Frequent Miler on the Air - Preferred Hotels bookable ONLINE with Choice Points | Coffee Break Ep05 | 3-26-24

Episode Date: March 26, 2024

Choice Privileges has made it easier to book their Preferred hotel partners, finally providing a way to book these online with your Choice points!  (02:41) - Overview of Preferred Hotels bookable online with Choice Points Read about how to Preferred Hotels are now bookable online with Choice Points: https://frequentmiler.com/preferred-hotels-now-bookable-online-with-choice-points/ (04:22) - What's the best ways to get Choice points? (07:43) - Read about buying points with a (sometimes available) cash and points trick: https://frequentmiler.com/a-sweet-spot-hotel-and-a-rookie-mistake/#Choice_Privileges_Cash_Points_The_cheap_way_to_buy_Choice_points (10:08) - Particularly exciting hotels in the Preferred Hotels collection (bookable online with Choice Points) (10:58) - U.S. options... (13:23) - International options... (14:18) - iPrefer (Preferred Hotel’s rewards program) (17:11) - Pros... (here's why you may want to do this) (18:34) - Cons... (here's what to watch out for!) (19:46) - Closing thoughts...does this change our approach to looking for hotels or earning points? Visit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media. You’ll find all other Frequent Miler on the Air episodes here: https://frequentmiler.com/frequent-miler-on-the-air/ Music Credit – Beach Walk by Unicorn Heads

Here we go. This is not your typical Frequent Miler on the Air episode. This is a standalone segment we're calling Coffee Break. Each Coffee Break segment will cover a single topic related to miles and points. And each Coffee Break is limited to 20 minutes or your money back. Enjoy. Today's coffee break, preferred hotels bookable online with choice points. Choice has long had the option to let you book preferred hotels and resorts with their points, but it used to be a kind of nightmare process of having to call up Choice

and ask if the person answering the phone has ever heard of preferred hotels in their lives. And if they have heard of it, did they know that it was possible to book those preferred hotels with Choice points? And if they knew that, then you could get to the point where they could establish that there was availability or not and then pass you off to someone else so you could start the process again. So that's how it used to be. That sounds like a lot of hassle. That sounds like a lot of hassle. It was a lot of hassle. But is it fair to say that the preferred hotels are like the choice properties of choice?

I was going to say great pun, but I can't get that out of my mouth. It's not even great. No, it's not a great pun. What preferred hotels and resorts is, it's similar to small luxury hotels of the world, SLH. It's also similar to leading hotels of the world. It's one of those loose collections of hotels worldwide that they, I think they pay into these, each individual hotel pays into these associations to basically have a marketing channel for the hotels. And in this case, Choice has long had a partnership with Preferred Hotels where not all Preferred Hotels, but a selection of them. And right now it's over 300 are bookable with choice points. And the exciting thing is now you could book it online. And so you don't have

any of that booking aggravation that you used to have. That's huge. That's huge. Being able to click a couple of buttons and book a really awesome property. I mean, that's part of the fun of the game. Yeah. Calling choice and like hunting around for the agent that knows what they're doing is not part of the fun, right? Right. It was kind of fun writing about it afterwards, but doing that was not even close to fun. So let's talk about what this is all about. So as we said, you could book online. Point prices mostly range from 25,000 points per night to 55,000. And I say mostly because there's one weird exception. A hotel in Oslo called The Thief is 20,000 points. So wait, The Thief steals fewer points. Yeah, The Thief has it backwards.

Okay, so it's my Robin Hood hotel right there. The Thief is one of a handful of hotels that used to be Nordic Choice hotels that are available in two ways through Choice Points. One is through preferred hotels like we're talking about today, and the other is directly through Choice's regular website. And in this case with The Thief, they've made the point price the same in both places, but usually the point price isn't the same. It depends on which route you go through. That's kind of interesting. That sort of just points out that as we're talking about this now when we're recording this, things might be totally in flux. We just learned about this ability, Book Online, over the weekend before recording this. And we haven't seen any like,

you know, announcements from Choice or from Preferred Hotels about this. So it kind of makes me feel like they're not really done. Like they rolled it out. Somebody flipped the switch and they were like, all right, let's toss this in test mode and nobody will find out. And then Greg, the frequent miler found out and it was just like, Oh man, somebody's Monday readers. That's right. That's right. Thanks to a reader wrote in, but yeah. So, so we'll see whether, uh, things change, but, uh, we'll talk about things as they are, as we're recording it for the most part. Um, so, okay. Before we, uh, dive into more details about this, let's talk about choice privileges.

If you have the city premier card, you can transfer those to choice privileges one to two. And so you'll end up with two choice privileges points for every one city thank you point, which makes these a pretty good deal because, as Greg said before, these preferred hotels properties generally range from 25,000 to 55,000 points per night. So essentially have that to get your thank you points total that you'll need in order to book those. So 12.5 to 27.5 for properties that are in general, pretty high end, nice places. So it's a slamming deal really with city points. Also Wells Fargo, their autograph points now also transfer to choice privileges one to two. So if

you've got an old Wells Fargo autograph card, or you signed up for the brand new Wells Fargo autograph journey card that just came out this week, those points, again, transfer 1 to 2 to Choice. And it's worth noting that both Citi cards and Wells Fargo cards have some bonus categories where you could be earning more than one point per dollar spent and then essentially doubling that when you transfer to Choice Privileges. So it's actually relatively easy to end up with a lot of choice privileges points. It is. I love that there's those two great opportunities. And then you can also buy points cheaply when they're on sale. As we're recording this, there's currently a sale where you can buy them for 0.69 cents per point. So, you know, about two thirds of a penny per point to buy

choice points. Also, each year in like the spring, there's a thing called daily getaways where often choice points are on sale for about half a cent each. Right. And so if you're able to get points cheaply, like even in that public sale right now, I mean, the daily getaways sometimes can be difficult to get. You have to kind of be on top of things and ready to buy them right away. But with that public sale that anybody can get right now at 25,000 to 55,000 points per night, you're talking about 172.50 to buy the points per night for a 25K property or 379.50 essentially to buy the points for a property that costs 55,000 points per night. Now, $380 a night is not a cheap hotel, but for some properties anyway,

you'd be getting a much better deal by buying points than you would be by paying the cash rates anyway. So it's not always going to be a slam dunk, but generally speaking, that's better than transferring one-to-one from Amex membership rewards points because Choice Privileges is also a transfer partner of Amex. And I think Capital One also maybe at one-to-one, if I remember correctly. So maybe not. Don't quote me on that. I think so, but I could be wrong. I didn't look that up before this because I don't pay attention to it because it's one-to-one

and you can buy the points sometimes for less than seven-tenths of a cent per point. So I wouldn't transfer my membership rewards points from my Capital One points to Choice. The other thing to know is if you're listening to this after the sale is over and they're not available for that cheaply anymore, keep in mind that I think still, do you know, can you confirm here, does the cash and points trick still work with Choice privileges? I wouldn't bet on it. That trick comes and goes. But at times it's possible to book a hotel, a choice hotel if you have some points, book it with a combination of points and cash and then cancel the reservation. And basically what's happened is you've used the cash component to buy the extra points that were needed. That's what sort of happened behind the scenes. So you end up with

more points than you started with when you do that. And so it's a way of cheaply buying points when it's available. Right, right. Yeah. So if it were available, if you found a place where it was available and it was available, you could transfer 6,000 points to choice if you needed to from Amex or potentially Capital One from Right. And then use that cash and points booking trick in order to book a cash and points type of a property and essentially buy points for less than a penny per point. We have a post about that. So we'll try and put that in the show notes for this show. But at any rate, you've got all those options and that's not it. You can also just apply for choice credit cards. We didn't even talk about that yet. But Wells Fargo also issues the choice

privileges cards. And so there's also issues the choice privileges cards. And so there's a couple of choice privileges cards, I think, right? Yeah. Yeah. I don't remember the names off the top of my head, but they each have their welcome bonuses. And so that could be a good way to get a bunch of choice points quickly as well. So you've got choices. Yeah, you have choices. In general, I don't recommend getting those cards to earn choice points through spend, though, because as we talked about before, both Citi and Wells have cards that transfer one to two to choice. And so if you earn points in those programs, especially within bonus categories within those programs, you can do a lot better than using your choice cards. It's worth mentioning.

That's a great point because I think you pointed this out maybe in a previous post or something that if you wanted to earn choice privileges points paying for choice privileges stays, like let's say you happen to stay at a lot of choice properties and you're like, oh, I should get the choice credit card. No, you should get the Wells Fargo Autograph Journey card

because that card I think earns five points per dollar on hotel spend directly at hotels. And then you could transfer those to Choice and end up with 10 Choice points per dollar spent at Choice Properties, which is, I think, a higher multiplier than what you get with the Choice Privileges credit cards. Probably. I don't remember the multiples off the top of my head, but that sounds reasonable. It is. It is. All right. So there's a lot of ways to earn Choice Privileges points, but is it worth it? Do we care? Why? and unfortunately when I look through like the preferred hotels collection and I look at the like most most like luxurious hotels that are in their collection those don't tend to be the ones that are available through here but there are there are exciting hotels and we're going to kind

of just list through some that we that we pulled out without really going into details just so that if you hear something like you've had your heart set on going to this particular area, you might know, okay, oh, it's worth checking out, see if there's a good preferred hotel in that area because Greg and Nick mentioned it. So within the US, here are just some that I pulled out because I thought they looked really interesting. And by the way, I also pulled out ones that I thought would normally get good value for your points, especially compared to in-season rates, paying with points offer a good value, which means

to me around one cent per choice point or better, which would translate to like two cents or better with City, thank you, or Wells Fargo points. So, all right. So within the US, we've got the Edgewood Tahoe Resort, obviously in Tahoe, and that's in Nevada. The Broadmoor in Colorado Springs is an iconic hotel there that looks fantastic. And I've been wanting to stay there a long time. The Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, essentially Miami area, is also another very, very well-known hotel that is bookable with choice points. Very highly rated hotels in Texas. There's a Hotel Emma at Pearl in San Antonio. There's the Post Oak Hotel at Uptown in Houston. And then going to the Northeast, we've got the Boston Harbor Hotel, which I don't know how great of a hotel it is, but I'll tell you what, it's a very expensive hotel. So that's a great value with points. I expect it's probably a very nice hotel too. You've got the Inn by the

Sea in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. That looks beautiful. I love Maine, especially the coast where it is. And then you've got the, I don't know how to say it, Chatham Bars Inn in Chatham, Massachusetts, Cape Cod, basically. Chatham, I don't know, in New York. Chatham Bars Inn in Chatham, Massachusetts. Cape Cod, basically. Chatham. I don't know. In New York State, anyway, that's how you pronounce that name, because there's a Chatham in New York, but I don't know whether it's the same, because sometimes those things get pronounced differently. So, I mean, yeah, there's a number of great looking properties in the United States, and we're not naming everything. There's properties in New York and New Orleans and all over the country. So yeah, there's lots of other places too

that might be worth a look. These are just some highlights that look really good and they do. I mean, I have to say a number of these that I've looked at and said, wow, they got excellent reviews across multiple platforms and look like really nice places to stay. Yeah, absolutely. And you don't have to stay in the United States. There's plenty of places abroad also, right? You're right. And I'm looking at time here, so I'm going to go through these really quickly. In fact, I'm just going to say where they are.

We see a great one in Tuscany, Italy. There's an amazing looking one in Venice. There's Singapore has several really awesome award-winning hotels. Tokyo has some amazing looking ones. You should really check those out. And there's several in Mexico, but one that really jumped out to me is in Playa del Carmen, which describes itself as an all-inclusive ecological resort in the jungle. And so that sounded really cool to me. And that's another one where compared to the cash rates, it would be really good value with points. So yeah, so there's

a lot of good stuff going on there. Now, when you book with choice points, and even if you have choice elite status, you're not going to get any choice elite benefits for your stay because this is just partner hotel the individual hotels don't know anything about choice um but um but preferred hotels has a rewards program called i prefer and it's possible to connect your i prefer loyalty number to one of these bookings that you make with choice points. In fact, I had previously set up my I prefer account like months and months ago. I had matched a high level status from my Hyatt elite status. I just contacted I prefer and asked and they matched me to their top tier elite status. I just contacted I prefer and asked, and they matched me to their

top tier titanium status. And after booking this, uh, booking a hotel with choice points, um, since it's become available online, a couple of days later, I got an email saying, Oh, Hey, you didn't, you forgot to connect your I prefer number to this reservation. Click here to connect it. And I was like, wow, that's amazing. So there you go. I don't think I'll earn points for this day, but who knows? Maybe I will. But what would be exciting is if I get elite benefits. Well, so what are those? What are the elite benefits? Yeah. So at the bottom tier, silver tier, you have what they call enhanced room upgrades, early check-in and late checkout. Gold status includes all of those, plus a welcome amenity. It's not clear what that is.

And then top tier titanium includes all of those plus a complimentary food and beverage offering. Again, I don't know what that is. And a digital anniversary gift. So you've got a mishmash of benefits that may or may not be valuable. We really don't know. I mean, both a welcome amenity and a complimentary food and beverage offering seems like it could be a good welcome amenity, a nice little start to a stay. So yeah, I mean, who knows, but it's probably worth, you know, tossing your hat in the ring for that if you've got a nice Preferred Hotels booking coming up to get that set up so that you can connect the two. Now, if you didn't get the email,

though, like if you've set up your I Preferred account after you listened to this episode and after you already had a booking, is there a way to get that connected? Yeah, you can. There's an option on the I Prefer website to connect an existing reservation. You have to wait something like 48 hours after you make the reservation before it lets you do that. And I bet that you could also just call the hotel and ask them to attach your I prefer number. I would think that would work as well. Very good. All right. So should we run down the pros and cons of booking preferred hotels properties with choice privileges points? Sure. So first of all, it's now that you could book online, easy to access many great hotels with points. Unlike booking choice hotels with points, you are not limited to booking within 100 days.

And that's a big pro of this. So choices own hotels. You can only book with points if your stay is 100 days or less away. You don't have any kind of limitation like that for these preferred hotels. So it makes choice points much more valuable, especially for those who prefer high-end stays. You have fixed award pricing. So each hotel, you know, it's just fixed. It's 55,000 points per night or 25,000 points per night, whatever it is. And so that can lead to great deals when, you know, especially when the hotel is priced high, like in high for high season in season rates, you can get some great deals. And as we just talked about a minute ago, it might be possible to get, I prefer elite status benefits.

You said you reached out to them for a match. You did that via email. How'd you figure that out? There was some sort of contact us form online that I used. Yeah. I don't remember exactly. Yeah. Very good.

I prefer website. Yeah. But of course, it's not all rainbows and sunshine. The cons are that, first of all, sometimes it can be a really, really bad deal. Actually, Greg put in the notes, a $10 hotel for 25,000 points per night. Yeah, I found one. Did you really? I did.

Oh my goodness, you did. What? That's insane. I didn't find anything quite that extreme, but I did find a number of places where using points just wouldn't have made sense compared to the cash rates. They look like actually nice. I found a place that was like $150 a night. I was like, wow, it looks really nice for 150 bucks.

It doesn't look really nice for 25 or 35 or however many thousand points it was. Exactly. So you'll want to check that out. You don't get the choice of room type like with choice privileges. In many cases, you can book almost any kind of room using the same number of points. But with these, you just get whatever it is. Right. I mean, usually, usually this morning I found one hotel like I did a sort of dummy booking through it in Billings, Montana, and it gave me a choice of like three different room types. And so that's new. None of the other ones I'd looked at gave a choice when I was playing around. So sometimes you do, but usually you don't have a choice. Limited choice.

Limited choice from choice. And then currently you have to have enough points to book one night in order to see availability through the booking page. So wrap up. What do you think about all this? Yeah, I'm excited. It's changed my way of thinking about when I'm looking at hotels to book in a particular area. I'm going to look at Choice and see what's there.

All right. Our time's up. All right. Very good. Another great coffee hour. Coffee break.