Frequent Miler on the Air - Wyndham's intriguing new card lineup | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep363 | 6-19-26

Episode Date: June 19, 2026

In today's podcast we see how Wells Fargo Attunes out, we'll talk about the PAZE craze (and why it pays to pay with PAZE), and Greg convinces Nick that a $395 Wyndham card is a good idea.Giant Mailbag(01:37) - Deya has a success story about Chase price matchFind our Best Rate Guarantee coffee break episode hereCard News(07:07) - Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card refresh is out(08:48) - Read more about Resy credit changes(14:33) - A new collectible is born: Wells Fargo Attune card no longer accepting applicationsCrazy Thing(18:19) - Chase erroneously emails about Ink Plus 5X(20:55) - Capital One Shopping: -0.25% AccorAwards, Points, and More(27:43) - Learn more about the PAZE $10 back, 10 times per card opportunity hereFind a Clover map here(34:55) - Citi ThankYou 50% transfer bonus to ACCORMain Event: Wyndham's intriguing new card lineup(39:46) - Wyndham refreshed its card line up...(41:13) - Changes to current cardsRead more about the card changes here(51:55) - Wyndham Earner Premier card (NEW)Learn more about the Wyndham Earner Premier card here(1:05:28) - Should you care about Wyndham Rewards?Learn how to value Wyndham points hereSubscribe 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 NetworkVisit FrequentMiler.com Did you know that Frequent Miller is also a website? At frequentMiller.com, you'll find all the latest deals, news about points, miles, and rewarding credit cards, the single best, Best Credit Cards page on the web, guides to all popular rewards programs, and many other terrific resources. If you'd like to get our posts sent to your email, go to frequentMiller.com/subscribe and sign up for free. https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyescape.com. On today's show, Wells Fargo, a tunes out. The Pays craze, why it pays to pay with Pays. And Greg convinces me that a $395 Wyndham card is a good idea. Frequent Liler on the air starts now. Today's main event, Windham's intriguing news, card lineup on Wednesday, June 17th, which will forever now be known as Windham Wednesday,

Wyndham announced a new premium card, a premium card, like a card that costs nearly $400 a year. It's the type of thing that none of us were expecting or hoping for, yet, yet, I find it oddly intriguing. They've also refreshed the rest of their card lineup, and there's a lot of good and bad in all of that. So we're going to talk about all of that in today's main event. Of all the ultra premium or premium type cards that we have expected, hoped for, wanted, waited for, this is the one that nobody had on their bingo card. Like nobody, nobody saw this coming. Don't try and tell me you thought it might happen because you didn't. It was a surprise. So we'll talk more about that surprise later on today.

But remember, if you want to jump ahead to that or go back to something later on, you can always expand the show description in order to find the timestamps. They're always right there. And wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to give this a like, a thumbs up, subscribe to our channel, enable notifications so you know when we drop the next episode. And without all out of the way, let's drag out this week's giant mailbag. All right. So today's Giant Mail is in response to a recent coffee break episode where Nick talked about his sort of

success in doing a best rate guarantee with Chase's the edit hotel booking. And so Dyer writes in, Chase Price Match worked. I recently booked a two-night stay at an edit property through Chase Travel for my daughter's birthday. Initially, I booked the stay through my own Sapphire Reserve account. After hearing your recent podcast discussions about the targeted Chase Travel price match guarantee, I discovered something interesting. My wife has the the price match guarantee feature on her Sapphire Reserve account, while I do not, similar to your situation. Thankfully, my booking was cancelable, so I rebooked the same room through my wife's Sapphire Reserve account and submitted a price match claim using a much lower rate available

directly through the hotel's website. Chase approved the claim within 24 hours and issued a $465 refund. Similar to your situation as well, according to Chase, the claim did not technically qualify because the cancellation policies did not match. The approval was granted as an exception because my wife was a, quote, valued Chase Travel customer, end quote. When I reviewed the actual cancellation terms, the discrepancy seemed surprisingly minor. The direct bookings cancellation policy was actually slightly more generous than Chase travel bookings by about 15 hours. Despite determining that this difference made the claim ineligible under the formal rules, Chase still approved the $465 refund as a one-time exception.

This is interesting. I mean, first of all, congratulations. Well done. I'm glad it worked out. It was awesome. It saved you $465. That's great. Love to hear it.

And I think it's another data point just showing that it's worth paying attention to this, especially if you're targeted for it. Because I think the really cool thing here is like we've, like we said last week. We're on the coffee break episode. We've been kind of down on the edit. Number one, the coverage isn't as good as something. other luxury booking programs. But number two, and probably even more important to us,

or at least equally important, is that the prices haven't been great in a lot of cases. But this enables you to get both the best price and the edit benefits. So why wouldn't you stack the two, right? Yeah, yeah. A credit to use or whatever. That's true. No, exactly.

It suddenly makes those $250 the edit credits that you get through Chase, the Sapphire Reserve card, like usable, or at least, you know, it could potentially save you money, whereas without this, it could potentially cost you money to try to use them. Right. Like in this example, right? If they had booked that hotel in order to save $250, but they were paying almost $500 more than they needed to, that's not saving.

That's costing. So anyway, so that's a great enhancement. And so it's great to see that at least slowly rolling out. Yeah, so real quick, though, I want to mention this one-time exception thing. It's kind of interesting. A reader made a point basically saying, how long are they going to make one-time exceptions like this before they decide that they've spent more on these one-time exceptions than they want to before they start tightening down the rules. And I think that that's maybe a good piece of skepticism to have that, you know, because my claim was approved with a one-time exception also you can read more about it in my post or listen to it on the coffee break. Um, interestingly, although the points guy didn't point this out when the points guy wrote about price match, if you actually look at the, the email that Nick Ewan received, I think they might have cut a piece of it out, because it does say one time exception in there and it doesn't explain the whole thing. So it sounds like whatever happened there was also one time except. So it's interesting that they seem to be making these one time

exceptions. Now, you know, I'm great, good. Good for now. And in this case, like, it, logically makes sense if the cancellation policy was better through the hotel. They ought to be honoring it. But not all programs will do that. A lot of them will fall back on exactly as the terms are written. So you do have to kind of watch out for that. But I mean, get it while the getting is good, so to speak. Use it while you can while it's useful. And then if they tighten down on those types of details, what I had said in my case, if they had came back to me and said, oh, well, the rate you're comparing against isn't prepaid. so we're not going to approve. My booking was flexible.

I would have just canceled the Chase booking, rebooked it, and submitted a price match to a site that was prepaid. And we can play that game all day long if we need to. For sure. Yeah.

Yeah. So it'll be a fun game to try to find, you know, prepaid, exact same cancellation rules and all that. Right.

If they get to the point, if or when, I guess I get to the point of not freely issuing those one time, except. I also wonder how much they might have been burned by, you know, when the Sapphire Reserve refresh first came out, they promised two cents per point points boosts for all of the edit

properties. And then they later walked that back. And I almost feel like they wish they had every time they do a two cents per point, they put one time exception in parentheses or something. Right, right. Just enough that expectations to you high. No kidding. All right. Well, that out of the way, let's talk about card news. So speaking of Chase and Chase is out with

the card news this week, the newly refreshed Sapphire preferred card is now out. We talked about this card, I think, on last week's show probably because the news was out. Is that true? We must have. We must have talked about it in depth. I hope we did. It shows how much, Nick and I remember what shows we recorded from one day to the next. Boy, if we didn't, big apologies, but the Sapphire Preferred has been greatly changed, and I do remember talking about this. So all of the good changes should be active in your account already if you have the Sapphire Preferred card, you know, already. So all the good stuff you should get, and then the bad stuff, again, for people who had the card before the refresh, the bad stuff kicks in October 1st. biggest of those is that high at transfer rate declines.

But to next point, not only is the refresh out, but the card's now available with a nice, juicy new 100K welcome offer where if you spend $5,000 in three months after being approved for the card, then you can earn 100,000 points. So that's an excellent offer. Yeah, absolutely. Base level, if you cash that out, it'd be $1,000. And obviously, if you transfer to partners, use them with points, boosts, et cetera, et cetera, you can do better than that. So that's a very nice offer on a card with a $95 annual fee that bonuses some common bonus categories.

So if you've been thinking about it, now's a good time to think a little harder. All right. Next up, we've got some potential changes coming to Rezi credits. So I published a post this week about the fact that statements, let's see, platinum card and gold card statements, Amex has been issuing the following statement on credit card statements saying effective August 1st, 2026, the Resi Statement Credit benefit will only apply at restaurants indicated as eligible for the Resi credit at the time of purchase. So they've added an indication on the Resi website saying this restaurant is eligible for the Amex Resi credit. And so in the post initially, I was concerned,

what does this mean? You know, we've seen, we've heard reader reports, we've read on this show, Reader Report. I know at some point, who had booked a Chase Sapphire Reserve table, some restaurant, expecting to use their credit only to go and eat there and find out that that restaurant, after the fact they found out, that restaurant had been removed from the program and wasn't eligible for the credit that they expected. So, so I speculated, is that going to happen here? Is Amex going to start taking restaurants out of the Resi credit or are they going to stop being eligible? Is it going to depend on the day of the week? You know, are you going to make a reservation, go to dinner and get a surprise later on that you didn't get a credit. But it doesn't sound like

that's the case. No. Another thing that's happening this summer and potentially August 1st, I'm not sure when exactly, but American Express had bought another reservation platform called a while back, and they are rolling it into Rezi this summer. And so when I heard this news about this message on the statement. I just thought, okay, I used to be in software development. So I was thinking about like, how, why would this statement have been put there? And it's, and, you know, back in my software development days, it would have been because I would have been looking at the big project to integrate all of these talk restaurants and then going, wow, I don't know that on, on August 1st, we're going to be able to identify all the

charges that come in from talk restaurants as eligible for Rezi credits. So I think, so, so my guess was that something like that was going on behind the scenes. And so they wanted to have a mechanism by which they could move all the talk restaurants onto Rezi, but not promise all those statement credits for all those new restaurants right away. Or maybe ever, I mean, there might be certain restaurants that are special for some reason that that will never get the credits. But, um, and then we got a message from Amex, uh, suggesting that I might have been right about that, right? Yeah.

It sounds like there are no plans to remove restaurants from the resi credit eligibility at this point. Uh, it does sound as though the, uh, it's, it's mostly those restaurants coming over from talk. So, uh, so, and like Greg said, we don't know, maybe they'll never be eligible. but my expectation is that those restaurants will eventually become eligible for the resi credit, but probably Greg is right. And I had put in the post,

I had mentioned that maybe this is a tech issue with integrating the talk restaurants. So when I published the post, I did say that because I did have that thought also that could be it. I just didn't love the way it sounded. But it seems like it's probably going to be okay news. So if you were nervous when you saw that, I would say maybe hold your nervousness. And maybe we're going to end up getting some really great restaurants that are eligible

for the Rezi benefit, which when they mentioned that they were going to fold these into Rezi, these Tock restaurants, we were like, oh, that'll be awesome for people who like to eat at fine dining establishments because, I mean, Talk has some great restaurants on it. So I think that's- Yeah. Also, just depending on where you are, a lot of restaurants. So in Ann Arbor, for some reason, Talk seems to be a lot more popular than Rezi. So I'm excited to just have a lot more options to earn my platinum card credits. As a reminder, which probably should have led with us,

MX platinum consumer cards give you $100 each quarter in statement credits towards any charges at Rezi restaurants. And you don't have to book, you don't have to make a reservation through Rezi. You just have to pay at the restaurant. And now what the statement is saying is you need to make sure that not only is it on the Resi platform, but it's indicated as eligible for the Resi credit. And then you'll get up to $100 back each quitter. Yeah.

And if you've got more than one consumer platinum card in your household, keep in mind that you could usually split tender at a restaurant is usually not an issue. We went out from Mother's Day, and I think we used four different platinum cards that we've, you know, split the bill across. And so that's, I think, a great way to potentially use. credits if you've got multiple platinum cards to go out to a place that, you know, some sort of big meal or special meal, et cetera. But also there's tons of just great neighborhood restaurants on Resi these days. I have really been impressed with how they've expanded, actually. So maybe not

great in Ann Arbor, but I know in like the capital region in Albany, there's a bunch of restaurants in Schenectady, which if you aren't from the capital region in New York, you've never heard of Schenectady, I'm sure. And even if you do live in the capital region, maybe it wasn't your first thought for dining, but man, we've had a couple of Italian meals in Schenectady that I've been like, these restaurants are terrific. And I wouldn't have found them if not for this resi benefit. So, so there you have it. Go Schenectady. All right. So that's that. Let's move on to a new collectible was born this week. A new collectible was born, which I sound excited about, but I'm not excited that it's become collectible at all. Unfortunately. And when we say collectible,

if you're not familiar, if you have not a long time listener, a collectible is a car that's no longer available to new applicants, that if you had, then you can keep, presumably, for some period of time, which can range from not very long to years and years, depending on the issuer and what they do with it. But unfortunately, that new collectible is a card that we have talked about several times in recent months. The Wells Fargo Attune card is no longer accepting new applications. What's up with us? Yeah, yeah. Well, let's back up a little bit. Wells Fargo's a tune card we've talked about because it's so interesting. It offered and does offer for existing card holders 4% back on such a huge collection, seemingly random categories of spend that you could do

really, really well with that card. And if you pair that card with a autograph card, you could move that cash back to the autograph card and then it becomes transferable points. so you could get even more value that way. So it's a really awesome fee-free card to have, but apparently Wells Fargo has decided it was too awesome for people to have, so they've stopped issuing it new. But Wells Fargo confirmed to us that current cardholders can keep the cards, and there's no plan changes to that. So I almost immediately, after hearing that, got on the phone with Wells Fargo. For me personally, I have an autograph card and also that premier card that's like the autographed journey card. And so I called to see if I could product change the autograph card

to the attune card. And there was no option to do that. But it wasn't necessarily because you can't product change to the tune. I don't know the answer to that yet. You might be able to product change to the tune from like a Wells Fargo cashback card, but the autograph card I was told has no product change options to like outbound options to go to something else from the autograph. What I was explicitly told is there are options to product change to the autograph, but not from the autograph. It's another way of saying it. So yeah, this is too bad because, you know, it's one of those as Wells Fargo's. rewards program gets better, this card becomes more and more interesting. And yet now the only

people who can have it are presumably people who already have it. And so if you have one of these, hold on to it for dear life. Especially if you have a yacht and you're paying your marina fees, because that was one of the four X categories. Yeah. It was probably bankrupting Wells Fargo. Right. Right. You got one billionaire super yacht is right. Right. I mean, it's a hefty bill to be paying four back on you know four points per dollar that's uh no small earnings there yeah so that's disappointing and surprising i as well as fargo is kind of improving their overall program i was surprised to see this card card pulled although it was really a great sleeper card that bonus so many interesting categories that it doesn't surprise me that it's not profitable

but but it surprised me just because we had no indication that they were going to make any big shakeups. So that's that. All right. So that wasn't the crazy thing this week, though. Let's talk about what crazy thing did Chase do this? Let me back up. We got a crazy thing double header.

I should mention that. We got a crazy thing double header. So sneak preview, there's more than one coming. What crazy thing did Chase do this week? Yeah. So lots of people have the old and no longer available Inc. Plus card, which offers 5X, very similar to, The Chase Inc. Business Cash card offers 5X at office supply and telephone internet and stuff like that.

But the Chase Inc. Plus, that old card, offered it for up to $50,000 of spend per year versus $25,000 with the Inc. Business Cash card card. So cardholders, not all cardholders, but a lot of Inc. Plus cardholders got an email from Chase a few days ago. What did it say? shocked the world. They said that starting October 1st, Inc. Plus card holders would earn 5X not on office supply, but on shipping charges instead. And then the other, I don't know, whatever other stuff, internet cable TV, the regular stuff that the card does also offer 5X on. But for most people listening to this show, the key category on that is office supply. And so the announcement was that that was going to essentially. change to shipping. Now, I should note, I have an ink plus card did not get this email. So like Greg said, it didn't go out to everybody, but there were plenty of reports of people getting the email. And of course, that would be pretty bad news for a lot of people, I think, right? Yeah, it would be. But later the same day, it was announced that the email was set out in error. And everyone who got that email

should get a correction sometime soon. So we'll see. It's an very odd error to make. I mean, something's got to be up. You know, I would have said that, except that didn't this happen with Chase? Like, about a year ago, there was something else similar. They sent out it.

And we were like, oh, was that a mistake or just a mistake that they sent it too soon? But I don't think that ever came to pass, right? Yeah, that's a good point. You know, it could be that Chase just wanted to get on to that. the crazy thing segment. Maybe. Maybe. They've been, it's been too long. It's been too long since we had a spot on this segment. So, so anyway, nothing to see here for now and hopefully ever with that change. So hopefully it sticks around. All right. Next up in what crazy thing? What crazy thing did Capital One shopping do this week, Greg? So a reader sent in a screenshot of their Capital One shopping

offer. They were looking at a core, shopping for hotels through a core's website, and Capital One shopping offered minus.25% rewards minus. Negative 2.5%. It's always going to cost you to book a core hotel for Capital One shopping. Do not click that link, whatever you do. I'd be really curious to see, would they take away rewards you've already earned because you earned zero point, or, you know, negative 0.25%? What what weirdness is that? Right, right, right. Yeah, I don't know what was going on there, but interesting, funny. Interesting. I like it. Yes. So Capital One shopping for the record, for those not familiar, is a shopping portal. It has nothing to do with Capital One. You don't need a Capital One credit card. It's just named Capital One shopping because Capital One owns it. But anybody can

sign up and you earn rewards that you can then redeem for gift cards. And I think Stephen reported this week that there were some new gift card options. out. And while those were rotating a lot for quite a while, might have been pretty stable for a while my redemption options. But I wanted to take a quick second here talking about Capital One shopping to mention a recent experience I had booking a sixth rental car through Capital One shopping. Now, I've written before in the past about how travel purchases made through Capital One shopping have weird tracking. They may track as ineligible until after travel is completed. So I've written before about some that track the way you would expect before travel is completed and some that show ineligible,

but then at some point after you complete travel, they become eligible and pay out. But my experience with Sixth was different and there are two interesting pieces to it. Interesting piece number one is that I rented a car and it didn't show up tracked at all. Didn't show up ineligible, didn't show up tracked, didn't show up with any indication in the shopping trip that I had made a purchase or a reservation or whatever. So I thought maybe it wasn't going to happen. And I had clicked through a button for 45% back, so I was pretty disappointed, but didn't show up before the rental, didn't show up while I had the car rental, didn't show up at least in the several days, week, maybe even two weeks, after I completed the rental, because I kept checking to see if it would show up and it didn't. And I thought, oh, man, that stinks.

I was expecting 45% back on that. Then a couple more weeks passed, like a month or so from when I rented the car, maybe not even quite a month. And all of a sudden, boom, it was there in my shopping history and it credited. I got the 45% back. So it was a nice surprise. I had thought it just wasn't going to track properly, but it did. Now, that's a horrible way to do it because, you know, I think a lot of people would just have canceled that car rental and booked something else and reasonably so because

how do you know it's going to come up? You don't. And if you fight it out with capital and shopping, maybe they'll give you something back. Maybe they won't. That kind of stinks. So anyway, but good news. got the 45% back. The other piece of this that's kind of interesting is car rentals are always complicated because there's a bunch of different fees and things. And I always expect I'm going to

earn shopping rewards on the base rental rate only, like however much they're charging per day, the rest I'm not going to earn on. But I broke this one down because the amount was pretty big since it was 45% back. And I noticed that it was only the taxes that I didn't earn rewards on. In other words, I did earn rewards on all those airport concession fee, blah, blah, blah, type things, just not the actual sales tax or whatever tax that is. And that's important because then today, as we record this, I got an offer for 75 back on 200 or more at 6th. And I had made a booking just yesterday. So I went in to check the price because my booking was $238. And when you initially break out the cost on the sixth website, it showed something like $150 for the price plus $100.

in taxes and fees. And you might assume you're not going to earn rewards on the $100 in taxes. But when I expanded that too, it was only about $30 in taxes. So this rental should qualify for my 75 back on 200. So I don't know that for sure yet. I'll know in a couple of weeks after I make a rental. But I expect it's going to work based on the way my 45% back works. So you're planning as to rebook it with that new offer?

I did. Yeah, I've rebooked it with a new offer already. Yeah. Because I booked it yesterday with only like 20 or 25% back or something. something, which would have been last. Yeah. Yeah. So hopefully that's going to work out.

Keep an eye on the blog because I'll probably post about it. So just bunch of random crazy stuff with Capital One shopping and also a good point of information there. I also had a weird tracking thing. I think last week I mentioned maybe that I had booked a show through StubHub after clicking through an offer from Capital One. one shopping that was for like shows and experience or something like that like spend a i don't remember how much it was but get a hundred dollars back and um that didn't track at all for several

days and then all of a sudden i got an email saying i was confirmed the the hundred dollars back so you know it's one of those where if if i just looked at the tracking i would have thought oh man i made a mistake or you know this is going to be a problem um trying to get this credited But it's just weird. Well, you know, it's funny you bring that up because we recently had reported in the blog about an offer for $100 back on 100 or more on tickets and show tickets. And so that was probably what the offer was, right? And so I got slick with it buying tickets to something where the tickets were, I don't know,

they were about $75. No, they were about $100 each is what it was. And so I placed several different orders. And one order was for two tickets. So it was actually about $200 and I was going to get $100 back. And the other orders, were each just over $100 through Vivid Seats is the site that I picked. Now, Vivid Seats, it's great because they put all the taxes and fees all into one,

so you just see one price for the ticket, except didn't end up triggering my offer on the orders that were 100 because apparently the ticket price itself was only $72 in change. It wasn't the $100 that I needed to be. So I didn't get anything on the two orders that I split off. The one order for the $200 in tickets, that was more than that. than 100 for the ticket. So I did get the 100 back on that one. But the other two, I was like,

ah, I split that out into multiple purchases just to try to use that offer multiple times. Capital One shopping got me there. So watch out for that. Got burned. All right. Next up, let's talk about awards, points, and more better news this week.

Well, it was better news anyway. Earlier in the week, it's still not bad. Pays is out with an offer to earn $10 or $10 back when you spend $10 or more. at merchants that accept pays. So what is pays and why should we care about 10 back on 10? Yeah.

So pays is like one of those online checkout options for when you're, when you're checking out online and it gives you different options like how to pay, basically. Sometimes PayPal, sometimes there's various other Google Pay might show up, things like that. If you're lucky, pays will show up. And when you pay through pays, you have with this offer enacted, and you'll see the offer right there as you're going to pay for it, they will credit your credit card account with $10 as long as you meet the terms of spending $10 or more for each transaction.

And they'll do that up to 10 times per card. So if you have a whole bunch of cards that are eligible for pays, which is most, I think, then you can do, you know, theoretically, thousands of dollars of credits with this. Nick said it's not as intriguing as it was at first, because when the news first broke about this, New Egg is a online store that does accept pays, and they sell tons of different merchant gift cards, and many of them are available for $10 at a pop.

And it was confirmed that those $10 purchases of gift cards would count for this Pays promo. And so a lot of people were jumping on and just buying as many gift cards as they could, $10 at a time with every credit card they could find that would work. I should mention this also stacks with a deal I think we talked about last week with Pays where if it's certain chase cards are eligible to get 10 points per dollar through pays. And so you can get theoretically both of these, the $10 back and 10 points per dollar at once. So both of those things are still in play as we're recording this. What's changed is that new egg stopped letting you pay with pays when you're checking out for low value gift cards.

I think any gift cards, I think. Is it any gift cards? I'm not sure. And so, you know, now at least with new egg, you know, if you want to buy stuff and use pays, you're going to want to look for, you know, actual stuff that you're going to buy. I think, Nick, you said you bought some kind of charging cable or something. Yeah, yeah. We just broke one the other day.

And so I needed to buy one. I was going to order it from Amazon. But hey, 10 back on 10. it was $9.79 plus tax brought it a little over 10. So that was a good deal for me. I'll probably order a couple more small things like that. Actually, Dan's Deals has like a list of links to stuff like on Sephora because Sephora takes it and a couple other sites.

If you're just looking for what's under 10 bucks that I might want and you don't want to shop around yourself, they had a bunch of links there to things. So yeah, I mean, it was super useful while it lasted. And you might think, do I really want to have a whole bunch of $10 gift cards line? around and you don't have to worry about it now since it doesn't work anymore. But at the time it did. And there were some like Uber. And I mentioned this because if this kind of thing happens again, the things to think about are, well, what kind of gift cards aren't a pain in the butt, right? Like what kind of gift cards can I can I combine together? So Uber, you could just add that to your Uber

balance. And so that was like a no brainer for a Lyft was again, no brainer for a lot of people. Disney gift cards can be combined in the Disney app up to like, I think, $1,000 or something. So I think people that were looking to maximize this probably focused first on those gift cards that are not a pain to use. And so that's something to think about if and when you see this type of promotion come around again. It was pretty wild while it lasted. And I think I don't know this for sure because I haven't checked today as we record this. But I think it might still work to send someone a Dunkin card through the Duncan app, which I just sent them to my own email address and printed them out to give to my kids' teachers. So that might be another option that's still out there.

Yeah. If you're looking for something. Anyway, an interesting finding that some people wrote about online is that Pays. So if you go to Pays's website, they have a list of merchants that accept Pays. But what you won't find easily is the fact that there's a point-of-sale system called Clover that accepts Pays. and Clover is widely used at restaurants. And so there are hundreds, maybe thousands of restaurants around the country that indirectly accept pays because they use Clover for their point of sale system. So there is a website called NextCard that has created some tools, some maps and things for these kind of situations.

And they created one for Clover where you can see. on a map, all of the restaurants that accept pays via Clover. And also you can filter to those that actually sell gift cards as well. And so once I did that filter, there are none anywhere near me at all. But, you know, if any of the restaurants you frequent are there or want to frequent or that sell gift cards that you'd be interested in, that could be a handy thing. And we'll have the link to that in the show notes. Yeah, you know, as you were talking about that, I pulled it up, just curious if there was anything in my area that takes it. And I mentioned this because, wow, this is intriguing. There is a private school. Like, it's just, it's a private school that apparently

takes Clover. And so I don't know if you'd pay your kids tuition $10 at a time, but I don't know of them having a restaurant there. So I don't, I don't know. Well, don't forget, I mean, Pays is also the chase offer of getting 10 points per dollar. So, you know,

getting 10 points per dollar plus whatever the card earns naturally for paying for tuition or something like that would be pretty amazing just by itself. Yeah. Yeah. So there you go.

There you have it. Interesting stuff there from Pays. So it was a good deal and still is a good deal while at last. We should mention, though, that I believe the 10 extra points per dollar on new ag is now scheduled to end June 30th because I think that overall deal was scheduled to last much longer. But new egg I think is going to stop offering 10 points per dollar at the end of this month. So check our post for more details.

All right. Next up, City is out with a transfer bonus from City. Thank you rewards to all the Corps. So Core, of course, is the loyalty program of chains like Fairmont and Ibus and Novita. and Sofetel and you could probably be more. Raffles, many more, yes. And so 50% transfer bonus to a core through July 18th. The ordinary transfer ratio from city to a core is 1,000 city points to 500 a core points. With this transfer bonus, it's 1,000 city points to 750 a core points. Now, that's not even one to one.

Why is this interesting? Yeah, it's interesting because a core points are worth quite a lot compared to most hotel points they're worth. Each a core point is worth two euro cents each. And each euro cent is worth more than a US penny. Anyway, so math works out to, you would be getting about 1.7 US cents value from your city points by transferring this way, even by getting less than one-to-one transfer. So that's that's pretty good. I mean, it's not amazing, but it's, that's a solid return for your city points. Yeah, it really is.

And when you consider the fact that it's, you use that towards any room. So you book whatever room type you want. You're not like stuck with normally award, award availability is for like a standard or base room most chains. But with a court, you can book whatever room it is you want, get that same consistent value. You could also charge things to your room like spa treatments. and meals and stuff like that and use your points to erase those purchases, again, at good value with your core points.

So like Greg said, not amazing value for city points, but really strong value for lodging and for other lodging related stuff that you normally can't pay for at a good value with points. Yeah, yeah. A good way to get a massage or a, you know, facial or whatever using your points. Right, right. One quick word of warning. I don't know if this will be an issue for anyone else, but you can use your

points either when booking online, you could apply your points right then, or you could apply your points at checkout at the hotel. I tried to do the latter, and that process required getting a security code from a core to kind of finish the process. The security code didn't show up. So I think it did show up like three hours later when I was long gone, but I wasn't able to use my point. So it's just a kind of word of warning that if you're going to do it, make sure you do it well before you have to be gone if you're going to do it at the hotel. Or if you can do it up front at the time booking, that's a safer time to use your points. Great, great safety tip there. And then one other tip for family travelers is that I didn't know for a long time, but I included in an update to our

Corps guide at some point is that a Corps offers a family rate at a lot of places, not all properties, but what they'll do is they'll give you 50% off the second room. Now, because the way taxes and things work, it's not quite a straight half off, but it's a good discount anyway. And so it's worth being aware, particularly in Europe, because a lot of times traveling as a family of four in Europe, one room won't do it for us. Or sometimes we have another fifth person traveling with us. And so we'll need two rooms. And a quarter looks like it can be really useful for that, because I found a lot of situations where that 50% off the second room works out to make it a good. deal from either perspective, whether it's cash or using your points. So just a tip you may not be

aware of because not very many hotel chains have something like that. Yeah. One more tip. So this is this is scheduled to go through July 18th. Last time this happened, when city went to fix the the exchange rate after, you know, after the promo expired, somebody accidentally switched it to a one-to-one transfer instead of a two-to-one transfer. And so it was available for, if I remember right, about a day and a half to transfer one-to-one to a core. And that, of course, was a crazy good deal. So I don't think it'll happen again, you know, but you never know.

So watch around July 18th or 19th to see what happens. Right, right. Don't think it will happen again, but we're going to be logging in on July 18th, just in case it does. It's not worth hanging on and waiting for that to happen. If you have a use for a core points, use the transfer bonus by all means. But we can always hope that lightning will strike twice. All right.

We'll be right back after this with our main event. We hope you're enjoying the Frequent Miler on the air podcast. Did you know that Frequent Miler is also a website? At frequentmiler.com, you'll find all the latest deals, news about points, miles, and rewarding credit cards, the single best best credit cards page on the web guides to all popular awards programs

and many other terrific resources. If you'd like to get our post sent to your email, go to frequentmiler.com forward slash subscribe and sign up for free. And we're back. Windham's intriguing new card lineup. Wow. So on Wednesday of this week,

Wyndham suddenly released a brand new premium card, and they, They changed up all of their existing credit cards in the U.S. market. We had no advance warning about this at all. We didn't know until we saw other blogs were reporting it that this had happened. And it's really significant. We're going to talk in this main event about what happened, what happened with the existing card lineup. And we'll do that kind of briefly.

then we'll go into depth about the new premium card. And then we're going to talk about why you should care. Wyndham, for a lot of listeners, Wyndham might not be on your radar, might not have been on your radar before. I think that it may be time to reevaluate that. At least that's what's happening to me. I'm kind of looking at Wyndham again saying,

is it time for me to look harder at it because there's some interesting things going on here? And on the flip side, I'm looking at it and being like, and if you didn't catch the shoulder shrug, I'm less intrigued, I think. So I'm looking forward to the discussion to see if Greg can convince me as to why I should be more intrigued by this new card. Although I think there are definitely some reasons to be interested in wind him rewards. And we'll discuss that a little bit later. But let's talk about the changes to the current cards because there are new coupons out, higher annual fees, changed earning rates and changed award discounts.

but when we talk about all these changes, if you are an existing cardholder, and by existing, I mean, prior to June 17, 2026, then none of this applies to you yet, or at least we don't expect it to. There's a chance that some of the good things maybe will come live on your account. We don't know for sure that they won't, but we're told that there's no change for existing cardholders. So we don't expect you're going to lose anything, at least not for the time being. Right. Right.

And specifically, you'll be able to keep your existing annual fee. You'll be able to keep your existing earn rates, like the business earner card 8X for gas, for example. That's something that you'll be able to keep long term. We've been told that, as Nick alluded to, that some of the new benefits might get extended to existing cardholders, but also that they're looking into providing a path to product change to the new version of the card if you want to. And I think some people will want to and others won't. And so that's great.

It's like the best of both worlds that you get to choose. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I totally agree with that. All right. So let's start with the earner, the first of the cards, because it's the card that has no annual fee. and so that one, the old earn rate was 5x on Wyndham stays and gas, 2x on dining and groceries. The new bonus categories are still 5x on Wyndham stays, but now 3x for vacation clubs.

So the Wyndham Vacation Club properties presumably, dining, groceries, and gas. So you've got dining and groceries still, but you've added gas and vacation clubs, and those are all at 3x now instead of 2x. Mm-hmm. So. Yeah. And the cards, yeah, and the card's 10% award discount is unchanged. So it's, it's all like minor good news for the fee free Windham earner card. Yes. And we still wouldn't generally recommend spending heavily on this card. And we can talk more about why when we talk about the value of Wyndham points. But, but it's, I think, net improvement here overall for that card.

Earner Plus, the Windham earner plus card has an increase in its annual fee. now. So it was $75 before. Now it's $95, so a $20 increase in the annual fee on the earner plus. The old earning categories or bonus categories were 6x on Windham stays and gas, 4x on dining and grocery. Now, from June 17th onward, 6x on Windham stays still, 4x on vacation club travel, dining and grocery. So it keeps the 4x dining and grocery. So it keeps the 4x dining and grocery but adds 4x vacation club and 4x travel. Is that all travel? No. So before I read out what travel means, note that at a high level, it looks like they got rid of the gas category. But what they did is gas really moved down from 6x to 4x because gas is included in their definition of

travel, which is really interesting. I don't know. It makes sense to me. Like you do pay for gas when you travel, and gas is necessary for car travel. But it's unusual. I don't know of any other card issuer that calls that, you know, that defines travels including gas. But anyway, here's what the term say travel means to get 4X on this card. It's defined as airfare, car rental, ride share, gas, EV charging, tolls, and trains. I mean, that's a fair range of travel purchases. it's a lot of the stuff you would need. Notably absent, of course, as general hotels other than Wyndham, but that's understandable on a Wyndham branded card that they're not going to bonus your purchases at other hotel brands.

And, you know, I agree with you. Obviously, gas is not usually thought of as part of a travel category. But I think it oddly makes sense here because, I mean, Windham has a number of brands like Super A travel lodge, a kind of lodge, I think is Wyndham that are brands that are frequently part of a road trip, right? I mean, they're definitely side of the highway type, a number of their brands anyway, are tend to be found in those types of places. So I think it makes sense to me that you would want a bonus gas and that you would kind of think of that as part of the trip.

Yeah, no, totally. Yeah, it's definitely seems like, you know, road trip is more on their mind than any other kind of trip. And certainly you're not getting anything for cruises, for example, which again makes sense because, Cruz is sort of an alternative to staying in hotels and they want you staying in Wyndham hotels. Yeah. Yeah. So it seems to make some sense. It's a relatively broad bonus category still for a hotel specific card.

I've got to say, you know, there's quite a range of bonus categories on this because you don't see usually quite as many different types of things bonus on hotel cards. So I like that. All right. Perks on this card. The 10% award discount is unchanged. Still get 10% off on award redemptions. 15,000 points each renewal now instead of the previous 7,500. So that's doubled to 15,000 points each year at renewal.

Now you get a meal delivery credit of $25 every six months. So if you order Uber Eats or DoorDash or something like that, $25 back every six months. And you get 15,000 bonus points if you pay for five nights or more at Wyndham Properties with this card in a calendar year. So if in the calendar year, you spend at least five nights at Wyndham Properties, now is it select properties or is it all Wyndham Properties that qualify for that one? Great question. I think it's select, but yeah, I believe so. I haven't looked in detail to that.

Yeah. So I think when I say select properties, I mean, I think it's select brands that count for that. But five nights and get you 15,000 points. So an additional 3,000 points a night you could look at it as if you're spending exactly five nights. And now you get National Emerald Club executive status, which is a common status. it's given with a number of credit cards, but nonetheless, a nice ad here for Wyndham card holders. Yeah, for sure. And National Executive status gets you the executive aisle when you're choosing your card and the, you know, base members for National get to pick from the Emerald Isle. And once you have

executive status, you get to pick from slightly nicer cars in the executive aisle. So that's actually a nice, a really nice perk. All right. Then we have the earner business card. And you'll fee now $149, that's up from the previous 95, so $55 increase there. The card used to offer 8x on both Wyndham stays and gas and 5x on marketing, advertising, and utilities like telecom, cable satellite, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now, 8X on Windham stays, 5x for vacation club, gas, EV charging, marketing, advertising, advertising, office supply stores, and shipping purchases. So we drop from 8x to 5x on. on gas and we lose 5x utilities. Yeah, I think that's going to be a no-go for a lot of our listeners.

A lot of people that we've talked this card up to in the past have been attracted for exactly those two things. The 8x on gas and 5x for utilities were both unheard of. and if you have the old card and you make use of either of those categories, you know, hold on to that. These cards, if you had them before, are now collectibles. So, you know, I think the earner business card particularly is quite an interesting collectible. Although, as we talk about the new perks, I think you'll see that it's not a given that the old one is better than the new. Yeah, so it still includes diamond status, as it did before.

But the new version of the card provides a 20% discount on award redemptions. That's up from 10%. So you're going to pay 10% less for your award redemptions. So that's nice. You get the National Emerald Club executive status and you get some coupons. So first up, you get up to $65 in statement credit for a wholesale club membership each year. And up to $50 in statement credits each year. for accounting software. Now, we don't know what's going to count for the accounting software.

If you pay for obvious accounting software, I would assume that it's going to work. But will things like Dell or Newegg purchases from sites like that that sell accounting software work? I don't know. So we're not sure how broadly useful that $50 will be, but it will be useful at a base level for some folks who are paying for accounting software. And that's probably more than one or two people out there. And the wholesale club membership, I mean, a lot of people have a wholesale club membership. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, so if you use this just to, you know, erase your wholesale club membership cost each year, that could right there account for the change in the annual fee. So you're, you know, so the net gain here really, I think, is the big thing

to think about is whether that 20% award discount is meaningful to you versus the 10% that the older version of this card has. You know, that's going to be an individual decision. And really, the big thing will be how much do you redeem your points for award stays? And the flip side is how much do you currently earn from the 8x gas and 5x utilities categories? Yeah, I mean, that's, it is my gas card in my household. It stays in the van and that is the, you know, the gas card for us. So I think I would have a hard time giving that up.

But I could certainly see where the math could be close because it is still going to earn five points per dollar on gas. And you're going to get the additional 10% off on your awards. So it's a little tough. I think you got really like you said, you got to do the math on that to figure out which is going to work out to be better for you depending on your earning and redemption patterns in the foreseeable future. Yeah. All right. Let's now talk about it. I don't get to the good one.

Yeah. I mean, you know, people always say to us, why doesn't Wyndham have a card that costs more than $300? I mean, right? It's one of the most common questions. That's what everybody wants to know is, how can I pay more for a Wyndham card than I'm doing today? And Wyndham's got your back now. So there's a new Wyndham earner premier card. It's $395 per year.

So if you've been begging for a way to spend more, then, And, well, actually, before, you couldn't spend more than $100 on a single window card. So now you can spend $395. So you get your wish there. And if we stopped there, everybody would stop listening, right? That's all there was to it. But you said you're intrigued by this. I am, but let me say, we're not going to get to the, the first, my first look

through of this stuff I was like yeah it's not for me so don't expect to be wowed as we as we list off the cards benefits until we talk afterwards about okay what it all means I gotta wait for the wow there's a little bit of wow but not not a huge wow I think okay all right let's talk about the cards earning rate eight X for Wyndham stays 4x for vacation club 4x for travel dining and grocery so So pretty broad. Travel is like what we described before. It's for airfare, car rental, ride chair, gas, EV charging, tolls, and trains.

And then, you know, 1X everywhere else. So pretty, you know, solid earning rate, but nothing that would get you super excited. Because, like, these aren't transferable points we're talking about. We're talking about hotel points that are not, you know, necessarily worth a ton. So earning 4x is not. super exciting. But let's talk about the card's perks. And the number one perk, which you'd be hard-pressed as things stand today, as we're

recording this, this might change soon. But if you go to the Wyndham site and look up this card or you go to Barclay's site and look up this card, you won't see what I think may be the number one most interesting perk of this card, which is that if you have this card, your points don't expire. all right wow and now what but but you can't just say that and not explain because that seems pretty intuitive that's the case with a lot of programs right but until now that has never been the case with windham right yeah and it's not even so simple is that you might be like okay yeah but i just have to earn some points every 18 months to keep them alive right right right um you do have to do that uh or

at least you did before this card because uh windham has two ways of points expiring one is um if you go 18 months without any activity, then your points expire. And that's pretty normal, but any activity then resets that clock. And so that's all good. The big problem with Windham points has long been the four-year expiry. Four years from when points are earned, they expire. And there's no way to, there's no good way to regularly extend the expiration. So you are, you know, you're stuck with if you earn a whole bunch of points today and you spend, you know, you spend, let's say, half of them and then maybe you keep earning more points out of that, but you don't have an opportunity to spend those original points. Those original points will still expire four years from when they're collected and the new points expire four years from when they are earned unless you have this card. And so this card, they didn't fix Wyndham rewards.

for this big issue. What they did is they fixed it for card holders of this $395 card. Yeah. And I mean, that really is a big problem. The fact that they expire and the hard expiry is something that we see with a few airline programs in the world. And it often gets mentioned with those airline programs because it's such a rarity. But I can't think of another hotel program that I know of anyway that has anything like this. Like, yeah, yeah, stick around, but it's not, not the case with Wendom. So, so while this benefit, you might be like, well, points don't expire. I mean, duh, you've got the card, right?

But that's not ever been the case for Wendom. That's a huge problem that this card solves. And I say a huge problem. It's not probably a problem at all to you if you don't have any Wendom points as we, you know, as we record this. But if you've got a bunch of Wendom points, it's really annoying because they expire, I assume, on a rolling basis and, tracking that's got to be a pain like uh yuck yuck yuck one more yeah um okay so anyway so that's that's the

first of many perks we're going to talk about next one uh every card anniversary uh you get 30 000 bonus points so um depending on how much you value those points that could be worth more or less to you but uh our reasonable redemption value uh for wind um points is 0.67 cents per point meaning half of the redemptions that we looked at are you get more than that and half you get less than that. So that's the average that we're going with. And at that rate, 30,000 points are worth about $200 towards future Wyndham stays. So that's a pretty significant piece, about half of the annual fee. But it actually gets a little better than that because,

the next perk is that you get a 25% discount on free night awards. So with a 25% discount, that means your points are worth 33.3% more than they were worth without any discount. So 30,000 points, even using our exact same reasonable redemption value of 0.67, which made 30,000 points worth about 200, 33% more than that makes it the value more like $270 in points when you get those 30,000 points each year. Does that make sense? That's a little convoluted, but you have to stack those two benefits to understand why the 30,000 points are worth more than they seem at first. And well, and it's worth mentioning, and we'll come back to this a little while later, that this is, you know, Greg, using our reasonable redemption value to figure it out. And the

reasonable redemption value, as he has made clear, is kind of the middle point where like about half our redemptions are below and half of redemptions are above. But, you know, you may adjust that up or down depending on your own use of points. I mean, you know, maybe you wouldn't consider staying at some of the places that are either one end or the other end of that. And so you should probably adjust your own personal evaluation some because you certainly can get either more or less value than this. And in some cases, by a significant margin. So worth knowing that, we'll come back to some of the better uses of Wyndham points, I think a little bit later. Also worth a mention here, though, that we've now mentioned the 0.67 cent reasonable redemption value. That's why the bonus categories

on all of these cards are of questionable value, because if you're only getting less than seven-tenths of a cent per point, then even the 4x categories, you're looking at what, 2.8% back in Wyndham points? I mean, that's good, but it's not earth-shatteringly good. So that's why Greg wasn't like wildly excited about that for like grocery. Right, right. Because there are plenty of other cards that offer a good grocery. Although, you know, when you have that 25% discount, that brings your sort of personal RV up.

And so we'll talk more about that later. But that means that even those bonus categories might be a lot more interesting because of that 25%. discount, or the business earner card's 20% discount. A very similar type of math goes on there. All right. Moving on with perks with this card, you get diamond status, which again is the same as what the business card offers. You get 30,000 bonus points when paying for five or more Wyndham Knights with certain brands with the card in a calendar year. So I think of that as sort of the, maybe the mattress run bonus. If you, if we find like a good mattress run for, you know, certain brands that, that this works for, then you could get even more points because

you're doing both at once. You get the standard card member discount on paid stays. You get executive, national executive status. So these are not too special. These are, these two that I just mention are available on all the cards, I think, or all the paid cards. You get a Wyndham Insider membership. Now, I haven't had time to go back and review what that's all about. I know Steven's done some posts about the insider membership. I think we talked about it once, but I was sufficiently uninterested to, you know, that I didn't remember any of it. Yeah, no, I mean, he basically made it seem like there certainly wasn't anything worth paying for there, although, you know, if you're getting it for nothing, maybe the perspective would change.

I have, I sort of tuned it in and out pretty quickly when I realize I'm not going to pay $95 or whatever it was that they were charging for that. But I think you make a good point here that we've mostly ignored it because of that. Maybe it's worth taking a second look and seeing, well, what might be worth something if it doesn't cost you anything? Right, right. Okay. Next, next set of benefits we're going to talk about are, you know, just like everybody, been clamoring for a more expensive Wyndham card. They've also been saying, give us coupons. We love coupons. So Wyndham is here to, Wendom's got you. Maybe at least one of them, Wendom specific. Right. Okay. So the Wendom specific one,

$100 statement credit when spending $100 or more at select Wendom brands. Now that one, that seems pretty good, right? Like if you're interested in this card, you're probably interested in Wendom, probably going to stay at some Wyndham hotels. And so you could either use it to pay for the room or maybe if it's one where you could charge some stuff to your room, you can earn the credit that way. So that seems pretty good. $100 per year for streaming services.

So that's, if you look at, we're not going to list out the whole list of streaming services, but it's a massive list and includes things that's not usually in those lists, like Kindle Unlimited and Audible and just a slew of other things. So I think chances are good that just about anyone who picks up one of these is going to find a way to save $100. And it's not broken up per month the way a lot of other streaming credits are. Yeah, I mean, I pay more than $100 a year for streaming that would qualify that I'm paying just a, like, pay for a Spotify monthly membership for music streaming. Yeah.

And I pay for that monthly. If they offer an annual plan, I haven't even looked at it. So it would be very easy for me to get this and actually stop paying for something that I'm currently paying for. So I can see. I think a lot of people will be in that type of situation where there's something you're subscribing to that would qualify. Right, right. Now, on the other end, you get $10 per month in credits towards meal delivery services. So that's much more like many other cards offer some variation of that.

So it's fine if you use those services enough to, to, to be. benefit from it, but I wouldn't value it at $120 a year. And then you've got the $65 wholesale club membership, which, you know, for a lot of people, I think, is kind of free money. It's probably not worth $65 to you, but it might be worth $50 or, you know, whatever. So that's, you know, pretty good, too. So I don't think these are pretty useful coupons. They're not, you know, you're not ones that you have to go. like look up what is an aura ring or, you know, things like that. Right. Right. Right. Should I give a whoop to somebody? Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I totally agree. And things like the,

you know, obviously staying at a wind and property could be applicable to anybody, wherever you are, probably, you know, the streaming service again, same thing. And the wholesale club, even as somebody who lives in rural America, I, I have a couple of wholesale club memberships that I primarily use for online ordering. You know, so it's, it does. even have to be a case where you live near a Holesville Club necessarily to find value in that. So as far as coupons go, I'll give it to Wyndham, they put together a decent set of coupons. Now, do I value those enough to justify the annual fee? I don't know about that.

I think that really depends on whether or not I care at all about Wyndham rewards. So I think that's what we need to address here. Shouldn't you care about Wyndham rewards? Well, before we get into that, though, it sounds like you, You have no interest in signing up for this card, right? I would rather than say no, I'd say very low. There are just so many cards on the market right now that intrigue me more. And I already have enough cards with a $400 or higher annual fee that there's not enough here to make me say,

okay, I need to spend $400 on that. That said, if I do look at it from like a very basic level here, I am spending the $100 a year on streaming services. and I am spending $65 on wholesale club membership, and that's not being reimbursed by something else. So really, to me, if I just take that off the top, then this is a less expensive card. It's a $200 and change card.

Would I pay $200 in change to get the $100 statement credit and to get the discount on award stays and make my points not expire? I don't know. I mean, it's not a bad deal, but it also doesn't compel me yet until you convince me why. Well, let me tell you my situation. So I have the old earner business card.

I get 8X for gas and I have a bunch of points and I so rarely have found uses for my Wyndham points. It's not that there aren't, there are Wyndham hotels that I'd be interested in staying at, but just I don't drive my, you know, travel around, you know, oh, there's a hotel that it, that I'd like to stay at unless they're like really special hotels and those tend to be more like the small luxury hotels of the world or certain preferred hotels and you know I'm not generally looking for Wyndham to drive a whole trip around not that they have some high-end hotels which it could happen but because I don't what usually happens is I know I'm going to city X, Y, Z and I look at what are the best hotels what's which ones can I book with? points and how can I get good value, all that kind of stuff. Windham just rarely ever

rises to the top when I do all that. And so for me, for my travel habits, you know, I have all these points that have just been sitting there and if I'm not careful, they'll just expire. And so in a weird way, I'm really interested in the fact that if I sign up for this card, I would get, they would never expire and I'd be able to kind of save my points for someday. How many years are you going to pay for that though in order to keep your points alive to then redeem them for what value? Yeah, I mean, that's exactly, that's exactly the question. So, so I look, so there's a few things I look at. One is, does the combination of getting 30,000 points each anniversary plus the coupons and the 25% discount, does all that add up to

you know, actually forget the 25% discount. Just those other things. Does it offset the annual fee enough that I'd feel okay about just having that card in my arsenal? And then when I do go to redeem, yay, I've got that 25% rebate, which is great. Another way to think about it is don't sign up for the card now. Wait until, oh, my points are about to expire. I don't want them to expire. Sign up for the card then, hopefully get approved.

Now my points don't expire. And then I get hopefully a good welcome bonus at that time. Keep the card for a year, evaluate at the end of the year. Do I renew? Can I product change to the no fee card and re-upgrade when I need it? I don't know. So those are the type of things that run through my head. And so those are the reasons why.

this card is suddenly intriguing to me. Yeah, I mean, that makes a lot of sense. And I had forgotten about the anniversary points when I was just doing all that math a minute ago, because the anniversary points are worth something to me. I think Windham rewards is becoming more interesting to me. And I guess I'll discuss more when we talk about why you should maybe be interested in Winham Rewards. So from that perspective, it is intriguing to me.

Like I said, there's just, I have so many cards that have high annual fees. I don't feel like I need another one right now. But your point is great that I don't necessarily need to worry about it right now. Either A, if I'm going to make a huge wind of redemption, where that additional discount in the award price would make a significant difference to me, or B, my points are about to expire or both, then I would probably consider applying for the card, particularly because the welcome bonus adds even more value to it. So for the first year, it's a no-brainer like almost any card on the market.

right and it's really debating whether or not it's worth continuing to pay for after that and given the value you get from the welcome bonus i think for all the reasons you just said it's probably worth keeping for a couple of years at least and then if you're not using the benefits then maybe cancel it but anyway so all right i almost have me convinced all right let's talk about why people should care about windham rewards um so windham still maintains fixed award prices it's not award chart per se, but it's sort of award pricing rule, which is that hotels are priced at 7.5K, 15K or 30k per bedroom per night. And, you know, you can look, you have to, you know, do a search to find out what the particular hotel you're looking for is going to be priced at,

but that's the price points. Yeah, I'm going to say I'm going to hop in there real quick because you mentioned the per bedroom per night, which was something that had had come up with the Vacasa days and with cottages.com, which we'll mention in a second here. But I'm going to jump in and say it's not necessarily per bedroom per night. In fact, I have a two-bedroom vacation club booked this summer. That's 30,000 points per night. It accommodates eight people. And so it's like when you're out of Wyndham property, it's per room, not necessarily bedroom per night.

So, but yeah, your point is. It apparently depends because I looked up. a vacation property in Hawaii and it was two bedroom and they were charging 60,000 for bedroom. Oh, interesting. Interesting. All right. So that's interesting to know.

Yeah, well, and those fixed price points can be good for getting outsized value. There's not a range. There's no peak and off peak. So if you're going somewhere at a peak time, that can really come in handy. And so that I think is a really good feature of Wyndham that three years ago, we would have been like, well, you know, like everybody else, they sort of have an award chart. But today, given the relative rarity of award price consistency, this is something that at least gives you a predictable sort of, I'm not going to say value, but a predictable structure for redeeming.

Yeah. Yeah. And also, as long as they keep this, you know, as Wyndham, if Windham continues to build out their high-end properties or buy up, you know, into high-end properties, that gets pretty exciting. Because if you think about, like, you know, Hyatt now, their top-end properties cost how many points? I can't even remember now, but it's stratospheric how high it can go. A lot, a lot. A lot.

A lot. Way more than 30,000 points per night. And so, you know, now I'm like, Windham, come on. Let's get some of these more of these high-end properties into your portfolio. They have partnership with cottages.com, which is a bunch of vacation rental properties, mostly in the UK, and they charge 15,000 points per bedroom per night for those. That can be a slamming deal. Like Hyatt and Hilton, Wyndham does not charge resort fees on points days. Now, you might say do they charge resort fees at all, but they do at some properties. And so, The fact that they don't do that on point stays is great. Absolutely. Yeah.

Another cool-ish thing is their partnership with Caesar's rewards lets you transfer up to 30,000 windom points to Caesars each year. And you can use those for one cent per point towards various things at Caesar's properties. Yeah, I want to mention while we're on that topic, that that can certainly be useful because you can use them not only for your room, but also. other things you charge to your room potentially and other stuff, show tickets in some cases, et cetera. So there's definitely some useful stuff on that side to get one cent per point. But on the flip side, it's worth mentioning, if you're into Las Vegas, that a number of Caesar's properties or most Caesar's properties can also be booked with Wyndham points. And you might get a better deal that way. Like I have, I recently wrote about earning Diamond Plus status with Caesar's. So now I have

a bunch of free room offers. And so like Sunday through Thursday, I can pretty much get a free room somewhere on the Las Vegas strep all the time, basically. It looks like, but Friday and Saturday nights, I'm not getting offers for free nights from Sears because Friday and Saturday nights in Las Vegas are very expensive. But almost all of the, I need a Friday night in Las Vegas and almost all the Caesar's properties are available for either 15,000 or 30,000 points per night. And that's, particularly for the 15,000 point places, it's like two cents a point versus the cash rates. of those rooms. So it can be really good sometimes for that, just leaving them on the Wyndham side and redeeming for Sears properties, or then I can slide some over to the Caesar's side and use them

to pay for charges at Caesar's properties, which also can be good. Also, that has been a way in the past of sort of keeping some of your points alive, which won't be an issue if you got, of course, the $395 Windham card here. But you can move points to Caesar, you can move them back from Caesars to wind them and potentially renew for some amount of time there. It gets a little complicated and it takes a long time. Yeah, the process is, it takes a long time sometimes doesn't happen. Like, points can go into the ether and be and disappear. Which is also worth mentioning, you're going to move to Caesar's rewards in my experience. It takes days. It's not like a, you know, don't do this the day you need them. Yeah, that's a really good point. The website says, uh, expect at least two weeks or something

like that, expect about two weeks. Um, but Nick, your example there is a really good example. of how, you know, on the days where those properties are really cheap for cash, then you can get one cent per point value by having moved your Wyndham points to Caesars and use them at the hotel that way. But because of the fixed rates that Wyndham offers, when you book it as an award stay through Windham, you're going to get good. value only when the cash prices are very high. And that's how you get better value for your Wyndham points. So if you know what you're doing, you can maintain a very high value for your windom points, which is great. Speaking of the value, so I mentioned before on the show, the

reasonable redemption value for windom points, we have at only 0.67 cents each. So two-thirds of a cent per point is what they're worth on average. But as we just discussed, if you're careful about how you use them, you could get much better value than that. But also, as we discussed earlier, having a card that gives you a significant discount on awards raises even the average value of your points. So even if you just book on average and you would get, if on average you would get two-thirds of a cent per point without an award discount, then your 25% discount will give you 33% more value than that. And your 20% discount with a new business earner card will give you 25% more values. So bringing your personal RV up to closer to like 0.9 that area. So that's pretty good by itself,

but you can do even better, much better, by being careful about how you book your awards. It's like only booking where you find the value. And we call that Cherry Picking Awards. So one way we look at what value is possible from cherry picking is by looking at our data set. Our data set is from the gondola hotel search platform. And it looks at like all the Windham properties that can find over a whole year of booking options. and it figures out things like the 50th percentile, which is what we use for our RV, and 75th percentile and 90th percentile are where you're cherry picking.

And so at the 75th percentile, meaning 75 percent of the awards are less valuable than the ones you pick, you're looking at 0.88 cents per point value, but much more than that because of the discount. At the 90th percentile, you're looking at 1.14. Add on 33.3% to that. And suddenly you're looking at almost high at level value for your points at the 90th percentile cherry picking. Okay, another way of looking at it, and this is just another way of looking at cherry picking, is that value also varies by brand. Registry collection, that's their highest end. Collection of hotels, not a huge collection. But their high-end hotels, you're looking at on average 1.13 cents per point value.

Again, that would be much higher with your discount. Dulce is an upper end chain, 1.05 cents per point value. Then it drops down Wyndham 0.79 and Ramada, 0.77. and then all the others are even lower end than Ramada, Deza and Super 8, those kind of things, are all like more down at that two-thirds of a cent or less value. So if you are someone who likes, you know, prefers to say more at the upper end of things, you probably aren't listening this far into this program

because you heard Wyndham and you're not interested. But if you're still listening, know that your options are better. for getting good value. Similarly, things can be cherry-picked by location. So, like, when you look at different locations, you see different point values. And that might be because those locations that do the best, tend to have the highest-end hotels

or it might be, they just tend to be more expensive. And so because of that 30,000 point cap, you're seeing a lot of very good value. And so New York City tops the charts here, averaging 1.28 cents per point without the discounts. So you're getting considerably more than that. Chicago, you're looking at 1.01, Los Angeles, 0.94, and it goes down from there. Yeah, you know, I, as somebody who lives in a drivable distance from New York City and goes to New York City,

usually a couple times a year for one thing or another, I find this really interesting now, particularly in the post-Hiat devaluation situation here, because previously I would always almost exclusively consider Hyatt because they offered excellent value for points and, of course, all my globalist benefits that I want to take advantage of. However, now with a million different pricing levels of Hyatt properties and the increasing cost and what I expect to continue to be increasing cost as more Hyatt properties move to higher pricing bands within their categories,

that becomes less and less attractive to me. And the ability to use 30,000 windham points becomes more and more attractive, particularly if I'm earning them at a clip of, you know, eight points per dollar on my old earner business card at the gas station. So I look at this in like next week. I looked up a day next week. World Cup's going on right now. We've got some friends who are going to be in New York to see the World Cup next week.

And I don't think we're going to go down and see them. But I just took a look as you were talking here to see what kind of value would it be next week. because I'm sure room prices are high. And the Beekman Tower, which is a place that we've stayed at before, that's like apartment-style rooms in Manhattan. Now, it's not like the middle of time square location. So it's not a location necessarily that you're going to salivate over. And it's also not high-end, but it was clean and decent and apartment-sized rooms in New York City.

30,000 points a night next week or about 600 bucks a night, the night that I looked up, you know, random night. Middle of the week, random night. So two cents per point. value before the award discount. Before the award discount. Yeah. And so I look at redemptions like that.

I say in the future, even if that's a little out of my way, I'm probably going to be looking at that over paying like 60,000 Hyatt points or whatever the Hyatt wants for their properties. I'll pay for the parking. I'll find a place with Spy Hero or Park Wiz or whatever if I need to. So or I'll take a train or bus in or something. I'll work the rest of that out. But that value, I think, is going to be hard to beat, especially with this 25% discount on this particular card. Now, am I going to rush out and get the card for that? Not yet, but that does

stand out to me as like, that's a particular use case that I have that I think this will be really potentially valuable for the additional discount on nights like that. But yeah, so I think the point here, though, is that I think if you're listening to this show, there's a good chance that the Windham redemptions you're looking at are either at our reasonable redemption value or better. And so, or at least that you're willing probably to wait for those opportunities. And if that's you, then I think when it becomes much more interesting, because I think there are enough opportunities to get around one cent per point before the 25% discount. With the 25% discount, you're doing even better. And then the bonus categories start to look pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. So all, you know,

all that works together to make it, make it all intriguing. It's something we're going to be, no doubt watching very closely. As Nick said, like, I'm not going to run out and sign up for this card tomorrow unless I get log onto my account and see that my points are about to expire. I don't think I'm there yet, but it's definitely intriguing.

It's something that, you know, especially if I, as I look around, as I find properties that are like, oh, yeah, I want to stay there. I want to use my winning points there. Then that's going to become really attractive. And so my, you know, I'm kind of rooting for a few things, for Wyndham, first of all, not to suddenly devalue their program as hotel chains like to do. And they've done before without notice, but hopefully they won't do that again anytime soon in a major way.

But also I'm looking, you know, forward to the possibility, at least, of them either, you know, adding more premium brands because I'm interested in that. or partnering with more partners. Like they used to have that Vicasa partnership. You know, I'd love to see them pick up something similar to choice has that partnership with preferred hotels. I'd love to see something similar to that so that you could get into more independent hotels with your Wyndham points would be great. And I might have wondered whether something that was coming or not even wondered. If you had said that to me a couple months ago, I'd have been like, I don't see anything like that coming from Wyndham. But I didn't see a $395.

card coming and I definitely didn't see a $395 card that we would talk this much about coming. So I don't know what's coming from Wyndham yet. They have taught me a lesson. And even after this news broke, my reaction was, does Wyndham have enough fans that are willing to pay $400 for a card? I mean, because Wyndham tends to have value brands that I assume most people are interested or drawn to based on value, based on getting a good deal for the price. and $395 does not scream like value, like value brand item to me necessarily,

although I think as we've talked about, the card can be a good value after all. Absolutely. 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 Frequentmyler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media, join our Frequent Myler Insiders Facebook group. And wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to like this or give it a thumbs up. If you have a question that you'd like to be considered for a future question of the week

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