Frequent Miler on the Air - Which Hyatt Milestone Reward should I pick? | Coffee Break Ep113 | 7-7-26

Episode Date: July 7, 2026

Greg earned a 3-night Hyatt milestone reward, which means he's faced with a choice of what to pick. He's got 90 days to pick that reward, but he's whittled away a lot of that time and now just has a few weeks left to decide. Which Hyatt Milestone Reward should I pick?(01:22) - 30 Night milestone rewards(02:10) - Pick One: 2K Next Stay Award(03:30) - Club Access Awards (2)(04:22) - $25 FIND Experience Credit(06:14) - 2 Preferred Seat Coupons on American Airlines(07:19) - What should Greg pick?(10:23) - Which Hyatt milestone rewards are best at each milestone?Subscribe and FollowVisit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media.Music Credit – “Ocean Deep” by Annie YoderMentioned in this episode:Check out all of our other travel podcasts from around the worldThis podcast is part of Voyascape, a podcast network that brings together the world's best travel podcasts. You can find all of our podcasts from around the world at Voyascape.com. If you are interested in advertising or sponsored content on any of our shows you can find out more at the link below.Voyascape Podcast NetworkFrequent Miler's Best Offers Pagehttps://frequentmiler.com/best-credit-card-offers/

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world atvoyescape.com. Today's coffee break. Which Hyatt Milestone reward should I pick? Welcome to Frequent Milers Coffee Break, where we focus on a single topic related to miles and points. Each coffee break is limited to 20 minutes or less or your money back. Hi, this is Greg. And this is Tim. Don't be confused by the headgear. I'm actually filling in for Nick while he's on vacation, which probably means that it's 3 a.m. on a cruise boat somewhere and he's winning a poker tournament. But Greg, you have a quandary that you're in the middle of, aren't you? I do. So I earned a 30-night Hyatt milestone reward, which included like a choice. I have to make a choice of which one I get. And they give you 90 days. Once you earn one of these

rewards, you have 90 days to pick. When I got the email, I, I snoozed it for about two months. And so now that email just got unsnoosed. I found it in my inbox and I see that I have until July 25th. So not much time left before I have to decide which of these things am I going to pick. And so I'm hoping you can help me with that. Okay. Well, first of all, my first piece of advice is deal with it before you've got 21 days left or 19 days left or however much you have until July 25. But so the 30-night milestone reward, Hyatt does a series every 10 nights, once you get to 20 nights, Hyatt gives you the choice of a, it gives you the option to choose between several different types of rewards. They get better effectively, the further, the more nights you stay.

But the 30-night milestone reward, the 39 milestone is probably the best one. The automatic thing that you get is a category one through four three-free night reward. Luckily, Greg automatically gets that so you don't have to worry about losing that by July 25th. But then you have the choice between four different options that you can pick. And the pickable options kind of go between met to mediocre. But let's go through them and see if anyone kind of strikes you straight off the bat. So the first is what they call the 2K next stay reward,

which is a great option if you only think about the first sentence. You get 2,000 bonus points on your next stay. why would you not want that? Well, because it's your next stay at Hyatt House, Hyatt Place, me and all hotels, which I believe is just Germany and Austria-specific, Hyatt Studios, which there are like three, Hyatt Select, unscripted by Hyatt, captioned by Hyatt, and you are Cove, or your Cove, which is a Chinese-specific brand,

effectively, it's in the Chinese mainland. And this is good for stay within the next six months. So what do you think? Does that jump out? Does that jump at you? Yeah. I mean, you know, it's not that exciting. Even if it was for all brands, 2,000 points isn't like a huge.

That's not a windfall. But one of the problems I have with this is I don't often stay at those particular brands. So the fact that it's limited to the next six months means that I could pick this and and potentially or even likely not use it at all and get nothing. You might have well just forgotten about the email to begin with. You're not going to use it, right? Right. So then, okay, so well, that might not be a perfect hit.

What about these? Club access rewards. So you can go to any high-at hotel that has a club lounge, and you get to relax in the club lounge. You get to have continental breakfast, evening hors d'oeuvres. It's like your own personal VIP lounge. That's pretty cool, huh? That'd be pretty cool if a lot of Hyatt's actually had those lounges available,

which there's not as many as there used to be. But I think this one could be really valuable for a lot of people, but anyone with globalist status, which I have, gets into lounges for free anyway. So it's completely has no value to me, although I think these are giftable, so I could at least gift them to other people. So that has value.

Right. So then sort of a little mesh still on that one. How about a $25 find experience credit? So Hyatt has effectively an experience platform called Find Experiences. They have everything from day tours of certain locations to restaurant experiences, to theater tickets, to concert, all sorts of different experiences for things around the globe. They tend to be a little overpriced. However, you can redeem Hyatt points for them.

And this would be also, this credit would go towards taking $25 bucks off the top of the price, of the price of the cost of one of them. How about that? Yeah. My biggest problem with find experiences is that they're really hard to find. They seem to have so few of them. And like they'll have a whole bunch, but in a very specific location. You know, they'll be like, this island in the Maldives has a whole bunch of experiences you can choose from.

But if you're not there, you know, it's. useless. So it's tough because it's one of those things like, well, I go to London pretty often. I found that actually Stephen pointed out to me that there are some fine experiences available at the Great Scotland Yard Hotel, which I've been to and really enjoyed. And I could totally imagine doing one of their foodie experiences there, for example. But I don't know. I don't know when I'm going to be in London next. And these experiences seem to come and go. They're not like available, you know, because you see it available now. It doesn't mean it's available for all time. And the specific one, Stephen pointed out to me was only available,

I think, in this summer and not beyond. Well, and I, you know, I can appreciate they really aren't everywhere. But I guess probably the original person who said they should be called hard to find experiences got overruled. And they just got this. No, no, no. Let's cut off the first two words of that. Okay, well, then lastly but not leastly, you can get two preferred seat coupons on American Airlines. Now, this can be used for you or it can be used for somebody traveling with you on an American Airlines flight. Now, they don't guarantee that you're going to actually get to your destination, but you will be in a preferred seat. And now these preferred seats don't get too excited because it's not main cabin. extra. It's preferred is my understanding. And so you effectively get, it's like an aisle seat or

something closer to the front, but not really any sort of extra leg room or any like additional amenities during your flight. Right. So how about that one? What do you think? Yeah. This one, I'm pretty sure is not giftable. So it has that not going for it. And I happen to right now have American Airlines Platinum Pro elite status. So it's completely irrelevant for me. So you're in a pickle, great for compiler. You're in a pickle because on the one hand, you have preferred C coupons for you that can't use because you already get them. You have the option of Club Access Awards that you already get because you're a globalist. You have a $25 find experience credit that you can't find for events that you can't find.

And you have a 2K, you can earn 2,000 bonus points on higher brands that you don't stay at. Yeah. And you've only got 19 days. So, you know, if I were you and I would probably, I would kind of rank them in this. To me, the preferred seat coupons automatically toss them out the window. You can't give them. You can't use them. Why would you use them?

Why would you take that? the club access awards could be useful to you if you feel like you can give them to friends or family or somebody that could use them because then that might be kind of cool if you're planning on taking some friends to a Hyatt hotel with you you can then use that club access award and they can actually chill out in the in the club with you instead of you leaving them outside which would you know which I normally do yeah which you normally do but at least this time you play Mrs. Frequent Myler wouldn't be giving you dirty looks while you're inside the lounge and everybody else is outside.

The find experience credit, you know, that could be cool too because I know you do like experiences when you travel. The problem is it's so unknown. It's like, well, would it? And this particular experience, does that $25 even make it worthwhile for you in terms of the amount of the price that we've got to get it off compared to booking that directly, right? So I would say if you are sure, like if you're sure or fairly sure that you are not going to stay in, A Hyatt house, Hyatt Place, me, and all hotels, etc. Within the next six months, to me it seems like the Club Access Awards may be your best option. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So I had come to the exact same conclusion as you until I opened up the Hyatt app to look at my upcoming reservations. I actually have a Hyatt Place reserved in the near future. So this is so ridiculous. I mean, so it's like, okay, it's 2,000 points. home. It's an easy choice this time, but only because of that. It's such a rare thing for me to have that book, but I do happen to have one coming up. So it's pretty easy. But if it were not for

that, yeah, I think I would have picked the Club Access Awards and found a way to gift them either to friends or on the Frequent Riler Insiders Facebook group and just made them available to anyone who could use them and that way someone would get some value from it. So yeah. Well, before you make your final decision, since now we found out that you in fact do have a high place reservation, are you sure you're a globalist? I'll double check that after this. Just do that before you make your final decision. That's all I'd say. All right. We'll be right back with more about picking milestone rewards after this. Hey, Nick, I just got a text from my cousin. He's asking me about a credit card offer he just got in his email and asking if it's any good.

Yeah, well, your cousin ought to go to frequentmiler.com and click the link at the top of the page for our best offers page. That's the best way for your cousin to know whether or not they're getting a good offer because we're committed to publishing the best publicly available offers. So if you see an offer for a credit card anywhere on the internet, you should always compare and make sure you're getting the best possible offer. And we're back. Now that Tim has helped me figure out what I'm going to do with my milestone dilemma, we're going to take a step back and go through all of the milestone options. At many different milestone levels, you're given options very similar to what we discussed earlier on the show.

But the specific options often vary. And so for each one, irregardless, we're going to pretend you don't have elite status and there's no interaction between what you pick one time and the next time. For each one, we're just going to pick what we think is the very best award at each milestone level. So let's start with 20 and 39 milestone rewards. Greg, what are they? Okay, so there you've got the 2K Next Day Award, two Club Access Awards, $25 fine credit, and two American Airlines preferred seat coupons.

I think that the best option is the two club access awards. By picking that, you get actually two stays where you get to get into a club lounge as often as you want. That could mean free breakfast. It could even mean free snacks, including you may be able to make a dinner for that whole week if you want to. So it can be very valuable. I completely agree. So what about at 40 nights? What's coming at you then?

There you got your choice of 5K bonus. points, a suite upgrade award, $150 fine credit, or two American Airlines main cabin extra coupons. I think the best option there is the sweet upgrade award. That gives you the ability to stay in a suite for an entire stay up to seven nights. I agree. It's a sweet choice. So when you come up to 50 nights, it gets even kind of better. What happens then? It does. At 50 nights, you get your choice of 5K bonus points, two sweet upgrade awards. $150 fine credit or two American Airlines main cabin extra coupons. I think the best option is a no-brainer here. Two suite upgrade awards are twice as good as one. Absolutely. I completely agree.

If one suite is good, if one suite upgrade award is good, two sweet is double sweet. Double sweet. So then it takes a break at the 69 level because you would get a global status. What happens at 70-9s? 70, 80, and 90 nights, you get your choice of 10,000 bonus points, one sweet upgrade award, $300 fine credit, or advantage gold status. I think the best option there is American Airlines gold elite status because not that A-A status is that exciting, but this is status you get for the whole year. So if you have a bunch of American Airlines flights throughout the year, you can get perks for every single one, including, you know, picking your preferred seats and all of that kind of thing.

I agree. I'd like to ask you a question, though. So if you pick that for 70 nights, which one would you pick for 80? Yeah. So Tim's asking that because if you've already picked the gold status, it's not going to do you any good to pick it again at your next milestone. So there, that's such a tough one. Yeah. 10,000 points, a sweet upgrade award because he's bringing in now dependencies that we said we weren't going to do. But a sweet upgrade award we've said earlier is really great, but you've already gotten a bunch of them from earlier selections. So do you still need more of them? That's going to be a depend on your situation. $300 fine credit, that's a lot of money to use on a find experience that you may or may not be able to find.

You know, and then 10,000 bonus points has solid value, but not nearly as much as what the potential upside of the other two are. I'm going to go with the $300 fine credit. I would agree. I think once it gets to $300, then it's like you can actually book something. So, you know, that actually becomes something that I think is pretty valuable. So now, lastly, what happens when you get past 90 and you're now into triple-digit nights? Do the options change at all? Yes.

Starting at 100 nights and all the way through to 150 nights, the choices are 10,000 bonus points, one sweet upgrade award, a Merrillville extra night, which means if you book one night, either with points or paid, you get a second night free. So it's a bogo. or you could get American Advantage platinum elite status. I think the best one there is the Mirval Extra Night. Mirval stays can be really expensive, whether you're paying with points or cash. So, you know, you could book that thing.

You could book one night with, let's say, 70, 80,000 points depending on when you're doing it. And whether it's priced low to high and get that second night. for free. So it can save a lot of points on a Miraval stay. I'm going to disagree with you, Greg, the frequent Myler. And I'm going to do it oh so hesitatingly because I agree. I love those Miraval extra. I love I had my wife and I just stated a Mirval property. I loved it. We used an extra night. It's a great deal for what you get. However, we just said that we looked at this last, those 70, 80, and 90-night selections and said, well, Amex or American Airlines gold status. is worth it because you get it on all these flights.

Now we have an actual significant elite status for American Airlines. And if you can use that over even two or three flights with bags and main cabin extra booking seats and possible business class flights, I think I got to go with that if I were going to. There's a strong argument for that as well. But that said, the Miraball Extra Night is a great option. do. This episode was produced and edited by Carrie Yoder, music by Annie Yoder. If you've enjoyed what you've heard today and you'd like to get more of this in your email inbox each day or each week, go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media,

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