Frequent Miler on the Air - How to gift free hotel nights | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep265 | 7-26-24

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 gift free hotel nights. So sometimes you want to give someone a present and sometimes the best present of all is to give them travel. And so we're going to talk about ways you can gift people your free hotel nights that you've earned through earning points, earning free night certificates and so on as part of our main event. Yeah, I love this topic because this is a fun thing to give to someone. You can give them a sort of a fun experience. And it also has outsized value, right? Because the points might be relatively easy for you to earn,

Starting point is 00:00:48 but worth quite a bit to the recipient. So it's also a gift that enables you to be more generous, perhaps. But don't forget, if you want to find direct links to the different timestamps, you want to jump ahead to a segment or you want to come back to it again, you can always find those in the show notes, expand the description box, wherever it is you're watching or listening. And please don't forget to like this video, give us a thumbs up, leave us some feedback and give us your thoughts about gifting hotel free night certificates and points. We always love to hear from you. Great. Let's drag out this week's giant mailbag. Today's giant mail comes from Ted. This was in response to my post Hilton Honors is winning me over,

Starting point is 00:01:25 but I'd like one more enhancement. In that post, I kind of raved about how I was more interested than ever at collecting Hilton points and free night certificates. And that's mostly because they added the small luxury hotels of the world properties as bookable with Hilton points and free night certificates, but also because they're adding more and more luxury properties to their collection. And in the comments of that post, Ted wrote, I'm going to be a cynic here. Notice a lot of YouTubers are pushing the Hilton ecosystem in the past few weeks. Does Hilton pay influencers to do this? Great question. A smart question to ask because you want to question where your information is coming from and the influences Does Hilton content. Our enthusiasm is just genuine. Both Greg and I have made a bunch of these SLH reservations because some of these properties just look amazing. Hilton has made some good changes.

Starting point is 00:02:33 So we're excited and happy about it. I'm sure there are some influencers out there that do get paid to push the brand. And usually it's going to say hashtag ad or partner or something like that. So people should be disclosing that when that's the case. But that's not the case for us. It's not something that we're getting paid to talk about. It's just something that we're legit excited about. Yeah. And I should say too, we've never published any articles that were sponsored by anyone. We've never been paid to write an article. We turn down offers to write articles for people all the time. If that ever changed, I don't think it'll change, but if that ever changed, you would see all over the post, this is sponsored. And so yeah, you can trust that what we write is because if we write, we say we're excited about something,

Starting point is 00:03:20 it's because we're excited about it, not because we're getting paid. Right, right. And we have done an episode before at some point when we talked about the business about something it's because we're excited about it not because we're getting paid right right and we have done an episode before at some point when we talked about the business behind the blog i think or maybe it was just in your origin story so if you're curious about how that works then we'll have a link to that in the show notes or at least a link to the post that greg has written in the past about that so you can understand how the our blog works how our site works and what makes us a little bit different than some other sites anyway in that regard um so you can understand how our blog works, how our site works, and what makes us a little bit different than some other sites anyway in that regard. So you can check that out and find out. But no, we're not getting paid by Hilton or anybody else to create content for them.

Starting point is 00:03:54 All right. So that's Mailbag. Let's talk about this week's Card Talk, which is probably going to be changing soon and not be called card talk for much longer, right? Yeah. So we made a decision. We're going to make some changes here. When we do a full credit card coverage, that is when we intend to fully cover all the details about a single credit card, we decided that would be better as a standalone show. We're going to break that out as its own thing. That way, if someone's interested in that card, they could just listen to or watch that show. And if you're not interested, you could just skip that show altogether to make that easier. But we're still going to have a segment in this slot to talk about credit card news. And so that's probably what we're going to call this going forward is card news. And that'll be for things like, you know, there's a great new credit card offer out or there are changes to an existing credit card. And, you know, maybe we've have to call it charged up or charged up segment.

Starting point is 00:05:05 So, so anyway, yeah, that's great. And so we're going to be talking about, and so definitely check out the card talk standalone segments that we're going to be publishing soon. That's going to be, I think, good and exciting and a positive change in something where you can find exactly the info on the card you want, rather than having to hunt through all of our podcasts to figure out on which one did they talk about that. We'll have individual episodes titled with those. So hopefully it'll be even easier for you to find the info you want on specific cards.

Starting point is 00:05:32 But certainly there has been huge news this week. So if we are having a card news segment, this was the week to change it to card news because there is big news on the Amex gold card. Yeah. When we separately published a show about the rumored changes. Well, to the MX Gold Card and the rumored changes now are live. They're exactly as they were rumored to be. So I think it's probably enough to just say it's all true, but maybe we should list out those big changes. Yeah. If you didn't listen to the coffee break episode, then the annual fee is now increased. It's now $325 instead of $250. It was 250, but it increased by 75 bucks. Now, if you're an existing Amex gold card holder, then you will not see that $325 annual fee until

Starting point is 00:06:17 your next renewal after October 1st, 2024. So if you've got a gold card and it's up for renewal soon, the good news for you is that the changes, the extra credits that are getting added are things you're going to be able to make use of, and you won't get hit with that $325 annual fee until your next renewal after October 1st. So that's good news for anybody who's around renewal time right now. I can just hear thousands of people who have renewal on October 2nd growing in right now. I'm pretty sure we got one that renews in November. So I feel your pain, but, uh, but for those who are our existing cardholders, the nice thing is you will get the new benefits. So speaking of new

Starting point is 00:06:58 benefits, one of the things is you could request a new white gold card. You ready to run out for the new white gold card, Greg? Um, no, but't mind it. By the way, that's also going to be available for the business gold card if you are interested in that card. So that's one of the few changes that go over to that one. One of the things I like about the different designs, all jokes aside, is that if you have multiple cards in your household, the different designs can make it really easy to quickly visually know what's what. So I do like offering multiple designs of a particular card. So I like that. And I like that this one, I don't know, I didn't particularly like the platinum card redesign. So this one's, I think a little nicer in my subjective opinion, but more important than that is that the card now has a $7 monthly

Starting point is 00:07:43 Dunkin' Donuts credit or Dunkin credit. So you should be able to, we think, maybe be able to use that by loading the Dunkin app. I'm thinking so. $7 a month, $84 a year. And you get a $50 semi-annual Resi dining credit. And so Resi is a restaurant reservation service, but you don't actually have to make a reservation in order to use this. You just need to use your card at a restaurant that is included on the Resi platform. It must be a U.S. restaurant on the Resi platform.

Starting point is 00:08:10 So this won't work abroad. I assume that's probably because it needs to be charged in U.S. dollars. So for those that really want to think outside the box, maybe if there are Resi restaurants in a country outside the U.S. that uses U.S. dollar as their primary currency. Maybe it'll still work there, but it's official terms are going to be just in the U.S. Forex at restaurants is now going to be limited to $50,000 in spend per year. Forex grocery or U.S. supermarket, I should say, remains as is. And the $10 monthly Uber crash that comes with the card, again, remains unchanged. And the $10 monthly dining credit continues to work for Grubhub and a bunch of other stuff.

Starting point is 00:08:50 But Milk Bar and Shake Shack are now removed. And Five Guys is added now as an option for that. So all of that, I think, is immediate, right? That starts right away. So these changes drop on the 25th of July 2024. And they're in place. Yeah. One important note, if you already have the gold card, make sure to register for the Resi

Starting point is 00:09:12 and the Duncan credits. So those are new things that you have to register for. If you have a new gold card, go into the benefits section of your online account and just register for everything that it says to register for, or else you're not going to get those credits. Glad you mentioned that. Yeah. There are a number of Amex cards that require enrollment in those benefits. So make sure you enroll. All right. So that all turned out to be true. We had a full coffee break episode just recently, so you can check out a link to that coffee break episode in the show notes where we talk about that card and those

Starting point is 00:09:45 what were rumored changes and what we think about them and keep an eye out because we're going to have a coffee break segment coming soon talking about, okay, well, what are the best cards for grocery and dining? If you perhaps aren't happy with the new increase in annual fee on the gold card. So keep an eye out for that coming in a coffee break soon. Yep. No, that's not it. One more piece of card news. We previously had reported on details about the Wells Fargo Attune card that earns 4% on a whole slew of categories. Pretty much every category that no other bank thought to make a category is a four percent category of this card um and i remember during the show i speculated that maybe amazon.com purchases would give you four percent uh because it says it has a few bookstores and also like online media

Starting point is 00:10:41 or something like that so there were a of things that sounded like roughly like Amazon. And we have a report from a reader named Artisa who says that, yeah, Artisa tried out the Wells Fargo tune on an Amazon.com purchase. And sure enough, 4%. So that's good to hear. Yeah, that's great. So of course, keep in mind that you could get one of the Amazon credit cards and they give 5% back, or you could buy Amazon gift cards perhaps in places that trigger category bonuses. So there are some other options to earn a decent return on Amazon, but it's really nice

Starting point is 00:11:17 to know the Attune card bonus is that, because man, that Attune card has such wide ranging for X categories. We talked about that on a previous episode too. And so we'll make sure we link to the, in the show notes to that episode as well, so that you can check out more about that, a tune card and we've written a post about it as well. So it's certainly one to keep an eye on.

Starting point is 00:11:36 Absolutely. All right. Let's talk about what crazy thing did Southwest airlines do this week or one mile at a time do this week or one mile at a time do this week one mile at a time anything that one mile at a time did based on stuff that southwest airlines did so southwest airlines has has um announced or i don't know if announced is the right word but anyway they they've let us know that a number of changes are coming, such as they're going to start offering assigned seating instead of a free-for-all. They're going to add premium seating of some sort.

Starting point is 00:12:15 We don't know what that'll look like, but some sort of premium seating. And they're going to add red-eye flights as an option. They've never done red eyes before overnight flights, never done it before. Initially their, their technology didn't allow for it. And then when they upgraded their technology, their union contracts didn't allow for it. Now they're past both of those hurdles. And here's the crazy thing is a one mile a time announces that part of news by saying Southwest airlines, red eyeeye flight's coming, finally! With an exclamation point.

Starting point is 00:12:50 Do we really think that Ben at One Mile a Time has been, like, just waiting, eager to take Southwest red-eye flights? It does seem unlikely that he's been waiting, but he's rooting for the rest of us that would take those flights. He's like, finally, you guys are going to join the modern flying world. I mean, I think it totally makes sense for Southwest to do that. But for anyone to be like excited with an exclamation point about flying Southwest Red Eye? I'm not excited.

Starting point is 00:13:17 Let's be clear. Yeah. Yeah. You know, actually, so the Red Eye, the whole Red Eye thing, I know that it's been a big deal that they don't have them. I know it makes it inconvenient because they're like just itineraries you can't put together because of the fact that they don't have the overnight flights. But the prospect of flying overnight, I don't know, I guess the prospect of flying overnight in a domestic economy class cabin in general doesn't really appeal to me very much. I know people do it all the time, but, uh, but certainly not with a family. And so I think actually what I dislike about these red eyes coming is that I feel like the flights that I want to take are going to get more expensive because the red eyes will be the cheap ones. And so now the daytime flights that I want are going to increase in price. And so that's what I really don't like about this change personal.

Starting point is 00:14:03 Yeah. On the, on the other hand, you know, Southwest makes it pretty easy to do, as you've taught me, to do same day changes if you buy the right type of ticket. And so if these are less expensive, I agree with you, it's possible that it's just going to push up other fares. But if these are less expensive, it brings up more options to get cheaper flights and then same day change. So you're not doing a red eye and then you can add the exclamation point back in. There we go. There we go. Yeah. And what do you, what about you think about the assigned seating? Is that a, you know, does that make you more likely to fly Southwest? Cause I know you don't usually fly Southwest. It's not your thing. Would you be more likely to fly it if you get assigned

Starting point is 00:14:41 seats? I would, um, you know, I you know i i just i i haven't flown southwest that much but like the one time i did with a pretty large group we had a connection and so even though i i can't remember if we had paid for like early boarding or whatever it was but so we got good seats on the first leg but then we ran to the, you know, to the gate at the next leg and had to be like, you know, I think we were last boarding the plane. Um, wasn't the end of the world, but I, I like, I, you know, I, I like knowing I'm going to be sitting next to the person or people I'm traveling with and, uh, Southwest makes that harder to know. Yeah, yeah, that's a fair point. You know, personally, I'm not excited about this,

Starting point is 00:15:31 but I think I understand. I think that a lot of people don't like this, and this is the thing that keeps them from flying Southwest or the reason why they don't fly Southwest anymore. So I think it's a very smart business decision. I do think that consumers in general want this and are willing to pay for it. So if I own Southwest, I would totally do it. Personally, I like the way it works right now because A, I don't have to pay for a seat assignment and B, I travel with young kids. And so Southwest allows families traveling with kids

Starting point is 00:15:57 under six to board after the A group. So I'm in trouble in Greg's situation where I get to end up with a tight connection and have to run to the next gate because that's not going to help me if I've already missed the A and B group. But most of the time that doesn't happen. So most of the time I don't have to worry about checking in exactly 24 hours in advance. I can board after the A group and I know we're going to sit together and we'll have the option to pick where we want to sit. I kind of like that, but I know most people don't. So I guess good job, Southwest. Unfortunately, I feel like those flights are going to cost me more now and make it harder

Starting point is 00:16:28 for me to choose Southwest, even though that's what my family prefers to fly. Yeah. I'll tell you what, if the premium seating is actually premium in some way, like not just extra legroom seats. And if you can book into those with the companion pass, I think that's going to be pretty exciting for some of us that care about those things. That's a good point. That's good.

Starting point is 00:16:50 That might work out really well. Yeah. So we'll see. We don't, they, they kind of said that they're doing this, but they didn't give a date or anything yet. I don't think so. I'm not sure when this is coming, but keep an eye out for it because it's going to be coming at some point.

Starting point is 00:17:04 All right. That brings us to mattressress Running the Numbers. This week's Mattress Running the Numbers. We've got a Marriott promotion out. Vacations by Marriott Bonvoy is out with a promo to earn 25,000 Marriott rewards points. Marriott Bonvoy points on a booking of four nights or more. A vacation package, I should say, of four or more nights. So tell me about this, Greg.

Starting point is 00:17:24 When is it? Where do I have to go? And how much do I have to spend in order to earn my 25,000 points? Right. First, let me give a big picture. Vacations by Marriott is not Marriott homes and villas. I was a little confused when I first saw the headline because I didn't know anything about Vacations by Marriott. I probably saw headlines whenever it first was introed and I promptly ignored them. But this is different. This is like those where you, where you buy airfare plus hotel all at once that type of vacation package, not a vacation home. So anyway, so I just wanted to put that out there because Marriott's Homes and Villas has done promotions that sounded similar very recently.

Starting point is 00:18:09 OK, so in order to earn the twenty five thousand bonus points with this promo, you need to reserve your stay before the end of July. So of twenty twenty four. So you don't have much time to reserve it. And travel must be by uh the end of december of 2024 okay so that's that's the tight window and it's tight window it see it appears from the terms and stuff that it could be any type of um package as long as it as long as it includes four night stays. And I'm saying that because they let you book either air and hotel or car and hotel. And so if you're looking for a cheaper stay and not interested in getting airfare as part of this, you might be able to do a car and hotel package. The only caveat I'm going to say is the terms did say something like you're eligible to do this at

Starting point is 00:19:07 all participating Marriott hotels. They didn't say what they meant by participating. I think what they mean is those that are participating in Marriott vacations, in vacations by Marriott, not participating in this

Starting point is 00:19:24 promo, but it's not clear to me. Um, so, so that's a little asterisk there. Um, also I didn't like, unlike when the homes and villas did a promo like this, when you're checking out, you actually see it says on there on the checkout, you're going to earn, you know, however many bonus points for this. Uh, this does not say say that so you're kind of left hoping that you did everything right so don't like those things about it um no um i hunted like around the world a bit uh for what's the cheapest package i could find i've i did find one for about $260, like somewhere in South Africa, I think it was. But it was hard to find that. And that was a hotel and car package would probably work.

Starting point is 00:20:16 So let me turn that over to you, Nick. Now, would you is this mattress run worthy, meaning it's worth booking this just for the earning the points? And oh, and you do earn elite knights as well, by the way. OK, so I'm going to say probably not. I was going to go hard. No, but I'll say probably not worth booking just for the points. It depends on how much you value the elite knights, maybe it starts to become a little more interesting. It's a good rebate. So 25,000 points. I know that recently Marriott

Starting point is 00:20:52 points are on sale for 0.86 cents per point. So you could have bought 25,000 points for $215 in the most recent sale. So if you look at it that way and say, okay, the points are a rebate of about 215 bucks, that's a really good rebate on a $260 stay. If you were able to find something like Greg's cherry picked example there somewhere in South Africa, that was 260 bucks. Well, then for a net cost, so to speak of about 45 bucks, you pick up four elite night credits, I guess. I mean, that's, that's pretty good. But, but unless you a know you need all four elite night credits, then I don't think I'd probably be worrying much about this. Although if you do find one, even that's three or $400 or $500, the rebate here is nice. It's a pretty good rebate. So between the rebate and

Starting point is 00:21:45 the four elite nights, not bad. If you find something that works, I'm not going to spend a lot of time like over the next couple of days that are left to book one of these to find one where I can use it during this small six month window. I think Mary, I just made this too tight to make it interesting or worthwhile. Yeah, I totally agree. If you're planning a four-night stay anyway, it's absolutely worth looking into, will this work for you? That's a really nice rebate. If you're doing a paid rate at an even more expensive hotel, find out how much it costs to add in the car. If it doesn't cost costs to add in the car if it doesn't cost much to add in the car getting 25 000 points on top of it maybe maybe uh very well worth it one

Starting point is 00:22:31 thing i don't know for a pure mattress run what i don't know with this is would you get the points in elite credit even if you don't show up to check yeah yeah you know i mean yeah you can't count on it's one of those things you can't even if somebody has success that you can't count on it working in every situation, I feel like so it's worth, you know, because if you could add the car for 100 bucks, let's say, well, then maybe it's worth doing this so that you get the 25,000 points. Similarly, if even if you have like a three night stay, it might be worth making it a four night stay, even if you leave after three nights, depending on, again, what the difference in price might be. So it's worth checking out if you are planning a three or four night hotel stay in the next couple of months, then maybe it is worth you taking a look for a few minutes to see.

Starting point is 00:23:31 And of course, of course, if you could use the rental card too, so much the better. All the better. All the better. Exactly. All right. So there we have it. Mattress running the numbers. It's not mattress run worthy, but it is a good rebate to check out.

Starting point is 00:23:41 If you think you're going to have a qualifying stay coming up, probably not one that we're going to do ourselves. of things we may or may not do ourselves let's talk about this week's award talk so for award talk this week we've got some transfer bonuses going on city has transfer bonuses through august 17th 2024 they have a 20 transfer bonus to windham rewards so you have 1000 city points to bendham points. And they have a 25% transfer bonus to Air France KLM Flying Blue, same sort of a thing, 1,000 city points to 1,250 Air France KLM Flying Blue points. So that looks pretty good, I guess, if you have an award to book, right? Yeah, I mean, I think they're both decent. I mean, Wyndham, I wouldn't do Wyndham unless you have a known need for the Wyndham points.

Starting point is 00:24:30 Frequently Wyndham points go on sale for around a penny or a tiny bit less than a penny each. And so this is still, you know, better than cashing out your city points at a penny each and buying the Wy points. So, you know, it's still, um, decent, um, but it's not like getting huge, huge value for your city points that way. Um, and then the flying blue, uh, we see transfer bonuses flying blue pretty frequently, but I like that program. I mean, it has a lot of, um, uh, you often get, uh, can get good deals through that program. And so that's one that, you know, I don't know if I was for some reason wanting to ditch my city cards and, and, uh, transfer out my points, I'd be willing to do it to flying

Starting point is 00:25:17 blue. Yeah. Yeah. I, I agree. And, and really I don't, the city's other transfer partners transfer partners, I mostly have access to all the city's transfer partners. The only one that I don't have easy access to is the choice, the nice bonus that they have, the double, essentially one to two that they have to choice. So that's the only other thing that I think is potentially a reason to give you pause to transferring with a transfer bonus like this if you wanted to ditch your points anyway, I guess. But I would feel more comfortable ditching them to Air France

Starting point is 00:25:50 Flying Blue. So this is certainly one to consider. We always tell people not to transfer speculatively. You know, if you have a use in mind, that's the best time to do it. But like I said, if you're going to cancel your card, then this is one probably worth considering. Though on the flip side, we do, like Greg said, frequently see transfer bonuses to Air France, KLM, Flying Blue. So if you miss this one, chances are good there'll be another one in not too, too long. You know, we rarely go more than a couple of months before somebody has a 25% transfer bonus to Air France, KLM, Flying Blue.

Starting point is 00:26:19 So it's not the hottest thing since sliced bread, but not a bad deal either. Yeah. Let me add one more thing, though, that just occurred to me. So it's not the hottest thing since sliced bread, but not a bad deal either. Yeah. Let me add one more thing, though, that just occurred to me. If you're a rewards plus card pulled with your City Premiere or Prestige card and you haven't used up. So just having that card means you get a 10% rebate on the points used for each year up to 100,000 points that you've used. So you get up to 10,000 points back. I could totally see saying my year, I don't see myself using my city points this year. I want to get that 10% rebate.

Starting point is 00:26:58 So I'm going to transfer up to 100,000 of my city points to Flying Blue, get that 25% bonus, get 10% of my city points back. Um, so you get 10,000 points back in that example. So yeah, I, I, yeah, it's, so it's, it's, it's, uh, pretty good. Yeah. That's actually, I think that's a fantastic point because then that turns it into a bigger transfer bonus because essentially you're turning 90,000 city thank you points into 125,000 airline miles. So if I did the math, right, I I'm questioning and it looks like a more than a 30, 38% transfer bonus than that would be because your 90,000 becomes 125. So yeah, 39% transfer bonus. So, uh, that, that then yes, that's a great point that would make it worth doing potentially even speculatively if you have that situation

Starting point is 00:27:47 going on. Smart way to look at that. Okay, that's Citi, but that's not all of our award talk this week. You found some cool stuff with SLH. Yeah, I just wanted to basically remind people, if you looked at some SLH properties bookable through Hilton and found no availability, keep looking. So we just saw some of the most desirable properties like Kalala Island and Grand Hotel Victoria at Lake Como suddenly release a lot of award space. And so then you can use your Hilton points or free nights or debates to book those.

Starting point is 00:28:35 I like using tools like rooms.arrow or max my point to both see what the space available looks like. And I talked about on an earlier show how to use rooms.arrow to do that. And also to set alerts. So if you don't see the dates you need, use one of these tools to set alerts so that it'll let you know when those nights become available. Keep in mind that some hotels have a minimum stay requirement, like three nights is common. And rooms.aero makes it really easy to see when that's the case. So my point being that if you're setting alert for a hotel like that, it better be a three-night alert or else you're not going to find anything. So you found a bunch of availability at those places at times you wanted to travel, right? I did. And in fact, I wrote about booking the Grand Hotel Victoria for when I need to travel. I wrote on our private Slack channel within our Freak and Miler team. And then Nick wrote back

Starting point is 00:29:33 with the specific dates that he's going to be there. We found out that he's checking out literally on the day I'm checking in. I have to get the picture out front, like tagging, you know? Yeah, that's hilarious. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, I think Greg wanted to be there even a little bit sooner, but because I've got three rooms bucked, it was a little harder to find the ability even to, uh, to arrive a day or two sooner. So, so my award. So, but I set up alerts who knows, maybe.

Starting point is 00:30:01 Yeah. Fun times. It's funny. Cause I, you know, we don't usually plan those types of things and that's happened you know before i guess uh where i've run into people that i didn't realize i was going to have booked at the same time so uh so that'll be really funny that we just happened to have booked during the same week that place so crazy discussing it in advance all right so that's slh check out for that or check for check for those availabilities that you want to be able to book. Last thing for award talk. And I can't remember if I talked about this last week or not, but if I didn't, then we should definitely talk about it. And if I did, feel free to ignore it and move on. But that is that auto slash triggers the

Starting point is 00:30:39 altitude reserves, real-time mobile rewards. So I recently booked a car rental. Now, that's something that in general does trigger real-time mobile rewards if you're booking a car rental with your Altitude Reserve card. And what I mean by real-time mobile rewards, if you don't know what I'm talking about here, is if you have a U.S. Bank Altitude Reserve card, you can use your points for travel through the U.S. Bank portal at one and a half cents per point. That's not usually a great deal, though, because their prices through the portal aren't always very good. I don't like to book through a portal anyway, most of the time. However, one thing that you can do that's even better or more convenient is you can pay for travel directly. And in some cases,

Starting point is 00:31:19 it'll trigger a text message for you to redeem your points via real time mobile rewards. And when that happens, that's at a value of one and a half cents per point towards travel, if you're using it towards travel, towards the qualifying travel expenses. And the qualifying travel expenses tend to be US-based, so US airlines, US rental car companies, et cetera. But we have found that there are some instances where a foreign airline will trigger real-time mobile rewards, for instance. We have a post about what works for real-time mobile rewards. So check the show notes for information about that. But my find here with AutoSlash is that I was booking a rental car overseas through a company that I don't think exists in the United States. I'd never heard

Starting point is 00:31:58 of the rental car company before. Didn't seem like they had any international chains there that I was familiar with. And so I was booking through Auto Slash and Auto Slash had the option to do a pay now rate where I pay Auto Slash right away. And it was still flexible. I could cancel up to 48 hours in advance. So I booked that and then immediately went to track it on Auto Slash in case they find a better price. But much to my surprise, I booked through Auto Sl slash again for a foreign rental car in a different country and a company that I don't think exists in the United States. And sure enough, I did get the text message from us bank with a real time mobile rewards offering for me to use my points at one and a half cents per point to cover that rental car. And so I did that. That's what I've been holding my us bank altitude reserve points for to kind of be my rental car reserve. So I thought that was great because of the rentals not going to end up

Starting point is 00:32:47 costing me anything out of pocket. Yeah, that's really nice. Very good. All right. So now let's talk about this week's main event. Main event time, how to gift free hotel nights.

Starting point is 00:32:58 This topic is top of mind for me. My sister is about to celebrate a big birthday and I asked her what she wants as a gift and she said, how about a few nights at a resort? And I was like, that's right up my alley. I can do that easily. And then it's like, okay, of the many points and free nights certificates and things I have, which ones are the options for this? So I dug up a post we have about this, which we'll link to in the show notes to figure it out. And that's what we're going to talk about today.

Starting point is 00:33:37 Yeah. So at a high level, the rules vary by program. And so there's different ins and outs and what have yous. And we're going to discuss that by each program. But the basic simple approaches are, first first you could just gift your points to your friend or family member and let them book for themselves in some cases second option you might be able to use your own points to book a stay for your friends so you book your friend's stay using your points you might in some cases be able to use your free night certificate to book your friend's

Starting point is 00:34:03 stay and finally you might be able to gift a free night certificate to book your friend's stay. And finally, you might be able to gift a free night certificate to a friend. Now, I say might be able to because, of course, like I said, the rules vary by program. So we're going to dig into that a little bit and talk about what your options are with each of the major programs. Sounds good. So let's start with just being able to gift your points to someone else so that they can then book the hotel on their own. Which programs allow that and which ones don't? Well, Hilton Honors is one that allows you to gift points to somebody else. Each member can transfer up to 500,000 points per calendar year into a pool.

Starting point is 00:34:38 So you can pool with up to 10 other people. And so each person can contribute up to 500,000 points to that pool. And each member of the pool is allowed to receive up to 2 million points per year so if I wanted to give points to Greg I can give him up to 500,000 points and Greg can receive up to 200 or rather up to 2 million points per year so that's pretty generous that should make it possible to book my resort for a few nights if you wanted to do it that way. For sure. Okay. What about IHG? You can, but there are some caveats there, right? Because they want to charge you to do that, don't they? Yeah. By default, they're going to charge you like half a cent each,

Starting point is 00:35:17 which is crazy because that's how much they charge during sales to buy points. So if you wanted to pay half a cent, you could buy points during a sale because you can buy them as a gift for somebody. So you could just buy the points. And then keep the ones you have instead of gifting them. Yeah. Luckily, there's two ways to circumvent that fee, right?

Starting point is 00:35:38 One is if you're a Diamond IHG member, you can gift your points to other people for free um they can't gift to you for free but you can give to them for free um even better anyone registered with an ihd business rewards uh with with that program can gift for free um and i'm stressing anyone because literally anyone can log into their IHG account and click a button to register for that and you're done. Now, the ability to gift for free doesn't happen immediately. Like you've got to wait some amount of time, which is unwritten, I think, how much time. But after a few weeks or so, you should be able to then gift your IHG points for free, which is pretty darn cool.

Starting point is 00:36:29 So I'll pay half a cent per point to do it. No, don't do that. Don't do that. Don't do that. That'd be crazy. It makes me wonder how many people do end up paying to do that every year without realizing that they could just click a button to do it for free. It stinks that IHG has taken advantage of that. But I guess if that makes it free for the rest of us, then just listen to this show and know you need to click that button so you can do it for free. Right.

Starting point is 00:36:53 All right. What about Marriott? Marriott lets you give points to other people, right? So you can give up to 100,000 points per year to other members and an individual member can receive up to 500,000 points per year. So I try to keep this on my checklist at the end of the year because my wife has had a whole bunch of Marriott points for years. And so I try to remember at the end of the year to move 100,000 points from her account

Starting point is 00:37:13 to my account. And I do it at the end of the year because I figure out if there's a reason to have the points in there throughout the course of the year. Great. But if I get to the end of the year and we haven't yet, and there's still a couple hundred thousand in there, then I'm going to move a hundred thousand over to my account because we usually book our Marriott stays through my account. So, uh, so that's something to keep in mind.

Starting point is 00:37:31 You can do that now online. It used to be years ago, you had to call and it was only free if you had elite status, but that's not the case anymore. You can do this online for yourself. Self-service. It's pretty easy to do. Yeah. One of the rare, uh, changes that the Mary Bonvoy program has made

Starting point is 00:37:46 in recent years, that's just totally positive. World of Hyatt. So yes, you can transfer points for free. Their technology is like 1990, circa 1990. There's no IT in Hyatt. No. So there's a form to fill out to transfer points to someone else. They used to require faxing it. Luckily, they now allow emailing it to Hyatt to get this done. So it's not hard, but it's kind of absurd. And you can all send or receive points once every 30 days is the only limitation there. But I don't think there's any limit to how many points you can send or receive.

Starting point is 00:38:29 I don't think so. I think technically it's supposed to be in order to book a specific award, but nobody's ever asked me what we're moving points for. So I don't think there's any sort of problem there. And yeah, we've moved over large enough six figure quantities without a problem before. So that that shouldn't be an issue. The once every 30 days in or out can be kind of a pain if you're moving points with different family members a bunch, because again, once you move them out, you can't receive any or give any for another 30 days. So it locks you in both directions for 30 days. So that's a little bit annoying, but it's minorly annoying and probably not much of a hassle for most people. So it is nice that you

Starting point is 00:39:10 can presumably move your points without any limit. So you could take care of whatever it is you want for somebody else in that way. So if you want to give your points to somebody, you could do that. And my wife and I, by the way, I should mention do that because she has a world high credit card and we've spent the 15 K for the free night certificate last couple of years. But I have the elite status with Hyatt. So it's not really all that useful to have points in her account. So instead, periodically, she'll move points to my account because we're going to book awards out of mine anyway. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:39:39 All right. What about a free night? So can you book a free night for somebody else using your points if you don't want to have to transfer the points to them and make them figure out how to do it, because if you're trying to do this for a family member, I don't know, I don't know, Greg's sister, maybe she doesn't even have a Hilton honors account or a world of Hyatt account and doesn't want to learn how to create that, receive the points and make the booking. Greg just wants to be able to do it for her maybe. So which programs allow you to do that? Yeah. So it seems like in many cases, you kind of need to do that by booking the stay and putting the other person in as some way,

Starting point is 00:40:15 in some manner, putting that person in as the guest who's going to be checking in. And, and that manner varies by person. So with Hilton, according to my notes here from the post that we have, that Hilton actually has a section in their online reservation that lets you add an additional name who can check in. Yeah, it does specifically have that. So you can add additional names. And in fact, I think you can add a couple of names on if you're booking a larger room type with hilton so you can even add a couple of people on the room so yes that is simple and it does i think explicitly say to add names to allow them to be able to check in so um so and i've done that enough times with hilton and not had any sort of an issue there so i think that's intended by Hilton there. What about IHG rewards club for somebody? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:41:08 Yeah. So our notes say, yes, I can't remember the details. Can you put it in on the online system? You just enter the guest name with IHG. Yeah. So that one's a pretty straightforward, simple one. You just enter whoever it is that's going to be staying. So you can book for somebody else that way. Although I did once run into a hotel that gave some pushback on this, oddly, but I think it's meant to be doable. So

Starting point is 00:41:32 you can enter that name anyway on the online form. So should be good. Okay. How about Marriott? Marriott. So this is something that actually I was not familiar with the fact that Marriott does, I guess, allow this to happen. I thought that Marriott does, I guess, allow this to happen. I thought that Marriott, you could enter somebody else's name, but technically it wasn't sanctioned. But there is a sanctioned way to do this, apparently. Yeah, so they explicitly allow you to do this up to five times per year. So they have this strange limit there.

Starting point is 00:42:01 You have to call to make this happen. But, you know, you do need to know that when you do that, neither the member booking or the person receiving the free night will earn elite night credit or elite benefit. And you're if the person gifting has elite status and the person receiving doesn't, you know, you're not goingifting has elite status and the person receiving doesn't, you know, you're not going to get elite benefits during that stay. I'm not sure that you're even going to be able to use elite benefits if you have them yourself or during the stay, but that, that's unclear. Yeah. Yeah. So there you go. You can, but there is a limit, the max of five times per year. Now, do you know, I'm guessing probably not. I don't know the answer to this myself. If you can do it five times per year, does that mean for a total of five

Starting point is 00:42:49 nights or five stays in each stay could be presumably a week long. That's for five separate stays. Five separate stays. Yeah. Okay. There you go. So there you have it. You can do that with Marriott apparently. So I haven't done that myself with Marriott that way. World of Hyatt. Can you book a stay for somebody else? Yes, you can. You can call and book a stay and gift it to someone else. Now that's different than guest of honor. I'm not talking about guest of honor. Maybe we'll discuss that separately. But with Hyatt, even if you don't have any elite status with Hyatt, you can call and use your points and gift the stay to another person. So I've done this at a time when I only had explorer status, I had no problem calling and gifting a stay to someone else. So that's nice. Hyatt makes it easy to do that.

Starting point is 00:43:34 They do. They do. And I guess since you brought up guest of honor, I think we should mention that, that Hyatt has this thing called guest of Honor, where when you, it's a milestone reward. So the more nights you stay at Hyatt, you can get different like gifts or earn milestone rewards. And one of them is these Guest of Honor certificates, which they work differently than they used to. The way they work now is for a stay that you've booked, and if you have a guest of honor certificate, you could apply it to that stay. And you get treated as if you have globalist status, which is how it's topped your status for the length of that stay. That means if you booked with points, you get free parking. If you booked with cash, you get no resort fees.

Starting point is 00:44:24 You get free breakfast. You get lounge acts, all the goodies, you get no resort fees, you get free breakfast, you get lounge acts, all the goodies that you get as a globalist, you could get if you use that certificate. Now, the other thing is you can give that certificate to other people. And that's how it's more often used is that you give the certificate to a friend, they attach it to their own reservation. They get all those globalist benefits and you will earn one elite night credit if you gift that to someone else and they use it.

Starting point is 00:44:56 So after they've used it, you get one. It doesn't matter how long their stay is. You only get one night, but that's guest of honor. So that's a really cool thing that doesn't really fit in the paradigm of any other hotel chain out there. No, it doesn't. And it makes it really nice. If you do have high globalist status, I mean, you can give somebody a really nice gift because that's great. If somebody doesn't have elite status already, they not only get a free stay, but they get a whole bunch of perks that they wouldn't have gotten otherwise. And those perks can be really valuable

Starting point is 00:45:23 in some places. You know, if you gift a stay to somebody with a guest of honor at like, you know, a nice property with a breakfast that might've cost $50 a person or something, parking that would have cost extra money. And so, and then they'll get late checkout and all that stuff. So I think that's awesome. It makes, it makes you excited as a, a higher globalist to give that as a gift makes the gift even better so yeah it really does and it doesn't have to be part of gifting a stay like if someone has their own and you want to give them something special say oh I'm gonna you know wave my magic wand and make you globalist for that stay and that could be really special depending on where where they're

Starting point is 00:46:00 staying yeah in fact I just recently had a friend reach out who said, Hey, I'm, I'm going to this city and there's two Hyatt properties. Do you have a recommendation between these two? And I didn't, cause I hadn't been to either one of them. He said, but, but if you're going, I have guest of honor awards. Do you need a guest of honor award? And he's like, Oh, that would be awesome. I would totally choose this one then if that's the case. And, and so that worked out really well for him. Yeah. Yeah. I actually gifted one to a friend who was had a stay in Costa Rica and they, they had some weird things about their reservation where to the extent where the certificate was never actually used. Um, but they got the globalist benefits during the stay and then they applied the same certificate to a stay in

Starting point is 00:46:41 California. And so that time it was awesome. Two for one gift there. Awesome. Two for one. Very good. All right. So that's using your points to book stays for other people. Now, what about, can you use a free night certificate to book a room for somebody else? Because a lot of different programs have free night certificates. Can you give those away? So it looks like with Hilton that you probably can. They have some pretty odd terms around the free night certificates. And they do say that you can redeem the free certificates for someone else. But once the certificate becomes issued to a person, it's non-transferable. Now, I tried to do that. Actually, my wife tried to do that to basically gift a free night certificate, like the use of one to me. And at least two different online chat people

Starting point is 00:47:41 couldn't really make that happen. They offered to put my name as the person who checks in. So in that way, you can do it. You can definitely, you know, use one for someone else so they can check in, but you can't really give the certificate to someone else for them to use. Yeah. You know, we, somebody told us at some point they had done this. And so I had dug into the terms and found that the terms make it sound like it's doable. But yeah, we've run into pushback trying to do it also. So at the very least, you should be able to add somebody else's name. And Hilton does seem to allow that and allow somebody else to check in.

Starting point is 00:48:18 So it is, for all intents and purposes, possible to be done. But I think this day is still going to end up under the user's name, the person who owned the certificate, unless you find somebody who knows how to do it, which may require a few phone calls if it's possible at all. Yeah, so there might be a way to do it. We just don't know how. Now, full disclosure, what I was trying to do,

Starting point is 00:48:40 what I'd hoped to do was have my wife book a fully cancelable stay with her certificates, but transferred to me in the process of booking that stay. The idea being, I hoped that if I canceled that stay, the certificates would end up in my account. Because that would make it simpler because mixing certificates across people, if you need to uh for single stay could be a challenge so um anyway that experiment failed well you know did you only try chat though did you try a phone rep i did not try a phone rep might be worth calling because you know if you have elite status you're going to get routed to a different representative than probably

Starting point is 00:49:20 you do with via chat yeah yeah all right ihg is up IHG is up next. What's up with IHG? So I think it's sort of like what we said with Hilton. Basically, you could use your free night certificate to book a stay with someone else who's checking in. I don't think you could actually transfer your free night certificate to somebody else. Yep, that's my understanding too. Marriott Bonvoy. All right, Marriott's like a hard no. You aren't allowed to technically do that at all.

Starting point is 00:49:53 Now, that said, I've had luck in the past using Marriott free night certificates booked in my name. And then when it comes time to check into the hotel, I message the hotel and say, hey, my sister in this example is going to be checking in first. Please put her name in as someone who can check in. And then she shows up and can check in no problem. I've only done that in the United States. Some people have had trouble with that kind of thing internationally in some places. So be careful about where you try to do that. Yeah. So with Marriott, especially, I think that can be an issue. But also I think sometimes with the other programs where you have to add another person's name, that is an important caveat that internationally,

Starting point is 00:50:46 sometimes they're more particular about both people showing up. So there is some amount of risk there if you're just adding someone as an additional guest. Yeah, so it's a little different whether the program allows you to specifically put someone else as the main guest or if they're listed as an additional guest, whether or not they would insist on the primary being there. Yep.

Starting point is 00:51:09 Um, all right, finally, Hyatt. Um, so we've, we've got some good news there. Yeah, that one's really easy. Yeah. You can give your free night certificate to someone else. And nowadays you can just do it online. You can send it right to them. Simple.

Starting point is 00:51:23 Just type in their world of Hyatt number or whatever. It's right under the awards in your account. And there's a button to transfer it to somebody else. Super duper easy. And that's nice because I mentioned before that my wife has completed the 15K spend on her World of Hyatt credit card. So she's earned her category one to four free night certificate and was able to transfer that to me so that I could redeem it. And we could use my globalist benefits when we do redeem it. So that's certainly a great program feature. Hyatt makes it really easy there. So while we did chide Hyatt a bit on their IT for transferring points, I've got to say they make it really easy to be able to move free night certificates and in general, really easy to book awards for other people.

Starting point is 00:52:00 They're probably the best out of the bunch here. They recently changed their program to make sharing sort of a core component of their program, except for with points where they still have that antiquated system, but at least it's still free. So let's talk about which program is best for sharing free nights. I mean, I don't think we even have to debate this. Hyatt is obviously number one. They nail every one of those categories we talked about. What about number two? I think number two, I would probably have to give it to Hilton because you can pull so many points per year. They make it relatively simple to pull points. I say relatively because in my experiences, the pools, the pooling has not happened instantly. And that's the most

Starting point is 00:52:45 annoying thing to me. I want the points to move right away. I hate that sometimes it takes like days with no real reason why to move the points over. So that's the one caveat there, but I've never run into a problem booking a Hilton property and adding someone as an additional guest. In fact, when I've called to try to transfer a certificate like that, they've explicitly told me they could just add that person's name to check in. So I think they're the second most user-friendly for this. At least that's what I would say.

Starting point is 00:53:15 I don't know. Do you agree, disagree? What do you think? You know what? I think we could probably all agree that Marriott is last just because how the rules about the free night certificates are so stringent.

Starting point is 00:53:27 But I think I would give the edge by a tiny margin to IHG. So I don't think there's any limits. I could be wrong, but to transferring points for free with IHG. Now, the Hilton limits are very high, so they're not a big problem. But sometimes you need to do some sort of creative work to get around them. And in the past, now it's been a long time, but in the past, I've been able to transfer a free night booking to someone else entirely, where it was like somehow they moved it to that other person's account altogether the the booking not the certificate um and uh that was pretty good

Starting point is 00:54:13 would that still work today i don't know because this was probably five or more years ago but um that was pretty cool that they allowed that yeah yeah radison used to be great for this too back before they were acquired by choice because they would make it really easy. You could just put it in somebody's name and it was very explicit, easy to book for somebody else. So that was, and they also used to allow points moving, but you know, that's one of those things back in the old days, uh, they are no longer their own program. So, so much for that. All right. Well, I think that, uh, brings us to the end of this week's main event, right? Oh, you know what? Let me back up because there's one more that we didn't mention and maybe it wasn't in the post and maybe that's why, can move your Wyndham Rewards points to Caesars and add a Caesars Rewards desk. A couple, a married couple, for instance, can move points

Starting point is 00:55:13 back and forth on the Caesars side, and then presumably you could move them back to Wyndham. So there's sort of a roundabout way to do that with a partner, not really an easy way to gift your points to somebody else. But I know with Vacasa vacation rentals, at least, you can indeed book a Vacasa vacation rental for anyone you want using your Wyndham points. It doesn't have to be for you. So if you're looking to book a vacation rental for somebody else, Wyndham is a great program for that because you can do that with Wyndham. I don't know about regular hotel stays with Wyndham. I have not looked into that. Okay. That brings us, I guess, to this week's question of the week.

Starting point is 00:55:46 And this week's question of the week came in because we had a reader on Facebook who said that they heard something on a recent coffee break segment where we were talking and we mentioned Amex family rules. And then she was wondering where she could find a link to more information. So this week's question is going to seem like a softball, but it's one I think we ought to talk about actually with a little bit of detail. So if somebody hears us talk about something, Greg, and they want more information, how can they find links and more information? Yeah. So, I mean, in general, you want to check the show notes because we try to put links to whatever we're talking about if we we have sort of one to one links in there in the show notes. But the other thing you can do, and I personally do this all the time, is I, you know, whatever the topic is, I'll Google frequent miler space, whatever the topic is, and see what posts come up in the Google search results. And that's how I could get to, uh, FrequentMiler resources about that topic. And that's what I would do in this example. Probably to be honest, uh, even before checking the show notes, I'd probably do that because it's

Starting point is 00:56:56 so quick. I would be just be like Google FrequentMiler, um, family, Amex family rules. Yeah. Yeah. And, and so I wanted to bring this up because that seems intuitive to anybody who's been doing it, but not necessarily to somebody who doesn't do it that way. I realized, in fact, I, that was the exact example I provided. I said, for example, you could Google Frequent Miler Amex family rules or family language, whatever it was, and you'll find our post about it. And that reader responded and said, you know, I never thought to put FrequentMiler at the beginning of the Google search, and I'm going to do that from now on. And I was like, well, yeah, I do that all the time, but that's because I do it all the time. And so I realized maybe other people aren't, because sometimes people do say, I searched for

Starting point is 00:57:38 this, but I couldn't find it. And I'll often ask what they did to search just because I want to know how people are trying to find things so we can make it easier to find. But certainly a tip if you're not familiar with it is, yeah, Google Frequent Miler plus whatever miles and points topic you want. Google's pretty good at finding the Frequent Miler post about it. So I wanted to get that tip out there for anybody who's not doing that already when you're like, oh, I can't remember. What are the Marriott Bonvoy credit card rules?

Starting point is 00:58:04 Well, just Google Frequent Miler Marriott credit card rules, and Google's going to get you there. They're going to get you to our site and our resources about it. So if we talk about something in passing and you're like, I didn't quite understand that, I want more information, I can't remember which episode it was on, then Google is your friend there with Frequent Miler at the beginning of it. Okay. Hopefully that helps somebody out there find something they're looking for. I want to say one more thing about that if you're uh one of the three listeners that are bing users microsoft bing search engine for some reason bing divorced us like the beginning of this year and i'm not kidding you could could search Frequent Miler and just about anything. It'll come up with other blogs, not ours.

Starting point is 00:58:50 It'll come up with our YouTube shows, but it will not show our blog posts. And I do not understand that. That's so weird. Yeah, it's so weird I've put in you know Bing has a way to say index this site and I put that in months ago and it still hasn't changed so I have no idea what's going on there so if you're a Microsoft Edge user yes if you work for Bing get on it reach out to us and help us figure out what we can do to make it easier for you to make it easier for other people to find Frequent Mylar. Yeah. We want to be back. We want to be back to

Starting point is 00:59:30 binging. Back to binging. All right. So there you have it. That's all the news fit to print for this week. If you've enjoyed this episode and you'd like to get more in your email inbox each day or each week, go to frequentmylar.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on social media, join our Frequent Mylar Insiders Facebook group so you can ask and answer questions like these all the time. And if you have a piece of feedback that you'd like to be considered for a future Giant Mailbag or for a future Question of the Week segment, you can send that too. Send it to Mailbag at FrequentMiler.com. Bye, everybody.

Frequent Miler on the Air - How to gift free hotel nights | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep265 | 7-26-24

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