Frequent Miler on the Air - How to find impossible hotel awards | Ep210 | 7-8-23

Episode Date: July 8, 2023

Ever wonder how you can possibly snag a reservation at a high-demand property that never seems to have award availability? This week, we discuss the tools you can use to make those impossible awards happen.   00:00 Intro   01:10 Giant Mailbag: Don't Hilton free night certificates have a big drawback?   04:25 Card Talk: Hilton Surpass and Hilton Business cards   https://frequentmiler.com/amxhiltonbiz/   https://frequentmiler.com/hilton-honors-american-express-surpass-card/#Goto   https://frequentmiler.com/why-i-paid-over-1000-dollars-to-upgrade-3-no-fee-hilton-cards/   12:20 What crazy thing . . . did Chicago Seminars do this week?   15:06 Award Talk Double Header   15:26 Cathay Pacific Asia Miles devaluation   19:38 JW Marriott Safari Lodge Availability   https://frequentmiler.com/jw-marriott-masai-mara-lodge-award-nights-available/   25:06 Main Event: How to find impossible hotel awards https://frequentmiler.com/tools-for-finding-impossible-hotel-awards/ https://frequentmiler.com/go/maxmypoint https://frequentmiler.com/go/staywithpoints   51:02 Question of the Week: Is the 95x / 95% back LifeLock deal worth doing for the Membership Rewards point s?   Music credit: Annie Yoder  

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 Liler on the air starts now. Today's main event, how to find impossible hotel awards. Boy, it is impossible. It's impossible.

Well, it's not impossible. Yeah, I guess. You're telling me the impossible is possible? Could I say? Nearly impossible hotel awards, but that doesn't sound as good. No, it doesn't. Nick, you just stayed at the Grand Hotel Victoria in Lake Como and wrote a glowing review. I think you would say it doesn't suck. No, definitely not.

But finding availability does suck. Finding availability is really, really difficult. And I think that's probably been the main response that I've seen over and over to your post about that is, that's great. How do I find WordSpace? And we're going to tell you today how to do that. We do have some tricks up our sleeves. Magic secrets. Okay. First, of course, we have the giant mailbag. Today's giant mail comes from Merrick,

who said, just listen to this week's podcast and the section on the current Amex Hilton signup bonuses. You're praising the Hilton free night certificate because it can be used at any Hilton property worldwide any day of the week, except you didn't mention only when there is standard room availability. So yeah, they can be really valuable, but good luck actually redeeming the free night certificate at a property like Conrad Bora Bora at the time you want to go and not have to build your itinerary around that single available night or when there are random dumps of availability. Would you agree that this is a major limitation? Yes, Merrick, I agree. And that's why today's show is dedicated to how to find these standard award nights so that you can use your free nights from Hilton or Marriott or Hyatt

and so on. You know what? I'm going to disagree a little bit though. It's not a severe limitation in the sense that it doesn't limit it any more than any other type of award, right? I mean, in general, hotel awards are only available when rooms are available on points. So whether it's a free night certificate or points or whatever else, it's all the same limitation. So and it's worth noting that that doesn't make the Hilton certificate worse than a Hyatt certificate or a Marriott certificate or whatever the case may be. All of the highest demand properties and all of the chains only have so many standard rooms and people obviously scoop those up. So, yeah, I mean, talking today about how to find those is important.

But like anything with award travel, if you're set on, okay, I want to go exactly these dates, you may have trouble if you're picking a place that's in high demand, peak dates, it might be hard to find flights, hard to find hotels, everything else. So again, we'll talk about techniques for finding those hotels today. But that is a key limitation of the game. And so flexibility, we often talk about, is your friend. If you can be flexible and build your trip around when you can find availability, then you're going to be a lot happier and experience a lot more of the winning that people talk about when they talk about award travel.

Oh, for sure. One little correction. You said that you have to book when there are points available, when it shows that a booking with points is available. Hilton shows every day of the year that points are available. You're right. Standard room award. It's only certain nights that standard awards are available. When they have premium awards or something like that,

then, yeah, you can pay 10 times as many points and you can't use the free night certificates during those times, which is also the same with Marriott. You know, they may have premium rooms available. You can't use your free night certificates. If only premium rooms are available,

if Hyatt only has suites available, you can't use your free night certificates. So it's, my point is it's the same limitation with all of the chains, but you're right. Yeah. It looks different with Hilton because Hilton has like literally every room available for points, which is unlike most of the other chains. And so it looks like there's always point rooms available.

It just looks like they look very expensive, at least at the most desirable properties. So, yeah. Okay. So moving on to card talk, let's talk about the Hilton Surpass and business cards. Today's a twofer. You. And so let's first talk about the features. The first thing you need to know about both of them is that they both have a $95 annual theme. And both of them offer a free night certificate with $15,000 spent. And that's how they really fit into today's show. Because on either of these cards, if you do $15,000 in purchases in a single calendar year, you'll earn yourself a free night certificate. with hilton those free night certificates as we've said before are valid any

night of the week at almost any hilton property in the world if there's a standard room available which is the great point from the giant mailbag so that is the exciting most exciting i think benefit of these cards so they also come with gold status. You can spend your way to diamond if you want to put $40,000 in spend on the card. And you could earn a bunch of points at Hilton, 12X at Hilton. The nice thing is that, let's see, you get 6X at restaurants and at US gas stations. That's on the business card, right? So 6X. No, both cards offer that. So both cards offer 12X Hilton spend, 6X at US restaurants and gas stations, and 3X for non-bonus spend. But they both have some different categories that offer 6X as well as the restaurants and gas stations. The Surpass card, so that's the consumer card, 6X at US supermarkets. So that's the consumer card, 6X at U.S. supermarkets. So that's a great one for people who spend a lot at supermarkets. And the business card, meanwhile, adds 6X for flights booked

directly with airlines or through Amex Travel, 6X for car rentals booked direct with select car rental companies, 6X for cell phone service purchased directly from a US service provider, and 6X for US shipping purchases. Both cards also offer 10 priority pass lounge visits per calendar year. And both have no foreign transaction fees. So that's where they're all in common. They mostly up till now are identical other than having different 6X categories. But the business card adds, if you spend all the way up to 60K, you get another free night. So that's a big difference with the business card. So let's talk about what are the advantages of the Surpass card over the business card? Well, so the Surpass card gives you, obviously, we talked about the 6X already, but the Surpass card also gives you a path to upgrade to the Aspire card, if you would like. And the Aspire card, of course, we've talked about a lot of times before, $450 annual fee, but it comes with

diamond status automatically, and it comes with an annual free night certificate, no spend required. And then I think you can get a second one at 60K spend, if I remember correctly. But it loses the 6X at US supermarkets and the other 6X categories, I think also. So it's not a super compelling card for regular spend, but it's nice for the benefits between the Hilton Diamond and the annual free night certificate. It can certainly be well worth $450. So if you have the surpass, you could upgrade to that. Sometimes you'll get an upgrade offer that will include what is essentially like a welcome bonus for upgrading without having to open a new card. Or if you don't want to continue to pay the annual fee,

you don't anticipate a bunch of Hilton travel coming up, then you can downgrade to the fee-free Hilton Honors card. So that one has no annual fee and offers the same base 3X everywhere, I believe. So you've got at least that option if you want to save some money, but keep that card open so that you can upgrade it in the future. So that's a nice benefit. And of course, obviously, the 6X is the big difference. 6X at US grocery stores, or US supermarkets, rather, I should say. That's certainly a big advantage since that's a category that a lot of people spend a fair amount of money in. I mean, it's one of the largest spending categories for a lot of folks. So it offers the chance to build up a lot of Hilton points and potentially earn a free night certificate also. Right. Yeah, absolutely. Business card, meanwhile, has advantages too.

Doesn't impact your 524 count when you sign up for the business card. And we mentioned before that you could get a second free night with 60k spend with the business card. I want to just jump back real quickly about the ability to upgrade to the Aspire card that I remember Tim had posted a cool post about like timing your upgrade and how valuable that could be. $250 per year in resort credits. And I think if you time it right, you can get both those credits in a sort of short amount of time. And you also get, you can get more free nights by timing your upgrade correctly and everything. And so check out that post because there's some real value there in upgrading from the Surpass or the fee-free version. And we should mention the card comes with $250 in annual airline fee credits also. That's, again, the Surpass or the Aspire card. The Aspire, not the Surpass.

Yeah, that's $450. Yep. So for $450, you get $250 in airline fee credits, $250 in resort credit that can be used to Hilton Resorts that are on the official list. Not necessarily all places with resort in the name are on the list, and there's a lot of places that aren't resorts. We've talked about that a lot of resorts that are on the official list and not necessarily all places with resort in the name are on the list. And there's a lot of places that aren't resorts. We've talked about that a lot of times before that are on the list. So $500 in annual credits plus the annual free night certificate can be totally worth it.

And if you time it out right, like we said, you can do even better. So that's great. So, okay. So we're in agreement that that's nice, having the ability to upgrade and the ability to downgrade potentially so what does the business card have over it or uh yeah i mean i already mentioned uh doesn't impact your 524 count so if you want to sign up for chase cards it's not going to hurt that ability uh and the second free night was 60k spend um overall i'd say these are both solid hotel cards um not you know not the best because they don't give you a free night

automatically for the $95, but still decent. And the gold status you get automatically can be valuable. You get either free breakfast or dining credits depending on where you are with your stay, thanks to gold status. So yeah, decent, decent cards. Decent, decent cards. So if you were to open one of them now with whatever offer happens to be out there, which one would you open? Is there one that you prefer between the two?

It would totally depend on whether... Yeah, so it depends whether you're like way over 524 not worrying about it anymore um or you know under or trying to get under uh in which case i would i would prefer the business card for that reason i i think um if it wasn't for the whole 524 issue, I would prefer the Surpass because I would... The Aspire card is one that I would love to have when I need it, but I don't stay at Hilton resorts often enough to want to pay for that every year. And even though the credits are more than the annual fee, I'd rather not just have to worry about that, but having the ability to jump up to it whenever I want to is pretty valuable.

So I like that one. Very good. Very good. Excellent. Okay. So that's our card talk segment out of the way. So then next up after card talk, we've got,

what is it? What crazy thing did the Chicago Seminars do this week? So Chicago Seminars, what are they? So every year for last, I don't know, 10 to 15 years or something like that, there has been a frequent flyer event in Chicago in October called the Chicago Seminars. And basically people who are interested in the miles and points and other hacks for getting free or reduced cost travel or better travel with elite status and so on,

get together and you watch presentations and maybe even more valuable, you meet other people who are also into the hobby and you build a network of friends who you can turn to. So that's been going on for years and years. And this year, it's a little bit different. You want to sort of summarize how it's different? Well, so there are two different seminars running the same weekend that are both kind of building themselves as the Chicago seminars. And so you

have one happening at the Holiday Inn Elk Grove, which has been the venue that has hosted the event for the last 10 years. But it's with different organizers than those who organized, I suppose, the first nine or 10 years of this. So there's one going on there. And then there's a second event happening at the, what is it? The Delta Hotel, Delta Hotel, Willowbrook, or it's a, there's a Delta Hotel nearby. So, so there's going to be two different seminars, both happening the same weekend, both probably with similar goals and ideas and, and, and different lineups of speakers, for sure. And so now, I guess people are going to have more choice in terms of which one they want to attend if they want to attend one of them. And both, of course, are aimed at raising money for charity. So

hopefully it means more for charities in the long run, I guess. Yeah, yeah. So we don't understand why exactly it's split into two and why they both have the same name. I think everyone agrees it's unfortunate. But I think if you go to either one, it'll probably be a good event and you'll enjoy it and meet some good people. No one, just by chance,

no one on the Freak & Miler team is going to be going to Chicago to either one this year. We just all have different things going on that weekend. So don't look for us, but I'm sure you'll have some good sessions and meet some good friends there. All right. That's the crazy thing. What's next?

We're skipping over mattress running the numbers and we're talking about award talk so this week's award talk is bad news as uh my son has learned to say my two-year-old the other day i can't remember what went didn't go right but something didn't go right and he he sung it for me he said want want want i got him trained got him trained, got him trained. So we got bad news for award talk this week. Cathay Pacific is devaluing Asia miles as of October 1st. So there's some bad news incoming. The good news is that they did give some advanced warnings. So you got a few months to plan under the current award chart.

Sweet spots, but tell us the bad news, Greg, be the, be the messenger. Yeah. Well, the other good news before we move on is that they still have an award chart well that's true that's that's a good thing i applaud the airlines that keep award charts that's good um so i you know spot checked some different awards uh kathy has two different award charts and a third type of award. I'll explain a second, but for Flying Cathay itself, there's one award chart and that looked to be hurt the worst, as far as I could tell just from doing some spot checks, around 30% higher prices. So 29% was most of the business class awards anyway, that I looked at are going up on October 1st. So you could, as long as you book before October 1st, you can fly after that

under the current rates, but starting October 1st, when you book, it'll be 29% higher, give or take. The, the, the other one, another award chart is called their multi-carrier awards, which kicks in when you have two or more of Cathay's partners, Cathay's One World partners on a single award. So for example, if you have British Airways and Qatar or British Airways and American Airlines or something like that in a single award, then it goes to this multi-carrier award chart. That didn't look at first blush. Again, I only looked at a few different awards, but I was seeing between 10% and 15% increase in prices, which of course we still don't want to see that. The third type of award is when you have only one partner. And that's where Cathay, to my knowledge, doesn't have an award chart.

So we can't see how hard it's hit. But in the past, it's generally been a little bit more than Cathay's own awards, so about $5K more for flying, for example, British Airways instead of Cathay itself. And so I would expect that 29%, 30% increase in prices on the single partner awards as well. Yeah. And so it's worth mentioning for now that while the current chart is there, there are some good value awards. And one of the best is flying to and from Europe because of the lower surcharges on British Airways flights. So you can often get pretty good deals around 61,000-ish miles one way. In fact, just a couple of days ago, a friend of mine asked me whether I thought it was worth paying $800 in surcharges to fly Virgin Atlantic business class or $400 to fly their premium economy. He was booking a last-minute ticket for a day or two later,

and I said, well, you're a day or two in advance. There must be some British Airways availability. If you don't want to pay as much in surcharges, check Cafe Pacific Asia Miles. And he has a Point.me subscription, a Point.me subscription, but didn't have Asia miles linked up. So didn't receive the Asia miles award because he had it set to show just the programs he has access to and did not have that linked up. So he didn't receive the result for that. Now I see, I don't link, I didn't link any of my accounts to, to my point.me subscription. So I just see all of the search results and he hadn't seen all of them. So when he did search Asia miles, he found, oh, wow. Yeah.

He was able to fly New York to London for 61,000 miles. And he said about $200 in surcharges, I think. So not a bad deal at all. Booked the day before departure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. That's a great thing.

And so again, that's going to go up probably about 30%, but we're not exactly sure because that's a one partner award example. Right. Yep. Yep. But I wanted to make that examples for people that, you know, cause now you still have access to the old pricing, right? Until October 1st. Is that right? So, so that you've got a little time anyway to uh you know enjoy the current award sweet spots all right so that was the first part of award talk but there's a second award talk this week and this is an exciting one so if you're a little bummed out by the asia mile devaluation let's cheer you back up with jw marriott masai mara lodge uh availability tell me about what's

going on here greg because i saw the message come in from you and I immediately searched for availability and I almost booked the place just because I got excited, but I didn't for reasons maybe we'll talk about in a second. But tell me what the good news is. What's going on here? Well, first, what is this? So Marriott has opened a luxury safari camp lodge in Kenya in the Masai Mara park. And so it just opened in April and it's all inclusive. It includes game drives, includes all the food. It really looks super high end. Most of the time when booking for two adults, you're going to be looking at about $3,000 cash per night unless you book with points. So we were worried when this came out that, you know, oh, since Mariette doesn't have award charts anymore, this is going to be 300,000 points per night or, you know, in that range. But recently, a whole bunch of award space popped up. And it was bookable for, at first, often around 100,000 points per night, and often under 100,000, which

is great for those who have 85k free night certificates, because it means you can book with those free night certificates and add up to 15,000 points to get your free night certificates because it means you can book with those free night certificates and add up to 15,000 points to get your free night. And then a very interesting thing happened. All of a sudden on July 4th, they dropped the price for a lot of nights down to around 75,000 points per night. So if you look between February and May of 2024, there are a lot of dates available for around 75,000 points per night. And so you could even do like a fifth night free type of award. And that brings it down to below 60,000 points per night average. So anyway, very exciting to get such a high end stay for, you know, what, at least with Marriott has become a reasonable number of points.

Yeah, I mean, well, it is even for anybody, there'd be a reasonable number of points, really, considering the cash price, right? Considering how much? Yeah, considering the cash price, that's an incredible value for your Marriott points. I will mention that probably the reason it's cheaper during this time is it starts to approach the rainy season in February and onward. And all this availability is before the Great Migration starts. So people flood there in June through October because hoping to catch the Great Migration. But still, people say this park is amazing regardless of whether you're there during the Great Migration. And so I still think it would probably be an amazing stay. Probably, yeah. When I looked, it didn't seem like they had any rooms that could accommodate four people. And so that was part of the reason I wasn't going to do it. I wasn't sure that it was going to be a good idea with my kids anyway, at the age they're at. We intend to go, you know, and do some safari stuff with them eventually, although we have intended to wait until they're a few years older anyway. Though when I saw this, I said, well, this is the type of availability that may not be around in a few years. So maybe we need to jump on this right away, which is why I looked at it.

But I think I also understood at least from some of the internal conversation, it seemed like it might be a little challenging to get there. Does it involve like another flight after you get to Kenya? Yeah. Yeah. You fly into Nairobi and then you switch airports to get on a little bush plane to fly to near the park where the park will pick you up in a Jeep or whatever and take you to the park. That bush plane, you're limited to 33 pounds of luggage total. That includes like your carry on in your luggage. So you can check your bags though. If you have bigger bags, you could check them at that airport in Nairobi for free is my understanding and then fly on. So that's an extra cost that bush plane is additional cost. You also have to

pay something like $70 or $80 a day to go into the park. So that's an additional cost. That's per person. And someone said that they checked about adding kids to a room. And because it's an all-inclusive type of thing, they only charge $1,000 per night extra for each additional person above the first two. So you might not want to bring your kids to this one. No, unless you're going to book two separate rooms anyway, which may be worth it at that cost, right? Maybe, maybe worth it. I think you probably would. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So if you can find availability for two rooms, so, all right. So that's a cool opportunity that's out there. If you've got that, you know, safari luxury safari type of experience in mind, there aren't very many

options to do a luxury safari experience using points. There's a couple out there, but that's one of the very few and probably the most reasonably priced, I think, in terms of points. Good luck finding that. It is out there. Check that out. We've got a post about it, so you'll find a link in the show notes. All right. I think that brings us to the main event. Main event time, how to find impossible or nearly impossible hotel awards. So we talked at the intro that Nick recently stayed at an SLH property bookable with Hyatt points, and it's very, very difficult to find or availability there. And so he wrote a glowing review about it. And then people say, well, how do I find award availability?

Same thing happened when I wrote a review of a place I stayed at in New Zealand. That was same thing. It's an SLH property. Fantastic, amazing value for your points, but very hard to find awards. And coinc coincidentally i was just at a marriott in michigan uh the in at bay harbor which is not nearly at that class of hotel it's it's not like this aspirational once in a lifetime type of hotel but it's a very nice resort and probably one of the best places in the u.s to use if you have 35 K free night certificates with Marriott. But the problem is it's in Northern Michigan. You only want to go in the summertime,

or at least that's the best time to go in my opinion. And finding award nights in the summertime is nearly impossible, but I was there over July 4th and had a great stay. And so I'm going to talk a little bit about how I found those when we get to that section of the main event. First though, let's just talk about with some of the chains, how if you're not using any special tools, how you can use their own websites to find hard to find awards. So starting with Marriott, when you're doing an award search with Marriott, Marriott just gives you the option to say, do you want to do a flexible date search?

So you can click that and say, you know, let's say you want to do three nights or something, um, press go, and it'll show you a calendar of all the days where the hotel you're looking at is available for three nights, starting with that date. Um, and so you could just, you know, click through all the months until you find something that you want. Yep. Hilton offers the same type of capability as Marriott. And so it's very, very convenient. One tip I'd give you with the Hilton site, at least, I'm not sure if this is the case with Marriott, although I feel like it could be. With Hilton, I always search for a single night flexible date to see all the nights with standard room availability. And the reason I do that is because sometimes there are, well, some properties have more than one room type that is

listed as a standard award. But if it's not the same room type two nights in a row, you won't be able to book a two nights day. You'd have to book two one nights days, which is fine if you're using three night certificates, whatever, book two different rooms, you know, one that's the, you know, deluxe this and one that's the, you know, wonderful that. And, and then probably the hotel is just going to put you in one room for both nights. Anyway, I've never had them make me switch and, or at least very rarely in a situation like that ever had to switch rooms. So, so I look for a single night availability. So I can see all the nights that have standard awards available. And then hopefully, hopefully, you know, crossing fingers, then you can see, OK, there are five nights in a row.

I want to do a fifth night free type situation. Hopefully it is the same room type available all five nights. If it's not, you may still not be able to take advantage of the fifth night free. But at least that gives me a full view of which nights are available. Now, the potential downside, I guess, is if any properties have a minimum stay requirement in order to find awards available. But do you run into that with Marriott and Hilton? I can't recall. I do, at least I have with Marriott. In fact, in a Bay Harbor, they often but not always have a two or three night stay requirement in the

summertime. So you will find different availability, sometimes more if you add more nights to your flexible date search rather than fewer. And so it's a little confusing that way, but that's an important thing to note for sure. In fact, I just ran that just to see what would happen this morning in a Bay Harbor in Michigan. And a one-night search surprisingly showed several single nights available in July for awards. And when I switched to two nights, there was an extra night that showed up available for two nights instead of the one. And so it was kind of interesting. They don't seem to be applying that two-night minimum as a blanket rule, but in certain situations, I can't really figure out what's going on there.

Maybe there's a special event or something. And so for those dates, they have a minimum stay requirement so that they make sure people aren't checking out on the day of the event or something. And so for those dates, they have a minimum stay requirement so they make sure people aren't checking out on the day of the event or who knows. Weird, weird, but okay. So that's a good tip though. That's a really good tip that you want to search different numbers of days and see what's available with those flexible date searches.

One big difference between the two, Hilton and Marriott, is that with Marriott, that calendar will only show you the days where there's a standard award available. Otherwise the calendar is blank. So it's really easy to quickly see which nights are bookable. That's leaving out some information. You might be able to have booked a room with a points upgrade on certain nights that it doesn't show. On the flip side, on Hilton, it's going to show you every day how many points it costs,

and you have to look for the word standard room award to see which ones are bookable with free night certificates. Yep. Yep. So that's definitely a key difference. So now when you're using Hyatt's flexible date search tool well wait no no you're not going to use how to have a flexible date search tool because there is none yeah that's a big big limitation with hyatt is they have what they call an award calendar but all it does is show you how many points per night a standard room would cost if it was available, but it doesn't show you whether it's available. And so with Hyatt, without any special tools, you're basically just hunting and pecking,

trying different days to see what's available. It's really frustrating. It is really frustrating. Although I will put one plug in here that Greg mentioned earlier, that attending things like Chicago seminars, conferences like that, one of the benefits is making friends who are in the game. And that's valuable for a lot of things. And this is one of those things, because the reason I found availability at the Grand Hotel Victoria is because somebody sent me a message and said, hey, I found awards available during this time, if you're interested, I know, because they knew they read my post, they knew that I liked the place and was interested in going back. And so somebody sent me a message. Now I'm in a different position than a lot of people because there's a lot of people that might send me a message since

I have a platform on the blog. So this was a blog reader that sent me that message. But in very similar circumstances, I've gotten messages from friends that I've met at conferences many times with similar types of things where they say, hey, listen, this is available if you're interested. So it's worth making connections for those types of things. But if you don't already have those types of connections, what can you do, Greg? How can you find awards? Luckily, there are tools that'll send you a message saying, hey, there are free nights available. First, let me start with a free tool called Open Hotel Alert. It's not really designed to show award nights. It's designed to show which room types are available for sale at different hotels. But most hotels that are part of chains that offer free night awards base the availability of free night awards on the availability of what they consider base rooms.

And so if you could figure out what the base rooms are, so usually it's things like standard king, city view, or something like that. And usually there's a couple that are considered standard. Like you might see standard king, you might see standard double or standard two queen, things like that. And usually there's a couple that are considered standard. You might see standard king, you might see standard double or standard two queen, things like that. Then you can set up open hotel alert to alert you for specific dates, whether or not the hotel has that room type that you want, or you could select multiple room types that will alert you if any of those are available. So that's really useful. I've used it before and it has actually worked out because one thing I need to mention is that if you do a search for a particular hotel, particular nights, and you see there's nothing available for points or for free night certificates,

that's not the end of the story because people are booking and canceling rooms all the time at all the hotels. will often book them as soon as they see availability and then set some sort of alert on their calendar or whatever to remind them to cancel it before whatever the cancellation deadline is. And different hotels have different deadlines where you can cancel for free. But my point is that all the time, stuff is going in and out of inventory. And so if you just look one time, you don't know that you're not going to have luck later. And you probably will if you set some kind of alert. You'll probably have some luck at many hotels. So that's Open Hotel Alert free tool. But there are two tools that are very similar to each other that are designed specifically for finding hotel award nights. And the two tools that I'm aware of anyway are Max My Point and Stay With Points. I've written before a post about Stay With Points, but readers replied and comments that you should check out Max my point as well and i have and i will be writing

up a comparison um soon between these two tools but for now i just think it's um really important to point them both out and and um talk about just how valuable they can be for finding these hard to get impossible to get awards um and i have a couple of personal anecdotes from right now. The stay at Inet Bay Harbor that I just had over July 4th, which I'm stressing that point because it was not only a summer date, but probably one of the hardest to get summer dates. Yeah. I had used stay with points. I had set an alert for the Inet Bay Harbor to tell me if any three nights in a row open up in either June or July. Actually, there's two different alerts the way stay with points works. But I set up two alerts to say June or July. If three nights in a row open up, let me know because I'm

going to want to book it. I knew August is too busy, so I'm not going to be able to do that. And sure enough, about, I don't know, a couple months ago, I got an alert, a whole bunch of three-night blocks had suddenly opened up. Before that, there was nothing. And why is that? I have a guess, which is that this hotel is super popular for weddings. And I think that weddings block out big chunks of rooms. And so it makes wards impossible. And then once it gets closer, they figure out how many they really need. And then they release the others.

That's my guess. But anyway, point is, I was able to get the perfect stay, thanks to setting that alert with stay with points. And then let me talk about the Grand Hotel Victoria Lake Como that Nick had just stayed at, loved it, wrote the post. And then I was thinking, oh, man, I need to, if I want to stay there, I need to look quick because people are about to read Nick's post and book it all up. So I tried out Max My Point. And it has... Actually, both tools will let you see a full year of single night availability. Every day of the year that there's one night in a row available. And I sorted by points available instead of seeing like the whole year at once, just the ones where there were points available. And there were three nights exactly over a time we were planning to travel and hadn't yet picked where we were going to go. I still don't know 100% that we're going to do it, but I went ahead and booked those three nights because why not?

So right there, I got two impossible to get awards in these two anecdotes. And it's not because I'm a blogger who somehow has connections. I'm just using these tools and they do work. So that's how they're so valuable. Let me talk about the similarities and differences between these two tools. First, let me say they're way more similar than different. So that's kind of interesting right there. They both support Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt, but not anything else. They don't support IHG, for example. So that's kind of a bummer for in both cases. Both show a full year of availability at once. Both have different types of alerts that you can set. So it'll let you know when awards become available that you didn't see before. um both have free options that are support that are ad supported uh and uh let's see the um both of them let you view a hotel they call it the points calendar which means see that full year of availability um and let me first say, these are not real-time full year of availability. This is like when they last updated,

which is typically going to be overnight, but for less popular hotels, they might even do it less frequently. So you do have to double check what you see on those award calendars, but it'll let you see the award calendar for hotels where they've pre-checked for a full years of of availability um and the leech let you create one alert and so um so they're both probably worth using the free

option um right now the max my point the free option is so full of ads. I found it like almost unusable to tell you the truth. Just because there are ads just everywhere. I really couldn't stand it. Both tools, though, have a mid-tier subscription model and a top-tier subscription model. So the mid-tier for Max My Point is only $3.99 a month, and Stay With Points is $4.99 a month. So pretty similar pricing, but Max My Point's a little bit cheaper. And both of those allow five alerts.

And Max My Point allows two what what they call any day alerts. And these are valuable because what it lets you do is say, I want to travel, let's say, in October to this particular hotel. So show me for all of October or whatever the range of dates you put in is. Send me alert anytime, any day in that range opens up, not just if the whole range opens up. Because a standard alert, so there's multiple types of alerts. I know this is confusing. Yeah, we have to explain this. Yeah, because I was like, wait a minute, what were the other five alerts then? Right, right.

So there's multiple types of alerts. Both of them have different types. And what they both offer is a standard alert where you say, I want to stay between October 6th and October 12th. Alert me when that block of time opens up entirely. That's like a standard alert. And that's also how that open hotel alert works, where you have a fixed block of time, you want to know if that's open. As we've talked about many times in the past, you're going to have much better luck if you're more flexible than that. And you're just looking for a block of

a couple nights in a row or five nights in a row, whatever it is, and you're not set on an exact date. So the way Max My Point handles that is it says you can put in a range of dates and we'll alert you if any one day in there opens up that wasn't open before. That is available for, you can set two of those at that mid-tier subscription. Stay With Points has a different and more flexible, in my opinion, version of an any-day alert, which is their flexible alerts let you say, show me for this whole month if there are three days in a row available or five days in a row or whatever your your thing is and and the great thing about that is um one i think it's the only way with alerts to find out if a hotel has a minimum stay requirement whether there's an award availability so let me say that again because i i don't think that's clear. Some hotels will not show any award availability unless you search for a block of three nights or five nights or whatever it is that they set. So with Max My Point, even though it's searching over the whole month,

it's looking for individual days that are available and it's not going to find any in that case. If the hotel set, let's say a three-day minimum with stay with points, if you're searching for a block of three days, it will find those three days that are available because it meets the minimum stay requirements. So that's a big advantage of stay with points. But those kind of alerts you don't get until you get to the top tier. And the pricing becomes very different at the top tier. So max my point at the top tier is $7.99 a month, but stay with points is $12.99. So quite a bit more per month, has that more powerful alert feature, but it still only gives you two of those that you could set at any given time. So,

you know, if you're watching June and July for the Inet Bay Harbor, and then want to also watch that Lake Como hotel, you're kind of out of luck with that. So that's kind of a shame. Overall, I like the features and functionality and user interface of MaxMyPoint better. But I love the flexible alert, the multi-day alert feature of Stay With Points. So it's really tough for me to recommend one or the other.

They both have strong reasons to be. Another type of alert I should mention that Max My Point has, which Stay With Points does not, is, I'm trying to remember what they call it, a daily change alert, I think it's called, which basically says, for this hotel, alert me if any single day changes. If a day opens up any time for the whole year, I want to know. And that's really great. If there's a whole hotel that you just are really interested in and you want to be alerted when something's changed, that's max my point has that one. So it's tough. They both have really good features. And I guess if you're really into staying at hotels, you could sign up for both. And actually, it might be worth testing out both,

see which you prefer. Yeah, I think that's probably the moral of the story to me, that I would probably try both of them for a month or two and figure, you know, if you did the top tier subscription with both of them, which maybe you don't even need to start at the top tier, maybe you start at the mid tier with both of them. But if you did the top tier, both of them, then you're talking, what, $20, $21 a month. So you test that out for two or three months and for $40, $60, $2, $63, whatever that comes out to be. That's not a huge investment. And if you find one great award in that first three months, then I think it's worth the extra 50 or 60 bucks. If you're looking at a place like the Anna Bay Harbor, the Grand Hotel Victoria,

if it costs you 40 or 50 or 60 bucks to find availability, I doubt you're going to walk away feeling like, oh man, I wish I hadn't spent that extra 50 bucks. I think that's a great point. And especially like, you know, if you're planning a big like honeymoon type thing and you're going to the maldys or whatever and you want to stay at the waldorf astoria that's you know infamously hard to book things like that um these tools are going to pay for themselves easily uh well if it's successful if it's successful it'll pay for itself which you know what and and even if it's not uh the

flip side of this is that people constantly ask me, how much time do you spend searching for award availability, whether that's flights or hotels or whatever? And I always have a hard time answering that because I do spend a lot of time doing it. It's not necessarily because I have to. It's because I enjoy the thrill of the hunt and finding things. And obviously, I'm doing it because I'm also interested in writing about different things. So I have a lot more reason to search all the time than a lot of other people do. But it's a fair point that if you want to stay at a place like the Waldorf Astoria in the Maldives or these other places we've been talking about, you are going to have to dedicate some time to searching again and again and again and again if you want to do it

yourself. So I mean, the other way to look at the cost of these types of apps or services is that it does save you a lot of time spent searching again and again, as long as you're able to pull yourself away anyway, and just trust the alert to work and say, Okay, you know what, I set the alert, I'm going to set it and forget it and leave it alone and not obsess over it. As long as you can do that, then I feel like the time savings for a lot of people that don't enjoy searching again and again and don't want to do that, I think it's probably worth what turns out to be a pretty limited cost. I mean, this isn't, we're not talking about a monumental amount of money on either of these. So I think it could be well worth it. As to which one, I don't have an opinion because I haven't used them both yet. But I think that it's certainly worth exploring these to save yourself some time and

find some cool awards. It really is. And I can't stress enough too that this process of setting up alerts really does work. I used it when we did the Three Cards, Three Continents challenge. There was the the delta hotel in toronto that i really wanted to stay at i had booked one night um and was waiting for a room to open up the for uh i booked one room and there were two of us traveling i had to get two rooms um i'd set an alert both in stay with points and in Open Hotel Alert because in that case, it was a fixed date for this. And both of them came through. I got alerts from both of those tools. And sure enough, I was able to book it. As things happened, we were delayed getting into Toronto. I canceled

those awards and we booked the hotel Sheridan instead, I mean, the hotel Sheridan instead, which I mean, the airport Sheridan instead, which was actually great. But point is, this really works. It's not making this up. I'm not trying to sell you on either one, any one of these particular tools, just saying that these tools are, to me, essential. If you want to stay in these hard to get properties, give it a look. And I think it bears repeating, and you touched on this before, but I think it bears highlighting on its own that these apps or these services are also particularly useful for people who are more date limited. Like if you have certain dates when you're going to travel, you know, Greg mentioned before that people cancel all the time before the cancellation deadlines. And if you don't know when that deadline is, or I mean, you don't know that somebody is going to do it exactly at the deadline. You don't know when they're going to cancel, but more often than not, somebody is going to cancel. And so, you know,

if you have one of these alerts set up, then that example he just gave in Toronto is a great one because he had a very fixed date where he's like, I need to stay on this day at this hotel and sure enough found it. And so, you know, are you going to find that every time at the Waldorf Astoria Maldives on the date you want to go? Obviously not. But you increase your odds substantially when you're using something like this. So I think that's, you know, it's certainly a good use case if you're somebody who has those set vacation days where you're like, oh man, it's only going to be this week. So I got to find availability for that specific week. I think an alert is invaluable

in that type of situation. Absolutely. Well, I think that wraps us up for the main event this week. So that's going to move us into the question of the week. And so this week's question of the week. And so this week's question of the week is one that I know we've touched on before, but it's back around again.

And so I know there'll be new people interested in it. So somebody writes us and this was from a few days ago. So the payout may have changed, but it's worth talking about because I'm sure we'll see it come back again. And so so Ben writes in and says, I noticed LifeLock is currently 95 percent or 95 membership rewards points per dollar back on Rakuten. Now, I noticed LifeLock is currently 95% or 95 membership rewards points per dollar back on Rakuten. Now, I don't know at the time we're recording this or the time you listen to this, that that will be the payout, but we do see that 95% back or 95 membership rewards points per dollar at Rakuten all the time. If you're not familiar, Rakuten is a shopping portal where you click through the shopping portal and then you earn rewards. And so this 95% back seems kind of ridiculous. If you're like, what do you mean you get 95%? Yeah,

you get 95% back or 95 membership rewards points per dollar if you sign up and got to keep the service for however long it requires minimum. So anyway, Ben writes, I noticed this is 95% back or 95 membership rewards points per dollar on Rakuten. Oddly, it is 20 back on the Rakuten browser extension, but 95 through the Rakuten website. I'm going to pause again. That's worth mentioning too, that you'll sometimes see a different payout between the website version of Rakuten and the app version of Rakuten or the browser extension. And Rakuten is not the only one like that. So you want to always keep that in mind when you're searching your various portals. There also happens to be a 10% back offer

on Norton on my Chase Sapphire Preferred. And of course, Norton owns LifeLock. So Ben goes on to say, I value LifeLock at basically nothing. So for the premium plan, this was essentially be buying 23,900 or so membership rewards points for $216 or about nine tenths of a cent per membership rewards point. Higher spend levels are also available by adding family members to the

plan. I'd be interested in getting your analysis or hearing a mattress running the number segment on this. Keep up the good work. Best, Ben. So we skipped mattress running the numbers this week, so I'm tossing it in via question of the week. If you have this opportunity and if you're not familiar again with Rakuten, you can choose to earn either cash back or MX membership rewards tossing it in, be a question of the week. If you have this opportunity, and if you're not familiar again with Rakuten, you can choose to earn either cash back or MX membership rewards points, one or the other. You can't switch back and forth. Maybe you can switch it, but you don't pick individually on specific transactions. You pick what you want your earning style to be. I choose membership rewards points because they're more valuable to me than pennies. But there's arguments for the

other way also. Preston Pyshko, MD, MPH, So anyway, would you, if you were earning membership rewards points through Rakuten, and it's at 95 points per dollar, so if the math works out to be nine-tenths of a cent per point, first of all, is that right? Second of all, would you do it? Is that worth it? Is it worth buying membership rewards points by buying a LifeLock subscription? Yeah, I mean, that's a great price to pay for membership rewards points. So I certainly think it's a good deal. But the total potential upside, like how many points you can get isn't huge and and there is some uh work involved in making sure like that you cancel life lock and uh if i remember i did this once i something like this it was a different

portal deal but and i remember it i think it like it wanted to lock some of my uh you know um what do you call it? Credit reports. Experian or whatever, the credit reports. And I don't know. I just remember it being kind of a pain in the butt to deal with going through. And it didn't seem like worth the hassle since it's one thing if you could scale it up

to earn like 50,000 membership rewards points. But since there's only a few thousand, I don't know. It doesn't excite me. Ben writes about 23,900. But if you add additional people, if I remember correctly, I think you can buy, I think it comes out to about $400. I think you can end up with somewhere around 40,000 membership rewards points for nine tenths of a cent per point.

But the point you're making is one that's definitely worth driving home. I think also now I haven't done LifeLock because I've seen other people kind of be like, and I don't need the membership rewards points that badly at the moment. So I haven't done it. But if I remember correctly, what I've heard is that you can't just cancel online. I think you need to call and talk to somebody to cancel that. Double check me on that. Fact check me because I don't know from personal experience. But that's what I recall hearing that you had to call and talk to somebody. So then you get the additional hassle of I got It's a good price. Nine-tenths of a cent per point is a good price if you're transferring to airlines and you're booking premium cabin awards. I mentioned that British Airways award that my friend booked just the other day for 60,000 points and 200 bucks day before departure business class. I mean,

that's a great deal. So if you were buying those at nine-tenths of a cent per point, if you were able to buy enough to book that ticket, which you can't in this case. But if you could, that'd be a pretty solid deal. So it's certainly, I think, a good deal for membership rewards points. It's not quite good enough for me because I earn enough membership rewards points through Forex at US supermarkets on my gold card and dining on the gold card and the various referral offers and things. So there's enough ways to earn membership rewards points that I don't feel the need to pay nine-tenths of a cent per point for them, but you certainly could do pretty well.

So there's our analysis. If you're willing to put up with the hassle, it's not a bad deal, but consider what the hassle is and what your other options for earning easy membership rewards points are. Okay. That's a good way of putting it.

I agree. I think that brings us to the end of today's show, which is perfect timing because I'm looking out the window and's a good way of putting it. I agree. I think that brings us to the end of today's show, which is perfect timing because I'm looking out the window and we're pulling out of Lisbon. So I've been on one of the free cruises this week, one of the MSC cruises from the various status matching. So doing a free cruise around Europe and we've pulled out of Lisbon. So I don't know how much longer I'm going to have cell service. So it's perfect time to end this one this week. But if you've enjoyed today's episode and you'd like to get this stuff in your inbox, you want to go to frequent miler.com slash subscribe.

Again, that's frequent miler.com slash subscribe. Join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media, Instagram, and you can join our frequent miler insiders group on Facebook. And that's frequent miler insiders in order to discuss this type of stuff. But if you have a question or a piece of feedback that you'd like to be considered for a future Mailbag segment or question of the week, you can send that too. Send it to mailbag at frequentmiler.com. Bye, everybody.

Bye, everybody.