Rewards programs, ranked by reliability

One fun thing about writing a blog is that reader feedback gives you a chance to see how different ideas interact and collide. Last Friday when I wrote "While I'm willing to take unlimited risk in my investment portfolio, I'm willing to take virtually no risk in my travel hacking portfolio," reader Danny commented:

"This seems like an interesting sentiment. I'd be far more concerned with keeping my investments sound than my points balance."

Then on Monday I wrote with respect to my findings on Hilton all-inclusive award pricing that:

"If points costs will fall to match low revenue rates, it is easier to justify earning large quantities of Hilton points knowing that you'll almost always get close to, or above, their imputed redemption value."

I've been thinking about these two ideas, risk and reliability, and how they interact in my travel hacking practice.

Devaluations are the big, unknown risk

For several years, the US Bank Club Carlson credit card offered the last night free on all award stays. Now, this benefit was never quite as good as it was cracked up to be since Club Carlson properties, even or perhaps especially high-end Club Carlson properties, are dumps (true story: months after the Radisson Blu Warwick Hotel Philadelphia finished their renovations to not be a dump any longer they left the program).

Many people, expecting that benefit to continue indefinitely, earned hundreds of thousands, or millions, of Club Carlson Gold Points (trust me — many of them are readers of this blog).

Then the last-night-free benefit ended, and those points could only be redeemed at still-crappy Club Carlson properties. The same spend that earned those millions of points could have been used to earn 2% cash back, unbonused Ultimate Rewards or Membership Rewards points, or another rewards currency.

That's the kind of risk that I do my best to avoid in my travel hacking practice, by earning the rewards I redeem and redeeming the rewards I earn.

Reliability is the certainty of being able to redeem rewards for the trips you want to take

Reliability is something slightly different than risk. A reliable program offers consistent redemption values, whether or not that value is high or low, attractive or repulsive.

For example, according to Hotel Hustle, the IHG Rewards Club offers quite remarkable consistency, with a median value of 0.58 cents per point, with 75% of award searches above 0.44 cents per point and 75% of awards below 0.68 cents per point. That doesn't make it attractive to manufacture IHG Rewards points, but it gives you a clear view of the value of any points you might earn in one of their periodic sweepstakes or promotions.

My top ten loyalty programs, by reliability

Whether a particular rewards currency is "worth earning" depends on both your cost of acquisition and your particular travel plans, so this is not a list of the top ten most valuable loyalty programs. It's only a list of the top ten rewards programs sorted by my view of their reliability.

1. Cash. Cash has the great benefit of maintaining its dollar redemption value no matter what happens. It is, in that way, the most reliable rewards currency. Into this category also falls the fixed-value redemption of currencies like Ultimate Rewards, Membership Rewards, BankAmericard Travel Rewards, and other rewards programs with fixed values, like Delta SkyMiles Pay with Points redemptions. Their reliability is unimpeachable.
2. IHG Rewards anniversary free night certificates. In the several years I've been travel hacking, I've never seen an IHG property that I would be willing to transfer points, buy points, or manufacture points in order to book. But they really do have a Chase IHG Rewards credit card that gives you an annual award night at any IHG Rewards property in the world! I've never seen a report of the certificate not being honored for any reason, except the chain's preposterously loose rules on award availability. As far as I can tell the thing is completely reliable. Compare that to Marriott's anniversary night certificates, which have become almost unredeemable as properties continually migrate up out of Category 4.
3. Flexible Ultimate Rewards. Chase Ultimate Rewards points held in a Sapphire Preferred, Sapphire Reserve, Ink Bold, or Ink Plus account are more valuable than cash but slightly less reliable, since their value depends in part on the value of transferred points. One component of the value of a flexible Ultimate Rewards point is the value of one United Mileage Plus mile, but the value of a United Mileage Plus mile is highly volatile, so that portion of the value of an Ultimate Rewards point is also volatile. Nonetheless, Chase strongly supports the 1:1 transfer ratio of Ultimate Rewards points to their partners, so the reliability of the program overall is raised by the relative constancy of programs like World of Hyatt and Southwest Rapid Rewards.
4. US Bank Flexpoints. Long-time readers know I love the US Bank Flexperks Travel Rewards Visa because of its generous bonused earning categories, but the process of redeeming Flexpoints introduces some unreliability into the system. Flights will sometimes be shown with odd fare differences which push them into a higher redemption band, for example. Nonetheless, the ability to redeem Flexpoints for between 1.33 and 2 cents per Flexpoint makes them one of the most reliable currencies around.
5. Flexible Membership Rewards. Here the problem of transfer partner volatility is magnified by the eclectic range of partners Membership Rewards has. For example, in 2015 the transfer ratio to British Airways Avios dropped 20%, from 1000:1000 to 1000:800. Then in 2016 British Airways created a special exception to their distance-based award chart in order to charge between 33% (off-peak) and 60% (peak) more for business class flights between Boston and Dublin on Aer Lingus. Today, you may need to transfer 75,000 Membership Rewards points to Avios to pay for a flight that would have cost 37,500 Membership Rewards points before the two devaluations. This doesn't mean that Membership Rewards points themselves have radically decreased in value (how often do you fly between Boston and Dublin?), but the example illustrates the way in which their reliance on transfer partners for value introduces a lot of volatility into the value of their rewards currency, since they don't control their partners' award redemption rates.
6. Southwest Rapid Rewards. Unlike a true fixed-value currency, Southwest Rapid Rewards points have fixed values only within each fare bucket: Wanna Get Away (between 1.4 and 1.6 cents), Anytime (about 1.1 cents), and Business Select (about 0.9 cents). That means that while you know you'll get one of those three values, which one you get depends on availability, reducing in my view the overall reliability of the program. Southwest enthusiasts avoid this problem by carefully watching the schedule and snapping up Wanna Get Away fares as soon as they become available, increasing the overall reliability of the program for them, at least for flights booked far enough in advance.
7. World of Hyatt. According to the Hotel Hustle database of search results, the lowest value redemption at Hyatt properties is 0.91 cents per point (the median is 1.78 cents). If my Chase accounts were abruptly closed and I had to speculative transfer my entire Ultimate Rewards balance, I would choose World of Hyatt in a heartbeat. Hyatt doesn't have properties everywhere in the world, which makes it hard to rely on as a first-string hotel rewards program, but if there's a Hyatt in your destination you're exceedingly likely to get a good redemption value.
8. Starwood Preferred Guest. Starwood has three different sources of value: their points can be redeemed for hotel stays at Starwood and Marriott, they can be transferred to airlines partners (either directly or through a Marriott Hotel + Air package), or they can be redeemed for revenue flights. That makes it almost impossible to get a bad value for your Starpoints, although it also causes the much more serious and common problem of hoarding Starpoints and being unwilling to redeem them for anything but the perfect redemption!
9. Hilton Honors. As I've been discussing lately, the biggest effect of the recent changes to Hilton Honors is that they've apparently deliberately increased the reliability of the program. While there will always be sub-par redemptions in any non-fixed-value loyalty program, Hilton appears to have increased the number of properties where points redemptions make sense compared to paying cash rates.
10. Legacy airline programs. I got into travel hacking at the very tail end of the period when, with flexibility and planning, it was still possible to fairly reliably book low-level domestic award tickets. Those days are over. Virtually all of my domestic travel today, in both economy and first class, are revenue tickets, not because revenue tickets have become cheaper but because award tickets have become completely unreliable as a means of booking domestic travel. International travel, especially on partners, hasn't seen quite as bad a gutting, and flexibility and planning still go a long way to booking flights overseas. Having access to legacy airline currencies through Ultimate Rewards, Membership Rewards, and Starpoints is still a reasonable tactic in case you happen to find award availability, but I don't think it can be the cornerstone of a strategy any longer.

Conclusion

There you have it, my completely subjective top ten ranking of rewards programs by reliability. This is certainly not the only ranking possible: those whose travel regularly brings them to expensive cities with Starwood properties will find they're able to get consistent value from Starwood Preferred Guest, and those who live in cities with many international partner airlines will likely get more consistent value from legacy airline programs than I do. But today, a combination of cash back, Ultimate Rewards or Membership Rewards, and one or two strong hotel programs seems most likely to help you pay as little as possible for the trips you want to take.

Quick hit: new Hilton all-inclusive award pricing is great

I earn a lot of Hilton HHonors points, and I'm going to be earning even more than usual this week, so I decided to take a look at some of Hilton's all-inclusive resorts to see if I could lock in some award space for next Presidents Day, since I had such a good time in Jamaica this year, and I remembered having a terrible time finding award space at Hilton's Rose Hall all-inclusive resort. While checking out the current award space availability, I discovered some pretty odd pricing anomalies — or features, if you prefer.

Searching for flexible dates doesn't work great (and never has)

When you search for flexible dates on the Hilton website, you'll be given something that looks vaguely like a flexible date search. For example, here's a search for flexible dates in July of this year:

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This looks like you've got some expensive premium availability at the beginning of the search period, some not-unreasonable premium availability for a few days, some less-expensive award space for a couple days, one date of low-level availability, 3 sold-out dates, and then some more premium availability. That's not what's happening.

Here are the actual lowest-priced rooms I could find on the dates during this search period:

• June 24: 70,000
• June 25: 70,000
• June 26: 65,000
• June 27: 65,000
• June 28: 65,000
• June 29: 65,000
• June 30: 70,000
• July 1: No availability
• July 2: No availability
• July 3: No availability
• July 4: 115,000
• July 5: 65,000
• July 6: 65,000
• July 7: 70,000
• July 8: 70,000

The award space on June 30 seems to flicker in and out of existence depending on whether I'm logged in, whether I'm doing a flexible search or a date specific search, etc. The search results shown on the website seem to be very path-dependent.

If this continues, it's a huge improvement over the old Hilton HHonors

Once I noticed these pricing anomalies, I decided to see whether I could find any more extreme prices. Here are a few weird prices I found checking the next few months

• April 9: 70,000 (0.76 cents/point)
• May 31: 45,000 (0.58 cents/point)
• June 1: 50,000 (0.58 cents/point)
• July 23: 41,000 (0.49 cents/point)

My original plan was to check each of the next 12 months and find the cheapest date with points. That ended up not being feasible because the Hilton website is terrible. It errors out after every 2-4 searches, periodically signs you out, and inflicts all sorts of other madness on you.

The key takeaway here isn't that there are atmospheric points redemptions (although they're squarely above Hilton imputed redemption values): the value you get from points depends on both the number of points charged and the comparable revenue rate, and the lowest points costs are on nights when revenue rates are in $200-400 range. Really brag-worthy redemptions are on nights when revenue rates are in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, and you're able to redeem a "mere" 95,000 points.

The real takeaway here is that by being willing to reduce point costs so dramatically on nights with low revenue rates, Hilton has increased the reliability of their points' value. Prior to the revaluation, the Hilton Rose Hall was 95,000 points per night regardless of the revenue rates available. In fact Hilton had a wide range of nice properties where on cheap nights it was difficult to justify redeeming points. If points costs will fall to match low revenue rates, it is easier to justify earning large quantities of Hilton points knowing that you'll almost always get close to, or above, their imputed redemption value.

The app works great

Last night after I scheduled this post I suddenly wanted to check over a few more things and opened up the Hilton app on my phone. After a few moments, I realized, "this isn't generating any of the errors the website was giving me."

If you think about there being a fixed "real world" of Hilton award space out there in the universe, it appears to me that the app is designed to tap into that world directly, while the website presents only a distorted image of it and requires you to rotate and adjust the lens in order to see different bits and pieces of the real world of award space.

Unfortunately the app doesn't have a flexible date search function, but since the one on the website is so terrible I hesitate to even say this is a disadvantage of the app over the website. In any event, if you know the dates you're interested in I highly recommend going straight to the app and skipping the website completely.

How do you want to think about budgeting for your hotel stays?

I've written a series of posts about my preferred metric for evaluating hotel loyalty programs, which I call imputed redemption values. This is a straightforward metric that tells you if redeeming hotel rewards points gives you a better or worse deal than paying cash that you've manufactured on your most lucrative cashback-earning credit card.

For example, a 95,000-point Hilton Honors redemption would require $15,833 in bonused spend on a Surpass American Express card. If your most lucrative cashback card earns 2%, that gives you a breakeven point of $316 (since for prices above that, a points redemption will require less manufactured spend), if it's 2.105% cashback you have an imputed redemption value of $333, and if it's 2.625% your IRV is $415. 

This metric doesn't tell you what you should do with points you've already earned — I always prefer to redeem points before spending cash. But if your points redemptions come in consistently above your imputed redemption values (95,000 points for a $2,000 night), then you are well-advised to continue earning those points, while if you fall consistently short (95,000 points for a $95 night), you might consider moving away from those loyalty currencies and towards additional cashback, instead.

Yesterday Frequent Miler posted an interesting analysis of some data (with a followup here) from the Hilton Honors program showing, as I'd hypothesized last month, that the new program would see redemptions bunched more tightly around the 0.4 cent per point redemption level. He provides some important insight on different factors that might affect the ultimate value you receive; read the whole thing.

Such analyses are very useful, but it's also helpful to pull back occasionally and give some thought to more basic questions: what's the best way to save money on your hotel stays?

What programs allow you to earn the stays you want as cheaply as possible?

Bottom-tier stays

There are phenomenal values at the very bottom of several hotel loyalty charts:

• If you have a US Bank Club Carlson credit card earning 5 points per dollar on all spend, you can earn a free night at any Category 1 property every time you spend $1,800. Even if your backup card earns 2.625% on unbonused spend, you're exceedingly unlikely to find a room for less than $47.25 per night — taxes alone are likely to be that much!
• With an American Express Hilton Honors Surpass card you can earn 5,000 Honors points, which is, I believe, still technically the fewest points required for a Hilton award stay, after spending $833 at a bonused merchant. That's not a value that any other hotel loyalty program currently offers.

Mid-tier stays

If you're staying in a more expensive market, for example mid-sized or larger cities, there are a few options for getting reliably outsized value:

• If you signed up for a Barclaycard Wyndham Rewards credit card back when the card still earned 2 Wyndham Rewards points for each dollar you spend, you can earn a free night at any of Wyndham's properties for every $7,500 you spend on the card — and Wyndham has a LOT of properties!
• In my experience Hyatt offers consistently reasonable pricing for mid-tier stays. For example, while the Chase Marriott credit card's Category 1-5 annual award certificate has become worthless as desirable properties migrate up and out of Category 5, most of Hyatt's centrally located city properties still top out at Category 3 or 4, costing 12,000 to 15,000 points per night, and are eligible for the Chase Hyatt credit card's annual free night certificate. If you have a Chase Freedom Unlimited credit card earning 1.5 Ultimate Rewards point per dollar, and a premium Ultimate Rewards card that lets you transfer those points to World of Hyatt, these mid-tier properties have an imputed redemption value between $160 and $200, while nightly rates can be substantially higher.

Top-tier stays

At the most expensive properties, a travel hacker has a few options:

• Hilton Honors currently tops out at 95,000 points per night (when standard room awards are available), allowing you to earn a free standard room award night for $15,833 in spend, or $12,667 on stays of exactly 5 nights, since the fifth night is still free on award stays;
• World of Hyatt standard room redemptions top out at 30,000 points per night. If you choose to manufacture unbonused spend on a Chase Freedom Unlimited in order to transfer Ultimate Rewards points to World of Hyatt, such a top-tier redemption would require $20,000 in spend, with an imputed redemption value of between $400 and $525 per night, depending on your best cash back alternative.
• Starwood Preferred Guest, and their new owner Marriott Rewards, seem like they should potentially offer some value, and indeed if you're committed to visiting one of their top-tier properties you should certainly redeem points instead of paying cash. If you're committed to visiting a top-tier, 45,000-point Marriott Rewards property, then manufacturing $15,000 in spend on a Starwood Preferred Guest American Express card and transferring the points to Marriott Rewards at a 1-to-3 ratio is clearly the cheapest way to pay for such a stay. However, for stay categories below top-tier Marriott Rewards stays I believe most travel hackers are likely to find more value elsewhere.

Conclusion

I have always thought it was a curious fact about travel that, when you do enough of it, transportation itself consumes a smaller and smaller portion of your travel budget. Of course you can make it more expensive by traveling in more expensive cabins, but the fact is a single night in a hotel can easily cost as much as a plane ticket!

I've never had any trouble finding miles, points, or cash to pay for flights; I spend much more time calibrating the points I earn for hotel stays than I do for my air travel.

Rebook your Hilton award reservations, but carefully

Some friends recently told me that since the latest changes to Hilton Honors went into effect they'd seen prices go down at some properties where they had existing reservations. I hopped online and saw that, indeed, the pricing on one of my upcoming reservations had dropped from 50,000 points to 46,000 points per night, and another had dropped from 60,000 to 57,000 per night.

Since both reservations were for 3 nights, that's 21,000 in found points, or $3,500 in American Express Hilton Honors Surpass grocery store spend. In other words, not that much, but not nothing either, and worth a few clicks in order to rebook at the lower rate.

Hilton is not good at stuff

First I attempted to change a 150,000-point redemption into a 138,000-point redemption. After completely the change, I was expecting to see my available Honors point balance increase by 12,000 points. Instead, it went down by 138,000.

In other words, instead of either calculating the difference in points required or redepositing the entire award amount and then deducting the new cost, the Hilton website simply deducted the new total points required.

That's not great. Today I called in and got a Diamond agent who, after I carefully explained what had happened 3 times, was able to figure it out and told me, "you should have cancelled the reservation and rebooked, or called in." She then proceeded to cancel my second, correct reservation and make me another, correct reservation, "explaining" that "the old reservation still has your certificate attached."

Also surprisingly rude!

Since I had her on the line, I also asked her to change my second reservation to reclaim another 9,000 miles. I was booked into an accessible room that had dropped in price, and the agent started interrogating me about whether I really needed an accessible room, and scolding me that they had a very limited number of accessible rooms, "like handicapped parking spaces."

This was so obviously inappropriate I don't have much to say about it, except to pass along what the Hilton booking engine itself says about the issue:

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If Hilton thinks there is a problem with people booking accessible rooms in order to save points they can address the problem by not charging more for non-accessible rooms. Instead they chose to go the opposite direction, fine-tuning to an ever-increasing degree the number of points they charge for different room types, dates, and properties.

I'm reminded of the study made famous by Freakonomics, in which charging parents fines for picking up their children from daycare late increased parental tardiness, since it swapped a monetary incentive for an ethical incentive. The price mechanism is marvelously effective, but one of the things it's effective at is swapping financial calculations for moral calculations.

Conclusion

Naturally the reason I was trying to change my reservations was to ensure that space wouldn't disappear between cancelling a reservation and trying to rebook. That turned out to be a mistake! If you're worried about award space disappearing, your best bet is to call in.

Otherwise, just cancel your reservation and use the redeposited points to make your new reservation — that's what they'll do over the phone anyway.

Blending earning and redemption rates

When an affiliate blogger is trying to sell you a credit card that allows you to redeem bank points against a travel purchase, they sometimes pull this fairly ingenious, if transparent, sleight of hand:

• When you earn airline miles for a purchase, then redeem those miles for travel, the value you get per dollar spent depends on the value you get per airline mile.
• When you earn bank points and redeem them against a paid flight purchase, you don't just get the value of your bank points, you also get the value of any airline miles earned for your paid flight.
• Therefore you should value a dollar spent with, for example, a BankAmericard Travel Rewards card not as the 1.5 cents in travel you get, but as 1.5 cents plus the airline miles those 1.5 cents in airfare will earn.

Did you catch the switch? All the work here is being done by the value of a dollar, a value which the blogger then assigns to whichever credit card has the highest signup bonus this week.

I thought of this yesterday because I'm in the process of booking a couple of spring and summer trips, and found myself in a somewhat related situation.

A Southwest Business Select fare buys a lot of Wanna Get Away fare

When I was booking my Southwest ticket to Montego Bay using US Bank Flexpoints, I booked a Business Select fare since Wanna Get Away fares weren't available and the difference in cost between Business Select and Anytime didn't move my fare into a higher Flexperks redemption band.

This creates the somewhat interesting situation wherein I redeemed 50,000 Flexpoints, worth $500 in cash, for a ticket worth $953.61, and earned 9,336 Rapid Rewards points, worth roughly $93 in Ultimate Rewards points I wouldn't have to transfer to Southwest in the future.

That future turned out to be yesterday, when I booked a ticket to Las Vegas for dates when Wanna Get Away fares are available. Since my ticket cost about 16,000 Rapid Rewards points, I only had to transfer 7,000 Ultimate Rewards points, worth $70, to Southwest to buy my ticket.

Now, it's worth saying that actual Southwest Airlines enthusiasts don't run into this situation: they book Wanna Get Away fares on every flight they're even remotely considering taking as soon as the schedule opens up, knowing they can cancel all their unwanted flights up to 10 minutes before departure.

But since I'm not a Southwest enthusiast, I was pleasantly surprised to see my best, cheapest choice for one flight earn over half the cost of my next flight on Southwest, which was also my best, cheapest option.

My first Delta Pay with Miles redemption

As long-time readers know, I earn 1.4 miles per dollar spent on my Platinum Delta SkyMiles American Express card by spending $50,000 each calendar year (or sometimes slightly more for technical reasons).

In order to break even against a 2.105% cash back credit card, my overall objective is to get about 1.5 cents per SkyMile on my award redemptions. If I can break even on my spend in that way, then I'll end up paying a $195 annual fee for 20,000 Medallion Qualification Miles and a domestic economy companion ticket.

Meanwhile, Delta-operated flights have a kind of "floor" on redemptions of 1 cent per SkyMile, since you can use Delta's Pay with Miles feature to reduce the price of revenue tickets by that amount: 10,000 SkyMiles reduces the cost of your ticket by $100, for example.

With all that said, today I made two Delta SkyMiles redemptions, both below my target threshold of 1.5 cents each!

I needed to book two one-way tickets, with a retail price of $362.80 and a SkyMiles award ticket price of 32,500 SkyMiles and $5.60 in fees. That produces a redemption rate of 1.1 cents per SkyMile for an award ticket, or just 1.54% cash back for purchases with my American Express card. Since I had the SkyMiles in my account, and I know my miles are worth nothing until they're redeemed, I booked my partner's ticket that way.

For my own ticket, I used the Pay with Miles option to redeem 35,000 SkyMiles against $350 of the fare, and pay $12.80 in cash for the remainder, getting exactly 1 cent per SkyMile in value. However, since Pay with Miles tickets now earn Medallion Qualification Miles, I'll also earn 2,663 Medallion Qualification Miles for the ticket. Compared to the award ticket redemption I booked for my partner, I'm paying 2,500 SkyMiles and $7.20 for 2,663 Medallion Qualification Miles.

From a pure imputed redemption value perspective, these two redemptions together leave me with a shortfall of $305.30, getting just $707.20 in cash value compared to the $1,012.50 I needed to break even on the prorated amount of spend (67,500 out of 70,000 SkyMiles).

What do these redemptions have in common?

I connected these redemptions in my mind because I happened to be making both of them on the same day. But they also both illustrate that, for me, there's no such thing as the perfect redemption: there's only the perfect redemption for the moment.

Instead of refusing to fly Southwest unless there were Wanna Get Away fares available, I redeemed fixed value points for the flights I actually wanted to take, and earned a boatload of Rapid Rewards points towards a future redemption. On the other hand, instead of redeeming SkyMiles at a low valuation, I redeemed them at an even lower valuation in order to accumulate a few thousand more Medallion Qualification Miles.

Finally, what all these redemptions have in common is that they let me pay as little as possible for the trips I want to take. And that, for me, is what travel hacking will always be about.

Conclusion

While the affiliate blogger version of this phenomenon is a barely-concealed attempt to sell credit cards, there's another element that rings perfectly true: earning a combination of fixed-value points, flexible points, and brand-specific currencies may give you the opportunity to leverage currencies against each other.

On the other hand, such a combination may cause you to orphan points in multiple programs without every getting sufficient value from any of them.

Quick hits: hijinks booking Mileage Plan awards on Virgin America

In the last few months I've written a couple posts about booking award travel on Virgin America, with Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan miles and with HawaiianMiles, mentioning a few things I had come across doing everyday research.

Lo and behold, I actually just had occasion to book a Virgin America ticket with Mileage Plan, and found a quirk that might cost you thousands of Mileage Plan miles if you aren't paying attention.

Virgin America sometimes only makes one First Class award seat available to Mileage Plan at a time

I was searching for two tickets between the East Coast and San Francisco for June, and saw two First Class seats available for 60,000 Mileage Plan miles on Virgin America's nonstop flight:

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After running the dates by my partner, I decided to just book one ticket for myself and book hers later. After running a search for one passenger, I found a First Class ticket available for just 25,000 miles:

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While selecting my seat, I noticed that the First Class cabin was completely empty. After booking my ticket, I decided that booking a refundable 60,000-mile ticket for my partner made sense to make sure we were on the same flight. But when I searched again, another First Class ticket had become available at the 25,000-mile level!

Then I remembered that all Alaska Airlines tickets are refundable greater than 60 days before departure, so I went ahead and booked her a low-level ticket as well.

Out of curiosity, I searched again and yet another 25,000-mile ticket had become available. In other words, Alaska Airlines was only showing one low-level First Class award seat at time, but immediately made an additional seat available each time one was booked.

This doesn't seem to be a universal phenomenon, since I was able to find 7 First Class seats simultaneously on the same route on January 18, 2018, but it does seem fairly common for dates in June, when I'm planning my trip.

Since Alaska award tickets are refundable within 24 hours of booking, and outside of 60 days, there's no risk booking low-level award tickets one at a time to see if additional seats become available. If they don't, and you'd like to make different plans, you can quickly cancel all the reservations you were able to make.

The Mileage Plan search engine shows incorrect fees on Virgin America

For some reason the Mileage Plan search engine shows fees and charges of $19, but once you select a flight and continue the correct fees and charges, in this case $5.60, are shown.

My only theory is that the engine might be adding half the $25 partner booking fee, $12.50, to the security fee of $5.60, and rounding up to $19.

In any case, when you proceed to checkout you'll see the correct, lower fee before paying.

Interesting Starwood and Marriott stacking opportunities

I was chatting yesterday with someone who has had a lot of success with Marriott recently, taking advantage of a number of opportunities that currently intersect due to the merger of the Marriott and Starwood hotel chains. While I don't generally think of Marriott Rewards as being a program that offers travel hackers much value, that may be less true today than it has been even in the recent past.

Here are a few ways you might be able to get above-average value from Marriott Rewards.

Transfer Starpoints to Marriott Rewards

While I mentioned this back in September in the context of Marriott Flight and Hotel packages, it's also true that you can simply transfer Starpoints to Marriott in order to book award stays.

Marriott award stays top out at 45,000 Marriott Rewards points (15,000 Starpoints) and Ritz-Carlton stays cost up to 70,000 Marriott Rewards points (23,333 Starpoints). The 5th award night is free for reservations with both Marriott Rewards and Ritz-Carlton.

That means the most expensive Ritz-Carlton property in the world requires just $23,333 in unbonused spend on the Starwood Preferred Guest American Express, or $18,667 in spend for stays of exactly 5 nights.

At the Tier 5 Ritz-Carlton, St. Thomas, you'd pay 280,000 Marriott Rewards points for a stay that would otherwise cost $2,729 in cash (dates June 30 to July 5, 2017). At roughly 1 cent per point, that would give you a roughly 3% return on your unbonused Starwood Preferred Guest American Express purchases.

Note that Marriott is terrible about making award rates available, so this isn't as low-hanging a fruit as you might otherwise hope.

Match Starwood Preferred Guest Gold to Marriott Rewards Gold

Since the merger you've been able to link your Starwood Preferred Guest and Marriott Rewards accounts and take advantage of your highest status in either program. You can find the details here, but the most important takeaway is that Starwood Preferred Guest Gold status matches to Marriott Rewards Gold status.

You can get Starwood Preferred Guest Gold status by spending $30,000 on a Starwood Preferred Guest American Express, or simply by holding an American Express Platinum or Platinum Business card, both of which offer complimentary Starwood Preferred Guest Gold status.

Marriott Rewards Gold status, on the other hand, is somewhat harder to earn and somewhat more valuable, coming as it does with free continental breakfast at Marriott properties.

Maximize the Chase Ritz-Carlton Visa

I don't carry the Chase Ritz-Carlton Visa since I don't pay $450 annual fees, but it has a number of features that may offer genuine value: a $100 hotel credit every time you book a paid Ritz-Carlton stay of 2 or more nights and three lounge upgrades on paid stays annually.

Those can be combined, and if you're aggressive about maximizing both benefits then three paid 2-night stays, each with a $100 hotel credit and lounge upgrade, during lower-cost or off-peak periods could handily offset a big part of that $450 annual fee, especially if you're traveling with a large family.

Conclusion

It really does seem like, for now, the merger of Marriott and Starwood has given those with Starwood Preferred Guest American Express cards access to similar values as they're used to at Starwood properties in Marriott's much larger portfolio of hotels.

Personally, my Hilton Honors Diamond status and cheap and plentiful access to Hilton Honors points, as well as Hyatt Gold Passport Diamond status and cheap and plentiful access to Hyatt points through Ultimate Rewards, together mean that I have no interest in spinning up another hotel loyalty relationship. But if you're still deciding on an approach to hotel stays, it seems you could do worse than looking into the Marriott/Starwood relationship.

How I think about the Hilton Honors reforms

People are talking about Hilton's recent announcement that they'll be eliminating the concept of hotel award categories and charging whatever they think is fair for a free night at their properties. They're also rebranding their loyalty program to "Hilton Honors," although I assume I'll keep spelling it "HHonors" for at least 8-12 months.

Hilton HHonors then

While some bloggers made a big deal about Hilton HHonors variable pricing, there was nothing mysterious about it. Every property had a fixed price for standard room awards, and that price varied by calendar month. You could find each property's standard room award rate, by month, by going to the Hilton HHonors Standard Room Rewards Pricing Points Search Tool.

That URL now redirects to the Hilton homepage.

Hilton Honors now

Now, properties will still have standard award rates, those award rates will vary by day, month, or season, and there will be no way of knowing how much a room costs until you check the award availability for the specific dates you're interested in.

That's bad if you are in the business of slowly saving up Hilton Honors points for specific stays at specific properties on specific dates, since by the time you save up enough points, the number required might slip away from you.

Obviously no travel hacker does anything like that.

What it means for a travel hacker

The starting point for a travel hacker looking at this situation is the Wandering Aramean Hotel Hustle "Visualize" page, where you learn that across thousands of Hotel Hustle searches, the average value of a Hilton Honors point is 0.450 cents and the median value is 0.425 cents.

Like Doctor of Credit, I'm under no illusion that this change is being implemented to help Hilton Honors members get more value from their points.

But there are three ways the changes to Hilton Honors could be implemented, all of which would be in the spirit of "saving Hilton money," but that would have very different implications for travel hackers.

• The average value of a Hilton Honors point could go down. Since grocery store manufactured spend on an American Express Hilton HHonors Surpass requires that you get 0.35 cents per Honors point to break even compared to a 2.105% cash back card, reducing the average value of a Honors point below that level would reduce the value of manufacturing Hilton Honors points compared to cash back.
• The standard deviation could go down. Currently, even with Hilton Honors points worth 0.45 cents on average, it's not difficult to find more valuable redemptions that get you up closer to the 1 cent-per-point range. A more aggressive pricing scheme might tighten the band around 0.45 cents so that it's still worthwhile to manufacture Hilton Honors points, but the potential upside of saving up Honors points is much lower than what a travel hacker might expect today.
• The upside value might be capped. This is the real risk to travel hackers, and to the Hilton Honors program itself: if the program keeps low-value redemptions, and keeps the average redemption value at 0.45 cents per point, but at high-end properties, or during peak seasons, instead of simply charging more points switches to a revenue-based system anchored at 0.4 or 0.5 cents per point, then the "upside risk" of accumulating Hilton Honors points will be eliminated. Currently, you can accumulate Hilton Honors points with relatively little downside risk and the potential for significant upside if you stay at a particularly expensive property during particularly expensive dates. Putting a firm cap on that upside would mean there was little point in wasting credit card spend on any of their Citi or American Express co-branded credit cards.

Conclusion

I think it's an interesting question, although not one to spend too much time thinking about, whether Hilton HHonors points were worth too much in the past.

While it was and for now continues to be trivial to earn hundreds of thousands of points while redeeming them for outsized value at Hilton's prestige properties, that could only have ever represented a tiny percentage of overall Hilton redemptions, most of which were done safely in their comfort zone of 0.4 cents or below.

So, will Hilton reduce the average value of their points by causing mid-tier properties to cost slightly more points, or will they make top-tier properties cost vastly more points? We shall see.

What are HawaiianMiles worth?

Hawaiian Airlines is a traditional US carrier that flies between the Hawaiian islands and between Hawaii and the Western United States as well as New York's JFK airport, and from Hawaii to Australia, New Zealand, American Samoa, Tahiti, Japan, Korea and China.

They have a co-branded credit card with an $89 annual fee and 35,000-mile signup bonus. The card doesn't have much value unless you fly a lot on Hawaiian metal, but if that's the case you get access to discounted flight awards and no blackout dates for award tickets. The card also gives 5,000 bonus miles each anniversary if you spend $10,000 on the card, but the card doesn't earn bonus points in any interesting categories of spend so that's unlikely to be the best place to direct your unbonused spend.

All of this raises the obvious question, "why are we talking about HawaiianMiles?" Good question! The reason we're talking about HawaiianMiles is, first, that they are historically very easy to earn. Long after Amazon.com, for example, was removed from airline and hotel shopping portals it remained on the HawaiianMiles marketplace, allowing you to earn HawaiianMiles for all your Amazon.com purchases. For heavy users of Amazon.com, that might mean tens of thousands of HawaiianMiles per year.

The second reason to look at HawaiianMiles is their travel partners. While you might not be interested in flying on Hawaiian metal between North America and Hawaii or the Pacific rim, you might be more interested in flying on their partner airlines. Since they have a fairly eclectic mix of revenue-based, distance-based, and zone-based travel partners, I had the idea of comparing HawaiianMiles redemptions on each partner with redemptions of that partner's own rewards currency.

Let's take a look!

All Nippon Airways

ANA is a transfer partner of American Express Membership Rewards, so their points are relatively easy to earn for folks with American Express cards that earn flexible Membership Rewards points.

Unfortunately, HawaiianMiles can't be redeemed for ANA flights between North America and Japan. Instead, there are two kinds of awards you can book: roundtrips between Hawaii and Haneda, in economy or business class; and roundtrips between Haneda and domestic Japanese destinations, in economy only.

There's no other way to say it: ANA's award chart for flights on their own metal is nuts. Here's Scott Mackenzie doing his best to explain it. However, we're just focused on the conversion rate between HawaiianMiles and ANA Mileage Club miles, which isn't too hard.

• Roundtrip domestic ANA flights up to 600 miles cost between 10,000 and 15,000 ANA miles depending on season, and 18,000 HawaiianMiles year-round, for a conversion rate of between 1.2 and 1.8 HawaiianMiles per ANA Mileage Club mile;
• Roundtrip domestic ANA flights over 600 miles cost between 12,000 and 23,000 ANA miles depending on distance and season. However, there are no eligible cities farther than 2,000 miles from Haneda airport so the equivalent ANA chart actually tops out at 21,000 ANA miles during high season. These flights cost 22,500 HawaiianMiles year-round, for a conversion rate of between 1.07 and 1.88 HawaiianMiles per ANA Mileage Club mile.
• Roundtrip ANA flights between Haneda and Hawaii cost between 35,000 and 43,000 ANA miles in economy, depending on season, and 90,000 HawaiianMiles, for a conversion rate between 2.09 and 2.57 HawaiianMiles per ANA Mileage Club mile.
• Roundtrip ANA flights between Haneda and Hawaii cost between 60,000 and 68,000 ANA miles in business, depending on season, and 155,000 HawaiianMiles, for a conversion rate between 2.28 and 2.58 HawaiianMiles per ANA Mileage Club mile.

HawaiianMiles are worth between 0.39 and 0.94 ANA miles.

JetBlue

JetBlue's TrueBlue loyalty program is revenue based, although the dollar value you get per TrueBlue point varies depending on, well, it varies. On a random search I found 6 different conversion rates, between 0.91 cents per TrueBlue point and 1.39 cents per TrueBlue point, with an average of 1.11 cents per TrueBlue point.

HawaiianMile redemptions on JetBlue are also revenue based, although the conversion rate comes with the stern warning: "Miles required for redemption will vary based on ticket value. Chart above shows ESTIMATED mileage redemption amounts."

Nonetheless, it's possible to calculate the minimum and maximum dollar value per HawaiianMile, and arrive at an average redemption value of 0.81 cents per HawaiianMile. Compared to the average of 1.11 cents per TrueBlue point, one HawaiianMiles is worth about 0.73 TrueBlue points. 

Korean Air

Korean Air SKYPASS miles are easy to earn through transfers from Chase Ultimate Rewards, but of course Ultimate Rewards points are valuable for all sorts of redemptions, so you might prefer to redeem a less flexible and less valuable rewards currency like HawaiianMiles instead.

There are three kinds of HawaiianMiles redemptions on Korean Air: roundtrips within South Korea, roundtrips within "Asia," and roundtrips between Korea and the United States. Flights can be booked in coach and business class. To the best of my knowledge Korean Air does not make partner awards available during their "peak" travel season, so HawaiianMiles can only be used for Korean Air redemptions during SKYPASS's "off" season (if you know otherwise let me know and I'll update this post).

• Coach roundtrips within Korea cost 10,000 SKYPASS miles or 15,000 HawaiianMiles, for a conversion rate of 1.5 HawaiianMiles per SKYPASS mile;
• Business roundtrips within Korea cost 12,000 SKYPASS miles or 30,000 HawaiianMiles, for a conversion rate of 2.5 HawaiianMiles per SKYPASS mile;
• Korean Air has three different zones in Asia, while HawaiianMiles has only a single zone. SKYPASS charges between 30,000 and 50,000 miles for coach tickets depending on zone, while Hawaiian charges 30,000 HawaiianMiles, for a conversion rate of between 0.6 and 1 HawaiianMiles per SKYPASS mile. In other words, HawaiianMiles are 40% more valuable than SKYPASS miles when redeemed for Korean Air flights to Southwest Asia;
• In business class between Korea and Asian destinations, SKYPASS charges between 45,000 and 90,000 miles while HawaiianMiles charges 60,000 miles, for a conversion rate between 0.67 and 1.33 HawaiianMiles per SKYPASS miles;
• Finally, between Korea and the United States SKYPASS charges 70,000 miles in coach and 125,000 miles in business, while HawaiianMiles charges 100,000 miles in coach and 200,000 miles in business, for a conversion rate of 1.43 HawaiianMiles per SKYPASS mile in coach and 1.6 HawaiianMiles per SKYPASS mile in business.

In sum, one HawaiianMile is worth between 0.4 SKYPASS miles (on domestic business class flights) and 1.66 SKYPASS miles (on coach flights to Southwest Asia).

Virgin America

Like JetBlue, Virgin America's Elevate program is revenue based. Unlike JetBlue, however, HawaiianMiles redemptions on Virgin America are distance-based, with three distance bands: under 750 miles, between 750 and 2,000 miles, and more than 2,000 miles. Virgin America Elevate doesn't black out award space to their own members (since the program is revenue based), but they do limit award availability made available to partners.

Until recently, there was no good way of checking Virgin America partner award availability, but since Alaska acquired Virgin America, it's now possible to search for partner award seats using the Alaska search engine. Look for dates where the lowest level award seats are available.

I can't think of any useful metric to convert a distance-based award chart into a revenue-based program. Elevate miles are worth "about" 2.2 cents each, so that's as good a benchmark as any when deciding whether to redeem HawaiianMiles on Virgin America flights.

Virgin Atlantic

Virgin Atlantic's Flying Club breaks out award prices for each of their destinations individually, while HawaiianMiles consolidates them into geographic areas. That means HawaiianMiles charges the same price for destinations that Virgin Atlantic charges different amounts for. Here's the HawaiianMile award chart for redemptions on Virgin Atlantic, helpfully annotated with the amount charged by Virgin Atlantic Flying Club:

View fullsize

The key takeaway is that while redemptions always require more HawaiianMiles than Flying Club miles, the difference narrows on Upper Class redemptions since HawaiianMiles awards don't accelerate in price the way Flying Club awards do. So while HawaiianMiles are worth between 0.25 and 0.42 Flying Club miles for economy redemptions, they're worth up to 0.92 Flying Club miles on Upper Class redemptions between, for example, the UK and Johannesburg.

Note that all redemptions on Virgin Atlantic will have carrier surcharges, which you can get a sense of on the Flying Club website.

Virgin Australia

Virgin Australia's Velocity program is only open to residents of Australia and a few other countries in the Pacific, so you're unlikely to ever actually redeem Velocity miles for a Virgin Australia flights.

HawaiianMiles and Virgin Australia Velocity both use distance-based award charts, although they use different distance bands (Velocity has more, smaller bands). Here's the HawaiianMiles award chart, with the corresponding cost in Virgin Australia Velocity miles:

View fullsize

Note that Australia is very far from the other continents so unless you're flying around the South Pacific all international redemptions will fall in the "Over 4,000 Miles" distance band, where HawaiianMiles are worth between 0.28 and 0.6 Velocity miles each in economy and between 0.3 and 0.64 Velocity miles in business.

Conclusion

Now that we've reached the end of the exercise, what kinds of conclusions can we draw? First, it's worth reiterating that HawaiianMiles are not very valuable, so you certainly shouldn't be going out of your way to earn them.

However, if you have access to cheap and plentiful HawaiianMiles, it's possible to redeem them for real value:

• If you live in a city served by JetBlue, HawaiianMiles are worth an average of 0.81 cents towards those flights. It would take a lot of HawaiianMiles before you could redeem for a cross-country flight in their Mint business class product, but if that's the flight I wanted to take I'd much rather redeem HawaiianMiles than pay cash!
• If you can find partner award space on Virgin America, short roundtrip flights cost as little as 20,000 in economy, and the longest flights in first class top out at just 90,000 HawaiianMiles roundtrip.
• If you can find Korean Air partner award space, HawaiianMiles can be redeemed for first class travel between the United States and Korea, or within Asia, at relatively reasonable rates.

If you don't have the patience or inclination to book travel on Hawaiian's partner airlines, HawaiianMiles can be transferred to Hilton HHonors points at a rate of 1.5 HHonors points per HawaiianMile. HHonors points are also not very valuable, but they're much easier to redeem than HawaiianMiles.

Finally, HawaiianMiles can be redeemed for about half a cent each in rental car gift certificates, or even gift certificates to Foodland, a Hawaiian supermarket chain.

Unbonused spend outlook for 2017

Earlier this month I wrote about the BankAmericard Travel Rewards credit card and Bank of America Preferred Rewards Platinum Honors, and favorably compared that combination to some of the best deals in travel hacking:

• A Chase Ink Plus and Sapphire Reserve, earning 7.5 cents per dollar towards paid travel on office supply store purchases;
• an Ink Plus and Southwest Companion Pass, earning up to roughly 16 cents per dollar on your office supply store spend;
• and an American Express Premier Rewards Gold card and Platinum Business card, earning 4 cents per dollar towards premium cabin airfare on supermarket purchases.

Those are great values. But if your appetite for manufactured spend is higher than your office supply store and supermarket purchase or liquidation bandwidth, you may be interested in manufacturing unbonused spend, as well.

With that in mind, here are some of the best current deals in unbonused manufactured spend.

Southwest Companion Pass

Earlier this month there was much hullabaloo about the impending loss of the ability to earn a Southwest Companion Pass through hotel transfers. But it's still possible to earn the Companion Pass through credit card spend (as well as signup bonuses).

The $99-annual-fee Southwest Rapid Rewards Premier card earns 6,000 Rapid Rewards points each account anniversary, while the $69-annual-fee Plus card earns 3,000 points. That works out to 1 cent per anniversary point, which is not a great value if you're already planning to manufacture large amounts of lower-cost spend on the card.

It's easy to overstate the case for earning the Companion Pass through unbonused spend, so let's be clear about the tradeoffs involved. For example, the Chase Freedom Unlimited earns 1.5 Ultimate Rewards points per dollar spent everywhere. On $104,000 in unbonused spend, which would earn 156,000 Ultimate Rewards points with a Chase Freedom Unlimited or (with the Companion Pass) the equivalent of 208,000 Rapid Rewards points redeemed for companion tickets, you're being paid $520 to "lock in" your preference for Southwest over Chase's other Ultimate Rewards transfer partners. That's the cash value of the 52,000 Ultimate Rewards points you don't have to earn to get the same value in Southwest flights.

The more highly you value the flexibility of Ultimate Rewards' transfer partners, the less willing you should be to lock in Southwest as your earning preference. In other words, paying twice as much for a Southwest ticket than you would if you'd earned a Companion Pass may still be worthwhile if you're getting three times more value from Hyatt or United transfers, which is not unreasonable at prestige properties or in premium cabins.

American Express Blue for Business

It's currently possible to sign up for a Blue for Business American Express card that earns 2.3 Membership Rewards points per dollar spent everywhere, on up to $50,000 in purchases during the first year of cardmembership. Mechanically speaking, you earn 1 bonus point per dollar spent, on up to $50,000 in spend, and then a 30% bonus on base (but not bonus) points earned at the end of the first year.

Since Membership Rewards points — even fixed-value, non-flexible Membership Rewards points like those earned by this card — are worth 1 cent each towards paid travel, if you book paid travel through the Membership Rewards portal you can treat this as a 2% cash back card that earns a bonus $150 in travel at the end of the first calendar year (if you reach the maximum of $50,000 in bonused spend).

Of course the real value of this card is unlocked when you combine it with a flexible Membership Rewards-earning card, allowing you to transfer your points to an American Express travel partner, or with a Platinum Business card, doubling the value of your Membership Rewards points when redeemed on one airline of your choice or when redeemed on any airline in a premium cabin.

Discover it Miles

The Discover it Miles offers 1.5 "miles" per dollar spent on all purchases, which can be redeemed against travel purchases made with the card or as an electronic deposit to your bank account. At the end of the first year of cardmembership, all the miles earned during that first year are doubled.

That means the Discover it Miles card earns 3% cash back on all purchases for the first year of cardmembership: 1.5% cash back on each statement, and another 1.5% cash back at the end of the year.

High Spend Bonuses

Finally, you may choose to manufacture unbonused spend on cards that don't offer a particularly high earning rate but give valuable benefits to cardholders who reach high spend thresholds:

• Delta SkyMiles Platinum and Reserve personal and business American Express cards offer bonus redeemable and elite-qualifying miles upon reaching certain spend thresholds;
• the Citi Hilton HHonors Reserve card offers an annual weekend night, redeemable at any Hilton property worldwide, to cardholders who spend $10,000 per year on the card;
• Club Carlson Premier and Business credits cards offer an annual free night certificate, redeemable only in the United States, at the end of each cardmember year you spend $10,000;
• The Chase Hyatt credit card, even after the transition to World of Hyatt on March 1, 2017, apparently will continue to offer up to 10 elite-qualifying night credits for $40,000 in spend per calendar year. Since that amount of spend will also earn 40,000 World of Hyatt points, you're sacrificing 20,000 World of Hyatt points compared to manufacturing the same spend with a Chase Freedom Unlimited card, or $20 in cash value per elite-qualifying night. If you expect you'll earn 45 elite-qualifying nights in 2017 through paid stays, those 10 bonus nights might be enough to earn you Globalist status through February, 2019.

Conclusion

Earning 2% cash back is a good baseline for unbonused spend, and one I use myself. Still, opportunities exist to get more value than that by taking advantage of card-specific bonuses. You can take advantage of the benefits most valuable to you, and then work your way down the ladder of value to that 2% baseline where you're confident you're not leaving any money on the table.