Two steps forward and one step sideways with Hyatt awards

I’ve seen a number of people write about two big improvements to the World of Hyatt award booking system: during the reservation process, Guest of Honor Awards (giving the guest Globalist privileges during their stay) and Suite Upgrade Awards can now be selected and applied online while make an all-cash or all-points reservation.

Previously, these awards could only be applied over the phone after a reservation had been made. Unfortunately, these awards still cannot be combined with each other or with Pay Your Way reservations, either online or over the phone. Let’s discuss.

“Pay Your Way” lets you use points, cash, and free night awards on a single reservation

I use this feature all the time, but it doesn’t offer any special value except convenience: most chains require you to “check out” and “check back in” when you move between different payment types and reservation channels, but as long as you’re booking through Hyatt you can combine points, cash, and free night awards however you like, as long as the same rate and room type is available for each night, saving you (or, God forbid, a loved one) a trip or two to the front desk during your stay to remake your keys.

That lets you use cash for the nights that are cheapest with cash, points for the nights that are cheapest with points, and free night awards for the most expensive nights (since Hyatt free night awards are classified by property category, not specific point values).

Again, this does not save you any money, points, or awards, as long as each of the nights is available on its own, although it may help you meet a minimum stay requirement during especially busy times if a property won’t let you book the nights individually.

Suite Upgrade Awards and Guest of Honor awards can be used online but can’t be combined with free night awards (or each other)

What many people have been talking about is the ability to apply Suite Upgrade Awards and Guest of Honor awards online at the time of booking. This is fine and good, but it’s only half the story.

As a reminder, Suite Upgrade Awards allow you to confirm an upgrade to a property’s entry-level suite, if available at time of booking. Previously, these awards had to be redeemed by calling into Hyatt. Now, there’s a radio button to click that lets you see if there’s an available suite and redeem the award for it during the booking process.

Guest of Honor awards give the guest (including yourself, if applicable), World of Hyatt Globalist status benefits during a stay, the most important of which are generally considered to be free breakfast, free valet parking (on award stays), waived resort fees, late checkout, and suite upgrades, if available at check-in.

So while it’s obviously not especially common, you can imagine a situation where you might want to apply a Suite Upgrade Award to a Guest of Honor booking, since the benefits are very slightly different. You want your in-laws to have free breakfast and late check-out but you also want to make sure they get a suite for their gazillionth anniversary instead of counting on hope or an e-mail to the general manager.

That’s not possible, since only one award can be applied to a reservation.

The problem and the easiest workarounds

That’s an extreme case, but a much more obvious situation is a Globalist or friend-of-a-Globalist trying to apply a Suite Upgrade Award to a Pay Your Way reservation, which happens to be the precise situation I found myself in the other week. I’d identified an upcoming Category 7 Andaz stay as a perfect redemption storm: a Category 1-7 free night award for the most expensive night and points for the cheaper ones, all made in a single online reservation through the convenience of Pay Your Way.

But as you’ve gleaned by now, it doesn’t work. You can’t apply a Suite Upgrade Award to a Pay Your Way reservation online, but Hyatt can’t apply it over the phone either.

How much of a problem this is depends on which nights you intended to apply the free night award to. Hyatt is better, in my experience, at detecting and combining reservations in advance, so if you’re using the free night award for your last night, you can just use the Suite Upgrade Award for the first nights of the reservation (booked with cash or points) and you’ll have a chance verging on 100% of simply being left in the same suite for the last, “ineligible” night.

This is less likely to work if the night you want to use the free night award on falls in the middle of your stay, but I suspect the odds are still pretty good.

I hesitate to venture a guess on how the billing would work out if you tried this with a Guest of Honor award, since many of those benefits are literally billed daily or nightly: breakfast, valet parking, resort fees.

Conclusion

World of Hyatt has been in a class by themselves when it comes to resisting the devaluation of their points and free night awards, and I am going to rely on them more in 2025 since I qualified for Globalist in 2024 for the first time since taking advantage of the Starwood-Marriott status match years ago.

But I’m not here to give them any more credit than they deserve: the system is still pretty annoying and I hope this post makes it slightly less annoying for the next guy.

Vermont, the ratchet of prosperity, the community of isolation, and the isolation of community

I recently spent a few weeks in Vermont during what they hilariously call “stick” season, the one between “leaf-peeping” and “ski” seasons (because the leaves have already fallen off but the snow hasn’t fallen yet), and the experience made a surprisingly profound impression on me, much like my bizarre trip to Galveston, Texas.

Vermont is a wonderful state, and I spent two memorable summers at Middlebury College’s Language School, so I have unlimited built-in good will for Vermont and Vermonters. But over the course of the trip I developed a kind of unease which I think is familiar to people who’ve read H.P. Lovecraft and his descriptions of the virtues of Yankee life.

Vermont is a very rich state

I think a lot of people intuitively understand that New England is one of the richest sections of the country, and therefore the world, mainly because it has been settled by capitalists for so long. There are lots of ways of measuring this, but they all tell the same story.

Besides the blip around Spring, 2020, Vermont has had an unemployment rate below 3% since 2018.

In 2023, Vermont’s GDP per capita income (in constant 2017 dollars, which is to say, actual per capita income is thousands of 2023 dollars more than this) ranked 23rd in the country, at $57,521.

If you prefer to judge the wealth of a society by how it treats its people, Vermont has performed better than the national average on NAEP standardized tests since they began administering them in 2002. Vermont also extended public health insurance to low-income adults under the Affordable Care Act in 2014. In 2020 it ranked seventh among US states for life expectancy at birth, at 78.8 years, placing it between Estonia and the Czech Republic among the social democracies and obviously well above the US average.

Besides the University of Vermont in Burlington, Vermont also is home to one of the finest liberal arts colleges in the country, in Middlebury, and a number of even smaller private colleges founded by various religious sects over the years.

This is a rich state. This is a virtuous state. But it’s also a state filled with people who behave like they are absolutely terrified.

New England newspapers are a national treasure

The first thing I do when I visit any place is grab the first newspaper I see, and keep grabbing until I leave. Over the course of my trip I managed to snag 5 weekly papers from 2 different publishing groups across several Vermont valleys. This is a bit of a callback to my conversation with Ted Fleischaker, publisher of a Portland, Maine, independent newspaper on a 2021 episode of the Manifesto.

There is something glorious about New Englanders that makes them simply mad for newspapers, but even Ted couldn’t compete with these things: 40-page tabloids with news, gossip, police blotters, classifieds, notices, and of course obituaries.

But as I read page after page of this loving-crafted, high-quality local reporting, a kind of unease crept up on me. What are they all so scared of? Don’t they know they’ve already won?

The Terror of taxes

What alerted me that something was wrong was a bizarre story in the Stowe Reporter about a fight over short-term rental registration fees. I don’t believe the article is pay-walled and I’d encourage you to read it for yourself before continuing here.

The core of the dispute was not, as it is in many communities, whether Stowe should regulate short-term rentals marketed through the lawless online marketplaces. That fight had been settled. The fight was whether the fee levied on short-term rental providers would raise too much money. At this point it’s necessary to quote at length:

“The selectboard last week wrestled for nearly an hour over how much to charge, to make sure the fees cover the extra cost the town will incur enforcing its short-term rental ordinance without fleecing owners just for the sake of bringing in extra cash…

“…Based on the idea that there are roughly 1,000 short-term rentals in Stowe, that fee would bring in $50,000 in revenue, which would cover the annual software cost of $40,000 and an extra $10,000 in staff time for the first year…

“…Board member Ethan Carlson said it would be better to err on charging more now and, in a future year, decide to cut back if necessary, instead of setting a fee that is too low and having to increase it later and having to face ‘a room full of people who are very upset.’

“He felt the estimate of $10,000 a year to cover the town’s administrative costs for running a registry was too low. But board chair Billy Adams said fees are rarely intended to cover the entire cost of doing business — for instance, fees for zoning permits, liquor licenses and dog registrations don’t fetch enough revenue to cover their respective administrative costs, he said…

“..Adams also worried about upsetting property owners who are already upset about paying high taxes to both the town and the state education fund. Adams, the lone no vote in adopting the $100 fee, instead suggested a fee of $40.

“‘One could say this is a little bit of double taxation or triple taxation,’ he said. ‘I think it’s reasonable to start out in a conservative place, until we get more information, and then move out from there.’”

After reading the article a few times, a lot of things started to settle into place. These are people who think every individual government activity — even activities they enthusiastically support, like regulating short-term rentals — should be financed by individual government agency assessments that exactly mirror that agency’s cost of doing business.

Why are hospitals organizing golf tournaments?

This creates situations that are genuinely absurd, to a non-Vermonter. Every issue of the Stowe Reporter and the Mountain Times (Killington) included two or three stories about local organizations holding pumpkin carving competitions, Halloween costume competitions, whatever. But then I found out about the golfing hospital. I will quote here only briefly:

“Sixty-eight golfers enjoyed sunshine, a light breeze, and perfect course conditions at the Copley Country Club for Copley Hospital’s 37th annual golf scramble on July 13. Thanks to 22 sponsors and the players, the event netted more than $26,000 for Copley’s Emergency Department.

“‘At the end of the day, we announced the five teams with the lowest net scores and distributed prizes, but the big winner was Copley Hospital,’ Emily McKenna, the hospital’s executive director of development, marketing and community relations, said. ‘We are close to reaching the $75,000 goal to purchase bedside monitors for the emergency department. The Gravel Grinder on Saturday, Oct. 5, should put us over. I am so appreciative of our generous community and their continued support of Copley.’”

Let me put my cards on the table here: I do not think hospitals should be organizing golf tournaments to raise money to buy bedside monitors for their emergency departments.

The curious case of the public schools

The main issue rocking the state of Vermont during my visit was not fees on short-term rentals, or hospital golf tournaments, or pumpkin-carving fun runs, or when the resorts would start producing artificial snow (although there were a lot of conversations about artificial snow).

The main issue was property taxes, particularly “school” property taxes. This is not a post about school financing, it’s about Vermonters, so I will explain the system as I gleaned it purely from my newspapers.

Each community sets its own budget for public schools, presumably through interminable town hall meetings like the one depicted in Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom of Speech” (where the speaker is depicted opposing the construction of a replacement school for the one destroyed by fire). The Vermont legislature then determines what the property tax rates in that community should be in order to raise enough money to pay for that budget. Parts of the budget (like capital improvements) are paid for by the state and I believe there’s also a burden-shifting adjustment between wealthier and poorer communities.

This creates a strange gap, between the people who set the budget (the town hall) and the ones who calculate how to pay for it (the legislature).

Into that strange gap stepped a lobbying group with a novel theory: Vermont’s schools are too good.

The “you’ve had it too good for too long” theory of government efficiency

As mentioned above, Vermont’s schools are outstanding, and everyone knows it and likes it. They like sending their kids to nearby schools (especially when it snows and the highways are impassable), they like seeing them thrive, they like seeing them graduate, and they like seeing them go on to bigger and better things. So how do you convince them to cut their school budgets, and the property taxes assessed by the legislature to pay for it?

You promise they can have the same quality schools while paying $400 million per year less in property taxes.

Obviously, no one believes this. The authors of the report don’t believe it, the legislature doesn’t believe it, the parents don’t believe it, and the second-homeowners (who don’t send their kids to Vermont schools) don’t believe it. But if enough people pretend to believe it, they can lower their property taxes by $400 million, which is a powerful incentive to pretend to believe something.

Isolated communities and the ratchet of prosperity

I’ve gone out of my way to be as generous as possible both because I love Vermont and because I think there are both obvious and true explanations for this behavior. The zealots and slave traders who settled New England believe they carved out their little islands of European civilization through frugality and virtue, and they did carve out little islands of European civilization, so who’s to say they were wrong?

Since I have a lot of rich readers, I am fully aware they’re nodding their heads right now: that’s the way to run a society. The lowest possible property taxes to pay for a few things like volunteer fire fighters and expired textbooks, and then a few charity events every year when the hospital needs a new defibrilator or runs out of stethoscopes.

But as an outsider, it looks like cringing terror, and I wish Vermonters would realize they’ve already won. The only people coming to take away what they have won are the people promising austerity for generations to come in order to save a few thousand dollars in taxes on their ski chalets.

Robinhood never understood what their appeal was

[edit 11/25/24: a trusted reader in the comments has the 3% cash back credit card, so it does really exist]

I’ve written a number of times about Robinhood, the free stock-and-ETF trading app, over the years, and back in March I wrote about what I described as “one of the best all-in-one financial products out there.” I was wrong, so today I want to explain both how I was wrong and why it matters.

Recap: the Robinhood Gold pitch

When I wrote that post, I described the new $5-per-month Robinhood Gold service as consisting of two unrelated components:

• a 5% APY interest rate on uninvested cash

• and a 3% cash back credit card (this product, to the best of my knowledge, still has not been launched, so set it aside for now).

Some people pointed out that this product also includes $1,000 in free margin in your investment account, but as will become clear, that is not worth nearly as much as it sounds. I would go so far as to say it is worth nothing, or less than nothing if it causes you to enroll in Robinhood Gold.

Market rates versus administered rates

My first mistake was misunderstanding how Robinhood markets the interest rates on uninvested cash, which illustrates the difference between “market” rates and what I call “administered” rates.

A “market” rate is like the one set on your credit cards or adjustable-rate mortgages: your loan agreement specifies a particular market index reported in some reputable newspaper and says you’ll pay that rate plus-or-minus an adjustment based on your down payment, credit rating, or the phases of the moon. The point being, the rate will change but it will change in a specified way known in advance: when the published market rate rises or falls.

An administered rate is set by the policy of the institution offering the investment or holding your funds. It is also subject to change, but it is set to administrative change, not mechanical or contractual change.

For example, US government Series EE savings bonds have an administered interest rate of (at least) 3.53% APY: the bond is guaranteed to pay out twice the invested amount after 20 years. If interest rates rise above 3.53% APY while you’re holding the bond, you also have the option to cash it out (with a penalty) and invest in the higher-yielding asset instead.

The rate on those bonds is administered by the US federal government, but in fact a lot of institutions work this way, normally as a way to gain customers. A bank or credit union can lose a little bit of money by paying above-market rates if their new customers also move in their lower-rate deposits or, even better, take out higher-interest loans like credit cards. This type of account is often marketed as a “Rewards” or “Kasasa” checking account, and I keep an eye on them at depositaccounts.com (although I’m sure there are other sources; I have no relationship with that website, I just use it).

Robinhood offers bad market rates, not good administered rates

In my post on Robinhood Gold I said, “The 5% APY offered on balances up to a million or so dollars of insured deposits[…]is competitive, but it’s not best-in-class; Vanguard is paying 5.28% on uninvested cash in their own brokerage’s sweep account as of today.”

But while Robinhood was advertising the Gold product as offering 5% APY, that was not true. It was just advertising its current below-market interest rate, and when interest rates went down, its below-market interest rate also went down.

This has happened twice since my post, and Robinhood has continued to misleadingly advertise the product in this way: first “earn 4.75% APY on your cash,” and now “earn 4.25% APY on your cash.”

Vanguard’s default federal money market settlement fund has a 4.58% 7-day SEC yield as of November 22, 2024. In other words, Robinhood started out earning less than Vanguard, and instead of becoming more attractive as an administered rate it has rushed ahead of them to become less attractive as a (below-)market rate.

The Robinhood Gold fee is administered

Hopefully the problem is now coming into focus: Robinhood charges a flat $5 monthly fee, but pays a fluctuating rate on uninvested cash. At a 5% APY, it takes $2,400 in uninvested cash to break even with the monthly fee. At 4.25%, it takes $2,824.

As interest rates fall and fees stay steady, it takes more and more uninvested cash to merely cover the fees on the account, before it even makes sense to start comparing interest rates.

You cannot hold both uninvested cash and use margin

The final issue, and why I didn’t bother mentioning it in my March post, is that you cannot take advantage of the free $1,000 in margin offered as a benefit of the account while also taking advantage of the interest rate offered a benefit of the account.

You can think of this in two different ways:

• the first dollar of a stock or ETF you buy always comes out of your uninvested cash;

• and the first dollar you receive when selling a stock or ETF is always used to repay your margin first before it begins to earn any interest.

Conclusion: don’t sign up for Robinhood Gold for any of their advertised benefits

I like to think that what makes this site different is that I always try to be as honest, straightforward, and accurate as possible, so lest any of my beloved readers get misled: I plan to continue paying for Robinhood Gold.

I’ve been experimenting with Robinhood extensively and have found some specific uses (unrelated to investing) which I’m not able to describe in detail right now, but which I’m happy to pay $120 per year to continue experimenting with.

What I certainly won’t be using it for is to hold my uninvested cash: cash is too valuable to hold with people whose business model is to make sure you get as little value for your money as possible.

As for investing with the account, I’ll be using $1,000 in cash and $1,000 in margin to partially or wholly offset the annual fee, as well as hold the free stocks they give me when people (very) occasionally use my personal referral link.

Venti pivots (out of existence)

As far as I know, I’m the only person who has written in detail about Venti, the weird high-interest travel savings program, so it falls to me to pass along the announcement of the end of their high-interest savings program:

“On December 31, 2024, Venti's partnership with Dwolla will be fully terminated. This means you'll no longer be able to deposit cash onto your Boarding Pass and earn points via interest payouts. To earn points on cash deposits, you'll have to bank with a financial institution that has partnered with Venti.”

I assume the last sentence is a reference to the program they announced in July whereby deposits at partner credit unions would earn Venti points in addition to the cash interest earned on those deposits. The program was of limited interest at the time because of the tiny number of credit union partners and the strict membership requirements they impose (congratulations to Georgetown University alumni and students).

Venti had one unique selling proposition and they couldn’t afford it

Venti’s website was terrible. Venti’s app was terrible. Venti’s airfare booking portal was terrible. Venti’s hotel booking portal was terrible. There was only one reason to use Venti, and that was the 9% APY (in the form of “points” that could be redeemed through the aforementioned booking portals) they offered on deposits.

This model relied on unredeemed points to finance it: since Venti was being paid for all the deposits they harvested, as long as the redemptions were small and few enough they could use the interest they earned on the entire deposit base to pay for the redemptions of that minority of users.

This model works extraordinarily well when it is adopted by firms that provide valuable services, like credit card companies. Chase earns interchange fees on every transaction, and interest on every unpaid balance, but only incurs the cost of rewards when they’re redeemed. Travel hackers may feel rich sitting on hundreds of thousands or millions of Ultimate Rewards points, but Chase feels even richer because they get to keep the money until we get around to redeeming them. This works for all the parties involved because Chase cards can be used to pay for goods and services, a valuable function in the modern economy. The fact that occasionally Chase is on the hook for the expense of a redemption is incidental to Chase’s view of the situation; Chase may well cheer us on when we score valuable redemptions, if it buys them a loyal customer for another decade.

Venti wasn’t like that. The only thing you could do with an account was put money into it, and the only thing you could do with the interest was book travel. In other words, there was no long tail of unredeemed points: the only people putting money into the system were people planning to make redemptions, forcing Venti to pay out a much higher percentage of the accrued points each month than Chase does in the example above.

Since interest rates are, in fact, below 9%, this situation could not and did not endure.

Conclusion

Venti has already redesigned their website to reflect their pivot towards a business-facing strategy. If anything comes of it, I’ll be sure to report back.

I’m not holding my breath.

Complete guide to all 3(+) Zillions/Zift card designs and Just4U earning

In Friday’s post I gave a breakdown of my experience with fixed value $100 “bonus” Zillions/Zift gift cards, which cost a flat $100 but have a $105 value that can be exchanged for egift cards, which can then be sold or used.

By necessity that was a post in real-time sharing my own experience to date. I wanted to put it up while the deal was still ongoing, and ahead of the frequent additional weekend bonus on gift card purchases at Just4U stores (Albertsons, Safeway, Acme, etc), which did indeed return on schedule last Saturday.

That urgency having passed, I want to share a more detailed look at the way these cards earn Just4U points and how they can be used. First, we must distinguish between not two, as I originally supposed, but three different subspecies of Zillions gift cards.

Fixed-value, tight variable, and loose variable Zillions cards

The three types of Zillions cards are distinguished by both the amount of money that can be loaded onto them and the merchants for which that value can be redeemed for egifts cards.

Fixed-value cards cost $100 and have $105 in value that can be redeemed at the merchants I listed last week.

What I call “tight variable” cards, can be loaded with between $20 and $500 and can only be redeemed for egift cards to the merchants listed on the front of the packaging. As with Gift of Choice cards, there are a bunch of different designs of tight variable cards with different combinations of merchants.

Finally, “loose variable” cards can be loaded with between $20 and $500 and can be redeemed for 176 different kinds of gifts cards (this works out to fewer than 176 merchants because some merchants are listed several times in different denominations). You can find a pdf document with all 176 options here.

Card type determines liquidation options

To determine the ultimate price you pay for the Just4U points this technique generates, you have to know how much value you get back for the card. The two most obvious ways to get value back from a card are to resell it and to use it.

This may go without saying for many readers, but you’ll always get the most value value from a card if you’re able to use it instead of the cash you’d otherwise spend for actual goods and services (discounted by the rewards you’d earn putting the purchase on a credit card). This will become relevant momentarily.

The highest resale value I found for fixed-value card options was Columbia Sportswear Company, which resold at 82% of face value on CardCash, or $86.10 for the $105 value of each card (the rate has dropped since then, a reminder that things move fast in this game).

The range of tight variable card designs has a few dozen often-overlapping categories. Nordstrom Rack was the best reselling option I found at 81.5% on CardCash. However, the options begin to get more interesting here, since several of the tight variable designs feature Amazon as a redemption. I doubt I spend much more than $100 on Amazon in a year, let alone $500, but I appreciate it’s extremely common for Americans to spend very large sums there, and using highly-bonused gift cards is a way to earn outsized rewards on those purchases, or on net make Amazon’s prices lower compared to other merchants

Finally, loose variable cards have the widest range of options (go ahead and check out that pdf now), and I was frankly astonished at the abundance. I do not find gift cards to be a particularly useful or pleasurable way to pay for things, and this is of course by design: un- and partially-redeemed gift cards are a feature, not a bug, to their issuers. What’s more, Just4U bonuses are often on the least-useful gift cards: it’s not uncommon to see every Safeway in the country advertising a bonus on Topgolf gift cards — a discount on the more-niche version of an already-niche hobby!

That’s not the case with loose variable Zillions cards. There are options that, in short, a normal person might use without changing their behavior in any way. A few that jumped out at me:

• Airbnb

• DoorDash

• Hotels.com

• Southwest

• Uber

• Uber Eats

If you ordinarily charge those purchases to a credit card earning, for example, 5% in rewards, then redeeming for these gift cards and using them as intended is equivalent to liquidating them at 95% — an astonishingly good deal.

The best reselling options I found among the loose variable redemption options were Staples at 83.5% and Home Depot at 84%.

Your earning rate determines your value proposition

All of the above is true completely irrespective of the promotion that was running last week. These cards are hanging on the rack all day every day, whether a promotion is running or not. What makes them worth buying is the bonus Just4U points, and yet again, the number of points earn varies by card design. Last week I collected 4 datapoints across three purchases and two promotions. Here are the results:

• On Thursday I bought a fixed-value card during the week-long 10-point-per-dollar promotion. I incorrectly reported last week that I had only earned 800 points, but I later realized my error: the receipt lists two values, “Points Earned Today” and “Gift Card Points.” At first glance I assumed the latter was a subset of the former; in fact they’re additive, so I received the full 1000 points I was owed in total.

• On Saturday I bought another fixed-value card and a tight variable card, and earned a total of 7,200 Just4U points, broken down into 6,000 Points Earned Today and 1,200 Gift Card Points, again for the full 12 points per dollar.

• Finally, on Saturday I bought a loose variable card and earned just 5,000 points, broken down into 4,000 Points Earned Today and 1,000 Gift Card Points.

Just4U gift card promotions are confusing because of the difference between the way they’re advertised and the way they’re processed internally. Most gift cards earn 2 points per dollar all the time, so when they advertise “4X points” or “10X points” they’re really saying you’ll earn 2 or 8 additional points on top of the base points. I believe those 2 base points are the Gift Card Points reported separately on your receipt, which suggests that all three designs earn base points all the time.

What seems to be happening is that the loose variable card earned those base points and the week-long additional 8 points per dollar, but not the additional 2 points per dollar during the weekend, but I can’t be sure because I didn’t buy a loose variable card during the week.

Conclusion

From these observations we can create a simple hierarchy of the value of the cards under different circumstances:

• The highest value will come from using gift cards at merchants as intended (almost) regardless of earning rate because of the vastly superior liquidation rate. Naturally this will usually be loose variable cards, but if you have upcoming purchases at merchants included on fixed-value or tight variable cards (like Amazon), then keep in mind their higher earning rate.

• If you’re reselling gift cards, fixed-value and tight variable cards are superior when they earn 12 points per dollar and loose variable cards only earn 10, since that 20% boost swamps any potential difference in reselling rates.

• If you’re reselling gift cards, fixed-value cards offer the best value when the 5% boost in value offsets the lower liquidation rate compared to a loose variable card. This is usually the case, but the differences can be nominal: the 84% payout for Home Depot is 4.3% higher than the 80.5% payout for Adidas (a fixed-value redemption option), a difference that is lower than the 5% boost in liquidation value, making the fixed-value card is a better option, but only fractionally: 1.55 cents per Just4U point versus 1.6 cents per point.

For most people I suspect the hassle of liquidating $105 gift cards will probably outweigh the increased value for most people most of the time: after all, even at 12 points per dollar that’s just 1,200 points per card. If you’re planning to stockpile tens or hundreds of thousands of Just4U points (I’m not, but it’s not an unreasonable thing to do if you sign up for a Freshpass subscription to keep your points from expiring), then doing so in 5,000 point increments will give you a headache one fifth of the size.

Complete list of all 77 Zillions/Zifts bonus gift card redemption options

[edit 10/12/2024: added a correction to the conclusion]

Earlier this week I wrote about the return of my favorite Just4U promotion: bonus points on “Online Exchange” cards, which can be redeemed online for a variety of electronic gift cards, which can then be used or resold. If resold, the loss you take on the face value of the card is the price you pay for a stack of Just4U points and the value of the cards in credit card spend.

Since the last time this promotion came around, I noticed some new card designs at Safeway branded with various combinations of the words “Zillions” and “Zifts.” These cards are, like Online Exchange, issued by Pathward, N.A., and distributed and serviced by our old friends at InComm financial services. I heard these cards were earning bonus points during the current promotion (ending Saturday, October 12, 2024), so I popped over to Safeway to pick one up and see how they work.

The two designs in my store were a “Zillions” card with a variable load amount up to $500 and a fixed value card that offered $105 in value for $100. Neither card, however, listed the merchants for whose gift cards the value could be redeemed, and the redemption website ZillionsGift.com infuriatingly does not list them until you enter a valid redemption code, so for the sake of my beloved readers I picked up a fixed value card and found out for myself.

The first thing I found out was that these cards are not earning the full 10 Just4U points per dollar under the current promotion; I earned just 800 points for my $100 card. My lightly-informed speculation is that the promotion is coded to add 8 points per dollar for a total of 10 points per dollar, since most gift cards earn 2 points per dollar year round. Since these cards are new, they may not be coded to earn that base 2 points per dollar, so during the current promotion they’re only earning the promotional 8 points. Again, that’s just my speculation based on many years of taking advantage of promotions like this. It may be a regional or brand difference instead; find out for yourself and let me know!

Complete list of fixed-value Zillions of Zifts gift card redemption options

Having acquired a redemption code, I plugged it into the redemption portal. Here are the current options for redemptions (they say these are subject to change and I don’t doubt them):

• adidas ($5 - $500)

• Aerie ($5 - $500)

• Aéropostale ($5 - $500)

• AMC Theatres ($5 - $200)

• American Eagle ($5 - $500)

• Applebee’s ($5 - $500)

• Baby Depot at Burlington ($10 - $250)

• Baker’s Square Gift Card ($5 - $500)

• Banana Republic ($10 - $500)

• Bass Pro Shops ($5 - $500)

• Belk ($25 - $500)

• Blaze Pizza ($5 - $250)

• Bob Evans Restaurants ($15 - $500)

• Build-A-Bear Workshop ($5 - $500)

• Cabela's ($5 - $500)

• California Pizza Kitchen ($5 - $500)

• Carters & Oshkosh ($5 - $500)

• Paramount+ ($25, $50)

• Chart House ($10 - $500)

• Chico’s ($10 - $500)

• Chili’s Grill & Bar ($5 - $100)

• Chuck E. Cheese ($5 - $250)

• Columbia Sportswear Company ($5 - $500)

• Dickey’s BBQ ($5 - $500)

• Domino’s ($5 - $100)

• DSW ($5 - $500)

• Famous Dave's ($5 - $250)

• Fanatics ($5 - $500)

• Fandango ($25, $50)

• GNC ($10 - $250)

• GolfNow ($25 - $250)

• H&M ($5 - $300)

• IHOP ($5 - $200)

• KingsIsle Combo Card ($10, $20)

• Kirkland’s Home ($5 - $250)

• Krispy Kreme Doughnut Corporation ($5 - $200)

• L.L.Bean ($5 - $500)

• Lane Bryant ($5 - $500)

• Main Event ($25, $50)

• Maurices ($5 - $500)

• McCormick & Schmick’s ($10 - $500)

• Michaels ($5 - $500)

• Mix It Up ($5 - $200)

• MLB Shop ($5 - $500)

• Morton's The Steakhouse ($10 - $500)

• NBA Store ($5 - $500)

• NFLShop.com ($5 - $500)

• NHL Shop ($5 - $500)

• O’Charley’s ($5 - $500)

• P.F. Chang’s ($10 - $500)

• Rainforest Cafe ($10 - $500)

• Regal ($5 - $100)

• REI ($10 - $500)

• Saks Fifth Avenue ($5 - $500)

• Saks OFF 5TH ($5 - $500)

• Saltgrass Steak House ($10 - $500)

• Smashburger ($5 - $500)

• Smoothie King E-Gift Card ($10 - $100)

• Soma Gift Card ($10 - $500)

• Spa & Wellness Gift Card by Spa Week ($5 - $500)

• Sportsman’s Warehouse ($5 - $500)

• Stitch Fix ($5 - $500)

• Texas Roadhouse ($5 - $100)

• TGI Fridays ($5 - $500)

• The Children’s Place ($5 - $500)

• Ulta Beauty ($5 - $500)

• Under Armour ($5 - $500)

• Village Inn Gift Card ($5 - $500)

• Vudu ($25 - $100)

• White House Black Market ($10 - $500)

• Xbox Digital Gift Card ($15, $25, $50)

I did some spot checks on this list and found that CardCash buys Adidas gift cards for 80.5% of face value and Columbia gift cards for 82% of face value, which is relevant when deciding how much you’re willing to pay for your Just4U points.

Variable load cards have different options

When I first grabbed the bonused fixed value card I was hopeful that the variable cards would have the same list of merchants, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. Listed on the front of the variable cards are several merchants missing from this list:

Conclusion, and warning

[correction: I did not realize Bloomingdale’s cards have to be mailed in to CardCash, eliminating that as a liquidation option. The next best Gift of Choice card I’ve identified is Nordstrom Rack, which pays out 81.5% on CardCash.]

It’s good to stay on top of new gimmicks as they come along in this game, but for now these cards appear to be strictly inferior to the older “Gift of Choice” cards, at least if your plan is to liquidate them to cash through reselling. Both brands have an option that pays 82% on CardCash (Columbia in the case of Zillions/Zifts, Bloomingdale’s in the case of Gift of Choice). It’s true the $5 bonus on $100 Zillions cards increases your payout by a free 5%, but if Gift of Choice cards earn 10, 12, or 14 points per dollar then the higher rewards swamp the effect of the lower payout. If the rewards earned on both types were identical, on the other hand, then the 5% bonus would be decisive.

Finally, a word of caution: since I redeemed my $105 card this morning I have not received any communications from them, neither confirming the redemption nor, even more importantly, actually sending me the Columbia gift card I ordered. I can look up my order in their system, which has my correct e-mail address and the correct details for the order, so it hasn’t been lost, but it hasn’t found its way to me.

As always, if you can’t be without money as long as it takes to fight to get it back, then don’t spend it on travel hacking!

My favorite Just4U gift card promotion is back

The only grocery store loyalty scheme I pay any attention to is the Safeway/Albertsons/etc. Just4U program, which periodically offers bonus points on the purchase of gift cards. When the bonus is high enough, it can be worthwhile to buy gift cards and resell them at a loss, making back more than the difference in value in Just4U points.

Through October 12, Just4U is running my favorite version of the promotion: 10 points per dollar spent on “Online Exchange” gift cards. These cards are actually just codes you enter online to redeem the value on the card for virtual gift cards at a variety of merchants. If you’re reselling the gift card, be sure the reseller you use accepts virtual gift card codes, since you won’t get a physical gift card to mail in.

Is it worth it?

Keep in mind, this manufactured spend technique is quite expensive: if you redeem an Online Exchange card for a Lowe’s gift card, for example, and sell it to CardCash for $402.50, you’re out $98.50. That’s either a lot of money or a little money, depending on what you get for it.

During the current promotion, a $500 Online Exchange card would earn 5,000 Just4U points. In order to break even, you need to value those 5,000 points at 1.97 cents each: if you valued 5,000 Just4U points at exactly $98.50, then this would be a way to manufacture “free” spend, since you’ll earn (hopefully bonused) credit card rewards on the purchase as well.

Another way of looking at it is in terms of revealed preferences. I happily manufacture spend at grocery stores year-round at a cost of 1.4%, so I don’t need to make back the entire $500 in order to get the same value I’m already happy getting; I’ll break even valuing Just4U points at just 1.8 cents each.

Check for a stack on Saturday

For many months Just4U has offered bonus points on gift card purchases almost every weekend. They don’t award those points for prepaid debit card purchases, but the promotion does stack with their other brand-specific gift cards, and should stack with Online Exchange. That means this deal could be even sweeter on Saturday, October 12, the last day of the Online Exchange promotion. I don’t see any reason not to wait until then, unless you’re worried about folks cleaning out the shelves in your area while you wait.

Don't forget resort fees when pricing Guest of Honor awards on paid stays

World of Hyatt elite “milestones” are, in addition to being a clever marketing gimmick, one source of additional value you accumulate as you earn elite qualifying nights each year. I recently broke down their value methodically here and shared my experience with “2K Next Stay Awards.”

At 40, 60, 70, 80, 90 elite-qualifying nights, and every 10 nights after 110 elite-qualifying nights, you automatically earn Guest of Honor Awards in addition to an award you choose. These awards allow you to give anyone (including yourself) the “in-hotel” benefits of being a Globalist elite. In addition to the breakfast and lounge access benefits most people are familiar with, and the guaranteed 4:00 pm checkout that’s my own favorite benefit, Globalists and Guests of Honor also get resort fees waived on paid stays.

The tricky part is that Hyatt does not remove resort fees from their pricing summary when you apply Guest of Honor awards online, which, if you’re not aware of it, will cause you to misvalue your World of Hyatt points.

You can see this clearly in these two screenshots, where a resort fee appears at checkout whether or not a Guest of Honor award is attached to the reservation:

Most of the time this doesn’t make a decisive difference: World of Hyatt points are usually so valuable that whether they’re “slightly more” or “slightly less” valuable doesn’t impact your booking decision.

Once you’re aware of the issue, however, it’s easy to imagine corner cases like the one I stumbled into at The Lodge At Spruce Peak, where I found the rates shown above. A Category 8 property, the hotel starts at 35,000 points per night during “off-peak” periods, and costs between 40,000 and 45,000 points per night during ski season.

At $424.08 per night off-peak, that’s already a marginal points redemption at 1.21 cents per point; you could book it through the Chase travel portal for fewer Ultimate Rewards points than transferring them to Hyatt.

But at the true price of $376.38 (after subtracting the waived resort fee and tax), it’s a truly godawful redemption at just 1.08 cents per point.

Conclusion

In the grand scheme of things, properties that charge resort fees are likely on the more expensive end of Hyatt’s portfolio, and thus likely to be solid enough point redemptions that a waived resort fee won’t change your booking calculus. But at highly seasonal properties, cash rates may drop by much more than points rates, while resort fees stay flat and make up a larger share of the total cost in cash.

In those circumstances, applying a Guest of Honor award to a paid rate may turn a marginal redemption into an outright bad one.

Correction: Membership Rewards-HawaiianMiles-Mileage Plan transfers are instant, when they work

Last week I wrote about Alaska Airlines’ announcement that miles could now be transferred back and forth between Mileage Plan and Hawaiian Airlines HawaiianMiles.

I wrote, “it takes a few days to complete the cycle of moving Membership Rewards points to HawaiianMiles and then moving them to Mileage Plan.”

This turns out not to be true. Instead, last week there seems to have been an outage in the connection between American Express Membership Rewards and HawaiianMiles, and transfers were completely failing.

In fact, I noticed at the time I submitted my transfer that my Membership Rewards balance didn’t reflect the trial transfer I initiated, and I didn’t receive a confirmation e-mail. Since it was my first transfer, I assumed that was just how the system worked.

When I submitted an identical transfer a few days later, the miles appeared immediately in my HawaiianMiles account (and I received a confirmation e-mail from American Express). I was then able to instantly transfer the miles to Mileage Plan through their dedicated Points.com portal.

Instant transfers mean there’s less need to speculatively transfer Membership Rewards points to Alaska, and makes it more marginally attractive to wait for another transfer bonus to HawaiianMiles.

Things are looking good for the Membership Rewards-Hawaiian Airlines-Alaska Airlines play

Last month I wrote about one possible use of the world’s most-hoarded, least-useful loyalty currency, American Express Membership Rewards: transferring them to Hawaiian Airlines HawaiianMiles in anticipation of a successful merger with Alaska Airlines and the ability to eventually transfer them to that much more valuable airline currency.

That “eventually” turned out to be sooner than expected, as Alaska announced the details of the loyalty plan connectivity last week, and it’s supposedly already operational through a Points.com backend. I’m currently testing it for myself, since it takes a few days to complete the cycle of moving Membership Rewards points to HawaiianMiles and then moving them to Mileage Plan.

I’ll post an update when the cycle is completed and I’ve confirmed it works as advertised.

Why it matters

The main attraction of this play is that Alaska Airlines miles are extremely valuable for domestic Alaska and American Airlines flights and internationally for flights on the oneworld alliance, but relatively difficult to earn compared to the direct transfer partners of Chase Ultimate Rewards and American Express Membership Rewards.

For the time being, this indirect transfer channel makes them as easy to earn as any direct Membership Rewards transfer partner.

Long-term risks

As is often the case, the two primary risks in this play are moving too fast and moving too slow.

By moving too fast, I mean speculatively transferring millions of Membership Rewards points to Mileage Plan, and then seeing that program devalued over the years it takes you to spend down those miles. I often get 5-6 cents per mile redeeming Mileage Plan miles on short-haul domestic tickets or business class tickets to Europe, but if those redemptions became revenue-based I’d feel silly for sitting on a million miles suddenly worth just a cent each.

By moving too slow, I mean waiting for another transfer bonus to HawaiianMiles in order to stretch your Membership Rewards points even further, while in the meantime the airline’s contract with American Express expires on its own or is broken early, leaving you with a stack of miserable Membership Rewards points instead of a bounty of precious Mileage Plan miles.

How I’m playing it

Like most things in this game, I’m planning to split the difference: I’ll move a couple tens of thousands of Membership Rewards points over every month, waiting to see if another transfer bonus comes along. If it does, I’ll empty out my account immediately, and if it doesn’t, I’ll end up moving over most of balance over the course of the next year anyway. And, of course, I can always speed up or slow down the transfers depending on other transfer opportunities.

Speaking of other transfer opportunities

I did not mention in my early Membership Rewards post transfers to Hilton Honors, which reader Bryan helpfully mentioned in the comments. Especially given the current transfer ratio of 1-to-2.6, if you value Hilton Honors points at 0.5 cents each this is a solid way to get rid of Membership Rewards points. It turns the 4 points per dollar earned on dining spend on a card like the American Express Gold card into a 10.4-point-per-dollar Hilton Honors earning rate.

I get a lot of value from Hilton Honors and spend my points almost as fast as I earn them, so I happily topped up my account during the current transfer bonus. However, unlike Mileage Plan miles, I can easily earn Hilton Honors points through manufactured spend on my American Express Surpass card, so I didn’t feel any urgency to empty out my Membership Rewards account, even though I know I’d eventually get decent value from the resulting Hilton Honors points.