Follow-up on non-lounge Priority Pass locations

After I posted a reminder on Saturday to enroll your Hilton Ascend American Express cards in Priority Pass, I did a little more digging into the non-lounge Priority Pass locations I mentioned at the end of that post. Reader Helmholtz pointed me to this One Mile at a Time post mentioning new locations in Miami and Denver, and I found this Points Guy post (brought to you by Bankrate) describing how their writer was able to take advantage of all three Portland locations on a single afternoon.

A few Portland folks on Twitter confirmed the same details, although one said that you're no longer allowed to buy bottles of wine to go with your $28 credit at the Capers Market location, as the Points Guy writer was able to do in September.

Finally, Doctor of Credit shared that you can receive the $28 credit multiple times if you wait 2 hours between visits.

For folks who are, or who have friends who are, based in Portland, Denver, Lexington, or Miami, this also increases the value of the Chase Ritz Carlton Rewards card, which allows you to add authorized users at no additional cost, each of whom is eligible for their own Priority Pass membership (so you don't need to be traveling with them for them to receive the benefit).

Conclusion

As someone who values airline credits, lounge access, and the other gimmicks used to sell credit cards at far below their face value, I value being able to get a restaurant lunch or dinner in an airport relatively close to face value.

The fact that I travel a few times a year to Lexington and Portland, where the option is available, means I'll get much more value from the 10 calendar year visits that come with my Hilton Ascend American Express Priority Pass membership than I suspected when I thought it was just going to be good for a few drinks in an Air France lounge.

Enroll your Hilton Honors Ascend American Express in Priority Pass

If you already carried a Hilton Honors Surpass American Express card, or if you recently signed up for a Hilton Honors Ascend card, one benefit it's easy to overlook are the 10 free Priority Pass visits you get each calendar year.

What is Priority Pass?

Priority Pass is a program that gives members discounted access to participating lounges, and certain other benefits. It's not a great program on its own, since the "discounted" lounge access is still $27 per visit and doesn't include any guests.

However, many credit cards now offer a free Priority Pass membership as a benefit of card membership, and if you have one of those credit cards, you may as well sign up. In addition to a membership in the program, the Hilton Honors Ascend American Express card also includes 10 free visits per year. This makes it the equivalent of the $249 "Standard Plus" Priority Pass membership, although it's handled slightly differently by Priority Pass on the backend.

How to get your 10 free visits

If you already had a Hilton Honors Surpass American Express and the Priority Pass membership card that came with that card, then they should still be linked, or at least they were for me. If you never used your Priority Pass membership (and why would you?) then that card's probably extremely expired. However, you can call Priority Pass (972-735-0536 in the United States), give them your information, and they'll send you a new card and provide you with the information you need to create an online account. Once you have an online account, you can download the Priority Pass smartphone app and use that to enter most participating lounges.

If you are a new cardmember or weren't enrolled in Priority Pass already, you won't know your Priority Pass member number until you get your card in the mail. That letter should also include the information you need to create an online account, but if it doesn't, just follow the instructions above.

Non-lounge Priority Pass locations

I didn't realize this, since I've never had a credit card that offered free Priority Pass visits, but it seems they've expanded their options beyond just off-brand airline lounges. There now seem to be a number of airport restaurants, bars, and other venues where you can redeem a Priority Pass visit for a credit towards your order. A few I noticed while clicking around the app are:

• Kentucky Ale Taproom (LEX)
• House Spirits Distillery (PDX)
• Capers Cafe Le Bar (PDX)
• Capers Market (PDX)
• Minute Suites (DFW)

At the first four locations, you get a $28 credit towards food and drinks for you and each guest (each redemption uses up one of your 10 free visits). At the Minute Suites in Dallas you get an hourlong private suite for you and up to 3 guests.

Those redemptions might be a better value in some locations than a visit to an overcrowded lounge. And if you lived in Portland or Lexington and frequently ate or drank in the airport before or after flights, in principle you could get $280 in value from a card with a $95 annual fee, ignoring any of the card's other benefits.

Question: how do these redemptions work for unlimited-access cards?

The Chase Sapphire Reserve, Citi Prestige, American Express Platinum and Business Platinum, and Chase Ritz Carlton Rewards credit cards offer a Priority Pass membership with unlimited lounge visits, and I'm wondering how non-lounge locations treat that benefit.

My gut tell me it shouldn't be possible for a Citi Prestige cardholder to receive three $28 restaurant credits with a single Priority Pass card by inviting two guests to lunch at the Portland airport, but I also don't see anything spelled out in the terms that would prevent it.

Does anyone have experience using the guest benefit at non-lounge locations?

Hyatt Globalist or Hilton Diamond for reimbursed business travel?

If you are primarily focused on hacking leisure travel, "choosing" between Hilton and Hyatt doesn't make much sense: earn Hilton Honors points with manufactured spend at grocery stores with an American Express Surpass/Ascend card, and earn bonus transferrable Ultimate Rewards points on office supply spend with a Chase Ink Plus or unbonused spend with a Freedom Unlimited. Then you can simply choose the right currency to redeem for each stay, and over time adjust each currency's earning rate accordingly.

Reader AG wrote me the other day to ask a different question: for a frequent business traveler with fully reimbursed hotel stays, "Which program do you believe offers the best value for loyalty when dealing with reimbursed business travel?"

Earning and Redeeming

The easiest way to compare the value of two programs for reimbursed travel is the amount of spending required in order to earn a free night. Since AG has enough paid travel to reach top-tier status in the program of his choosing, this simple result is easy to calculate and present side-by-side:

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Note that this chart reflects the changes coming to Hilton point earning in April, 2018.

The chart shows is that you can pretty closely map the amount spent on room rates and charges at properties in each chain with the number of free nights you'll earn at them.

The mapping isn't perfect, and if you were convinced that, for example, 95,000-point Hilton properties are not, in fact, the equivalent of 30,000-point Hyatt properties but instead mere 20,000-point properties, then you might conclude that Hilton in fact requires 50% more spend for an equivalent night. That's not a conclusion that's going to fall out of the math, but rather from your own experience and preferences.

Bonus thresholds

An additional consideration is what bonus thresholds will be triggered by a frequent paid traveler. Both Hilton and Hyatt offer bonuses after staying a certain number of nights. What I've done in this chart is convert those bonuses into an equivalent amount of spend:

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I've converted the Hyatt Category 1-4 and Category 1-7 awards into the equivalent number of points if the certificates are redeemed at the highest tier property possible (adjust for your own redemption preferences).

If you have 100 paid nights planned and intend to spend an identical amount of money at either Hilton or Hyatt, this chart shows that Hyatt essentially "tops up" your actual spend with an additional $13,077 of what you might call "synthetic" spend, almost enough for 3 free nights at top-tier properties (although $2,308 of that synthetic spend can only be redeemed at Category 1-4 properties!). Hilton adds just $5,000 in spend-equivalence, barely enough for a single top-tier night.

Paying

Note that this discussion has completely ignored the points earned by the credit card you choose to use to pay for your stay. Might the bonus points earned by using a chain's co-branded credit card change the calculation?

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Going from earning 20 Hilton Honors points per dollar to 32 points per dollar (actually slightly more since the Ascend's bonus points are earned on taxes in addition to room rates and charges) reduces the amount of spend required by 37.5%, while charging Hyatt room rates to a Chase Hyatt credit card reduces the amount of spend required by just 31.6%. Since Hyatt stays required somewhat less spend than Hilton stays to begin with, the advantage of the Ascend card over the Hyatt credit card has the effect of narrowing or eliminating that advantage, depending on the category of your desired redemption.

Conclusion

Looking at these results, it seems clear to me that holding all else constant, Hyatt offers frequent reimbursed business travelers superior value to Hilton, especially when they intend to redeem their points at properties in the top half of each chain's redemption chart. Points earned on purchases at each chain are roughly equivalent, while Hyatt offers considerably more lucrative bonuses to very frequent travelers.

This conclusion should naturally be adjusted according to your own situation:

• will Hyatt's smaller footprint keep you from booking all your reimbursed stays with them, forcing you to split your paid nights between two or more chains?
• will Hyatt's smaller footprint keep you from redeeming your points, or force you to settle for less desirable destinations or properties?
• have you checked for award availability at the properties and destinations you're interested in? Does one or the other chain tend to have more or less availability at the properties and during the seasons you're interested in?

No single hotel chain, or airline, or rental car company, or cruise line works for everybody. And thank God! If it did it would be overrun and the value would be killed immediately. A hard look at the numbers can make it easier to make an informed decision, but it can't make the right decision for you.

Guest post: Triggering MERRILL+ Delta SkyClub membership

Today's post was written by friend and longtime reader of the blog Robert Dwyer, about his experience with the no-annual-fee Merrill Lynch MERRILL+ Visa Signature card, which many people signed up for when it was offering a signup bonus of 50,000 points, which could be redeemed for two tickets worth up to $500 each.

You can find Robert on Twitter @RobertDwyer.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to one and all!

—The Free-quent Flyer

Guest post: Triggering Merrill+ Delta SkyClub membership

The Merrill Lynch MERRILL+ Visa Signature card is an oddly charming credit card. For such an obscure product it has proven to be quite popular. And it was gone, at least for new signups, before we knew it.

But thanks to its generous 50,000 point signup bonus (worth 2 airline tickets up to $500 each, a combined value of up to $1,000) and no annual fee, a lot of people still have this card.

Full review over at Doctor of Credit.

Before you cancel it or entertain the thought of product changing to another BofA credit card, you might consider keeping it for the bonuses it offers for spending $50,000 each calendar year. You get your choice of:

• A $200 air travel incidental credit -OR-
• A Delta Sky Club Executive membership (which costs $745 or 70,000 Delta miles otherwise).

I like cards like this with a threshold bonus, especially since the points it earns for spend are worth up to 2 cents each towards air travel booked through their portal.

I opted to spend $50,000 on the card this year for the Delta Sky Club membership.

Why do this?

Pretty simple really: although the AmEx Platinum cards (the ones with $450+ annual fees) offer Delta lounge access, it’s not full-fledged access. You can’t bring guests. Not even your spouse, and definitely not your kids. The same is true of the AmEx Delta Reserve card: no guests for those who gain access through a credit card.

A full-fledged Delta SkyClub membership also means you can visit the Delta lounge when flying other airlines. You can’t do that if you gain access through a credit card: you must be flying Delta that day.

Although we’ve carried an AmEx Platinum card (or three) in one form or another over the past few years we’ve never been able to take advantage of Delta lounge access while traveling with our boys. That’s a bummer because I actually appreciate lounge access more when traveling with family than on business.

And given the routes Delta serves I’m more likely to be flying with them when traveling with my family than for business.

So although the full-fledged Delta SkyClub membership that comes with spending $50,000 on the MERRILL+ card is a seemingly minor delta (ha ha) over what you get with AmEx Platinum it actually takes me from a situation where I’ll rarely visit a Delta lounge, to being able to take advantage of it most times we fly.

How to do this

Frequent Miler wrote a piece on whether it was worth it to spend $50,000 on the card. His conclusion: It’s not worth it. What a killjoy!

But his post was helpful thanks to a screenshot describing how to activate the SkyClub membership.

1. Call 800-419-0000 and ask for “Benefits”
2. Tell the rep you’ve spend $50,000 on the card this calendar year and would like to take advantage of the SkyClub membership benefit
3. They’ll confirm that your spend level, ask for your SkyMiles membership number, and activate your membership

My experience leveraging this benefit

We were flying Delta for Thanksgiving with a connection so I called to active the SkyMiles membership about a week in advance. I was pleased that the rep I spoke to (on a Saturday morning no less, no bankers' hours for these guys) knew exactly what I was talking about and swiftly activated my SkyClub membership. He told me that my membership materials would arrive in a couple weeks but that if I was visiting a lounge in the next week or so I could give them my SkyMiles number and I’d be able to get into the lounge.

I was leery of this going through without incident so I checked my Delta profile the day we were set to fly, both on my computer and the Delta app. I didn’t see any indication the access had been activated so I called Delta to check. They didn’t have any record of it, but hinted that the SkyMiles desk isn’t so tightly linked with the SkyClub people so I might want to just give it a go at the airport and see what happens.

When we got the airport I provided my SkyMiles number and we were welcomed in without incident. The whole family! Take that, overcrowded Delta lounge.

A week or so later my membership card arrived, indicating an activation date roughly 2 weeks after my initial call to MERRILL+ to activate the membership with an expiration date a year out.

The timing of the start of the membership is a little strange. The Merrill rep told me the membership would start on the first day of the month in which I called. Yet the activation date on the card I received coincided with the date of my first visit, which was not the first day of the month.

Not sure what to say there in terms of optimizing the start time of a membership, but the upshot is it’s nice that you can call ahead of your first planned use and access the club without the physical card. And now that my membership is active I see it in My Wallet within the Delta app.

Now I’m free to enjoy Delta’s network of mostly mediocre, sometimes overcrowded lounges. With the whole family!

Bottom line

Earning full-fledged Delta lounge access through spend on the MERRILL+ card might be worth it for some, especially those who travel with family or colleagues.

The opportunity cost of spending $50,000 on the card isn’t so bad when you consider:

1. the card has no annual fee;
2. and the card earns up to 2 cents per point towards airfare (so it isn’t that far off the earn rate of the top cashback cards).

Sure there are better cards that earn 2.6525% or even 3% cashback (for some period of time after signup, with barriers to entry getting and maintaining eligibility for those cards). But I find it’s a good practice to spread your spend around. It’s theoretically possible, but practically difficult to put 100% of your spend on a single card.

If you’ve got an existing MERRILL+ card and a Delta SkyClub Executive Membership appeals to you, I think this can be a nice play.

FQF's wrapup

For me the biggest takeaway from Robert's post are that while the "Plus Level" benefit is earned on a calendar year spending basis, it's valid for one year from when you redeem it. While that doesn't increase the value of the membership ($745, or however much you choose to value a SkyClub Executive Membership), it does increase the value of the benefit, since you can time the activation of the benefit so that as many of your trips through airports with Delta SkyClubs fall within the benefit year as possible.

Additionally, note that according to the Doctor of Credit post linked above you can "top up" airfares in excess of $500 by redeeming MERRILL+ points for one cent each for the excess amount. That means you should always at least consider booking more convenient or premium cabin airfares in order to get the price of your ticket up to at least $500 in order to get the full 2 cents per point in value from the first 25,000 points of your redemption.

Which earning opportunities interfere with each other?

Today's post is more of a reference for myself because I am terrible at keeping track of all the different rewards programs out there, and which ones interfere with which, so I thought it would be helpful to write all the ones I could think of down in one place. I'm sure I missed some, so please correct me in the comments.

Credit card and bank offers

Several banks now offer rewards for spending money at particular merchants:

• American Express Offers For You;
• Bank of America BankAmeriDeals;
• Chase Offers (currently only available to Marriott Rewards Premier and Slate cardholders).

The key attribute of these offers is that they're triggered by spending money with the card at a particular merchant (or sometimes through a mobile payment service). That means they can't be combined with each other, since you can only spend the same money with one card at a time (although split payments may allow you to trigger similar offers on multiple cards).

Drop

Drop does not appear to interfere with any other purchase-tracking rewards program, so you can trigger Drop rewards in addition to any other rewards your purchase earns. If you haven't yet joined, you can search for the app "Drop - Free Cash Rewards" app in your mobile app store of choice, and feel free to use my referral code x01i7 (or not).

Uber Visa Local Offers

Like Drop, Uber Visa Local Offers appears to run on a completely separate rewards platform, so you can earn Uber credit alongside any other rewards triggered by your purchases.

Ebates in-store cashback, Alaska Mileage Plan in-store miles, and HawaiianMiles Marketplace

Both Ebates and Alaska Mileage Plan's in-store earning programs are operated by Cartera, so typically the same offer linked to the same card should only track in one of the two programs. How well that's tracked and enforced isn't entirely clear to me, so if you have the time and inclination I suspect a fertile area of investigation would be experimenting with adding, removing, linking, and unlinking particular offers from particular cards. 

If that sounds like too much work, under most circumstances I suspect you're better off linking Ebates offers than Alaska offers, unless you're earning miles towards a particularly lucrative Alaska redemption or Alaska is running a promotion awarding extra miles for partner transactions.

Oddly, a third problem several readers have reported to me is using the same e-mail address for the Hawaiian Airlines HawaiianMiles Marketplace and Ebates (the same problem might appear with Alaska as well). Blog subscribers know about a very cool deal that used to exist through the HawaiianMiles Marketplace, but these days the only participating merchants on the mainland (at least in my neck of the woods) are Gap, Athleta, Banana Republic, and Old Navy. I don't shop at those merchants so I don't know if HawaiianMiles interferes with purchases there tracking through Ebates and Alaska. If not, that could be a potentially interesting double dip for folks who do a lot of clothes shopping.

Dining rewards programs

As far as I know, all dining rewards programs are operated by Rewards Network, and you can only enroll a credit card in one dining rewards program at a time. Here's a quick reference list of dining rewards programs:

• American Airlines AAdvantage Dining
• United MileagePlus Dining
• Delta SkyMiles Dining
• Southwest Rapid Rewards Dining
• Alaska Mileage Plan Dining

Note that you can be enrolled in all of these programs simultaneously! However, a single restaurant purchase with a single credit card will only earn miles in one program at a time.

Thanks Again

Thanks Again does not appear to me to be a very good program, but for folks who spend a lot of time and money in airports, I feel compelled to at least mention it. Earning points through Thanks Again for airport purchases shouldn't interfere with any other programs in this post (although I can't imagine ever earning enough points through the program to be redeemed for anything).

Online shopping portals

Like the dining rewards programs, online shopping portals will interfere with each other, but not with any other rewards you're trying to trigger. So, for example, if you want to make a Name Your Own Price reservation through Priceline, you shouldn't have any trouble combining the current Drop offer of 10 points per dollar spent (1% cashback) and 5% cashback through a shopping portal like TopCashBack.

Likewise you should be able to earn 30 Drop points per dollar spent at HP (3% cashback), points or cashback through a shopping portal (TopCashBack is currently paying 8%), 5% OPEN savings through an American Express small business credit card, and potentially an additional targeted American Express Offer For You.

You can find my referral links to the shopping portals I use on my Support the Site! page.

Brick-and-mortar promotions

I am typically totally oblivious to these things, but it's also possible to combine credit card offers, in-store rewards programs, and brick-and-mortar promotions.

I recently visited Bed Bath & Beyond, not to buy gift cards, which is the only reason I would normally set foot in there, but to buy some bed linens. That let me combine my in-store Ebates cashback with one of the 20% off coupons they seem to mail me every 3-4 days.

Similarly, the other day I stopped into a few local restaurants where I had American Express Offers For You for $25 and $50 off $75 in in-store purchases. It happened that both restaurants were also running holiday gift card deals for $20 and $25 in free gift cards when you bought $100 in gift cards. Since I had the offers on both cards, I picked up a total of $345 in gift cards and paid just $150 after the Offers For You statement credits posted. If the restaurants had also participated in dining rewards programs, I could have received an additional batch of miles for the in-store purchases.

Conclusion

As I mentioned at the beginning, this post is mainly meant to get all my thoughts on these programs in one place so I can refer to it in the future. If there are any other programs, or conflicts, that I'm missing, let me and other readers know in the comments and I'll try to keep this post updated.

Table stakes for a decent Marriott credit card reboot

I've been traveling all week, but followed with interest the announcement that Marriott will be rebooting their credit card lineup, with "mass consumer," "premium," and "super premium" credit cards offered by Chase and American Express. Having no interest in speculating about what the cards will actually look like, but wanting to say something about it, here's my take on what to look for in the credit card reboot.

The problem with Marriott credit cards

I haven't carried a Marriott credit card for years, because despite Marriott's broad global footprint, the cards stink:

• The earning rate of 1 Marriott Rewards point per dollar translates into an imputed redemption value of $900 for top-tier properties, which cost 45,000 points per night. That's absurd compared to any other hotel rewards program besides IHG Rewards Club.
• The annual free night certificates offered by the Marriott Rewards Premier credit card are limited to Category 1-5 properties. Marriott has experienced enormous category creep in the last several years, so there simply aren't any Category 5 properties available in the medium and large cities I typically visit. Even IHG Rewards Club credit cards offer free night certificates you can use at all IHG properties worldwide.
• While not impossible, it's outlandishly expensive to manufacture mid- and top-tier status through the Marriott Rewards Premier credit card, requiring as it does $105,000 in spend (in addition to the 15 free elite qualifying nights) to earn mid-tier Gold status.

I'm not in the prediction business, so I don't expect Chase and Marriott to implement my suggestions, but here's the absolute minimum I would look for to even begin to be interested in one of the rebooted credit cards.

An earning rate of 1.5 points per dollar

The fundamental problem with the Marriott Rewards co-branded credit cards has always been the same: their redemption rates top out at 45,000 Marriott Rewards points, which is higher than Hyatt (30,000) or Starwood (35,000), but the earning rate on their co-branded credit cards is the same (one point per dollar). Hilton properties top out at 95,000 points per night, but their credit cards earn a minimum of 3 points per dollar (and offer bonus points in easily-manufactured categories).

The problem was made even more ridiculous when Starpoints became transferrable to Marriott Rewards at a 1:3 ratio, so the same top-tier hotel award night required $15,000 in spend on a Starwood Preferred Guest American Express, but $45,000 in spend on a Marriott Rewards co-branded credit card.

Besides that, anyone can earn 1.5 Marriott Rewards point per dollar with a Chase Freedom Unlimited credit card paired with a $95 Sapphire Preferred, Ink Plus, Ink Bold, or Ink Preferred credit card. Why would they pay anything at all for a Marriott Rewards co-branded credit card that earns less than that?

If a premium or "super-premium" Marriott Rewards co-branded credit card earned 1.5 or 2 points per dollar on unbonused spend, or on easily-manufactured bonused spend, it would begin to look competitive with other cards and combinations of cards already on the market.

Anniversary free nights redeemable at any Marriott property

If a Marriott Rewards co-branded card wants to be taken seriously, it has to get rid of the category limit on anniversary free nights. A natural compromise would be to limit the free night certificate to weekend nights as the Citi Hilton Honors cards do, but in any case the category limitation of Marriott Rewards free night certificates is a pure liability for them at this point.

Gold or Platinum status after a reasonable amount of spend

Any decent co-branded credit card would have to offer at least mid-tier Marriott Rewards Gold status after spending a lot, but not too much, money on the card. Hilton offers top-tier Diamond status for spending $40,000 on its premium co-branded credit cards, and mid-tier Gold status just for carrying them. I understand that Marriott wants to preserve its most valuable elite status for its most valuable customers, but that's not our problem. If it wants people to carry its co-branded credit card, it has to make it worth our while.

Conclusion

To be clear, these aren't three separate suggestions for things Marriott could do to improve their co-branded card lineup. Marriott, Chase, and American Express would have to do all three of these things before I'd consider applying for one of their credit cards.

Who wants to pay an annual fee for a card with inferior earning, an inferior anniversary bonus, and a nominal elite status?

Sapphire Preferred, Sapphire Reserve, or Ink Preferred for Ultimate Rewards transferability?

I am on the record believing that much of the caterwauling about the end of travel hacking is essentially an artifact of individual travel hackers aging and having more responsibilities in other parts of their lives and less time to dedicate to the game. A person starting today wouldn't miss Vanilla Reload cards, just like when I got started I didn't miss buying dollar coins from the Mint. You can't miss what you never knew.

On the other hand, it's absolutely true that things are constantly changing, and keeping up-to-date on changes taking place is essential if you don't plan on retiring when your favorite credit card, award sweet spot, fuel dump, or manufactured spend technique is killed.

One such important change came about when Chase stopped issuing new Ink Plus small business credit cards.

The Ink Plus is the best Ultimate Rewards-earning credit card

People who currently hold Chase Ink Plus (and an even earlier card, the Ink Bold) earn 5 Ultimate Rewards points per dollar spent at office supply stores. While those cards can come with expensive activation fees, it's possible to turn a profit buying them virtually regardless of the liquidation technique you use, including even the most expensive options like making ordinary bill payments through Plastiq.

The Ink Plus also makes the Ultimate Rewards points you earn with other cards, like the Chase Freedom and Freedom Unlimited cards, transferrable to Chase's travel partners, meaning you don't need to hold a Sapphire Preferred or Sapphire Reserve card in order to maximize the value of your Ultimate Rewards points.

I say all this by way of background, and in case you already have an Ink Plus account: don't close it!

Brief aside: the Chase Ink Cash is still available for new signups

I try not to give recommendations around here. Your situation is different from my situation, your needs are different from my needs, etc.

But the no-annual-fee Ink Cash card is still available for new applications, and it still earns 5 Ultimate Rewards points per dollar spent at office supply stores (although only up to $25,000 per cardmember year, unlike the Ink Bold and Ink Plus maximum of $50,000 per cardmember year).

If you don't have one or more Ink Plus or Ink Bold accounts (and possibly even if you do!), moving an Ink Cash card up your list of applications in order to get another $25,000 in annual bonused office supply store spend seems like very low-hanging fruit to me at this point.

You can't sign up for new Ink Plus accounts

Chase hasn't given any indication they plan to force current Ink Plus or Ink Bold cardholders to change to the recently-introduced Ink Preferred, but they have stopped opening new accounts with those products.

That means if you have a portfolio of Chase Freedom, Freedom Unlimited, and Ink Cash cards that are earning fixed-value Ultimate Rewards points, you have to decide which Chase card to use to turn them into flexible Ultimate Rewards points.

So, which flexible Ultimate Rewards-earning credit card is best for someone without access to an Ink Plus? Like I say, I don't give recommendations, but here are four factors you can use to help you decide.

1) Product changes

Chase's proprietary credit cards can be more or less freely changed within the personal and business credit card "silos." That means the Sapphire Preferred and Reserve cards can be changed to Freedom and Freedom Unlimited cards, while an Ink Preferred can be easily changed to an Ink Cash card.

On the personal side, a Freedom Unlimited card is quite valuable for earning 1.5 Ultimate Rewards points at otherwise-unbonused merchants, but you only need one since you enjoy that earning rate on an unlimited amount of annual spend. Freedom (not Unlimited) cards meanwhile earn 5 Ultimate Rewards points per dollar spent in specified bonus categories, which have typically included widely-available manufactured spend opportunities like grocery stores and drug stores, but that bonused earning is capped at $1,500 per quarter, per card. That means you're typically best off accumulating as many individual Chase Freedom accounts as possible.

On the business side, as mentioned the Ink Cash is the last remaining Ultimate Rewards-earning credit card available to new customers that earns 5 Ultimate Rewards points per dollar spent at office supply stores.

The decisive question then is whether you prefer to earn bonus points on a finite amount of spend or fewer points on an unlimited amount of spend. If the former, an Ink Cash card lets you earn up to 125,000 Ultimate Rewards points on $25,000 in cardmember-year office supply store spend, while a Freedom card lets you earn a maximum of 30,000 points on $6,000 in calendar-year bonus spend. If the latter, the Freedom Unlimited card lets you earn 1.5 points per dollar spent on cheaper, unbonused manufactured spend or, for example, on unbonused reselling opportunities.

I'm not differentiating between the two premium personal cards here, since both can be product changed to either of the Freedom or Freedom Unlimited cards.

2) Signup bonuses

The Ink Preferred currently has a signup bonus of 80,000 Ultimate Rewards points after spending $5,000 within 3 months, while the Sapphire Preferred and Sapphire Reserve cards offer 50,000 points after spending $4,000.

That should give the Ink Preferred a strong advantage if you plan to transfer the points to Chase's travel partners. If you plan to redeem them for paid airfare, the difference shrink somewhat since the Ink Preferred signup bonus is worth $1,000 in paid airfare while the Sapphire Reserve's bonus is worth $750 due to its higher fixed redemption rate of 1.5 cents per point.

Note that unlike with some fixed-value rewards currencies you can combine points and cash on Ultimate Rewards booking portal reservations.

3) Bonus categories

If you plan to hold a flexible Ultimate Rewards credit card, it would be nice if you could earn some bonus Ultimate Rewards points with it:

• Both the Sapphire Reserve and Ink Preferred cards earn 3 Ultimate Rewards points per dollar spent on travel;
• The Sapphire Reserve earns 3 points per dollar spent at restaurants while the Sapphire Preferred earns just 2 points (the Ink Preferred doesn't bonus restaurant spend);
• The Ink Preferred earns 3 points per dollar spent on internet, cable, and phone services.

If you're a reimbursed business traveler, especially one in charge of wining and dining clients, the Sapphire Reserve or Preferred has the advantage, while if you can convince your employer to let you put $150,000 in telecommunications charges to your Ink Preferred card that would be a no-brainer.

4) Trip delay insurance

Depending on your own travel habits, this may be a decisive factor or more of a tie-breaker. The Sapphire cards have excellent trip delay insurance (Reserve for delays of 6 hours or an overnight stay, Preferred for delays of 12 hours or an overnight stay), and it applies to reservations paid for with the card, booked through the Ultimate Rewards portal, and award tickets so long as you charge the related taxes and fees to your card.

I've used Sapphire Preferred trip delay insurance in the past and it was both fairly painless and fairly lucrative.

Conclusion

How to weigh these different factors in your own travel hacking practice is up to you, depending on your particular earning and redemption needs. Since I already have a couple of Freedoms, a Freedom Unlimited, and an Ink Plus, my advice wouldn't be worth anything to someone new to the game.

That being said, two obvious approaches suggest themselves. You could use a personal card (which one you choose depends on your own situation, including the factors above) as your permanent flexible Ultimate Rewards card, and then periodically apply for Ink Preferred cards before downgrading them to Ink Cash cards.

A second approach would be to alternate applying for personal and small business credit cards every 24 months (in order to be eligible for new account signup bonuses on the personal cards). This way you could product change Sapphire Preferred or Reserve cards to Freedom or Freedom Unlimited cards, and Ink Preferred cards to Ink Cash cards, gradually accumulating a stable of cards that are each subject to separate bonus earning limits. In this strategy, you would always have a flexible Ultimate Rewards card, but it would alternate between a personal and small business card, as long as you could continue to be approved. Of course, this approach may be somewhat riskier since it would always be subject to Chase approving your product change requests and new card applications — no sure thing!

When did Hilton get so bad at processing award stays?

I'm no thought leader in travel, so I'm not going to paint this as a symbolic or meaningful decline in the quality of the Hilton Honors program, but I had a pair of experiences this weekend that together formed one hell of a coincidence. My mom was visiting from Oregon, and together we drove to the Maryland coast to get out of the city for the weekend.

Hilton Honors award reservations are easy for hotels to screw up

Being a travel hacker means never having to share a hotel room with your parents, so I booked us two all-points award stays at a Doubletree property in the Annapolis suburbs, one with my partner as the "additional guest" and one with my mom as the additional guest. The stay went smoothly, but when the folios were emailed to me on the morning we checked out, only one of the rooms had been zeroed out; the other showed a charge to my credit card for the two nights of $480 or so.

The next night, I had booked my mom a room at the Hilton Garden Inn near Washington National Airport, again with her as the additional guest on the reservation, and got a text from her asking whether the stay was a points stay or a points and cash stay. I thought this was a pretty strange question, but she said the front desk clerk had been confused. Sure enough, the next morning the e-mailed folio showed the full room rate had been charged to my credit card!

If it hadn't happened two nights in a row it probably wouldn't have even registered with me; there are all sorts of things you have to call a hotel about to follow up on after a stay, and it only took two 2-minute phone calls to get both sets of charges reversed. The fact that it happened under identical circumstances, however, makes me think there may really be a Hilton reservation issue when the "additional guest" checks in on an award stay without the primary guest. There's no rule against booking such stays (I do it all the time), and the charges are easy to reverse, but the pattern is certainly suggestive.

A more serious concern would be if you booked an award stay for someone and they provided their own credit card on check-in, and that credit card was charged the full price of the stay. If they were nervous talking about money, like many Americans, they might simply pay the charge thinking you'd stiffed them! And of course if the reservation were held with a debit card, you could experience serious cashflow issues or even overdrafts while the refund was being processed, which can take several days.

Conclusion

I don't have any grand unified theories about the source of this issue, and don't have any idea whether it originates on Hilton's side as a reservation software issue or on the properties' side as a training issue or even an attempt to grift unwitting guests. The solution is simply to be aware of it, check your Hilton folio as soon as they e-mail it to you, fix the issue before you check out if possible, and call as soon as you discover it if not!

How might the World of Hyatt-Oasis partnership work?

Via Travel with Grant, I saw the other day that World of Hyatt is planning to partner with a luxury home rental company called Oasis (and that you can use discount code "UnboundxHyatt" for a $100 discount if you book before October 31). Apparently at some point in the near future you'll be able to earn and redeem World of Hyatt points on these stays.

When I first saw this tie-up described, I thought there was no way it could possibly work. After doing a bit of digging, I've actually come around to the idea that it's possible, if well-executed, for the partnership to make sense for customers.

Let's take a look.

World of Hyatt points are very valuable because of the low maximum points redemption

Setting aside for the moment the value of the World of Hyatt program (it's comparable to the other major programs for paid stays, contingent on your elite status and credit card) and focusing on the value of World of Hyatt points, you see that World of Hyatt points are uniquely valuable because of the very low maximum number of points you need to redeem: the most expensive Park Hyatt properties in the world cost no more than 30,000 World of Hyatt points.

Since Chase Ultimate Rewards points can be transferred to World of Hyatt, that puts a hard cap of $300 per night in cash value on the cost of your hotel stays in destinations with Hyatt properties, subject of course to award availability.

Across all redemptions Hyatt presumably turns a profit

While an award redemption during a particularly busy or expensive weekend may require World of Hyatt to pay properties close to retail, most of the time Hyatt pays just a small fraction of the retail cost of your stay (properties sometimes accidentally print on your folio the amount they're paid by Hyatt so it's worth taking a look at your folio on award stays if you're interested).

I don't have any special insight into the economics behind this process, but across all award stays I think it's safe to assume Hyatt makes a modest profit: Chase pays them more for World of Hyatt points than Hyatt pays out on award stays, and Hyatt properties pay more in licensing fees than they get paid for award redemptions (hopefully making up the difference by being able to charge more and attracting customers loyal to the program).

How could World of Hyatt redemptions work with Oasis?

I did some clicking around Oasis to get a feel for the prices these properties typically charge, and they span a pretty wide range. I searched for the 6 US cities on Oasis, for a 3-night weekend stay in November. Here are the rates I found:

• In Austin, prices range from $110 for a one-bedroom to $1,200 for a 4-bedroom;
• In New York City, from $222 for a one-bedroom to $1,350 for a 5-bedroom;
• In Chicago, from $140 for a one-bedroom to $2,160 for a 5-bedroom;
• In Los Angeles, from $144 for a studio to $6,000 for a 6-bedroom;
• In San Francisco, from $152 for a one-bedroom to $519 for a 2-bedroom;
• In Miami, from $180 for a one-bedroom to $4,995 for a 7-bedroom.

To synthesize these rates, in the US market Oasis charges between $110 and $222 per bedroom on the low end, and between $259 and $713 per bedroom on the high end.

My mistake when I first glanced at the Oasis website was to think that there's no way Hyatt could square the circle of paying $4,995 per night to an apartment's owner while charging a low enough number of World of Hyatt points to make the redemption reasonable to their members (who only pay 30,000 points at the most luxurious properties in the Hyatt portfolio, remember).

The answer, of course, is that they'll charge per bedroom per night, as Wyndham Rewards currently does for redemptions at their vacation properties.

If I had to guess I'd say redemptions will start at 12,000 or 15,000 points for the cheapest apartments, and top out at 30,000 points for the most expensive, on a per-bedroom, per-night basis. Redeeming 210,000 World of Hyatt points per night for a 7-bedroom house in Miami obviously isn't something you'd do for a weekend getaway, but for a wedding, bachelor party, or other special occasion it would offer 2 cents per point compared to paying cash. There's no question there would be some takers at that rate (and since each property can only accommodate one reservation per night you only need to book a maximum of 365 nights per year).

I could see this working for family trips

Right now Oasis doesn't have very many participating cities or properties, but presumably they're intent on rapid expansion to new cities and signing on more properties within their existing footprint. Once World of Hyatt redemptions are live, we'll see what kind of value redemptions ultimately offer. The obvious value of these redemptions will be for folks traveling as a family who want additional living, kitchen, and dining space compared to what they'd get at a hotel.

If the alternative is booking multiple hotel rooms and eating out for every meal, or having to spend a lot of time driving between your hotel and your destination, then being able to stay in a single unit, in a good location, with a kitchen and other amenities could be very valuable.

The devil will be in the details

Obviously since the partnership hasn't launched yet, it's impossible to say whether it will "really" be a good deal or a bad deal. There are a lot of ways it could go wrong:

• World of Hyatt awards include all taxes and fees. Will taxes and fees be included on Oasis awards? If not, they'll become a significant co-pay on award stays, since in addition to taxes Oasis reservations also charge a cleaning fee.
• Will award availability match paid stay availability? Most (all?) Oasis properties have minimum stay requirements, but will they be longer for award stays than for paid stays? Will there be blackout dates for award stays, or will you be able to book with points any nights available with cash?
• Will award rates be too high? You can imagine Hyatt investing nothing in this partnership and simply allowing you to redeem World of Hyatt points for one cent each towards Oasis stays. That's an extreme case, but if they set redemption rates too high on a per-bedroom, per-night basis, the whole thing will be a meaningless embarrassment.

Conclusion

While I doubt I'll ever book an Oasis stay with World of Hyatt points, over the course of writing this post I slowly came around to the idea that, if well-executed, the Hyatt-Oasis partnership might provide good value to families under certain circumstances.

But until redemption details are announced, all we can do is speculate.

About Delta Private Jets

Last week I wrote about how I would think about earning Diamond Medallion status with Delta after the changes going into effect for Medallion Qualifying Dollars in January, 2018. I then quipped on Twitter that "If you're just a rich guy who wants Diamond Medallion status just get a Delta Private Jets Card."

I was referring to the ability to deposit $100,000 on a Delta Private Jets card and receive Diamond Medallion status. You would then have 2 years to spend the $100,000, which you can redeem either for private jet flights or for commercial flights marketed by Delta. If you buy full fare commercial tickets you also get a 20% discount (they would still be much, much more expensive than the "discounted" tickets ordinary people buy; I assume this benefit is targeted at companies that insist on booking refundable tickets).

This is, obviously, not worth doing for an ordinary travel hacker. But you can imagine a well-connected rich guy, or even a very frequent reimbursed business traveler who wouldn't earn enough Medallion Qualifying Miles or Segments for Diamond Medallion status, getting quite a lot of potential value from this benefit.

That's because the status you get from Delta Private Jets is supposed to give you "immediate" access to Diamond Choice Benefits, for instance, that could be worth a thousand dollars or so, between Sky Club membership, global upgrades, or just selling Gold Medallion status. If you get Diamond Medallion status for the year you join and the next two years, you could potentially receive three sets of Choice Benefits to offset the cost of prepaying for your Delta travel.

Unfortunately, I haven't seen any reports of how this benefit works in practice. Folks with that kind of money don't spend a lot of time posting on public message boards, I guess.

Two other ways to get Delta Private Jets access (but not Diamond Medallion)

When I started writing this post I hoped to reveal a secret backdoor into Diamond Medallion status. You see, there are two ways to get a Delta Private Jets card without spending $100,000:

• American Express Platinum cardmembers can deposit as little as $50,000 on a card, and receive a 3% bonus on the card's value (if you were planning to deposit $100,000 you would want to open a Platinum card just for this benefit; paying a $550 annual fee for a $3,000 boost in value);
• all SkyMiles members can redeem 2,500,000 SkyMiles for a $25,000 Delta Private Jets card.

What the internet couldn't tell me is whether people pursuing either of those options would still receive Diamond Medallion status! So, I picked up the phone and committed journalism: I called Delta Private Jets and asked.

What I found is kind of interesting in its own right. While these three methods of buying a Delta Private Jets card all seem different to a travel hacker, with different thresholds and benefits, Delta Private Jets doesn't actually seem to differentiate between the methods internally. You can redeem SkyMiles in any amount in excess of 2.5 million, and you can use a Platinum card to load any amount in excess of $50,000 to receive a 3% bonus, or both.

But regardless of how you pay for the amount you load, the benefits you receive depend only on the amount you load. There are a few minor differences concerning hourly rates and such, but the two important ones are:

• Loads of less than $100,000 expire in one year, rather than two years;
• and loads of less than $100,000 don't grant Diamond Medallion status.

In other words, Diamond Medallion status is a benefit of the amount you load, not a benefit of Delta Private Jets membership (this has been misreported absolutely everywhere I have looked for it).

Conclusion

One hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money to spend on airfare, and it's a hell of a lot of money to loan to Delta interest free for two years in the hopes you'll spend it within 24 months. On the other hand, for somebody rich enough to not mind the float, but not rich enough to actually fly private and shop around for the best private jet pricing, and who knows they'll spend $100,000 on Delta-marketed flights for themselves and their employees, friends or relations in the next 24 months, this is the quickest and easiest path to Diamond Medallion status I know of.