Frequent Miler on the Air - Wyndham's Excellent Point Sale | Coffee Break Ep50 | 3-25-25

Episode Date: March 25, 2025

Wyndham is having an excellent point sale that lasts until April 15th (2025). Read more about it here or listen to this episode for details.  (01:15) - Wyndham point sale: Through April 15th, if you buy 3,000 or more points, you get up to an 80% bonus. (01:47) - Simultaneously, all 3 Wyndham Earner cards have increased welcome bonuses Learn more about the increased bonuses for all 3 Wyndham credit cards here. (02:55) - Vacasa Vacation Rental Learn about Wyndham and Vacasa here. (05:55) - Wyndham Grand Visit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media. Music Credit – Beach Walk by Unicorn Heads  

Welcome to Coffee Break, where we focus on a single topic related to miles and points. And each Coffee Break is limited to 20 minutes or less for your money back. Today's Coffee Break, Wyndham's excellent Point Sale. Wyndham Rewards is out with an excellent Point Sale. So today we're going to talk about whether or not it's worth it or what some of the use cases are where you might get fantastic value out of this point sale. So let's start out with the details of the point sale right now through April 15th, 2025. You can buy Wyndham points and if you buy 3000 or more points, you'll get an 80% bonus on

the purchase or up to 80% bonus, I should say. Blue and gold members, which are your base level members and mid-tier members get a 70% bonus actually on buying points which drops the cost per point to 0.76 cents per point. So that's less than a penny a point, about three quarters of a penny per point. For base level members and gold members, Platinum and Diamond members get the 80% bonus and pay 0.72 cents per point. Either way, that's an excellent deal. Windham ordinarily sells points at 1.3 cents per point, and they put them on sale occasionally, usually though for right around 1 cent per point. Just below or just above 1 cent per point.

This is an excellent sale at.76 or or as low as 0.72 cents per point That's quite a bit less than the normal sale price for Wyndham points, which makes it potentially worth considering Yeah, absolutely and our reasonable redemption value for Wyndham points is right at about one cent per point So that means buying points for less than 0.8 cents each means you're very likely to get at least a 20% discount by buying points at this rate. But it can get even better right now because at the same time as the sale is going on, we also have all three of the Wyndham Earner credit cards are available with increased welcome bonuses. The one that's particularly attractive is the earner plus card which is out with a 90,000 point bonus after only $2,000 spend in the first 90 days. That also gives you platinum elite status which means there

may be time for you to you know sign up for that card, get that platinum elite status, and then buy points if you need even more points than the 90,000, then buy points at that elevated 80% bonus rate, which would be pretty nice. Also, all three of these cards give you a 10% discount on awards, so it's just all that much better. You'd be getting even more value than you would otherwise. If you had to buy points to get, you know, more expensive award,

you'd be getting a discount off the award. So you wouldn't have to buy as many points. Right point. All right. So to give you an idea how good this could be, I came up with an example. One of the things you could do with Windham Points is you can book Vakasa vacation rentals. And it's kind of complicated exactly what the sort of point price is. It's either 15,000 points per bedroom per night

or 30,000 points per bedroom per night, depending on what the cash rate is. And you can see our post, which will be in the show notes for details about exactly how to figure that out. But what I did is I looked at a property in Hawaii. I found one that was a two bedroom condo available for five nights. The cash rate was $2,300.

The point price for that stay would be 150,000 Wyndham points. So if you're starting from scratch and you don't have any Wyndham points or any elite status, you would need to spend 150,000 points. But if you had a Wyndham earner credit card, remember that 10% discount, that means you'd only need 135,000 points. So here's the scenario. You sign up for the Windham Earner Plus card with the 90,000 point bonus.

You spend $2,000 on the card in order to earn that bonus. Now you have at least 92,000 Windham points and you've got platinum status. So the cost for the annual fee for the card is 75 bucks. So it's not like there's big outlay there. Now you're still short though of the 135,000 points you need. You can get there though, by buying 43,000 points with the 80% bonus for $313. And so that brings the total cost to $75

for the annual fee for the credit card plus $313 to buy additional points. So $388 total cost for what otherwise would be a $2,300 total stay. Yeah, wow. I mean, that's a huge discount. Yeah, it totally is. And you know, there's a lot of perks to having one of these cards,

one of these Windham Earner cards anyway. So, you know, if you're looking at a big stay like that and you're thinking, well, do I really need this card? You know, just keep in mind they come with other perks and they come with that 10% discount on awards is forever. So that's something that would benefit you long term potentially. Very good. So the cost is certainly one potentially good use. And of course, that's just one example.

There are lots of other Vaca examples that could work out really well. I mean, usually get what is it like 1.3 cents per point or so more or less on the cost of redemptions, maybe a little bit more, maybe a little bit less, all depends on the situation. Yeah, it really does. You can get up to something like 1.6-ish cents without a credit card giving you a discount and a little bit more if you have the credit card. Here's another example. This one doesn't involve getting the credit card.

Let's just say you have that, you have elite status already, maybe you already have a credit card or you got it some other way. I just looked up a kind of random Wyndham property in Florida for like over the winter when you want to go. This Wyndham Grand property for three nights was over $1,300. You could book that same property for 90,000 points. So of course, if you do have a Wyndham credit card that brings the cost down to 81,000 points and you can buy those 81,000 points

with the sale for $585. So you're talking about a over $1,300 stay for $585. Huge discount again, by buying the points. So these are just a couple of Examples where I try to you know, dig up real numbers to show, you know, wow, this is really is a good good sale Yeah, you know, I recently booked an all-inclusive in the Caribbean Don't forget Windham's got a whole bunch of all-inclusive properties in the Caribbean also in Europe They have a partnership with Grand Palladium as well I forget Windham's got a whole bunch of all-inclusive properties in the Caribbean, also in Europe. They have a partnership with Grand Palladium as well, so it's not just Windham all-inclusive

properties that you can book. But I booked one just recently in Cancun where cash rates with tax and everything were around $1,000 a night, and I was able to redeem points. The points rate, rather, was 30,000 points per night, but of course, because I have one of the Windham credit cards, I get the 10% discount. So it was only 27,500 points per night, which in this sale would cost about 200 bucks. So it would be a nice discount and $200 a night for an all inclusive in the Caribbean. If you're going in the wintertime peak demand, certainly going to be a pretty good deal.

So so there's quite a few of those opportunities out there as well. There are a lot of different times when it might make sense to buy window points. So I think it's certainly at least worth a look to consider, you know, is this going to line up with your travel plans? Because if it is, it might be worth buying points. Yeah. And that's really important what Nick just said, because like, I've gone a long time without spending any of my window points, you know, it Just because this is a good deal doesn't mean it's the right deal for you. If, cause if your travel plans don't,

have you staying at a Wyndham property or one of those partner properties or a cost of vacation rental or coddages.com which are similar or vacation rentals in the UK. If none of those are gonna work out for you, then there's no point in the UK. If none of those are going to work out for you, then there's no point in buying points. But if you are interested, we felt like it was worth highlighting what a good deal this could be. Don't forget, if you've enjoyed this and you'd like to get on our email list, you want to

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