Frequent Miler on the Air - World of Hyatt Business Credit Card | Card Talk Ep5 | 9-5-24

Episode Date: September 5, 2024

You can read more about the World of Hyatt Business card here or listen to this episode of Card Talk to hear a quick but useful summary on the World of Hyatt Business card. (00:15) - World of Hyatt Business Card Earning rate and card fee (00:56) - World of Hyatt Business Card Perks (02:03) - What does the "elite qualifying night credit" perk mean? (02:36) - Hyatt Leverage membership (05:01) - Do we like this card and who is this card good for? (10:15) - Find podcast Ep270 "Hyatt Elite Milestone spending vs Mattress running" here.

Welcome to Card Talk, the show where we help you decide if this credit card belongs in your collection. The World of Hyatt Business Credit Card. Let's get into the details. All right, so this is a card that has a $199 annual theme, making it a little pricier for a hotel business card, although I guess we've seen feet creep on other cards recently to earning rate. You're going to earn four points per dollar at Hyatt hotels, two X on fitness clubs and gyms, and then two X also in your top three categories per quarter out of a

number of different categories, dining gas and a bunch of various travel and business related categories. So whichever your top three categories each quarter, you'll earn 2x on those, and then of course 1x everywhere else. All right. So in addition to those uninteresting spend categories, you do have a number of perks that this card offers. After $50,000 spend in a calendar year, you get 10% back on redeem points for the rest of that calendar year, up to a total of 20,000 points back.

So if you're going to go for this, make sure you do the 50K spend earlier enough in the calendar year so you can take advantage of the points back. Another perk is up to $100 each card member year in Hyatt statement credits. Spend $50 or more at any Hyatt property and get a $50 statement credit up to two times per year. So you're looking at up to $100 back a year. You also get Discoverist elite status, which not worth a whole lot. I think you get like 2 p.m. late checkout or something like that. So that's much better than nothing. But you also get to give that

discoverer status to up to five employees. And those employees don't have to be card members. So that's something. All right. Here's where things get a little more interesting uh you can earn five elite qualifying nights uh of credit before uh per ten thousand dollars of spend within a calendar year so uh what does that mean it means uh instead of having to to spend five nights at hyatt hotels in order to get closer to your next milestone or elite status level, you can spend your way to those milestones and elite status levels by spending, again, $10,000 to get each five elite qualifying nights. And you can, let's see, the last perk I want to talk about is Hyatt Leverage membership. So Hyatt Leverage is like a business program which anyone can join for free, anyone with a business can join for free,

even without this credit card. But if you don't have this credit card, then you and your employees have to spend 50 nights at Hyatt hotels, booked under your Leverage membership code in order to keep Hyatt Leverage ongoing. And if you have the card, then there's no 50-night minimum requirement. So you can get leverage kind of for free. Again, it's free for everyone, but now it's without a minimum. What does Hyatt Leverage give you? It gives you a

discount off of paid stays up to 15%. And where it gets really interesting is you can earn two tier qualifying night credits for every $5,000 in eligible spend up to a total of 60 per year. So, you know, if you and your employees use your Hyatt leverage code and book a bunch of Hyatt stays, paid stays, you could easily earn up to top tier Hyatt Elite status. Actually, without staying in a Hyatt hotel at all, if your employees stay enough, you can earn globalist status just by this leverage membership. So that's pretty interesting. Yeah. And the leverage discount sometimes is a pretty good deal. I just recently stayed at the Hyatt Centric Murano in Venice using the frequent miler leverage rate because that was the best rate available for

the dates that I needed. So I used that rate and then I applied a suite upgrade actually to the to get their duplex suite. So that was pretty nice. I had originally booked a cash and points rate of some sort on the suite, but I realized I could pay even less and not pay the points if I booked the frequent miler leverage rate. So anyway, that's a benefit that is not to be discounted, so to speak, because it can't be a decent discount now and then. So there's, okay, there's a few good perks. You alluded to the fact that the bonus categories are a whole hum, which they're not particularly exciting. A lot of the 2X categories are categories where you can already earn two

or maybe even three points per dollar in some cases, even with a card that doesn't have an annual fee. So they're not particularly exciting bonus categories on this card. However, it does have some good perks. So what do you think? Is this card worth it? Who should have it? Who shouldn't have it?

What do you think about the card? Yeah, to me, the sad thing about the card is, you know, paying $1.99 a year and not getting at least one free night the way the $95 personal card gives you a free night each year just for having the card. That's kind of surprising and disappointing. On the other hand, if you spend enough on the card and it's pretty easy to get up to 20,000 points back per year if you've spent $50,000 on the card. So you have to be a big spender for it to be worthwhile in that way. And the $100 in Hyatt credits is easy to collect on as well. So those two things, you know,

could easily make up for the $199 annual fee. But really, I think the only reason, like it sort of makes up for it, but only if you have another reason to get the card, in my opinion, like I wouldn't, I wouldn't say, Ooh, you know, these perks are so good. I should get the card. Um, it's where, where the card to me is really interesting is, um, the, uh, ability to spend your way to elite status by getting five qualifying nights with each $10,000 spend. That's better than the number of nights you'll get with the equivalent amount of spend on the personal card. And so if you're interested in spending your way to status, it's a really good way to do it i've written separately about how having both cards is even better because the personal card also gives you five nights automatically um but anyway uh the so that's good if you do 50 000 of that spend then you also get that 20 percent

you know rebate, yeah. have big spend and who are interested in spending their way to high at elite status, I like it for that. Yeah, it can be useful for that. My excitement on that 10% rebate after the 50k spend is very limited. And the reason why is because you're probably sacrificing at least one point per dollar spent in order to spend on this card versus something else. So if you're spending in a 1x category, you could be earning two transferable points per dollar spent on a different card. And even if you're spending in one of the categories where you're going to earn 2x, there are probably other options on the market where you could be earning 3x in most of those categories, if not even more. So you're looking at an opportunity cost of, I think, at least one point per dollar spent. So your opportunity cost to spend 50k on this is 50,000 points. So even if you maximize that 10% back and get the 20k points back, I mean,

obviously, that's better than not getting that back. But it's not, to me, something that's worth spending $50,000 on the card to get. You really only want to be spending that much on this card if you highly value Hyatt Elite status and you need those Elite Knights. And keep in mind that you only get the Elite Knights at every 10K spent. You get the five for 10K spent. So if you only need three Elite Knights and you're spending $10,000 on this card, well, you'd probably be better off spending. I didn't actually do the math on that to see if it would be better on the consumer card, but you might be better off using a consumer card or mattress running rather than spending

50K or additional 10K anyway on this particular card. So I think you really have to be somebody who runs the numbers carefully. If this card is going to be something you're going to have and hold and keep, you've got to run the numbers carefully to decide, is it worth $199 and the opportunity cost of the spend? I'd have a hard time justifying it personally. No, I mean, I totally agree with your analysis. If you look at it first from the value of these perks,

the 10% rebate, the $100 back, then it's not worth it. You could talk yourself into it being even, but as Nick pointed out, the, the opportunity cost of spending $50,000 is too high. However, if you look at it the other way, if you look at it as like, I want to, I've got a lot of big spend, I want to spend my way to hide elite status. Then I see those perks as like making up for the fact a little bit that you are using a, um, that you're earning one X on your way to elite status. And so here's a little bit back to make it less painful that you're only earning one X along the

way. There you go. There you have it. So if you've got a ton of spend and you want to make it a little less painful to get a poor return on spend, then, uh, this might be the way to go. But we both really highly value higher elite status and the milestone benefits. So while both of us are sounding, I think, kind of lukewarm on this card, we do recognize that those elite status benefits and milestone perks

can be super valuable. So they may be worth spending towards. We've done a separate Frequent Miler on the Air show where we discussed that idea. So you can check that out also in our full length Frequent Miler on the Air episodes. Yep. Very good. All right. I think that wraps us up for this week's card talk. Come

back and check us out again. And don't forget to check out frequent miler on the air every Friday. Bye everybody. If you want more information about this card, don't forget you can find a direct link to our site in the show notes. Just expand the description box to find a link to our site. That's frequent miler.com. You can join our email list at frequentmiler.com slash subscribe, and we'll see you next time.