Frequent Miler on the Air - How to book the world's greatest hotels with points | Coffee Break Ep28 | 10-1-24

Episode Date: October 1, 2024

We all get especially excited when we use our points for knock-your-socks-off hotel properties. The Travel and Leisure's Top 100 list can be a useful way to get ideas about which properties have this wow-factor. Every year, Greg likes to go through this list and find which hotels can be reasonably booked with points. In this episode, he'll discuss his findings. (00:49) - The Best Points-Bookable Hotels in the World (2024) [based on Travel & Leisure Top 100] See Greg's analysis of points-bookable hotels on the Travel & Leisure's top 100 list here. (03:40) - How to book the Hyatt, Marriott, and IHG hotels (04:43) - How to book Hilton/SLH hotels (06:13) - Leading Hotels of the World / Leaders Club Learn more about booking Leading Hotels of the World properties via Citi ThankYou points here. (08:02) - See our How To video for using Rooms.aero for finding difficult award availability here. (10:09) - Choice Privelages and Preferred Hotels (13:42) - The Citi Rewards+ advantage Read more about the Citi Rewards+ card here. Visit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media. Music Credit – Beach Walk by Unicorn Heads

Here we go. This is not your typical Frequent Miler on the Air episode. This is a standalone segment we're calling Coffee Break. Each Coffee Break segment will cover a single topic related to miles and points. And each Coffee Break is limited to 20 minutes or your money back. Enjoy. Welcome to today's Coffee Break, where Nick and I are going to talk about how to book the world's greatest hotels with points. Yeah, I mean, I love to use my points and I love to use my points to stay at great hotels. So I'm pretty excited to talk about using points to stay at great hotels. So this all kind of

started because you found a particular list of great hotels. So this all kind of started because you found a particular list of great hotels. And I mean, of course, there's a lot of lists out there, but Travel and Leisure creates a list of their top 100 best hotels in the world each year. And you always kind of take a look at that list, right? Yeah. So I went through their top 100 list, which I don't for a second agree with is necessarily really the world's best 100 hotels. But it's useful to just have a starting point because I was curious how many of these can be booked with points. And not just at all with points, but to get potentially really good value for your points. Because that's really the game we play, right?

We try to see whether we can get outsized value for your points because that's really the game we play, right? We try to see whether we can get outsized value with our points and that's the goal here. So going through that top 100 list, I found quite a few. I found 28 that can be booked with points in ways that could potentially give you outsized value. So for example, leading hotels of the world, 10 of the 28 hotels were just in that group. Hyatt had five. Marriott and IHG, four each. Preferred hotels, which are specifically ones bookable

with choice privileges points had three. Hilton had two, one an SLH and one an Waldorf Astoria. Smith properties, which can be booked with Hilton points. I did not include those because in my opinion, our options for using points to book those doesn't give us outsized value for those bookings. And so they're less interesting to me. Yeah. Mr. and Mrs. Smith with Hyatt points is just not going to yield good value compared to using your Hyatt points to stay at a Hyatt. So the five Hyatts that are on the list, I'm sure, are a much, much better value than booking any Mr. and Mrs. Smith, really. So that's why those don't make the list. Yeah, I mean, I find this a lot of fun because while Greg, I agree with Greg that

this list is surely not the be all and end all in terms of best hotels in the world. It seems reasonable to assume that the 100 hotels that travel and leisure included are probably all pretty darn nice. And so, you know, maybe they're not the 100 absolute best in the world, but there are a hundred of, you know, the very good hotels, you know, of some of the best anyway out there. So it's cool to see that properties that are recognized in that way can be booked with points and not just booked with points, but booked with points to really good value. So that's exciting. So how can we do this? I think so. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. So let's step through each of those programs to talk about how

best to book them with points. The first three I'm going to talk about are kind of obvious. So we'll do this really quick. Hyatt, Marriott, and IHG. I mean, basically you book those with Hyatt, Marriott, and IHG points. The Marriott ones, you have the option of doing their fifth night free awards to save some points that way. Sometimes you could use their free night certificates depending because Marriott only allows you to add up to 15,000 points to those. So it depends how expensive the hotel is on points as whether you can use your free nights. IHG, if you have one of the IHG credit cards, you can get the fourth night free. Or you could use IHG's 40K certs that are top-offable, meaning the ones that come with the Premier cards, you can add points to those.

So those are some ways you can book those. Now let's move on to Hilton. The story isn't different with Hilton in that it's the same thing. You could book the Hiltons with points or free night certificates. You could get the fifth night free when you're booking with points. So it's the same story as some of these others. The difference here is that Hilton unlocks small luxury hotels of the world, the SLH properties, which surprisingly only one was on that top 100 list. But when I've looked at top lists before of other kinds, or even this list in past years, there have been a lot more SLH properties. So I think it's more of a quirk

of this year's list. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure that there's some level of marketing that comes into this stuff and money that exchanges hands, I imagine. So I'm always a little dubious, but like we said, I'm sure these are all super nice places. Recently, the Michelin Guide, which is obviously famous for its star ratings for restaurants, added hotels. And so while they have Michelin stars for restaurants, they now have Michelin keys for hotels and a hotel can have one key, two keys or three keys. And so, for instance, I noticed a couple of SLH properties with Michelin keys that were not on the top 100 best hotels list from Travel and Leisure.

So, I mean, who knows? There's surely quite a few nice SLH properties out there. So it's exciting that you can use your Hilton points or free night certificates to book some of those incredible hotels. It is. It really is. So that's awesome. But there's a bunch of there,

there are a few programs we mentioned earlier that are not encompassed by those what big four programs of Hyatt, Marriott, IHG and Hilton, you have leading hotels of the world. And that's where the way to unlock those stays for good value is start with city thank you points. And if you have the city premier card, you can transfer your thank you points normally five to one to leading hotels, what they call leaders club. Now that sounds like not good. I mean, to start with five points and end up with one point, right. Um, but leaders club points tend to be worth about 8 cents each towards, uh, leading hotels of the world properties.

And so you're talking about getting 1.6 cents around for your city points. And sometimes it turns out that city sometimes has transfer bonus to leaders club. And so with a 25% transfer bonus, you're looking at around 2 cents per city point for booking these stays, which is darn good. Yeah. One of the things that I think is exciting about this is that while for the most part, certainly with Hilton, IHG, and Marriott, you're only able to book base rooms at good value with points. And so you're likely just going to be able to book whatever the base room is, and then you're going to be handcuffed by the availability of a base room, which at some of

these luxury properties, there, A, probably aren't very many base rooms. And then B, there's obviously competition for those base rooms. So the chances of you finding one available, well, it becomes more difficult anyway. And you have to use tools like we recently recorded a how-to video on how to use rooms.arrow to find great hotel deals to find those awards, because you do need sometimes to use a tool like that in order to find standard room award availability. But with Leaders Club, since your points are more or less being applied towards the cash rate, you could book any room type and get that consistent value of, like Greg said, 1.6 cents per city point or with the transfer bonus, more like 2 cents per city point, and then get yourself

whatever room type it is you want. You need a suite? You can do that with your points. And so that's kind of nice about this. It provides a good opportunity for good value there. Yeah. Another thing that's nice about it is that, you know, joining Leaders Club is free and it's a necessary step in the process in order to move your city points over to Leaders Club. And just by booking through Leaders Club, so by booking with points or with cash through Leaders Club, you get a bunch of perks for your stay, almost like elite status perks. So you get, um, you know, early check-in, late checkout. Now these are, neither is guaranteed, but, uh, but that's, you know, you could get room upgrade, uh, daily breakfast for two, you know, there's some,

oh, and a, and a gift, I think a welcome gift as well. So anyway, I got to try this out last year at a property in Florida. And I was actually really, really pleasantly surprised how nice the perks that come with Leaders Club were and how well they were delivered at this hotel. Now, all these hotels are independent from each other. So there's no promise that your experience will match mine in any way. But at least what's on paper about what you're supposed to get is pretty good.

That's awesome. That's awesome. So, okay, that's one that's different than the others in terms of it's not as straightforward or obvious, perhaps, how to do that. But we have a couple others, others too that are less straightforward and obvious than say booking with Hyatt or Marriott or IHG or Hilton points. So next up, we've got what the choice privileges

and preferred hotels partnership, right? Yeah, so preferred hotels, it's a collection of hotels very much like leading hotels of the world or like small luxury hotels. So preferred hotels, you can book with choice points. And not all of them are available with choice points, but the three I identified in that top 100 list were. And the thing there is

that sometimes you're going to get really awful value because they've started charging over 100,000 points per night for some of these. But I analyzed a bunch of these and found that there are still quite a few where you could get really, really solid value for your points. And so that's exciting, not just because you could get decent value with your choice points, but because from either, costs, if I'm remembering right, something like 26,000 points. That's only 13,000 city or Wells Fargo points for this hotel that starts at something like $580 a night. And that's an incredible bargain. So there are some really sweet deals there. I should mention, too, this is sort of a side trick.

If you separately ask preferred hotels to match your status, if you have status in other hotel chains, your preferred number, your loyalty number, will be attachable to these reservations made through choice. So you should get whatever elite benefits you're due just by doing that status match as well. So that's a nice little kind of hidden perk to that one. Nice, nice. Yeah. I mean, that's exciting if you're able to find one of these because 13,000 city points are Wells Fargo points for a room that might cost, like Greg said, more than 500, close to $600 a night. That's a slamming deal considering the fact that otherwise your choice is to transfer to airlines, of course, which you can get good value doing that or cash those points out at like one cent each, right? So basically, if you're looking at 13,000 points, an amount that a lot of people will redeem for a $130 gift card, being able to instead trade that for a hotel that would cost five or 600 bucks, that's a really good deal for city points or Wells Fargo points. And we often, or maybe we don't often enough talk about the fact that the opportunities to get outsized value with hotel points are fewer than there great opportunity to get good value for hotel booking with CityPoints, which you otherwise weren't really going to get until this whole choice

privileges one to two partnership came out. And then really once Greg wrote extensively about the preferred hotels partnership. So that's pretty awesome. Yeah, it is really awesome and Citi not only can unlock these two kind of unusual approaches to booking top hotels not only unlocks leading hotels in the world and preferred hotels indirectly through choice but it also has

another advantage which is pretty cool which is if you also have so I mentioned before having the city premier card as a good way to unlock the ability to do these transfers at full value if you also add on the fee-free city rewards plus card and you you combine your points with your premier card then you get 10 of your points back each year, like automatically when you redeem your points, including transferring them to another, when you transfer to choice or you

transfer to leaders club. And, uh, now it's limited to up to 10,000 points back each year, or another way of saying that is limited to a hundred thousand points transferred each year. But still, um, that alone, that makes your city points even more valuable towards these top hotels. Yeah, that's fantastic. So that's a good play to have a premier and a rewards plus card. Now, do you recommend opening a rewards plus card just for that 10% rebate? Or how do you recommend going about getting a rewards plus card? Yeah, the reason Nick asked the question that way is the Rewards Plus card usually doesn't have a very exciting welcome bonus, but there are other Citibank cards that do.

And Citi is kind of unique as far as I know among the card issuers in that you can generally product change after you've had a card for a year from any of their personal cards, including like an American Airlines card to something like the Rewards Plus. So if you're not in a hurry to get your Rewards Plus rebate, you could apply for whatever the latest, greatest American Airlines card offer offer is get maybe 70,000 American Airlines miles. And then later, product change that card to the rewards plus. the card open for a year, it's got an annual fee anyway, or most issuers will require the year to be up before your product change. But yeah, that's perhaps a better way to end up with a rewards plus. Like Greg said, if you're not in the hurry to get the rebate this year, then that's what I would do. Even if you are in a hurry to get the rebate this year, the 70,000 American

Airlines miles or whatever it is that's available right now in an American Airlines credit card are probably worth more than the 10% rebate. So I would go that route if I wanted the rewards plus and just be patient and wait until next year to get it. So yeah. All right. There you have it. Don't forget, if you've enjoyed this and you'd like to get on our email list, you want to go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list, follow us on all the various social media and check out our Frequent Miler on the Air episodes dropping every Friday.