you know, might stay in them and like them now. I mean, nobody's like crazy loyal about Wyndham, are they?

I mean, so. So, yeah, it would have seemed to have been a really, really niche thing. But I'd say now it's not. It's not a niche thing. I mean, it is a niche thing in the sense that you still have to be interested in using Wyndham points, I guess. But there are some nice Wyndham properties and they have that partnership with cottages.com where you can rent some pretty nice places in Europe. You'll pay per bedroom. So it's perhaps a little bit less appealing than it once was. At least I think they still have that partnership

and they do have their vacation rentals as well. So there's a number of different options where it might be pretty appealing to vacation rentals in the United States look pretty nice too. So if you can pick up points at eight points per dollar at the gas station, I mean, just doing my rough math, you know, a couple of minutes of math here that that seems like you're paying less than two tenths of a cent per point if you're doing like kind of traditional manufactured spending type stuff, not even considering the Visa Savings Edge stuff that Greg is talking about. If you're able to stack anything else, great. So, I mean, that's pretty cheap for Wyndham points. It is.

So this isn't really a mattress run. This is a way of getting free nights and other perks just for signing up for a card and keeping it and paying the 95 bucks a year. So before we, before I ask you about Caesars, I think we could, it sounds like we're both giving this mattress running quotes. Right. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. I think so. Okay. It's on my list for my next round of signups. So tell me about Caesars. Like how valuable is that diamond status, or is it? Oh, no. Well, it certainly is. If you're going to stay at a Caesars property,

then it sure is. Because number one, you don't pay a resort fee when you have the Caesars diamond status. So in Las Vegas, that's like 25, 35 bucks a night, something like that at most places. So you won't pay that at all. And that could really add up. I mean, if you say for four nights, you've already beaten the annual fee, so to speak, in which you've saved on resort fees, you don't pay for parking. And really the key benefits are that you get a $100 celebration dinner credit. So you can eat at one of many different restaurants or buffets and you get a credit of $100 towards your meal when you have Caesar's Diamond status. So you can do that once per year. Now it is kind of select restaurants, not exactly every restaurant, but it includes a range and includes a range from

like the buffets to some of the really nice or high end restaurants. So we had a great time with that in Las Vegas last year because I went to Las Vegas, a few of us had picked up Caesar's Diamond status thanks to the status match stuff. So we were able to all use our credits together on one nice meal. So that was a great deal. And then you also get two free show tickets per month. And again, it's select shows. So it's not necessarily the top end of the Caesar's shows, but they don't look too bad. And there was something there that I kind of wanted to see. So yeah. So I have a vague memory. Am I remembering this right?

I thought I remembered you writing a post or maybe it was Steven writing a post that they weren't offering the two free show tickets anymore. Is that? I don't, well, that's news to me. It could just be a bad memory. That's news to me. I don't think I wrote that.

So news to me if that's the case. The other thing that Caesar's Diamond status comes with is a free stay at the Atlantis in Atlantic City. Or not Atlantic City, the Atlantis in the Bahamas, rather. And that, I believe, is a four-night stay. You still do pay the resort fee on that one. So it's not totally free. And you're supposed to gamble.

And I know that a year ago there were some reports of people being told that they were going to get charged the full rate if they didn't do any gambling. And so I don't know. I avoided that. I haven't gotten mad. Who knows when you're going to go to the Bahamas? I'm not sure. So I don't know. I don't value that one super high.

But if you love Atlantis and you go every now and then, then that might certainly be something appealing because you'll save something for sure. So overall, Caesars Diamond status is pretty good. So for $95, getting all of that, getting 8X gas stations, I'd say that, and 10% off on your Wyndham award redemptions, that's a, like we said, two thumbs up. I think that's a good one. Yeah, yeah. It's a winner.

And it won't impact your 524 status because it's a business card, right? That's right. That's right. Yeah, yeah. Sweet deal. Yeah. Sweet deal. Yeah. All right. You ready for today's main event? The main event. Welcome to the main event. So today's main event, as Greg said, Hotel Loyalty Wars, Hyatt and Marriott battling it out. Hilton and ISG standing back. What's going on? So, you know, we've talked a lot about Hyatt coming out strong with all these great overlapping promotions. So, you know, what appears to be points for one stay. But instead, they came out with one of the,

arguably, one of the best credit card bonuses we've seen that I can remember. Not just Marriott credit card bonus, but just in general. And not just hotel bonuses, just in general. Exactly. A credit card bonus, period. Right, right, right.

So for the Chase Marriott Envoy Boundless card, which is their, I think it's $95 a year card, you get, if you sign up and spend $5,000, you get five free nights. And these are free night certificates worth up to 50 000 points per night so these are the same 50k per night certificates you get if you have the ritz card or the bonvoy brilliant amex card but thus you get by signing up for the bonvoy boundless which sort of confusingly is the card that gives you a 35k free night every year upon your anniversary. So for, you know, that's almost the most mind-boggling part of this promotion. Like, I wouldn't have been surprised at all. I mean, I still would have thought it was

a good promo, but if they come out with five free 35k nights, but instead they went 50K. And that was really nice. So, you know, at a very high level, it's just kind of interesting that Marriott's battling for your credit card business while Hyatt's saying, no, we're battling for your real in-bed business. And that seems to be the strategy they're taking at least so far. Meanwhile. Okay, all right. So are we going to talk about that Marriott card now or later? Should I jump in?

Let's jump into the details of that card. Then we'll back up to the big picture. All right, that sounds good. So that Marriott offer, the five certificates certificates five free night certificates worth up to 50k there's some nice things about it there are five certificates so you don't have to use them all together you can use you know two here two there one another time it's that or use them all together of course as greg noted in the post you can't get the fifth night free when you're using the search you got to be using points so you're not going to get like six nights out of that, or it's not quite as flexible as having points. Pretty cool though,

because you could get a category seven off peak. You can get a category six, you can get a category five when it's in peak pricing, which Greg has shown before. Oftentimes when you want to go, they are. So there's a lot of flexibility to that. However, I'm not going to recommend this to people in my life who I think probably normally this would be a great offer for. In fact, my wife said, oh, should we recommend this to so and so and so and so? We have a lot of friends and family that aren't really into the game, so to speak, at all. And I explained the deal and she said, oh, well, that could really help this person or that person. And I said, yeah, but certificates are only valid for a year

and we don't know what's going to happen over this next year. Now in the past, sure, they've been good about extending certificates. I don't know if they're going to be extending all of these. There's a lot of certificates on the books now. We don't know what's going to happen. Yeah. We don't know what's going to happen with that. You can't count on good customer service. And I don't mean that to say that Marriott's not going to have good customer service. I mean that I wouldn't sign up expecting customer service to just be nice and give me an extension. You have to have a plan to use those in the next year. And I feel like right now, it's just too hard to predict whether or not you're going to be able to easily use those to

great value in the next year. There's a lot of great properties if you can travel to them, but we just don't know what's going to happen. So I'm less excited about it than I would be any other time. I mean, the amazing offer, terrible timing. I totally agree. Totally agree. I have some reservations that I've set up prospectively at the Inn at Bay Harbor, which I've written about on the on the blog it's a category five so it's it's one that's standard 35k but it's often 40k a night and um so i you know if i was eligible for this card which i'm not i get, you know, at a minimum 35 K a night value from this. Cause often when we go up, we don't stay for five nights in a row.

So, so I wouldn't really be missing out on that fifth night free issue. And so, you know, from that point of view, it's you know, a very good, you know, it would offset, what, 175,000 points for me, I think, if I did the math right. That's even if they weren't at 40k a night when I was staying. So, yeah, I, let me do the math here 35 times 5 175 yeah so yeah so i totally agree with what you're saying i just i just do think that people who can use it it's actually very good but but don't get me wrong i put a lot of caveats in my post about it saying why you, some people have sort of advertised it as a 250k offer, because 50k times five, but it's not even close to that. No, right? No, definitely not. Definitely not. But I mean, yes, but yeah, like you said, I think that's probably the ideal case scenario for somebody

to consider this somebody who has a property in their backyard, so to speak, within a drivable distance that they're excited about, that they like to go to, that they'd be happy using the certificates at as a backup plan at the very least. I think that type of scenario makes a lot of sense. If I had that, then yeah, I think I would go for this. And to some extent I do because I live within a drivable distance to New York City and I like to go usually a few times a year. But again, right now, I don't know if that'll be the case in the next year. So a little harder for me. But for a lot of people that have that type of situation, I definitely could see this making quite a bit of

sense. So it's an interesting offer. There's no doubt about that. Or if you live in Hawaii, if somebody lives in Hawaii, this is the rare welcome bonus that could be really good for you. Because if you want to go to another island and stay at a place at one of these nice properties, you can do that. Greg showed a number of great places there that you could use these 50K certs at. So there's, I think, some scenarios where it could make a lot of sense, but for most people, I feel like it's probably got to be a pass for now. And that's too bad because there are some great 50K properties. It really is an interesting offer and an interesting way to hook people in, you know, to kind of take the total opposite approach from what I think we probably expected, right? I mean, do you expect

to see something like this? No, not at all. Not at all. This was a big surprise to me. Although, I mean, you know, we did expect to see big offers coming out during this time. And we have. We've seen some really terrific things coming out. And this is creative. This is very creative. Because Marriott knows that not everybody's going to use these. Not everybody's going to use them at 50K properties.

So it's not as big of a cost to them, I'm sure. Not as big of a risk in terms of having all those points out there. So it makes sense. And it's something that you could excite people with by showing them, hey, look at not as big of a risk in terms of having all those points out there. So it makes sense. And it's something that you could excite people with by showing them, hey, look at this nice place you can go or this nice place. I think it's a really smart move on Marriott's end, as good as you could probably do from there. Right. Now, let me bring up something sort of related here. It seems to me that all this time during the time where companies have been introducing promotions to sort of make up for COVID, that with Marriott, we've seen something come out

from the Chase side of the Marriott credit cards before we hear about a similar thing on the Amex side. Am I remembering that right? Like when they did grocery bonuses, I feel like the information came out for Chase first, and then we found out about Amex. I think so, yeah. And then later. Yeah, I think so.

So, you know, Amex has two Chase cards that are available to sign up for. I'm sorry. Yeah, Amex is not selling Chase cards. They don't have any Chase cards at Amex. Anybody who works at Amex that has a chase card, put that in the way, all right? Amex employees are going,

well, we have chase cards, but no. Right, so they've got two merit cards. One is a business card, which I wouldn't be surprised if we don't see anything particularly great come out of that. But the other is the Bonvoy Brilliant, which is their $450 card. And I can't imagine that they're going to sit by and say, we're going to just let everybody sign up for the Chase Bonvoy card and not do something special on the Amex side.

So I think we're going to see something special. I don't know what it is, but I'm looking forward to it. I think that's a particularly good point, not just because they don't want to see the chase kind of eat their lunch, so to speak, but because the people who sign up for that chase card are not going to be eligible for the Amex bonus for quite a while. So, so they're not just like losing in the sense that a competitor has got something compelling. They're losing in the sense that each person who signs up for that chase card

is not going to be able to get a welcome bonus on the MX card. So they're basically losing those customers altogether. So that, that's a bigger, I think bigger reason, a bigger motivator for MX to do something. So I'll agree with you. Initially, when you said that, there was part of me that says, I don't think so, just because

a lot of those ultra premium cards haven't done much yet to try to attract new customers. So I was less in the camp of thinking that they're going to do something to attract such an expensive card. But when I thought about it from the second perspective there, that they're going to lose the access to those customers altogether for a couple of years, then I think it makes more sense that they've got to do something. Now, what it's going to be, I don't know. I mean, what would your prediction be? Because they obviously have to compete at a higher level here with a much more expensive card. So what's the higher level than 550k certs?

Well, I feel like there's there's two directions they could easily go and i mean there's so many different things they could do but the the sort of obvious options for them are to do one is to do five nights but for like maybe 80k certs or 70k certs um so so that they are worth you know, even higher level of categories of stays. That's one possibility. And it would have the same benefit for Marriott as this one does, which is there's going to be a certain amount of breakage that they're going to count on. And people who don't use their certificates before they expire. The other, you know, another obvious possibility is that they do a mind-boggling big points offer, 200,000 points, something, you know. I mean, what would

the mind-boggling big, because I feel like 150 is no longer mind-boggling big, you know, in the same things if you're looking at these 550k certs. So I almost feel like it would have to be 200. And that seems like it has to be be 200. And that seems like- I think it has to be 200K and it seems unlikely, doesn't it? It does. It does seem unlikely. I mean, that's what I'm thinking.

I'm like, they can't possibly do 200K, can they? I mean, if they do, if they get 200K, that would be pretty crazy. It would, it would. And then it would really make me regret that I don't have any Marriott credit card slots available to sign up because that would be an offer worth pursuing. And you wouldn't have to worry about, oh, I don't have plans for the next year because

the points don't expire as long as you have activity every couple of years. So yeah. I don't know. I don't know. It's interesting. It'd be interesting to see what happens for sure. So all right. So Marriott is fighting for your credit card business

and maybe Chase and Amex are going to fight each other. We don't yet know. But at the very least right now, Marriott's out there swinging with Chase to try to get you to sign up for their card. So, and Hyatt, as we've already talked about, large extent, they're doing some great promos, Worth Mattress running, et cetera, et cetera.

So what about Hilton and IHG? Like yeah yeah before before we tackle them let's just one last thing about hyatt do you think they'll come out with a better offer for the hyatt card yeah yeah i definitely do i almost unquestionably because at this point we're getting that part of the pandemic now we kind of predicted a lot of this stuff, like Greg kind of alluded to earlier. Early on in the pandemic, we said there's going to come a point where travel is going to start to be crawling back, but people are still kind of apprehensive and hesitant. And we figured that when that starts to happen,

we'll see some big offers because they're going to have to do something to attract people to these cards that people are like, oh, I'm not traveling, I don't need a card right now, blah, blah, blah. So we're going to see some increased bonuses on the co-branded cards. We had kind of predicted that a while back. And sure enough, that's coming true. I mean, we're seeing that by and large. I mean, one after another, pretty big, cool new bonuses on the travel cards. So I think Hyatt is due here. I mean, the bonus has been the same forever. And if they're going to compete for credit card business, they're going to have to offer something better. So it seems like Chase is in improvement

mode here. We've seen all of the enhancements, the Freedom Flex that came out, the enhancements coming out to the Freedom Unlimited card, obviously a number of big bonuses, rumors about stuff coming on the Sapphire Reserve card maybe in the coming days here. So, so there's a lot of different stuff happening on the chase side. I think the Hyatt bonus is definitely going to increase. The question to me is what does that mean? Like, is it going to be free night certificates? Is it going to be points? How much, what do you think?

Do you have any predictions as to where it'll go? Yeah, no, I, I don't. I mean, I, you know, I don't think they'll – well, I was going to say I don't think they'll do anything to directly compete with the five free nights. But I guess if they took away the point bonus and offered, you know, five category one to fours or something like that, that might be possible. See, I think it'd be more likely for them see in the past hyatt's old offer was two nights anywhere it was uncapped true right so i think it'd be more likely

to see them offer uncapped certificates again maybe three uncapped certificates or something like although they don't have uncapped anymore as a concept right they they have the category one to seven as their high that's true they're taking away those 40K properties and the Miravals and a few random things here and there. Yeah, that's true. Still, I get your point that those certificates, how many of those do you think they would do to try to make that compelling? It'd have to be more than two, right? Right. I think three would probably be fairly compelling in category one to seven category seven properties you can get some really nice expensive category seven properties and

three free nights at a top tier property would probably be more appealing than five nights at a mid-tier property although no yeah but but here's the thing so that's that might be more appealing for us who know what to expect what what can we get from uh right one through seven versus a one through six on the marriott side and we know that oh wait there's peak and off peak over there that's going to cause problems but um an average consumer might just look and say wait i can get five free nights over here and only three over here. I don't know. Yeah, I think that's a good point. I think they either have to do five nights of some sort

or just forget that approach and do more points or a combination of points and cash back, you know, something different to make it attractive. You know, if they do do something, it's going to be really discouraging for all those people who have signed up recently for the Hyatt card. Because I think a lot of people have

in order to prepare for the fourth quarter bonuses, which are better if you have the Hyatt card. And some bloggers recommend it. It's a great card to get if you're a beginner. And so some people probably signed up. Exactly. Bloggers are right so uh exactly so and and the reason the reason it's particularly uh disappointing now is chase does seems to have stopped matching the better offers when they come out they used to if

you signed up recently would easily match you to the better offer, but we haven't heard any positive data points about that for a while now. So I don't know. I think that's just one of those bad timing, you have to say, you know, that's a shame. So moral of the story is, if you haven't signed up for the World of Haya credit card yet,

you're thinking about it, I would wait. Yeah, I would definitely wait. And this is one of those times where I wouldn't even think about the opportunity cost of waiting, blah, blah, blah. Just wait, because I think it's got to get better. I'd be very surprised if they let all of the other Chase cards increase their bonuses and didn't do anything with the Hyatt card.

I agree. So there's got to be something. I think it's going to come soon. That's my bet anyway. And we talked about Marriott offering bonuses on their side. Now, I think that when you said at the beginning that Hilton and IHG are kind of standing back, I think it was unfair because you look at the fact that IHG increased the bonus on their card this week to the 140K offer. Hilton has had good new

bonuses. And in fact, I don't know if we've reported it, but I did see recently that there's been an offer when you're connected to Wi-Fi at Hilton Properties, you might be able to get a link online to go to it, that there's been an offer on the Surpass for two free nights after meeting minimum spend instead of getting points free night certificates, which is kind of more interesting with Hilton because the certificates that are earned before the end of this year are valid for two years and any night of the week. So with a two-year expiration, I'm more interested in free night certificates than I am with a one-year expiration with Marriott. So that's kind of appealing and interesting, two nights at any Hilton property. So that's an

uncapped certificate and valid for two years. So I feel like Hilton and IHG are doing something, just maybe not something quite as good. And in the Hilton case, it's not really a public, easily accessible offer for everybody to find. Right, right. Also IHG, yes, they upped their bonus on their premier card to 140K, which is a very good offer. But I think we've seen similar offers before from them for this card.

And so, you know, they're not going above and beyond to really try to attract the customers and customer loyalty the way Hyatt is doing with promos and Marriott's doing with the card. And it's kind of surprising because in the past, both IHG and Hilton have had particularly strong loyalty plays of like stay, you know, either get, you know, triple or quadruple points or, you know, the stay at this brand and that brand and then get 10,000 bonus points for that plus all these other bonus points. So, you know, that's why I kind of characterize it as it feels like they're just kind of standing back and I don't get it.

I, you know, it feels like... Oh, I think I do. Do you? I think I do. I think I do. What's their plan? So, well, I don't necessarily know that they have a plan, but I get why they're not doing it.

So IHG, their accelerated promotions that they had for a long time, like Greg was just saying, would often be something like, you know, stay a weekend night at Holiday Inn Express and a weekday at a Staybridge Suites and jump up and down and pat your head and rub your tummy and spin in a circle three times and you get a whole bunch of points, right? But right now, people are obviously traveling much less and an offer like that, that seems to be encouraging people to stay at a bunch of different brands and go on a bunch of different trips, just might not have great optics. It might not look great from the perspective of trying to encourage people to do super unnecessary mattress run type travel. Now, of course, I'm saying that we're talking about mattress running. We talked about mattress running high at globalist status. But I think that from a company perspective, it probably just doesn't seem like it's going to resonate with people the same way with the

average customer, the same way that it has in the past. So I feel like that probably isn't going to come for a while yet until we start to see travel become more common and comfortable for people. Hilton, I'm kind of surprised though. Hilton, I'm kind of surprised that they haven't just, you know, tossed the points on, piled the points on, but they are rolling over nights. So, and that's something that not everybody is doing. So that's- Right, right. They're doing some nice things with the, with those free night certificates. I really like that, that they've extended them to be any day of the week, whereas normally they're just weekend, and they extend them for two full years, which some brands haven't, like even Hyatt. I believe if you have a free night,

if you had a free night that expired this year, then they did push that out. But if you have one that expires like January 1st, I think it's still sitting there at January 1st. And Radisson, I don't think has extended certificates that are upcoming expiring at all. I think if they expired in a very short window, they extended a little bit. What Radisson did is they moved them all to expire, like the ones that expired this year, if I'm remembering right, they moved them all to December 31st

of this year. Yeah, it was something terrible like that that's not really useful for anybody. And then I got three of them with my spend on the Radisson card that I got in like, I don't know, April or May, peak pandemic time when I wasn't going to be able to use them. And I'm presumably not going to use them the rest of this year.

So I'm only going to have a few months, maybe in 2021 to use them. And of course, there's no extension at all on those. So, all right. So now in fairness, Hilton has actually had some decent stuff going on. So, you know, we're talking about what Hilton might do. You're saying that you thought that maybe Hilton needs to do something more. IHG needs to do something more in order to attract business. But Hilton right now is offering double points and double elite night credit and those get you to the milestone benefits faster because those extra elite nights count towards the milestone benefits

also so i mean right now they are giving away a decent pile of points like what more does hilton need to do to compete with marriott's five free night certs and and hyatt's promotions that are giving you extra elite nights and extra points like what what should we look for hilton to do to compete stronger yeah well i you know i just think hilton set the bar really high in the past there there have been promotions with triple points and i you know i feel like it went up to quadruple points, and we're not seeing that. And the whole thing, bonus elite nights, I mean, with Hilton, most people shouldn't care about elite nights because you get status from the credit cards.

So, you know, yeah, I guess, what do they give you for milestones? Once you hit 40 nights, you get 10,000 bonus points, and every 10 nights from there, you get another 10,000. And at 60, you also get an additional 30. So you're right. I think that nobody's chasing Hilton status because you can just get it with a credit card. But if you're somebody who is traveling for work still for some reason, and you've been doing traveling, you had a bunch of nights

at the beginning of the year before the pandemic or whatever, and you're in that range of the 40 to 60 nights, then you're getting triple points. And for each 10 nights you get, you're getting another 10,000 points plus another 30 at 60. I mean, you've gotten a decent number of points.

I'll grant you that. It's decent. I just don't think it's eye-opening enough to compete on the level of five free nights or no, you know, no stack all these promotions together and you know, that, that,

that get an awesome status. All right. Okay. So Hilton, you got to do something. We don't know what it is. Cause I mean, you're giving away points left and right.

You give an extra elite nights and it's not enough. Cause you also give away the status really easily with the credit card. So it's got to be something more. I think free night certs, though, is a good move for Hilton. I think making an offer with two or three free night certs that are uncapped and valid for two years would certainly put the pressure on because Hilton does offer those uncapped free night certificates and the ones that are issued this year are valid two years and any night of the week. So I think

that would make a splash because like you said, Hyatt doesn't really have the uncapped certs anymore. I think that Hilton could make it eye-popping by saying, stay at any property anywhere in the world for two or three nights for free, then I think that's something that would work. I agree. And I'd love to see that on their Aspire card. Like I'd like to see both the points bonus that they normally offer plus a couple of three nights, something like that.

Yeah, I think that would be really interesting. That brings us to the question of the week. This week's question is one that you actually answered, but I didn't find the answer satisfying enough. So I wanted to bring it up. I had it marked for question of the week and it took you a few days and then you got back to the person.

I said, oh man, I was gonna ask you that. So I'm still gonna ask you because I think this is a question that other people would have. So Casey asks the question via email and he says, hi guys, I was wondering if you had thoughts on why some fantastic brand offers don't show on that brand's Amex card. For example, Greg mentioned the excellent Delta offer

not being on any Delta cards. All those Hilton offers don't show on our Hilton Aspire or our Delta Platinum. So I had to resort to putting them on a card that'll only earn one membership reward point per dollar. I chose the Everyday Preferred in the hopes I can get more than a half. Just intrigued, figured the brands would be upset that these offers aren't encouraging use of their cards. Sorry. So what do you think about this? This is something that we've noticed in the past, something that we've noticed for a long

time, that oftentimes when there's a good offer that comes out like a Delta, you know, 10% back on flights or something, or one that's good for Hilton or Marriott, we sometimes just see that they don't end up on the card that would make the most sense for that type of offer. Do you think this is intentional? Is this just some weird glitch in the system? Is there a reason they just don't want you to get the extra points and the offer?

What's the deal with that? It is really odd. I mean, it's certainly possible that there's some intention along the lines of, well, we know that this person already has the Delta card or the Marriott card or what have you. So we don't need to encourage them to fly Delta or stay at Marriott or stay with Hilton. Whereas if you don't have that card, maybe they want to encourage you. So there might be some intent there.

My guess is it might be more just chance. I don't know. But like with a recent one of these where it didn't show up on the branded cards, we actually saw it showing up a few days later on the branded card. So for some reason it it you know maybe they have uh rolling rollouts like they roll out first to their membership rewards and

cash back cards and later to their branded cards or something like that i i really have no idea but it's weird you know i've noticed this happen also with grocery offers because i've had sometimes where there's been a statement credit offer at a grocery chain that comes out on like the business platinum, but not on the gold card. And that's not the card I want to use there. I found that happened with membership rewards cards also, where there's something that would be a bonus category. Gas is another example where I've had these gas offers on the business platinum, but not on a card that earns a bonus on gas. So it's, I find it kind of annoying. Cause I'm always like, it's not worth the total,

whatever it is then. Cause I got to give something up in order to get it. So it's always kind of a bummer. But sometimes it's the other way around. Like sometimes you get a nice, like grub hub offer on the MX gold card that already gives you like grub hub benefits. So,

you know, it does use that just this week yep yep totally use that just this week and i should also say for casey's benefit that that hilton offer did show up on the aspire card in our household so and actually uh casey wrote i think it was casey wrote back a few days later after i responded saying, oh, thanks. I checked, you know, I'd already picked, I'd already picked that offer on a different card, but my spouse was able to find it on, on the branded card. So yeah. So, so it's basically, well, just wait, except there is a little bit of risk in that, right? Because some offers are very limited enrollment and they'll

disappear before you could sign up. So if the offer is so smoking hot that you have to get it, just go ahead and sign up on a suboptimal card. But if it's one where you're like, it's nice, it's good, but I'd rather have it on another card. I think it's usually safe to wait. I agree. I agree. When it's something like $100 back on $300 at Delta or Dell or something like that, that might fill up. So I would just add that right away and say, go ahead and just make sure you have it. And an Amazon offer, pretty much any Amazon offer is likely to fill up right away. Right away. Yeah. So yeah, grab those types of offers. But if it's something like 50 back on 250 at a Hilton or something, you can probably wait a few days and see if that comes up on your co-branded card. So

it's a strategy worth pursuing. Another thing that somebody mentioned recently, you've mentioned it recently too, is that they only show a hundred offers at a time in your available offers. So if you already have a hundred offers showing on the co-branded card that you would like to see some other offer on, maybe add a few of those offers that you don't really care about to bring yourself back down under a hundred and then another day or two later, check back because they'll probably have refreshed the offers that are available to you. That's worth knowing too. Yeah, that's a good tip. I can't quite figure out what happens there because I have noticed that even when I have 100, I still see new offers appear on that same card. Yeah, sometimes.

There must be certain offers that roll off when new ones appear. But yeah, if you want to have a better chance of the new offers appearing, I think keeping your number of offers available down to probably below 90 is probably a good idea. By the same token, I think it was Steven that mentioned to us via email that he had more, he had a hundred plus offers that he had added to a card. And so one of the offers that he know he added to the card didn't show up anymore in the added offers. I assume that probably it will still trigger, but, but you know, that's another thing to be aware of. Cause I would have thought, oh, the solution is just add everything. And every

offer that comes out, add it to something. But that could create some confusion too because you might not see the offers you added that you actually wanted to add. Right. So I think the strategy is to have multiple Amex cards and add those junk offers to multiple cards instead of just one. And that way some of the junk offers are one card, some are on the other. And then you're less likely to go over 100 on either side. So, yeah. All right.

All right, my friends, that brings us to the goodbye song. I want to thank you all for being out there, listening, watching, whatever it may be. If you want to get on our email list, join our Facebook group, follow us on Twitter, all that good stuff. You want to go to thefrequentmiler.com slash subscribe. Again, that's thefrequentmiler.com slash subscribe. Again, that's thefrequentmiler.com

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