Frequent Miler on the Air - Roll your own hotel elite status | Ep222 | 9-30-23

Episode Date: September 30, 2023

Want to get elite treatment at hotels without investing the time and effort in enough nights for elite status? Instead of spending fifty or sixty nights a year in hotels with one brand, you can simulate status with some simple tricks.  00:00 Intro 01:52 Giant Mailbag 06:08 Card Talk: Bank of America Alaska Airlines credit cards https://frequentmiler.com/as/ https://frequentmiler.com/asbiz/ https://frequentmiler.com/alaska-airlines-companion-fare-guide/ 20:10 What crazy thing....did Delta do this week? https://frequentmiler.com/delta-may-walk-back-some-of-their-recently-announced-changes/ 26:09 Award Talk: Alaska and JetBlue status matches for Delta elites https://frequentmiler.com/alaska-airlines-offering-status-match-to-draw-disappointed-delta-frequent-flyers/ https://frequentmiler.com/jetblue-offering-very-generous-status-match-to-delta-elite-members/ 33:56 Award Talk: PointsYeah improvements 38:23 Main Event: Roll your own hotel elite status 41:02 Preferred Partner Hotel Booking programs https://frequentmiler.com/getting-the-elite-experience-without-elite-status-via-luxury-partner-programs/ 45:18 Hyatt / SLH partnership 49:04 Earning more points for paid stays 55:21 Room upgrades https://frequentmiler.com/how-best-to-book-hyatt-luxury-suites/ 1:11:38 Free Breakfast 1:13:28 Is elite status worth it? 1:18:43 Question of the Week: What kind of manufactured spending is safe? 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 miler on the air starts now. Today's main event, roll your own hotel elite status. Yeah, you know, last week we talked about airline status and, you know,

there's been a lot of hubbub about that lately. But the flight only lasts a few hours. You're in the hotel several days. So elite benefits or elite-like benefits can really make a difference. Yeah. And just like airline elite status, a lot of people will do better finding their own way to get elite-like perks rather than staying in a hotel for like 60 nights or whatever the requirement is in order to get that elite status. So we'll get into all the ways you can roll your own hotel elite status later in the program in the main event. And first reminder that if you want to jump ahead to that

segment, because you're not interested in all the cool and interesting and fun things we're going to talk about in between, you could go to the show notes and you'll find a sort of table of contents with the timestamps for each segment of the show and you can jump around that way. You can. I don't know why you would, but you can. You'd miss out all the good stuff in between, like, well, no, you know what?

I was about to transition us, but we should also remind people to like this video. If you like it, if you enjoy it, if you do skip ahead and you're like, wow, this is awesome, then great. Give us a like. If you like it, if you enjoy it, if you do skip ahead and you're like, wow, this is awesome, then great. Give us a like. If you skip ahead and you're like, oh man, I got to listen to other stuff too. Good. Give us a like, give us a thumbs up, leave us a little bit of feedback, subscribe, enable notifications. All of those things help. And be sure to subscribe to our email list. I always mention this at the end of the show,

but we should probably mention it at the beginning once in a while too. You can subscribe to our email list at frequentmiler.com slash subscribe so you can get posts in your email inbox each day or each week. Yeah, very good. All right, now let's go to the giant mailbag. Today's giant mail comes from Andrew and it's regarding our conversation last week about the US Bank Altitude Reserve Card, where I said some stuff that was wrong. So let's hear it in Andrew's words. He says, one correction I would add on the $325 travel and dining credit for that card. The spend does not have to be with the physical card to count. U.S. Bank applies the credit automatically for transactions, even when they're done through a

mobile wallet. My card just renewed last month and I went to check the transactions online after the podcast because the mention of that limitation caught me by surprise. And by the way, that was totally my fault. Anyway, all of my mobile wallet dining transactions have been getting the $325 credit applied to them automatically. I only carry the card when getting rental cars on trips. So 99% of my usage ends up being mobile wallet. So there you go. You know, I'm going to take some responsibility on that too, because I thought that it was incorrect.

I thought that I had gotten the credit on mobile wallet purchases once I opened the card just a month or two ago. But I was a little gun shy. I didn't hop in to correct you, Greg, because I've hopped in a few times to be like, are you sure about that in the last several months? And every single time you've been right when I've questioned you. So I was like, you know what? Let me not question Greg this time. He's probably right again. And I don't want to sound silly. So I didn't jump. I should have been brave. I should have been bold. I should have said, I think you're wrong, Greg. Let me log into US Bank right now. And we could have settled it

right then and there. But yeah, so I'll take some responsibility for not having known that for sure also. So yeah, that's good. I mean, it's great news because that's how you want to use the card is mobile wallet, right? Exactly. Exactly. You get 3X everywhere by using it for mobile wallet. And then if you along the way, just earn those travel and dining credits automatically, just the way you're using the card anyway, then it makes it so much easier to turn that $400 card into a $75 card basically because of those credits. Because you're still earning the rewards on that spend too, even when you're getting it rebated. So really good card. My mistake goes all the way back to when the card

was first unveiled i had read through the terms and conditions very carefully about the card because it was just very interesting it was unlike anything and it still remains on unlike anything out there and um i have this memory of there being a whole section in there about how any mobile wallet payments don't code as travel. So, you know, they do that. And at the time, it was just travel credits. It wasn't travel and dining credits. So I think that's either changed or they never sort of coded it the way that it was written in the terms. I don't know which.

But anyway, that's the background of my mistake. And it's great to hear that mobile wallet works today. Certainly possible that Google and Apple got better at passing along the MCC codes along the way. I could totally imagine in the beginning, maybe they didn't. And now they do. So it works. So that's great.

That's awesome. It's a good card. We've talked about it a bunch. We don't have an affiliate link for that card or anything. It's not something we talk about because we want everybody to apply so we can get rich. We don't make anything at all if you apply for it. It's just a great card. How many cards do we talk about a lot because we want to get rich?

None of them. None of them. And I think that's something that makes us unique. But if you go to our best offers page, often you'll see that lots of the cards in the list of the best 10 consumer and business cards are often cards that don't have an affiliate link because we just show the best offer, whether it pays us a commission or not. And the altitude reserve is a great example. It's one that you've talked about for a long time. And I had held off on because I thought I wasn't doing that much in-person spending,

but my in-person spending just keeps increasing. And so nowadays that basically everybody seems to take mobile wallet payments. It's super easy to use. And actually, it's made my life easier because I don't even worry about whether I have my wallet in my pocket before I walk out of the door a lot of times when it's just a short trip to the store. So that's been really nice. Very good. All right. Well, but that's not today's card talk. One credit. Right. I was going to say, now that we've talked about one credit card, let's talk about another one. It's time for card talk. Today we're going to cover. Go ahead. Yes. This week on card talk, we're going to talk about the Bank of America Alaska Airlines credit card.

And there's two versions of the personal and a business version. So what do we have there, Nick? Well, so there's a $95 annual fee. And that is true on both the consumer and the business these days, right? There was a time when the business card I think was a little less or they display it weirdly or something when you're in your login because of the way Bank of America creates the business login separate from the card logins. But $95 annual fee there and 3x on Alaska Airlines purchases. I mean, there's a lot of cards that are in three acts on travel. So that's fine. If you're spending a lot on Alaska Airlines, though, I'd be a little nervous since it doesn't have travel protections. I don't believe anyway, unless you're going to tell me differently. And but I don't think it does. So and then the

personal card offers bonus category on gas, electric vehicle charging, local transit, ride share cable and select streaming. I don't get too excited about streaming because who spends so much money on streaming that they're going to earn a significant number of points. Cable, though, I mean, cable's not cheap. And so and I guess if you subscribe to enough streaming services, maybe it's similar. But ride share, local transit, EV charging, I guess those are all kind of nice. The ride share, local transit, though, those are typically travel categories on a lot of other cards. So again, that's super exciting there. The EV charging, though, that's pretty unique. I don't know if there are very

many cards offering 2X on EV charging specifically. So yeah, I can't think of much going on there, but we'll probably see more and more of it as that becomes more popular, I would guess. Very similar on the business card, 2X gas, electric vehicle charging, local transit, ride share, and shipping instead of cable and streaming. You get 2X on shipping. And then 1X everywhere else. So not the world's most rewarding card ever. Those are, I'd say, fairly ho-hum bonus categories, though Alaska miles can be fairly valuable.

So there are some reasons you might consider those. You also get a 10% bonus on earned miles if you have an eligible Bank of America account. So what's the eligible account, Craig? I mean, I don't know off the top of my head what exactly, but I know just a regular checking account will be fine. Yeah. Yep. Yep. And you get your first free check or first bag check free free, your free first checked bag. That's the order I was looking for. Free first check bag for you and up to six other companions on the same reservation. Priority boarding 20% back on in-flight purchases. $100 off an annual Alaska lounge membership if you want a lounge membership.

But the star of the show, the benefit that really makes this card interesting and worthwhile is the annual companion certificate. And so you get a one use annual companion certificate every year after $6,000 spent. And that companion certificate allows a companion to join you for $99 plus tax. They say that starts at $121. I'm not actually sure that it does go all the way up to 121 necessarily. I feel like in the past I've looked at it and depending on the route, it might not even be quite that much, but at any rate, around 100, 120 bucks or so, if you fly to Mexico, you're going to pay more in taxes, you know, be aware that you'll pay the taxes on those flights. So the reason the companion certificate is so interesting is because it's really flexible. It makes it sound like it has

to be used on a round trip. And if you just use it on a simple round trip, you can get excellent value out of it, particularly on transcontinental flights or flights to Hawaii or Mexico, potentially. So you can do pretty well with a basic round trip, potentially. But what makes this even more interesting is that you can do different things. Like, for example, a one-way ticket will work with the Alaska Companion Certificate. You can have a stopover in each direction on a round trip, I believe. You can certainly have a stopover on a one-way. I'm pretty sure you get one in both directions. I'll have to link to our guide about using this below. So you can get a stopover. You can also, of course, build in some long layovers. You can use this on flights

to Hawaii, flights to Mexico, et cetera. So you can create a pretty complicated itinerary with this. Round trip is pretty flexible. It generally means you can go west and you can go east once each. So you can't bounce left and right across the country, but you can kind of continue slowly in one direction with different stops. A stopover can be up to, I can't even remember how many days off the top of my head, but I think it's a long time. So that makes it something where you could kind of almost build two separate trips out of one of these companion certificates. And the things that I additionally like about this are number one, the companion earns miles like it's a paid ticket. So both of you earn miles based on distance flown. So you can put together a really crazy itinerary if you're like the mileage running type and you just want to fly really, really long. You can do that really, really reasonably with this because

you can fly a you can fly really long and then be both earn mileage based on miles flown if you're crediting it to Alaska Airlines. So that's, I think, an awesome benefit I've shown before in the past. So you could put together itineraries where you'd each earn something like eleven thousand or twelve thousand miles with no elite status. So you could certainly put together something kind of crazy like that and get a pretty good deal on it. And then if you have elite status with Alaska, you can use upgrades like guest upgrades or qualify for free upgrades. Still, when you're using this certificate, I've done that before. I had Alaska elite status once many moons ago, and I applied upgrade certificates to fly in domestic first class using an Alaska companion certificate. So there's a lot of reasons to like that, especially if you're kind of creative and you don't mind a ridiculous routing. If you're someone who just wants to fly nonstop A to B, it could be valuable. If you're someone who's like, you know what, I want to fly

A to B to C to E to F to G all in one direction where it kind of doesn't match up right, but it earns me a lot of miles and I get to see some places for 24 hours, then this could be a really awesome benefit. So that's really cool. A few questions for you. One, when you're paying for the taxes and fees, do you need to pay with your Alaska credit card? Officially, yes. You have to pay with your Alaska credit card when you're paying for both the primary ticket and the companion ticket. So officially, yes. However, anecdotally, what people have found works is if you have funds in your Alaska wallet, then you can apply those to the ticket first before your Bank of America card. So for instance, if Costco has Alaska gift cards on sale, they often put Alaska Airlines gift cards on sale for 10% off. You can buy a $500 card for $450 pretty often at Costco. You could apply that to

your Alaska wallet and then use that to pay towards the flight. Or if you've got funds from canceled trips in there, then you could apply those also. So it used to be that you could pay with any old credit card, sort of anyway. It had to be in the name of somebody traveling or the companion certificate holder, I think. But these days, you have to use the Bank of America card from which you got the companion certificate or wallet funds from your Alaska wallet. Gotcha. Next question. I know the answer, but I just think it's important to say it. So they partner closely with American Airlines. Can I use this companion ticket to fly American Airlines? Yeah, no. No, you can't. Only on Alaska operated

flights. So that's it. Alaska operated flights only. No partners at all. Yeah. So for me, I've had the Alaska card in the past. I've never actually used the companion ticket, even though I've had it in the past. The thing that I want to do with it is there's one flight out of Detroit. It goes to Seattle. But then I could fly onward to Hawaii, all on Alaska. And so that's what I'd love to do with it is have my wife and I fly to Hawaii and back for half price, basically, with that companion ticket. So that would be a great thing, especially if we get elite status, then we can apply upgrades and hopefully fly in first class. Yeah, that would be awesome.

And you know that stopover in Seattle so you can stop and stay there and enjoy the city for a few days on your way. And personally, I find that the ability to use that stopover potentially really valuable. And I say potentially because I haven't used the certificates that we've had over the last few years either because it's only on Alaska operated flights. And I just don't have that many options where that makes sense. But one reason that it appeals to me potentially is because, for instance, I booked a flight next year to fly to Hawaii from Newark to Honolulu. It's on the nonstop, which is kind of nice, but an 11 hour flight with a five year old and a two year old and economy class or three year old or maybe six and a three year old by that. I don't know. It just doesn't seem like tons of fun.

If I could break up the trip and do five hours to the West Coast, stay for a couple of days and then five more hours. There's certainly some appeal to that. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So my take on the card and then we'll do next take is I think it makes a ton of sense for those who are in Seattle or fly Alaska a lot for whatever reason. I'm not too excited about the card in general for a couple of reasons.

One, it used to be you'd got the companion pass every year just for paying the annual fee. Now it requires $6,000 spend. And that doesn't sound like a lot, but the problem is Alaska miles, while they can be super valuable, they've been devaluing their award charts little by little at times and introduce this new partner award chart that just says awards start at this price and it could be anything. And we've seen examples where awards have become anything. And so, again, there are still places where value is fantastic with their miles, but I don't really trust that that'll remain that way long term. So I'm pretty lukewarm on this card. Yeah, I mean, that's all fair. I think Seattle is maybe too limiting to say it's only really for folks in Seattle

because they have such a robust West Coast network. I feel like if you're in San Francisco or Portland or Los Angeles, or even maybe, I don't know, San Diego or some of the other West Coast cities, I think it still could potentially be very attractive because they have a decently robust network on the West Coast cities, I think it still could potentially be very attractive because they have a decently robust network on the West Coast. They don't have a very good network on the East Coast, and there's no really flying between two different East Coast cities. So it doesn't appeal

to me very much anymore. It's just there aren't enough uses for me. But I think if I lived on the West Coast in a major city or near a major, flew out of a major city anyway, then it would at least pique my interest. But totally fair. $6,000 spend, you're giving up better rewards. You could be earning on another card so that companion certificate is less free than it sounds. And it's not even free. It's 99 bucks plus taxes. So you got to add in the cost of doing the $6,000 spend. It's definitely a card on the decline at this point. I think Alaska probably needs to either A, pump up the benefits or B, pump up the bonus to make it more exciting. And even then, like Greg said, I'm skeptical of the value of Alaska miles because of their propensity to just devalue without any

warning or explanation or shame, really. Now, I do want to throw in a couple of positives before I leave everybody thinking I really dislike this because compared to American Airlines credit cards, there's some big advantages. So the companion ticket only requires $6,000 spend. American Airlines cards that offer that require either 20 000 or 30 000 annual spend um that's a huge difference the other big difference american airlines companion tickets you're flying economy and even if you have my understanding is even if you have elite status you're not going to get bumped up um with alaska you can apply your elite upgrades and all that as we talked about so there's some big advantages there. It really comes down to, I think, the route network. If it works for you, as Nick was saying,

you're on the West Coast or whatever, then it probably is a sort of no-brainer to get this card. But for someone like me who has one flight out of my local airport, it's not a long-term keeper. No, no, I can totally understand that. In fairness, by the way, the Alaska, or rather the American Airlines cards require 20 or $30,000 spend, but that does get you much closer to elite status with American Airlines too. So there's trade-offs if you want to spend more

on those cards versus spending the six on this. There's a lot of different things to consider. The other thing that I wanted to mention just popped out of my head. So it's probably not that important anymore. So yeah, oh, I know, electric vehicles. I wanted to mention just popped out of my head. So it's probably not that important anymore. So yeah. Oh, I know. Electric vehicles.

I wanted to mention that this is fairly unique that it offers the 2X on electric vehicle charging. And I don't have an electric vehicle. I have no frame of reference as to how much it costs to charge an electric vehicle. So whether or not that spend is going to be significant is lost on me. But one thing that I think about when I see that is I remember there was a debit card for a while called the point debit card that's long been dead, but they frequently offered what it was essentially 10% back on electric vehicle charging. And so they were using one of these card reward networks, and I don't know which one that definitely other

cards participate in. And I don't know whether that electric vehicle charging has continued on on some of those other lesser known cards. Like the one that comes to my mind initially is maybe, and again, this is a maybe, I haven't looked into it at all, but the M1 owner's card from M1 Finance is one of those that has a bunch of those different cash back amounts that are actually running on some other cash back

sort of a platform behind the scenes. And I bet that there's something out there that offers better than 2X on electric vehicle charging. So while I did mention that as a potential strength here, if you're an electric vehicle driver, I would do some research on what the best option for you is, because this may not be it. Yeah, that is definitely true. Okay. So I think that brings us to award talk. And this week, wow, we've got a lot. No, I'm sorry. It doesn't.

I skipped ahead again. That brings us to what crazy thing did Delta do this week? My goodness, Delta has shocked the world yet again, haven't they, Greg? Hey, so you remember a couple of weeks ago, Delta had some news about their program, about their elite program. I remember something. Sky Club access. There was a lot of news story, right? Yeah, there was a lot of very disturbing news for Delta elites, for those who get into Sky Clubs.

It all looked pretty grim. That was two weeks ago. And fair to say there was a lot of blowback on that, right? Fair to say that there were a lot of people very unhappy about that, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Huge number of people, including yours truly. I wrote a post.

You know what? I shouldn't say I wasn't mad at Delta or anything like that. It was more than just it. It was the last stone to push me over the edge. Wow, I'm mixing metaphors here. But anyway, towards not chasing Delta elite status going forward. less than two weeks after that announcement, the CEO, Ed Bastian, went to a Rotary Club meeting in Atlanta where he was interviewed about various topics. And one of them was these upcoming changes. And it was very interesting because one of the things he said is that, boy, have they heard from their members. And when I say they, he also said he personally has heard from countless people who reached out to him personally and were unhappy, basically. So

he explained why they were doing the changes. It makes a lot of sense. They have way more top-level elites than they had before, and they can't provide the level of service that they want to deliver to those top level leads so they think the solution is to have fewer of them um similar with the sky clubs that uh the the sky clubs are too crowded and uh so they want to limit access so that's the reasoning behind them but anyway he did say that they are going to rethink, walk back some of the changes they announced. And so we should be hearing something in a few weeks. You know, that's sort of good news.

But I'm going to temper that and say what I really didn't like that he said. I watched the video also was when he said that they did too much too soon. They wanted to just rip off the Band-Aaid rather than have to nickel and dime a little bit each year. So that, to me, made it very clear that this is definitely where they want to end up and they're going to get there one way or another. It's just they had looked to do it all at once rather than deal with a negative news cycle every year for the next four or five years.

They figured they'd deal with it one time and be done with it. When they're talking about ripping off the Band-Aid, they were talking about ripping off the Band-Aid for themselves so that they wouldn't have to hear as much or take as many barbs over the negative news. So I think that to me sounds like, yeah, maybe they'll walk back some of these changes for next year and that'll be nice for next year. And maybe the year after it'll not be too much worse. But I would say within a few years, this is where we're going to be. So you know where we're heading. So if you want that world of pain, then stick with it. And if you are like, you know what, maybe I need to explore other options. I still think it's worth exploring some of those other options now. And there's an argument to say, well, take advantage

if they reduce the requirements, take advantage of it while the requirements are attainable. So I could see that, but I could also see saying, you know what, let's get started on something else so we can find out what's right for you if this, you know, Delta structure isn't going to work for you. Yeah, I agree with you a hundred percent. In fact, I had some predictions in my post about Delta's potential walk back of what what they might walk back and my number one prediction and is that they'll sort of soften the blow to current elites who have a lot of rollover elite mqms are called um because that's something they could just change that change how they how they uh address the the people over status, make it better for them

without changing the future direction of the program in any way. They could keep all those high level requirements and just say, all right, we'll let the people who are very highly elite now roll over more and have good status next year, whatever it is they decide to do. And it won't hurt their long-term plan. So that's why I think that's a likely outcome. But beyond that, I can't really say what might happen. We'll see. Well, I thought you had excellent predictions in the post overall, so it's worth looking at. And Greg was pretty spot on with the predictions of what was going to change initially. So I'll be curious to see if that all works out again on the on the walkback predictions.

So we'll find out sometime in the next few weeks, I imagine. But at least, you know, I'll give Delta credit. They're listening. A lot of programs would just have said, you know what, whatever, we ripped off the bandaid and this is going to go away. It's going to blow over. We just need to wait it out. So at least they're listening. And they said, you know what? There's enough people unhappy. We should change something. And I'll give them credit for that, because I mean, plenty of people were unhappy about Alaska devaluing various things overnight without any notice over the last several years. And they haven't made any changes in that front. Right. I mean, Virgin Atlantic, similar

devalued their award chart a few times without any notice. They did walk back on one of those with the Delta flights to Europe, but generally speaking, no. So at least Delta here is saying, you know what, we're going to listen to the feedback and make some adjustments. So credit where credit is due. Thank you for that, Delta. All right. So that's part of the award talk, but that's not it. There's a lot more. If you're a Delta elite, you've got some opportunities to pick up elite status. If you want to test out the waters and see if the grass is greener, where can you go next? Yeah. So it's pretty fun seeing first Alaska Airlines and then JetBlue coming out directly in response to Delta's announced changes saying to all the Delta elites out there, hey, give us a try. We're going to give you a status

match to sort of a comparable level of status with our program. And both of them has, and these status matches are usually just for 90 days. So that's how status matches usually work. And then there's usually a challenge component. If you can meet some level of flying or spend with the airline in those 90 days, you can keep your status longer. Both Alaska and JetBlue are going further and saying, all you need is our credit card. One of our credit cards, business or personal. And if you get matched, you'll keep status for all the next year. Alaska even went a step above that and are bumping us up. So those of us that are platinum or diamond medallion are getting immediately matched without the credit card to 75K status with Alaska. But if we have the credit card, we get bumped up to 100K Alaska status.

So they're really offering a lot there. And I love it. And this is probably a big reason why Delta is like I heard you. They also heard from their competitors who are nipping at their heels. And that's a cunning move. It's a really cunning move. Because, I mean, everybody's heard the statistics lately. I think people like Greg and I probably were less surprised by them than other people about how much money airlines make by selling miles to the banks. You know, that's that's something I think has long been known in the award community, at least by bloggers, if nobody else.

But I saw a bunch of mainstream news sources or news stories this last week or two weeks about that also. And about the fact that, what did they say? Like 1% of GDP supposedly is put through on Delta Amex cards. And so this is a really cunning move by Alaska and JetBlue to say, hey, come on over here. And if you get our credit card, then we'll make it even easier for you because they see a piece of that pie also, not just the elite members, but also a piece of the pie that can potentially make them even more money in the long run. So I thought that was brilliant. It was really cunning. I should mention, though, that you mentioned if you have diamond or platinum status

now and you get the credit card, you'll end up with status all throughout the next year. That's true if you've qualified for those levels of status this year. If you qualified last year and you haven't requalified this year for platinum or diamond, then I believe it's just a challenge even if you get the credit card. Am I right? Am I wrong? Oh, gosh, I don't know. I haven't read the terms and conditions. You don't bump up. No, it's not a challenge. I take that back. Greg is right. You keep status to the end of the year. You won't bump up unless you have status that you have earned this year. So you'll bump up one additional level beyond what you would normally match to with Alaska.

So, I mean, Alaska 100K, that seems fantastic because that's not a status that's generally easy to get. We just talked about the limited route network of Alaska. And so, you know, that's the status that requires a decent amount of flying potentially, and they require a decent chunk of it on Alaska, not on partners, if I remember correctly. I can't remember exactly what the numbers are, but enough that you would have to be a pretty regular Alaska flyer to get that.

So you're going to get to get a taste of the good life, so to speak. JetBlue, I thought, was even more interesting, potentially. Now, that one's, they say, limited to the first 30,000 people to do it. And I say more interesting. I don't know. Maybe that's not the right way to characterize it. They're giving some additional choice benefits along with the elite status, whereas the Alaska choice benefits you might typically earn with top tier status you won't get right away. Whereas with JetBlue, you get a high level status, they give you a huge number of bonus miles when you're flying and crediting to Alaska if you have that status. So you can do a lot of flying on Alaska itself, but or on partners and you'll benefit from elite status in some ways. Like with American, you can even get upgrades. But with all of them, you could get like with other ones, you might have lounge access and things.

And you'll earn a huge number of miles. So that's really, really cool. With JetBlue, this is only true at the very top level, but one of the benefits is getting four helicopter rides between New York City airports and Manhattan. And so that would be just really, really cool. I don't know. So my wife and i we both signed up for that uh match the jet blue one we'll see what happens but um i'm not diamond right now with delta so i won't get that top tier mvp and my wife is diamond but she's hasn't re-qualified for diamond for 2025 so i i mean 2024 so i don't know how they're to match her. Probably not to that top tier, I would guess, but we'll see. Well, you know, so here's the reason why I think Greg, the frequent

miler should be considering this. I know that you and your wife, at least in the past, I don't know about next year, but you have traveled to the UK usually almost every year. You take a trip to the UK, it seems every couple of years. And if you do that, British Airways often has competitive business class fares. And that's interesting to me because you can often book those business class fares through like the Chase portal. If you've got the Sapphire Reserve, you get one and a half cents per point in value. Or within Amex Business Platinum, the 35 percent rebate also makes the points worth a little bit more than one and a half cents per mile. You can only get up to like a million points a year rebated that way. But that's interesting. A, sometimes you'll find a good British Airways fare to Europe.

B, often, very often, you can find good British Airways round trip business fares starting in Europe. So if you take one trip and then you decide you're going to take another trip, you could kind of nest those and book your return to the United States and then return to Europe later on in the year. And the reason I bring that up is because British Airways with Alaska, even their discounted business class fares are in 250% of miles flown in redeemable miles. And if you have top tier status with Alaska, then you get another 250%. You're talking 500% of miles flown on that. So, I mean, you can earn just a boatload of points. And if you're using your points at one and a half cents per point to buy a relatively cheap business class

fare to begin with, you can really reduce your cost quite a lot if you've got top tier Alaska. Oh boy, I'm all over that. And you didn't even mention like the AARP discount when you're booking British Airways or if you have the British Airways credit card, you get a 10% discount. I don't have that card, but that would be kind of interesting. I wonder if it'd be worth getting that card, even if I'm crediting everything to Alaska. Might be. I don't know. I don't know. But anyway, so I think there's a lot of reasons to potentially be interested in the Alaska match, not the least of which is the mileage credit based on mileage flown and the big bonuses. British Airways is not the only airline that offers big bonuses. They're just one of the best anyway, in terms of the big bonuses for paid premium cabins for business and first class. So if you can find discounted fares in those cabins, you may pay the same number of miles that you would for an award ticket, but earn a boatload of Alaska miles in the process. So that's always kind of nice. So,

all right, great there. So lots of reasons to consider that match, but we've got more in award talk this week. We're still not even done with award talk because this week we've got some improvements that came from popular award search points. Yeah. Tell me about what PointsYeah is doing, Greg. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So just as a reminder, PointsYeah is a silly named tool that works like Kayak or Google Flights for searching for flights, but it gives you award pricing and availability instead of cash pricing. And it's really quick. And so it's quickly become my favorite tool for that type of search. It is free. You get three alerts you can set up for free. You get to search for up to three days at a time, and that's all free. They have added Turkish Miles and Smiles.

Now, initially when they added Turkish as one of the things that they search, it was only for Turkish's own flights, but now they're also finding Star Alliance flights if Turkish's website can find them. And I actually stumbled upon that accidentally the other day. I was looking on points here for award flights between Cape Town and Johannesburg. And there was a lot of economy available. Then I thought, I'll just check what it looks like for business class, even though it's short flight. And something came up for really cheap. And I was like, what is that? Oh, it's Turkish flying Star Alliance. South African Airways. South African Airways.

Yeah. Yeah. So that was really cool. Other big news from Pointia is that they have a new paid subscription tier. And believe it or not, I think that's really good news for everybody who likes the free program because they didn't change. When they came out with the free program, I just assumed that it was just a matter of time before they start charging for exactly that. But instead, what they're doing is they're adding more capabilities at the paid tier and keeping the free tier as it

is. And they claim that they're not going to change that for the free tier. So that would be good news long-term for those who want it free. But the paid tier gives you a seven day window when you search. So you could say, look for flights anywhere within these seven days. Again, the free tier is just three days. The paid tier gives you 21 active alerts that you can have instead of a maximum of three. And the paid tier costs $89.99 a year is the long-term plan for it. But right now, you can lock in the price at $59.99 a year. And supposedly if you pay for that now, you'll be locked in forever at that, let's call it $60 a year price. So I think that's awesome. I think the hardest thing about this is that the tool is so good for free. Um, do you want to pay for the,

for the, um, the advanced tier? And, and I'd say, I mean, $60 a year is cheap for what it gives you, but at the same time, the free one is awfully good too. So I'll let everyone make up their own mind there. It's a good deal either way. Yep. I agree. I agree. Nothing I really can add there. I totally agree with everything you said there. So that's exciting anyway. Lots of exciting developments there. I mean, PointCI is one that I've been using a lot more too, because it's just fast. Now we should probably mention though, that it's not perfect. And that's been the case with all of the various award search tools over time in that it doesn't search every award program. So there are still some that you might miss. So you do, if you're going to, you know, just focus

on points. Yeah. Then you're going to have to figure out, okay, well, which programs do they not support that I need to search manually separately so I don't miss any awards? Yeah, exactly. And I do, though, I have to walk back. I think it was last week I said that Pointia had not found some flights that I was able to find through United. And it turned out that the settings on my alert with Pointia was restricting things. so it wasn't showing those flights. It turned out when I reset the filters and just did a fresh search, it actually did come up with those flights. So whatever I said last week, negative, was actually wrong. Okay.

Well, there we go. Another mea culpa. All right. So I think that, my friends, that brings us to this week's main event. It is time to roll your own hotel elite status. Yeah. So so hotel elite status can be really, really valuable with the right level of status and with the right program. You can get things like on almost all programs, you'll earn more points on paid stays. In many programs, you can get late checkout. Sometimes you'll get a welcome gift. Sometimes you'll get a room upgrade.

Sometimes you'll get lounge access at the hotel, sometimes free breakfast. Some of them have sweet upgrade awards for top tier elites. So those are the types of things that you can get with high level elite status. And they can be great. But it can be really expensive to chase hotel elite status. Because often you'll be booking either more expensive or less desirable hotels in order to just stay enough times within the chain of your choice. And you might alternatively say, oh, I'm going to get status through a credit card, but most of those credit cards cost a lot of money. Like the Bonvoy Brilliant card is what, 550 or something like, no, it's even more. $650. Yeah, $650. That'll give you platinum status with Marriott, but it's $650. And another way of getting elite status is spending a lot on

certain hotel credit cards. And there's an opportunity cost. You could be earning better rewards with other cards. And so all these things that people do to get and maintain elite status can be really expensive. And so sometimes it's just better to roll your own. And I almost think that for most people, it probably is better. I think for most leisure travelers for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I you know we love our top tier high at elite status but when i step back and look at you know the options available to us like i'm not sure that it really makes sense to keep chasing it at all um now that's debatable and we're not gonna get into that particular debate now because instead what we're gonna do

is we're gonna talk about the alternatives how can debate now because instead what we're going to do is we're going to talk about the alternatives. How can you roll your own and get these kind of benefits without having actual elite status? So first, we're going to talk about a couple of sort of all-in-one options where you get a whole bunch of those perks all at once. And then we'll talk about how to get individual perks. So, Nick, the first all-in-one option is to book your hotel stay through a preferred partner hotel booking program. Can you tell us what's that about? Yeah.

So there's a bunch of these preferred partner programs. The one that a lot of readers will probably have heard of before is Amex fine hotels and resorts, uh, where you book through that program and you have to have a certain credit card for that. Uh, however, there are a bunch that don't require a specific credit card. So for instance, Hyatt has a program called Hyatt Prevay. And in order to make a Hyatt Prevay booking, you need to find a travel agent that's affiliated with Hyatt Prevay. But then when you book through them, you get a whole bunch of elite-like benefits. You end up getting, for instance, potentially free breakfast or a property credit, a room upgrade at the time of booking,

early check-in, late checkout, things like that with these various preferred partner booking programs. Hyatt has Hyatt Preve, Marriott has Marriott Stars and Luminous, Hilton has Hilton Impresario, IHG has something like that also, Peninsula's got one, Four Seasons has one. So lots of different hotel programs have one of these where you book through an agent and you get a bunch of extra benefits. So that can be pretty nice if you want some of those things like free breakfast and certainly the property credit can come in handy. Very similar to elite benefits. I wrote a post a couple of years ago. I did this at a Hyatt New York City. I'll drop a link in the show notes

to my experience with a Hyatt Preve booking. People often ask if you make one of these bookings, since you're doing it through a travel agent affiliated with the program, is it going to cost you more? And the answer is, yeah, yes and no. Well said. So you'll have to pay the standard rate usually for the hotel, whatever the standard rate is. If you've got AAA, for instance, and there's a AAA discount, well, you can't stack that with the preferred partner booking platforms. However, programs or rather hotels like Four Seasons, for instance, often don't have any discounts available. So you're going to be paying the same standard rate that

basically everybody else is too. And sometimes the difference might be really slim. And so you may look at, okay, well, free breakfast and $ hundred dollar property credit at a Ritz Carlton is more valuable to me than the discount of 15 bucks a night or whatever it might be with AAA. And I made that number up. So it's obviously going to vary. It could be a little bit, could be a lot. So you're going to have to run the numbers yourself, but it's pretty easy to find these. We have one, we have a one that we're affiliated with Travel Zork, and I'll have a link in the show notes to our entire post on these preferred partner booking programs. Nice thing, too, is that you get a point of contact who is in direct contact with the hotel. So when you have requests, you can send them to this person who will get in touch with somebody

at the hotel, and you can rest fairly easy that whatever your request is, is probably going to get taken care of. We found when we did our recent Party of Five challenge that our booking through Marriott Stars got upgraded faster than the direct booking for a Titanium member. We received notification of the upgrade sooner. So that's nice that it seems like there may have been,

at least in that case, some priority given to people booking through the preferred partner program. And actually with Hyatt's program, Hyatt Purvey, you get an upgrade to the next category up at the time of booking, assuming that it's available. So that's something that gets confirmed right away within a day. Anyway, they usually have to reach out to the hotel to apply that. But that's just one of the benefits of booking through the program.

So one time I booked the Park Hyatt in D.C. and I booked a room right below the junior suite and got upgraded to the junior suite right away at the time that I booked. So sometimes you can find competitive rates at these places. Now the minimum stay requirements vary from one program to another and one chain to another. Like with Hyatt, you only need one night at a Park Hyatt or an Andaz, but with a Grand Hyatt, for instance, it needs to be at least a two night stay and not all Hyatt Regency properties participate in this. So there's some complication, but we have a post about the whole thing. And so I think it's very good for people who aren't going to chase elite status because you get very elite like benefits. Breakfast is nice, you know, potential upgrade and a potential

property credit or things that can make your stay a little bit nicer. Yeah, absolutely. And sometimes you'll see deals to, like through fine hotels and resorts, for example, you'll sometimes see third or fourth night free. And I think that can go a long way towards making it more price competitive with AAA discounts or whatever else you have. Another all-in-one option where you get like elite-like perks, just like what Nick was talking about, is through Hyatt's relationship with Small Luxury Hotels of the World, SLH. So when you book an SLH property through Hyatt, whether you book it with cash or with Hyatt points, you're entitled to a room upgrade, given, you know, if available. So based on availability, free breakfast, and also based on availability, early check-in and late checkout.

So, you know, you're not getting like property credit or whatever, but a lot of those sort of standard benefits that you're getting with those other hotel booking programs are also available through SLH. So that's pretty cool. Being a Hyatt elite doesn't really help you with an SLH stay, like other than you'll earn more points from a paid stay. But yeah, so it really is, you know, really nice. Just being a Hyatt member gives you these elite benefits when you book with SLH. Yeah, that was the part that I wanted to emphasize that anybody booking through Hyatt, no status required, gets free breakfast. So you don't need to be a globalist to get that benefit.

In fact, you don't get any additional benefits like Greg said, as an explorist or globalist. Anybody with a Hyatt account that books through Hyatt gets this. The other key differentiator that Greg mentioned, but I'm going to emphasize, is that when you book SLH through Hyatt, you get these benefits even when you book with points. Whereas the preferred partner programs that I talked about a moment ago are only on cash rates. You can't use points, you can't use upgrade certificates and things like that when you're booking through a preferred partner program like Hyatt Preve or Marriott Stars or Fine Hotels and Resorts. However, when you book SLH properties through Hyatt Purvey or Marriott Stars or fine hotels and resorts. However, when you book SLH properties

through Hyatt, even if it's an award stay, you get your free breakfast and potentially an upgrade and late checkout. So those things can be awesome. And I'm doing fairly well on getting access to upgrades anyway at SLH properties. It's going to vary tremendously based on how many rooms are at the property and what demand is like, but it does seem to be something they are aware of at the front desk when you book through it. So that's nice. Yeah. Similarly, not long ago, Hyatt bought Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which is a program similar to SLH in many ways. At the time we're recording this, we don't have any details about how Hyatt's going to handle it, but I wouldn't even be surprised if by the time this rolls out, we might have an announcement from Hyatt. But my guess, so this is a prediction at this point, is that the type of perks you'll get when booking through Hyatt for Mr. and Mrs. Smith properties, I expect will be similar to what we see with SLH.

So we'll see. That's my prediction. And the reason that prediction makes sense is because similar. So SLH is sort of a loose connection to boutique properties. It's not like set brands like Andaz and Hyatt Regency. It's a bunch of independent hotels that are very nice, and in at least some cases, very expensive, similar with Mr. and Mrs. Smith, right? Exactly. These things, SLH, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, they don't own the properties. They don't manage the properties. It's more of a marketing platform for these properties, really. So they get sort of a badge. They could say, we're a Mr. and Mrs. Smith or a luxury hotel.

And in order to get that badge and be able to sort of get people to find them through these programs, they have to agree to providing certain perks and things. And that's where that all happens. So yeah, yeah. All right, let's talk about now the individual perks. Like there's many things you can get individually by doing things different ways. So for example, the ability for if you have,

we talked about earlier that if you have high level lead status with hotels, you'll earn more points for your stays for your paid stays. But you know what? There's some really good ways to earn a lot of points for paid stays where you don't need status at all. No, definitely not. for our quick deals. And you'll be alerted to them often because for instance, Rakuten often runs portal promotions where we'll see great payouts for like IHG, Choice, sometimes Best Western, every now and then Marriott.

Also worth keeping your eye on Capital One Shopping for targeted offers through Capital One Shopping, which is a portal just like Rakuten. It's not actually something that requires a Capital One card. And the nice thing about those programs is you click through from, let's say, Rakuten. Let's

say they're offering 10x on IHG or 10% back is the way they'll display it on IHG. You click through the IHG link on Rakuten and that takes you right to IHG.com. So you're booking directly with IHG. It doesn't have to be a prepaid rate. It can be a rate you pay later at the hotel. Whether or not your discounts will work varies on the type of discount and whatnot. But if you're booking a regular rate anyway, a regular postpaid rate when you check out, that's fine. And you'll earn the reward sometime after checkout. And the nice thing, of course, about Rakuten is that you have the option between earning

cash back or earning Amex membership rewards points. So when you see a 10x IHG through Rakuten, it's like earning 10 membership rewards points and still booking directly through IHG. So you will still earn hotel points, for instance. And if you happily get those benefits. Right. And I'll take the 10x membership rewards points over the same number of hotel points any day of the week.

Membership rewards points are just worth much more, except maybe with Hyatt. But you don't even have to choose, though. You don't have to choose with that. Although where you do have to choose is when you're clicking through a portal to go to something like Hotels.com or one of those other third-party things. That's another way of earning more points. So that's where I think, while I like Rakuten better in general, because of the earning membership rewards, Capital One Shopping tends to have some pretty good rates

for some of those third-party booking platforms. So you can search for hotels through there and earn, gosh, we've seen anywhere from a low of around 5% to 15% or more. 18%, yeah. Yeah, I think at 21 at some point. They just have some crazy good deals through there every now and then. So a lot of rewards available just by depending on how you go about booking your stay. Now, another category that's very similar is there are several credit cards where if you shop for hotels through the bank's travel portal, you can earn 10X rewards. So Chase Sapphire Reserve and Capital One Venture X and currently the Citi Premier card through, I think, next June, all have this feature where if you have those cards and if you click through the airline's travel portal and you buy a hotel stay, you pay for a hotel stay, you will get 10 points per dollar.

And these are very valuable transferable points. So that's pretty awesome. You said the airlines portal, but I think you meant the, did you mean the bank portal? I meant the banks portal. I meant the banks portal. Sorry. Yes. The bank portal. So the chase portal, the capital one portal or the city portal. Now in most of these cases, I think in all the cases, you have to prepay for the hotel stay. But in many cases, it's fully refundable. So you shouldn't think of it as, you know, don't be too worried about getting locked in. But do check the fine print when you're checking out.

Because especially with Capital One, I found it hard to find the ones that offered uh reconciliation it free cancellation so so watch out for that um mx has something similar but they are for 5x for platinum cards when you book through their um through their travel portal okay um so then there's uh another one it's sort of like a portal, but not as Rocket Miles, which is a site, it's a hotel search site where if you pick what kind of points you want to earn and you book travel through there. So it's like a hotels.com, but it's a special one that rewards you in points. So that's an option. If you're into American Airlines points and status, you want to go through American Airlines hotels, which uses Rocket Miles under the covers, but it'll give you more points and loyalty points that way. Finally, there's a lot of credit cards

that just give you nice bonuses, like 3X, uh, around for, um, for, uh, hotels. So whether they're bonusing travel in general or hotels specifically, you've got the Sapphire reserve, altitude reserve city premiere, the American express green card, and a lot more that, that bonus card. So use those cards to pay for those days. We should also mention on your paid stays to, uh, to also American Airlines Simply Miles, because they sometimes have card-linked offers where you can earn additional American Airlines miles on your paid stays. We saw one just recently before we recorded this anyway for IHG properties. It was Holiday Inn and Holiday Inn Express

specifically this time around. It was 930 miles when you made a booking of $100 or more. So sometimes we'll see that and that may stack with a shopping portal. For instance, if Rakuten is offering a great portal rate for IHG, you can potentially click through Rakuten, book at IHG, use your card that is synced up with that Simply Miles offer and earn both the rewards from Rakuten and the American Airlines miles and loyalty points. And in that specific example, maybe even hotel points also. So there are certainly ways to stack lots of extra points on your paid stays. If you're going to pay for a stay, there's a lot of ways to maximize your return in terms of points earned. Yeah. Yeah. Let's jump down to room upgrades. So let's say I want a nicer room. We're going to talk about suite upgrades separately, but let's just say, you know, one of the reasons I want elite status obvious one is just book the nicer room from the get-go.

I think you'll find depending on the situation, sometimes the prices aren't that different. So if you think about all your savings by not chasing elite status and say, I'm going to apply them towards the stay being exactly what I want from the get-go, then you could think of it that way. But there's also some times where you can use point, redeem points without having elite status and get into a nicer room. Yeah. Choice privileges is one that we've talked about frequently before because choice privileges, not always, but in many cases, they will charge the same number of points for any available room, or at least for many different room types. So there are frequently, again, not always,

but frequently opportunities to redeem the same number of points that you would for a regular room with one king bed for a suite of some sort. And the quality of that suite is going to vary with the property that you're looking at. But there have certainly been times where we've found that to work out really well. I wrote a few years ago about doing that at a hotel in Napa Valley where we ended up with, I think, five beds in our room or something for the same number of points as a room with just one bed. So you can sometimes do pretty well with choice privileges. And remember, of course, you can transfer city thank you points one to two to choice. So if you look at a choice property that costs 10 or 16,000 points per night, half that in terms of the number of city points you need to book that. So that can sometimes create a particularly good deal.

I have a reservation at a city property this weekend, or I'd rather a choice property this weekend because of this. Yeah, yeah. One of the best deals that I'm aware of is in Venice. There's a choice property in Venice. And so you could get it for essentially half price by starting with a city premier card, but they'll let you book right into one of their top suites for the same price as a standard room. That's awesome. So that's really cool. Marriott, sometimes, now this is just random. You have to be looking around, but sometimes the base point price lets you book into a higher level room that

if you look at the cash rates would cost more. So sometimes you'll get into a deluxe room instead of a standard room, just at their base point rate. And sometimes, this is probably more common, you'll see a point price that is higher because what they're doing is they're saying, here's the cost with a points upgrade. Or they might charge you like $50 or some amount to upgrade basically at the time of booking. So that's how you could use Marriott points to secure a deluxe room, for example. And we should note that you can't usually book that with a free night certificate. So even if your free night certificate is worth more points than the number of points are charging on that reservation, you can only use the free night

certificates from the credit cards towards standard rooms, not towards the upgraded rooms. So this is a situation where, you know, if you're going to be going at it without any elite status or upgrade instruments, then this is potentially your best method of getting one of those nicer rooms. And like you said, sometimes the cash upgrades are very reasonable. There's been several times actually where I've said that makes more sense than booking a flat out award or whatever. So so it's always worth checking those. Yeah. And I think it's been a while since I've looked at these. I think Wyndham sometimes does sort of similar to Choice where they'll have multiple room types available for the same price. But don't quote me because it's been a while. Right. Right. All right. What if you want to get into the hotel lounge?

What are your options there? Well, the easiest option is to just book a club room with Hyatt using World of Hyatt points if it's available. So Hyatt will allow you to book directly into a club access room with points at properties that have a club. Now, I say they will allow you. Obviously, it's going to be based on availability that won't be available every single date and every single time and every single place. But it's certainly a good option to

consider because it's not a very high upgrade over the cost of a standard room. I can't remember off the top of my head how many points additional it costs you per night, but it's not very many more points to book a club room. And that could really add to your stay. I mean, certainly I've said before, because I travel with kids, having a place during the middle of the day to get a snack and a drink at the hotel is really valuable to me just 3,000 points a night to upgrade at the time of booking to a club room so that you'll get club access throughout your stay, which can be really valuable. Marriott, so very similar to what I was saying before about upgraded rooms with Marriott. Sometimes you'll see the option to book into a club room with points. And in that case, it's always going to be an upgrade. So as Nick said,

you're not going to be able to use your free night certificate if you have one. But if you have enough points, you'll generally just be paying more points for the room with lounge access than you would have paid for a regular room, or you might have to pay a combination of points and cash to do that. But Marriott sometimes does offer that. Very good. Well, even more important to me than the club lounge is a suite because I like that additional space. And that's one of the things that keeps me chasing elite status, but it almost shouldn't, right? Because there are some ways to get a suite without elite status. Talk about that. Yeah. Yeah. So this is sort of the holy grail in a way. I mean, because all those preferred partner hotel booking things we talked about don't guarantee getting into a suite. And it's possible to, but if you really want a suite upgrade and not pay the full cash rate of an expensive suite, there are some options.

And so one is to, with Hyatt again, just book a suite. Their award chart has pricing for suites, and they break that down into standard suites and premium suites. Premium suites cost twice the rate of a base room. So if a room costs 15,000 points a night, the premium suite costs 30,000 points a night. A standard suite, which is going to be smaller than a premium suite usually, will cost somewhere in between that.

So it's more than a base room, less than a premium suite. But you can just book it out right from the get-go. Yeah, yeah. That's really nice because some of the premium suites can be really nice. I mean, we've seen some amazing ones. I mean, you wrote a whole post about some of the best luxury premium suites around the world that you could book with Hyatt Points. Oh, some are just ridiculous.

I mean, you're talking about multi-bedroom suites, sometimes with a butler and just all kinds of amazing things. So it can be really, really cool. You could be talking about penthouse suites and all of that. And often for a really reasonable number of points. Hyatt gives you another way. Let's say you were able to book base rooms at a reasonable cash rate. You could pay points per night to upgrade to a suite. Yeah. And now this isn't always available. Similar to the premium suites aren't always available with points, but it is frequently available. You'll have to look through the various award rates and it'll be something called like an LP points upgrade or something along those lines. Because actually, Hyde has a few different options. You can book using cash and points, which typically charges

about half of the cash rate and about half of the points rate for, say, a premium suite. But the better option in many cases is going to be this LP points upgrade rate that, like Greg said, allows you to pay the standard rate for a standard like one king type of a room and then pay six thousand additional points per night for a standard suite or nine thousand additional points per night for a premium suite. I'll link to a post that we wrote where we showed the the Prince suite at the Grand Hyatt in Dubai. That was pretty phenomenal. And I feel like we paid something like one hundred and fifty dollars and nine thousand points a night for this incredible suite that would have cost well

over a thousand dollars a night to book. So I think closer to two, if I remember correctly. So that was a pretty amazing suite. So you got a couple of different options there. And again, they're not always going to be available, but they often will be. Something I want to mention here too, is that there's a long ongoing joke about Hyatt, that there's no IT in Hyatt, because it kind of sounds like there should be an IT. But of course, it's double meaning that their information technology, their IT is not always particularly good. And so we sometimes see situations where the system just doesn't calculate those cash and points rates. Right. And so it's sometimes, I mean, worth checking out different properties that you might be

interested in to see what the different rates are, because you're not going to notice in the initial search results that there's something pricing kind of wacky. But I mean, to give an example, I'm not going to share it yet because I haven't stayed yet, but I booked a presidential suite at a Hyatt property this year where I'm paying something like one hundred and seventy bucks and the nine 9000, half the points of a premium suite. I can't remember whatever half the points of the premium suite was, which was very reasonable and way less than the cost of booking the presidential suite. So sometimes it's just wacky and how it calculates those things. So, you know, it's worth looking around anyway,

checking some of those properties where you might like to stay and seeing what additional rates there are beyond just the standard room and standard cash rates. Yeah. Yeah. It's a little overwhelming. They have so many different ways that you could potentially book rooms and suites. And so Nick was referring to that they have this cash plus points option, which is different from booking a cash rate and upgrading with points. Those are two different, completely different rates. And usually the first one is a bad deal, but sometimes, as you said, they actually do the math wrong or something. Something gets messed up in the IT, as you said, or the lack of IT. So that's fun when that happens.

It is. Yeah. So the other options we've identified are similar to what we've already talked about, that like Marriott, sometimes you'll have the suite upgrade option right in the search results. Choice, we mentioned that before, the same cost for a base room at many hotels, but definitely not all of them will let you book into almost any room, including suites sometimes. Especially now that they've brought Radisson Americas into their program because we found that it seemed like most of the Radisson properties that have suites, the suites were available for the same rate as the room. So that's a really cool way to get into a suite for a really cheap price. And again, I think I've seen that sometimes with Wyndham.

Well, yeah, and they have some properties that are just one-bedroom suite standard. And of course, they've got the Vacasa partnership, which is sometimes better than a suite upgrade because you might be able to book an entire home for 13,500 points per night if you have one of the Wyndham earner credit cards. So that can certainly be something that could give you a suite upgrade. There was one more that just popped into my head a second ago. And then as soon as I started talking about Wyndham, it popped back out. My goodness, it was a good one, too. And I can't recall what it was now.

And similar, this isn't it, but similar to what we said before, shop around, I know what it was. So let me finish that thought. Shop around because sometimes you'll be surprised that the cost of a suite may not be that much more than a standard room. And so you may find that booking through a portal like the Chase portal, for instance, if you've got a Sapphire Reserve and you can get one and a half cents per point, might actually cost you fewer points than booking an award room. It's worth checking that. But the other point I was going to make is that with very popular properties, there is often a fairly standard upgrade price. If you book a standard room using your points, if you reach out to the hotel in advance and say, listen, I'd like to upgrade to this one or that

one. We see this all the time at properties in like Bora Bora and the Maldives. If you Google Flyer Talk and the name of the hotel, then you can find a thread about it. And oftentimes people will share data points as to how much it costs to upgrade, for instance, to an overwater bungalow at some of these properties, because often they have just pretty standard pricing in terms of what they're going to charge you. Obviously, there's a chance it could vary at certain times of the year, but it may just be worth reaching out and saying, listen, I booked a regular room. How much would it cost me to upgrade to a better room? And I've even gotten lucky and had that happen for free before. So that's another technique.

Yeah, no, and you could do that literally with any hotel. Just reach out to them and ask them. They may or may not have a standard rate, but they'll probably offer you some price in it. And you don't have to accept it if it's too much. It could be very reasonable. And like Greg said, you can look at this as, okay, well, I'm not chasing after elite status. I'm not spending the money on that. Instead, I'm going to spend the money on making sure that I get the upgrade that I want rather than waiting until I get there and hoping that I get an

upgrade. So I can see the wisdom in taking that kind of an approach if you're staying at places where those upgrades just work out to be reasonable enough. So suites. Yeah. So suites. Yeah. So I did something just like that really recently. It wasn't to get into a suite, but I wanted to book a particular IHG hotel in London. And the only thing available with points... Oh, and I wanted to use a free night certificate. And the only thing available with points or free night certificates was a single room. So literally you can only have one person in it, had a single bed in it. So what I did is I booked it, then reached out the hotel and said, hey, there's actually going to be two of us. So anyway, you can switch us to a regular

room. And they said 50 pounds. I said, great, let's do it. Because it was exactly where I wanted to be when I want to be there. And I get to use the value of the free night certificate that was going to expire anyway. So, you know, win-win. There you go. Win-win. Absolutely. That's a, that's a great point. And that's one that I, we move, you should drive home more often that, you know, we're not afraid to ask on things like that or, or test and see what's going to happen. You shouldn't be because if you ask the worst you're going to hear is no, but you might be surprised and get a good answer. So I think that that's something that it's funny because it came up with manufactured spending this week.

And I was thinking that sometimes people have a concept that we do way more of that than we do. And I was thinking to myself, well, not necessarily. We just if we see the right opportunity, then we're not afraid to maximize it. And so that's what I think where these fit in very similarly that Greg saw, oh, I've got an expiring certificate. This hotel is available. It's not got the room that I need. But let me just try because worst case scenario, if they say no, you can't have anything else. And he cancels it and gets a certificate back and book something different. So it's worth a shot in situations like that. Yeah, I also, by the way, set an alert with both MaxMyPoint and with Hotels.Aero to see if that hotel will open up for

that night, the regular room. Problem is neither one of them will let you set an alert that says how many people must be in the room. So they keep showing results saying there is a room available. So that didn't work, but anyway, it's a reminder to keep trying to testing it. So if the two bed, if the regular room opens up, I'll rebook it that way. I think that's something that really separates you, Greg, from a lot of people. A lot of people will focus on what they can't do. And they're like, oh man, I can't use my certificate because it's only good for one, you know, one bad, a single. Whereas I feel like Greg is very good at saying, well, what can I do?

And sometimes that's a valuable question to ask. So so good. Good tip there with the suite upgrades. All right. That's not all free breakfast. We all want free. I want free breakfast. I know I shouldn't say we all want it.

It doesn't matter to everybody, but it matters to me. I want free breakfast in the hotel. I want to go downstairs and get breakfast without having to walk anywhere, put on jackets or put the kids in a stroller. I just want my breakfast and then go back to my room and finish getting ready for my day. How can I get it, Greg? Yeah. Well, I mean, the obvious thing, just book a hotel that includes free breakfast. A lot of them do. It's not just the cheap hotels. A lot of boutique hotels, for example, just offer free breakfast as a standard thing. So it's worth checking that out before you go to great lengths to try to figure out how to get elite status to get that free

breakfast. It might be that where you want to stay has it anyway. The preferred hotel booking programs we talked about before, most of them include free breakfast as a perk. We talked about SLH before. If you book through Hyatt, you get free breakfast as a perk. Now, that's an example where a lot of times that perk is really not a perk because a lot of those SLH properties do include free breakfast anyway, but not all of them. So a lot of them, or some of them, you do have to book through Hyatt to get that free breakfast. Another one is to do the things we talked about earlier about getting lounge access because you can always usually get free breakfast in the hotel lounge if you can get in. What did we miss? Did I miss anything?

I mean, I think those are the key benefits that matter to most people. And that last one asking about lounge access is another one that fits in with Greg's point from before. Sometimes it can be a reasonable cost to upgrade to that. Whether or not it's reasonable is obviously going to vary, but it can be worth asking. Sometimes you book that standard room and say, well, how much would it cost me for a lounge access room or for a rate that includes breakfast? Because sometimes you'll be pleasantly surprised. So it's always worth trying anyway to see what's possible there. But no, I think you hit the main ways for us to replicate elite-like benefits without going after elite status. And that really calls into question, is it worth going after 50 or 60 or 80 nights per year, whatever it is for the 75 nights for Marriott Titanium to get high level elite

status? And that's not going to be my question of the week, but just quick take, Greg, with all of these different options to get free breakfast, lounge access, suite upgrades, is hotel elite status worth it? Or is it like airline elite status where we were like, only for some people? Yeah, the more I think about it, the more I think it really is just for some people, for certain situations, makes sense to be chasing it. Um, it's, you know, I, I think we can point to, um, big expensive, uh, stays or benefits that we've gotten and say, well, look at that. If you do that a lot, it's obviously worth it. But, um, if you back up and

say, well, how much of the decision to stay at that particular resort or that particular hotel was driven by the fact that you had elite status or knew you would by the time you went? And could you have maybe found something even that you would have even preferred more that might have cost less by being open to whatever. All of these are things that kind of go through my mind and make me think that hotel elite status, as we've known forever, just like airline elite status, these programs are designed to make us do irrational things, to make us keep staying at Hyatt hotels, even when they're not the best choice for where we're going. The difference here, unlike the Delta elite status, boy, I just love my top tier elite status. So even though I know rationally, it probably doesn't make sense.

I don't know. I don't know if I'll give up chasing that. We'll see. It's hard to give up. Yeah, I mean, that's a really good example. And the one you just made a minute ago is perfect because I booked a trip to Hawaii next year. I booked the Grand Hyatt Kauai, which we love using World of Hyatt points. But I could book a Vicasa that fits all of us for like 13,500 points per night via Wyndham, spend way fewer points during that stay, maybe get an even nicer

place to stay, depending on the situation. You know, even if I book a two bedroom, I'm still going to pay fewer points than I would with with Hyatt for the Grand Hyatt Kauai. So so am I silly to go after the Grand Hyatt Kauai for lounge access and breakfast and maybe a suite upgrade? And then, of course, tagging on to the end of that as well. I'm not quite going to be at 60 nights by the end of this year. So I already have some mattress runs booked towards the end of the year. And how many points am I willing to put into that? I mean, I have one booked where I just have like a four hour layover and there's a category one airport hotel. And I was like, oh, I'll get enough time. I could probably get there and check in and pick up a night for thirty five hundred points. And, you know, is that ridiculous? I mean, to some extent it is, of course, on the flip side,

if I'm able to get a suite upgrade and apply it to that stay at the Grand Hyatt Kauai, if there's one available whenever I get my suite upgrades, well, I mean, maybe it is, but you have to really do the math on that. And I think Greg's right that for the average leisure traveler, it's kind of crazy to chase after this. And it's even crazier if you know someone who's a frequent business traveler who has high elite status, since you could be able to take advantage of guest of honor bookings if you're nice to your friends. So that it's it's a tough one to to nail down. It's hard for me to justify going after Marriott or Hilton Elite status,

apart from the fact that it's relatively easy with credit cards. But again, unless you're staying a lot with your employer footing the bill, right, where somebody else is paying for the stays, then I think you will probably spend money that you don't need to and stay at places that you wouldn't pick if you're a free agent. So it's worth examining those for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I think with Marriott and Hilton, especially, if you think you'll benefit from platinum Marriott elite status, I really think you should be looking at just whether the Bonvoy Brilliant card is worth it to you. Yes, it costs $6.50 a year, but it comes with a free night certificate, it comes with restaurant credits and platinum status. And I bet you if you decide that that card, the benefits outweigh the annual fee, then you could stop worrying about chasing the lease. You just have it. And then when you find you're not getting value out of platinum status,

cancel that card the hilton is even easier if you like diamond status get the aspire card that has more credits per year than the the annual fee um and the free night certificate so or the surpass at 95 bucks and you get yourself your you know like breakfast credit so to speak the dining you know the food and beverage credit when you stay yeah for 95 bucks a year. Like all you need to do is stay four or five times at Hilton properties for that card to be worth what you're paying for it. So if you're going to stay 10 times a year, for instance, then that's a super cheap path to getting more value out of it than what you put into it. Right. Right. All right. about. Specifically, this came up with people asking about clawbacks on the MX gold card,

buying gift cards at grocery stores, because word on the street is that a lot of people are getting points clawed back who bought gift cards for $505.95 at a grocery store. Data points thus far have indicated that those clawbacks have not hit at least many people who mixed in other types of purchases. So what are your thoughts on what's safe, what's not safe? Like, obviously, I should lead with this, that nothing is totally safe. You know, we're talking about manufactured spending. There's always the chance that the issuer is not going to like what you're doing, right? So if it's true manufactured spending, there's some level of risk of getting shut down or clawed back.

But what are the safer things that people can do? And should they just stop with the grocery store altogether on Amex cards? Yeah. So just real quickly off the top of my head, I mean, buying gift cards in large quantities, so thousands of dollars worth, it always runs some risk that the bank's going to notice it and do something about it. It's not common for that to happen, at least outside of Amex and those situations Nick was talking about, but it could. So some safer things are not really manufactured spending, are things like paying your taxes with a credit card or paying estimated taxes with a credit card. You'll pay a fee of under 2% to use a credit card.

And if you overpay your taxes, you'll get the refund once you file your annual taxes. So you're losing out on interest on your money in the meantime and so on. But I don't think there's any risk of clawbacks because it's a sanctioned purchase, basically. Then there's other more niche things like using your credit card to make Kiva microloans is another thing that I think 100% safe as far as you're not going to get clawed backs or get your account shut down. It's not safe from the point of view of your money. You might not get your money back, but that's for you to figure out.

Those two kind of pop to mind for me. But what about you, Nick? We've often said before that when an issuer has like a speed limit set that dividing that out over the course of the year, it should be a good rough indicator of what will probably be okay. So, you know, if a card offers 5X at office supply stores on up to $25,000 spend per year, you can divide that out over 12 months and say, well, it looks like they're expecting that I might spend up to about $2,000 a month at office supply stores. So that amount

is probably not going to raise any red flags. And I say probably because these things are complex. If it was simple and there was one simple, easy metric, then the people that they're trying to weed out would know that and do it, and then they wouldn't be effective anymore. So it's not quite that simple, but that's generally going to be safer if there's been some sort of speed limit. But the interesting thing is that we've heard from a lot of people who've bought these gift cards on Amex Gold Cards, where there is a cap of you get 4X on up to $25,000 spend at grocery stores or US supermarkets rather per year, and then 1X after that. And there's quite a few people that are well under that 25,000 who have had points clawed back buying gift cards in the exact amount of the gift card

and the purchase fee, the 505 95 or whatever, assuming that the fee is 595. So there may be some reason to mix in a couple other purchases if you're buying a gift card. And you know, don't scale up too quickly is also always a piece of advice that we give. If you see something like that and you're like, oh my goodness, I can just keep buying $500 gift cards. Well, probably not, especially if you've never done it before and you try out of nowhere to buy a whole bunch, then you're increasing your risk of shutdown. So we have a post on why shutdowns increased a few years ago anyway, and how to avoid them. And I will link to that in the show notes.

And generally speaking, you know, I think that probably both of us are relatively comfortable with staying within whatever the speed limits are on cards with set speed limits. So the cards with no limit that things get more questionable in terms of, you know, where is the limit and nobody really knows. And does it matter if you mix in other purchases? I don't know if that's really true or not. I mean, it's pretty easy if they're getting level three data for them to see what you're buying and claw back the points if they don't want to award them. So I mean, those are all things to consider. Certainly when I'm working on a new card welcome bonus on an Amex card, I don't typically buy gift cards. If I do, it's one or two. It's not a lot of them. And the other thing is that we have heard some data points from people who said that they made tax payments and didn't receive a welcome bonus. But there was a recent, relatively recent report

on Reddit of someone who filed a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau complaint against Amex because there's nothing saying that tax payments don't count. And there's a lot of people that try to play the term readers and say, oh, well, it's because the tax payment is cash-like. And that's both people you'll see in online forums and you'll hear it sometimes from customer service, but they don't list that and the things you can't do. And in fact, quite the opposite, they list it in places as something that you can do with your card. And the IRS is clear that those purchases will be run as purchases and not cash advances. So there was a recent report of a successful Consumer Financial Protection Bureau complaint about that. And then

we had a reader in our Facebook group that asked about doing that. And in the end, he just followed up the food chain a bit with Amex and they awarded his welcome bonus, despite the fact that a couple of agents initially said, oh, no, it's because you made tax payments and those are cash like, so they don't count. They do. And they did. And he got the bonus. And lots of people have. So if you haven't, it's worth continuing to follow up, I think, because it's pretty clear that that those purchases should count and should not be particularly risky. And again, all that you have a caveat with the fact that, you know, if you get a brand new card account holder and you max out your limit on day one, I mean, that could be a red flag that's going to cause you a problem. We've had some people say that

spending on the temporary card that Amex gives you when you first get approved might be part of the problem. That spend might not be automatically counting via the Amex system. So maybe it's better to wait until you get the physical card in the mail. I'll find out soon because I did a bunch of spend on the initial card that they give you. If you get the instant card number at approval, I did a bunch of tax spend on a card not that long ago. So I should find out relatively soon a data point on that. So I wanted to address that anyway because it has come up and it's been a topic of discussion this week. So, all right.

I think we're all set there. All right. Very good. If you enjoyed today's show and you'd like to get this stuff in your email inbox each day or each week. You want to go to frequent miler dot com slash subscribe. Again, that's frequent miler dot com slash subscribe to join our email list. You can follow us on social media. Join our frequent miler insiders Facebook group. And of course, like I said before, wherever you're listening to the show or watching it, please give us a like subscribe, enable notifications, leave a comment or a piece of feedback. We'd love to hear from you. And if you have a piece of feedback that you'd like to be considered for a future episode, you can send that to. Send it to mailbag at frequentmiler.com. Bye, everybody.