Comparing IHG's 4th-night-free with Marriott and Hilton's 5th-night-free

I was reading Danny the Deal Guru’s write-up of the latest Chase IHG Rewards signup offers and something jumped out at me: the 4th-night-free benefit offered to cardholders, including those who hold the no-annual-fee IHG Rewards Traveler card. To be clear, this isn’t a new benefit, it’s just one I haven’t had a chance to think about in depth.

Generally speaking, I don’t rate IHG or their rewards program very highly, because while they have an enormous global footprint, they’re rarely competitive compared with the main hotel programs I rely on, Hilton and Hyatt. For example, I regularly visit Portland, OR, which on a sample search turned up two downtown Hyatt properties priced at 12,000 World of Hyatt points, a Hilton priced at 37,000 Hilton Honors points, a Marriott priced at 30,000 Bonvoy points, and a Kimpton priced at 25,000 IHG Rewards Club points (plus a nightly “amenity fee”). For a one-night stay, it would be ridiculous to choose the IHG property unless you’d built up a large orphaned balance through various shenanigans.

Since my framework is manufactured spend, not signup bonuses, it’s easy to make a direct comparison between the options:

• 12,000 World of Hyatt points transferred from Chase Ultimate Rewards is worth $120 in cash.

• 37,000 Hilton Honors points earned at 6 points per dollar with the American Express Surpass co-branded card is between $123 (if the same $6,200 in spend had been put on a 2% cashback card) and $185 if the points were purchased for 0.5 cents each, an offer which is regularly available, including now through March 7, 2023.

• 30,000 Marriott Bonvoy points are worth between $240 (if you bought the points during one of their periodic promotions) and $300 (if you transferred the points from Chase Ultimate Rewards.

• 25,000 IHG Rewards points are worth between $150 and $175 if you buy them using the “points and cash” trick (purchasing points while making an award reservation, then cancelling the reservation and having the points refunded to your account).

This makes comparing the four sample reservation options, and indeed comparing all reservation options at the four chains, easy, if on average:

• World of Hyatt points cost 1 cent each;

• Hilton Honors points cost 0.42 cents each;

• Marriott Bonvoy points cost 0.9 cents each;

• and IHG Rewards points cost 0.65 cents each;

then on a one-night stay you can convert the points cost of any property into the cash cost of manufacturing, transferring, or purchasing the required points. In the concrete example above, we saw that Hyatt and Hilton were quite competitive, while Marriott and IHG Rewards were significantly more expensive options.

On four-night stays, the equation changes, but only for IHG Rewards points. On four-night stays at the other three chains, the cost per point remains the same, while the 4th-night-free benefit offered by the IHG Rewards credit cards increases their value by 33% or decreases their cost by 25% to 0.49 cents each — same difference. The four-night IHG Rewards stay now costs just $122 per night, putting it squarely in the middle of the “competitive” pack of Hyatt and Hilton, or even on the cheaper end (ignoring that pesky Kimpton amenity fee, which you obviously shouldn’t in practice).

Moving to a five-night stay, the equation shifts again, but this time against IHG Rewards, since Hilton and Marriott both offer the fifth night free on award stays. The cost per night on the sample five-night stays with Hilton is $123 per night, with Marriott is $216, and with IHG $130. Hyatt doesn’t offer free nights on longer stays so their cost per night remains flat at $120.

Reference Card

I wanted to use a specific example to explain why I personally don’t care for IHG Rewards, but in case you want to bookmark this post or paste the values into your notes app, here are the shortcuts when calculating the cost of stays of various lengths.

Stays of 1-3 nights:

• World of Hyatt: 1 cent per point

• Hilton Honors: 0.42 cents per point

• Marriott Bonvoy: 0.9 cents per point

• IHG Rewards: 0.65 cents per point

Stays of exactly 4 nights:

• IHG Rewards: 0.49 cents per point

Stays of exactly 5 nights:

• World of Haytt: 1 cent per point

• IHG Rewards: 0.52 cents per point

• Hilton Honors: 0.34 cents per point

• Marriott Rewards: 0.72 cents per point

Now you can easily calculate the cost of reward stays of up to 5 nights in length in every city in the world — not just in Portland, Oregon!

When should you optimize for spontaneous, planned, or predictable expenses?

I like to generalize travel hackers into three broad categories, although none describes any individual perfectly.

Roughly speaking, I think of opportunistic travel hackers as people who keep an eye on signup, referral, and manufactured spending opportunities in order to maximize the value of their earnings throughout the year. I doubt this is the largest category, although it receives the most attention from mainstream blogs, so in some ways it’s the easiest to get involved in. Frequent Miler, for instance, hosts a simple page indicating what current signup bonuses are available and how they compare to previous offers.

The flip side of opportunism is that because it’s opportunistic, it’s unlikely to directly or even closely correspond to your needs. For example, take a look at how Gary Leff is currently promoting the Citi American Airlines business credit card right now: “70,000 by the way is what it costs from the US to the Mideast, India or Maldives on Qatar. You can even fly Qatar’s Qsuites, which may be the best business class in the world.” Fair enough, but what does that have to do with me? The message delivered by and for opportunists is “apply now, earn now, figure out what to do with the miles later.”

The second bucket is tactical travel hacking, which is roughly what I did for our stay at the Grand Wailea: I had a plan for the Aspire signup bonus, a plan for the resort credit, and a plan for the Amex Offer for $70 off $350 in spend at Waldorf Astoria resorts, and as soon as I’d used them all, the card was closed.

Just like opportunism, tactical travel hacking has tradeoffs. By focusing on individual awards, you’re more likely to earn the miles and points you actually want to spend, reducing the chances of orphaned miles in random accounts. On the other hand, if you’re concentrated on a specific award, you’re subject to award availability for that precise award space. This comes up most frequently when looking for premium-cabin airline award space, but limited hotel award space is an increasing problem, especially at premium properties that play games with blackout dates, variable pricing, and of course what qualifies as a “standard” room; while writing up this post I couldn’t find a single date with standard award nights available at the Grand Wailea!

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot more about what I think of as logistical travel hacking. Rather than focusing on the highest signup bonuses (which I may never redeem, or redeem at a fraction of their supposed value), or individual high-value trips which may or may not have award availability when I need it, I’ve been focusing on rewards that I am highly confident I’m going to be able to redeem, even if I don’t know when or where.

This has resulted in a subtle transformation in how I go about earning and redeeming miles and points. For example, I’ve written extensively about how companion tickets like those offered by the American Express Delta credit cards and the Bank of America Alaska Airlines credit cards didn’t offer significant savings when compared to manufacturing spend on higher-earning credit cards. And I still think that’s true, as far as it goes. But the higher your confidence that you’ll be able to redeem your companion tickets at something close to face value, the smaller that trade-off becomes.

Take, for example, the Alaska Airlines companion fare. For roughly $121, plus a $75 annual fee, you can book a second passenger on any Alaska-operated economy ticket, including destinations in Mexico, Alaska, and Hawaii, and including some pretty zany routing rules. The same $196 spent on, for example, office supply store prepaid debit card activation and liquidation fees might earn 100,000 Ultimate Rewards points on a Chase Ink Preferred card, worth $1,250 or $1,500 in airfare, depending on your local opportunities and the frequency of in-store and online in any given year.

From an opportunistic perspective, the companion fare makes no sense, since it would be trivial to get more than $196 in value from 100,000 Ultimate Rewards points. From a tactical perspective, you can imagine signing up for the card when you have a specific, expensive Alaska-operated ticket in mind. But the logistical perspective is different: if you always buy Alaska-operated tickets with your companion fare, then you have the opportunity to optimize the rest of your earning and redemptions around the remainder of your travel needs.

Conclusion

I’ve always said, the point of travel hacking is to spend as little as possible on the trips you want to take, and the least valuable point is the one you don’t redeem. That’s still true, but a few years of travel restrictions have managed to convince me that it’s at least partially incomplete. From the opportunistic perspective, if availability suddenly opens up on a premium carrier or at a prestige property, you need to have the points available to redeem immediately. From the tactical perspective, you grind out the points, miles, and status you need to book the trip you want. But from the logistical perspective, you might choose to cover predictable, recurring expenses with tools like annual free night certificates and companion fares even if you might have short-term opportunities to spend less for the same night or flight. As the joke goes, the Pentagon overpays for toilets but they get a great deal on F-35’s.

Like a lot of people getting started in travel hacking, I first dabbled in opportunistic strategies but found I just didn’t care that much about stockpiling points it would take me years to eventually redeem, at uncertain value. Over the course of a few years, I shifted over to tactically earning bonused points in the currencies I was planning to redeem for specific trips: Chase Ultimate Rewards, Hilton Honors, and US Bank Flexpoints, in particular. And in the last few years I’ve increasingly been focused on logistics: if I know I’m going to book a ticket for two on Alaska Airlines or Delta, or stay at a Hyatt or Hilton, then what those companion tickets and free night certificates do is take those redemptions off my mind, letting me focus on the rest of the pieces of a trip, like deciding when to book through Hotels.com and when to book directly.

Don't sleep on Hilton's (extremely) variable award pricing

For some time now Hilton has employed variable award pricing to maintain a rough value of 0.5 cents per Honors point. That isn’t set in stone, and it’s not uncommon to see values as low as 0.4 or as high as 0.6 cents per point, but it’s clearly the benchmark redemption value they aim for across the entire Hilton portfolio. Outsized value of course is available when prices are unusually high and when booking stays in multiples of 5 nights, since the 5th night is free for all Hilton elites (when means just about everybody).

As my tone suggests, variable award pricing is usually treated as a defect in the program, but it has a silver lining: award prices also vary downward, as I found to my advantage during my recent stay at the Hampton by Hilton Glasgow Central.

I was redeeming US Bank Flexpoints at 1.5 cents each for the first night of my stay, and a topped-up Hotels.com award for the second night, which left me with two nights I planned to book using points. Here’s my booking history:

• 7/8/22: booked night 3 for 35,000 points

• 7/11/22: canceled night 3, rebooked for 33,000 points

• 7/13/22: canceled night 3, rebooked for 32,000 points

• 7/21/22: canceled night 3, rebooked for 31,000 points

• 7/22/22: booked night 4 for 34,000 points

• 8/6/22: rebooked night 4 for 32,000 points

That final reservation was just 2 days before night 4 — I had already checked into the hotel, but was still able to rebook that night and was instantly refunded 2,000 points! In total, these shenanigans saved me a total of 6,000 points, which you might reasonably consider to be kind of insignificant in the grand scheme of things. On the other hand, saving those points was a matter of clicking a few buttons on my phone, something we do for far less reward all the time!

Further considerations

In the list above I attempted to draw a subtle distinction: for night 3 of my stay, I was canceling and rebooking my stay, while for night 4, I rebooked my stay without canceling. This is because of a quirk in the Hilton reservation system: when editing an existing award stay, you must have enough points in your account to cover the full price of the updated reservation. When I was tinkering with night 3, I didn’t have the 31-33,000 points in my account, so I had to cancel the existing reservation before using the refunded points to rebook that night.

By the time August 6 came around, enough additional points had posted to my account that I was able to edit my existing night 4 reservation without canceling it first. I simply selected the same dates, the same room type, and 2,000 points were immediately redeposited into my account. This was ideal since I had already checked into the hotel at that point and all four of my reservations had been linked. If I had canceled the 4th night, I would have had to check back in and have the keys remade. A minor inconvenience, but one I was happy to avoid.

That brings me to a final consideration: if you’re not taking advantage of the 5th-night-free benefit, you may find it best to book each night of a 2-4 night stay separately, for the simple reason that when one night goes down in price, another might go up. If one night falls by 1,000 points, there’s no opportunity to rebook if the price of another rises by 1,000 points or more: separate reservations make it easier to capture intrastay price shifts.

Hotels.com exemplifies the importance of redeemable intervals

Affiliate bloggers (and Secretaries of Transportation) love assigning a dollar value to miles and points, which makes it easy for them to compare the value of signup bonuses across currencies and manipulate their valuations when a particularly large referral bonus comes along.

There are naturally people for whom this approach makes sense, like mileage brokers who sell award tickets and hotel stays to folks who don’t know or care where they come from: selling a hotel stay that might cost $10,000 in cash for $5,000 can be a good deal for all involved if you only paid $1,000 for the points.

But this approach has never made any sense to me, since miles and points aren’t fungible. I can’t opportunistically earn 20,000 American miles, 20,000 Delta miles, and 20,000 Spirit miles and redeem them for a 60,000-mile United flight. If the United flight is the one I need to take, my other three currencies aren’t worth 2 cents each, or even one cent each: they’re worthless.

This is one reason I work to keep many of my balances as low as possible. I only have 797 Mileage Plus miles in my United account, and have no intention of earning more any time soon (despite having flown United last month and flying them again next week!). If any potential use does come up, I can transfer the precise number of United miles I need from Ultimate Rewards, and then draw my balance back down into the 3 digits, just where I want it to be.

There’s no better way to illustrate this than with the example of Hotels.com.

Stamps, rewards, and the importance of thinking in tens

To refresh readers’ memory, Hotels.com has an extremely simple rewards program: when you book a night through them, you receive a “reward stamp.” Collect 10 stamps, and you receive a “reward night.” You can then redeem reward nights at virtually all the properties on their platform for the average nightly rate you paid for your 10 reward stamps.

Importantly, however, if the stay you’re trying to book costs more than the value of your reward nights, you can simply pay the difference in cash to “top up” the value of the night. This makes the risk of breakage single-tailed: you can lose some of the value when booking a room cheaper than the value of your reward night, but you’re not penalized for booking a room that’s more expensive (although you won’t earn a stamp on those “top-up” nights).

There are therefore two ways of thinking about the value proposition of the Hotels.com rewards program:

• it offers a 10% rebate on each paid night you book through the platform;

• after the 10th night you book through the platform, you receive a voucher worth up to the average value of your last 10 nights.

Regardless of the approach, the value of the voucher doesn’t change. What changes is the value assigned to each night you book through Hotels.com. If you take the first approach, then when you book through Hotels.com you can mentally multiply the cost of your stay by 90% to reflect the 10% rebate the program offers. If you take the second approach, the first 9 nights you book through Hotels.com generate no value whatsoever — only the 10th night you stay generates any value at all.

I prefer the second approach, because focusing on redemption thresholds makes it easier to compare the relative value earned by booking through different channels, as a recent experience illustrates.

Last month we visited the Midwest for a week to see some friends and family, and the best price I found was, as usual, at a centrally located Hyatt Place downtown. The lowest rate I could find was $136.85 per night, plus tax, which is irrelevant regardless of the booking channel.

Where the booking channel comes in is that $958 spent on a paid Hyatt rate would earn me 4,790 base World of Hyatt points, and 958 bonus points as an Explorist member, for a total of 5,748 points.

Now look at this through the same two lenses as above. On the one hand, since I redeem World of Hyatt points I’ve transferred from Ultimate Rewards fairly regularly, the points I’d earn on this stay could be valued at a minimum of $71.85 — the value of the same Ultimate Rewards points when redeemed for paid airfare.

Through the second, redemption-focused perspective, 5,748 World of Hyatt points are essentially worthless, since 5,000 points is just barely enough to book a Category 1 property, and only during off-peak and standard pricing periods! That story would be completely different if I had an upcoming high-value Hyatt stay and insufficient points to book it. In fact, I have plenty of Hyatt points and free night certificates, so the additional points would simply sit in my account growing stale.

That may well have still been my best option. After all, 7 Hotels.com reward stamps are just as worthless as 5,000 World of Hyatt points. What changed the calculus is that I already had 4 Hotels.com reward stamps in my account that had been rolled over all the way from 2019! That meant “crediting” my Hyatt Place stay to Hotels.com would put me over the redemption threshold and earn me a reward night, in my case worth $141.88, which I promptly redeemed with a small top-up for a night on our upcoming trip to the UK.

Sharp-eyed readers will have noticed one small but potentially critical error I committed: I was sitting on 4 existing reward stamps and then credited another 7 nights to Hotels.com — leaving me with a worthless “leftover” reward stamp! It may have been strictly superior to credit 6 nights to Hotels.com (securing my reward night) and the cheapest of the 7 nights to World of Hyatt (to save future Ultimate Rewards points). I say “may” have been because I didn’t bother checking the rates for individual nights, and it may have turned out the one-night rate was substantially higher than the longer-term stay rate I ultimately booked, erasing the value of the additional World of Hyatt points.

Two additional considerations: cashback portals and the Hotels.com credit card

Just as I set aside taxes and fees above, since as far as I know they are not included in the earning calculation with any loyalty program, I also skipped over cashback portals, which typically offer 1-4% cashback on hotel bookings (including Hotels.com bookings), although with periodic outsized offers, like the current 9% cashback rate at IHG properties offered by TopCashBack. Since those offers are for cashback, and have relatively low cashout requirements, you should always check where your total rewards (loyalty program + cashback + credit card earnings) offer you the most redeemable value.

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Finally, it’s worth mentioning the no-annual-fee Hotels.com credit card. The card has a paltry signup bonus (three $125 reward nights after spending $5,000, which can’t be stacked but can be topped up), but the earning structure does offer one interesting opportunity: for every $500 spent on the card, you receive one Hotels.com reward stamp. As mentioned above, each reward stamp has an assigned value which is averaged into the value of your reward night. Hotels.com assigns these credit card reward stamps the value of $110, so if you put exactly $5,000 on the card (for example, to meet the signup bonus), you’d end up with a fourth reward night worth exactly $110.

If you squint at it just right, that means someone trying to sell you this card could in principle convince you the card has a $485 signup bonus and earns 2.2% on ongoing spend (a $110 reward night for every $5000 in purchases). But that’s not the interesting opportunity offered by the card. Instead, since you earn a $110 reward stamp every time you spend $500 on the card, it’s ideal for topping up your reward stamp balance when your existing stamps have a relatively high average value (and you don’t have upcoming Hotels.com stays booked).

To give a simple example, if you have 9 reward stamps with an average value of $250 each, manufacturing $500 in spend on the Hotels.com credit card doesn’t yield $11 in rewards (2.2%). Instead, it yields a reward night worth $236 ($2250 plus $110 divided by 10).

I wouldn’t say this “supercharges” the Hotels.com rewards program. What it does do is reduce the downside risk of orphaned reward stamps, so at the margin makes it more appealing to book hotels based on price through Hotels.com, knowing that every time you accumulate 6 or 7 reward stamps through stays you can easily calculate the final value of the resulting reward night you manufacture with the credit card.

And if, like me, you have no interest in active participation in loyalty programs like Marriott or IHG, but notice that their properties are occasionally attractive in terms of price, location, or amenities, especially outside of big cities, it may be worth taking a look.

Conclusion

I tailored this post to Hotels.com rewards but hopefully I’ve made clear the point is universal, and not just for people who keep their balances as low as possible like me. If you’re saving up points for a week-long stay at the Conrad Maldives Rangali Island you might well need 600,000 points and a free night certificate, for example. But you don’t need 610,000 points and a free night certificate — only the points you redeem have value, the 10,000 leftover points are just gonna sit there, getting stale.

Hilarious, humiliating admission by Bilt Rewards

I woke up this morning and, compulsively reaching for my phone, saw a tweet so embarrassing I had to read it 3 times to make sure I understood it correctly. Twitter user @playalaguna asked Richard Kerr, the Senior Director of Travel at Bilt Rewards, a perfectly sensible question: “Why is BILT rounding dollar amounts down on points, $2.99 crediting as $2. Most cards round up, at least when it is $.50 and above...”

Now, you may find this user’s tone a bit more aggressive than absolutely necessary, and you may find quibbling over a maximum of 3 Bilt Rewards points (since the co-branded credit card earns 3 points per dollar spent on dining) to be a bit extreme, but the quibble is a perfectly reasonable one, especially since as playalaguna mentions, virtually all rewards credit cards solve the problem by “erring” on the customer’s side.

Now consider the possible responses you could make as a high-profile figure in the travel hacking community and brand ambassador for your company. A few obvious options:

• Neutral: “Thanks for bringing this to our attention! We’ll reach out to our credit card partner and make sure points are awarded correctly going forward.”

• Apologetic: “Sorry about that! A lot goes into launching a brand new rewards program and credit card partnership, and we overlooked that. That’s why your feedback is so important to us.”

• Legal/Technical: “For privacy reasons our current relationship with Wells Fargo only allows us to see whole dollar amounts for transactions so we are only able to award points in whole dollar increments. We’re working to change that and we hope you’ll be patient as we resolve this issue.”

What did Richard Kerr say? “Economics for a startup worked on whole dollar spent. Now that we’re a year in, we’re looking at making all these rules and idiosyncrasies as rewarding as possible. Send me a DM and I’m happy to award you the point.”

This is an astonishing admission. Kerr is saying that not only was this “rounding down” a known issue, it was not a bug, but a feature of the program! Bilt Rewards deliberately short-changed its credit card users in order to award them as few points as possible, in order to keep people from reaching redemption thresholds as long as possible, in order to spend as little money as possible, in order to stretch their startup funding as long as possible.

To call this “customer-unfriendly” would be a gross understatement. It’s downright customer-hostile: the customer is the enemy at the gates, trying to get as much value as possible from our program, and our corresponding duty is to give them as little value as possible.

But more than that, it flies in the face of everything we know about how loyalty programs succeed. Rewards programs attract customers when they offer frequent positive reinforcement, even when the actual value of the rewards is negligible. A few weeks back I received my REI “dividend,” a coupon that can only be redeemed at REI, so I’m going to buy my new bike helmet at REI instead of on Amazon or at a local bike shop. A $15 quick endorphin hit is going to net REI a $45 sale, plus whatever else I pick up while I’m in the store.

Bilt took the opposite tack: overpromise, then underdeliver, or even better from their perspective, don’t deliver at all.

Quick hits: what's on my mind in June 2022

It’s been a pretty slow month in the travel hacking world, and nothing’s jumped out at me so far in terms of killer deals that needed to be passed along immediately, but I’ve been taking notes about a range of opportunities and situations that I thought it would be useful to dump into a single reference post for folks who may have missed them.

Summer hotel promotions

I try to keep my Hotel Promotions page mostly up-to-date, but even if I miss a promotion, it’s always essential if you’re staying at a chain hotel to do a little light Googling to make sure you’re registered for any promotions you’re eligible for. All the chains but Marriott are currently offering universal promotions, so be sure to register for them before you stay.

Hotels.com for non-chain and secondary chains

I recently made two reservations through Hotels.com, one for a 7-night Hyatt stay, and another for a 3-night stay at an independent hotel in England.

There are two important things to keep in mind about Hotels.com. First, stays do not earn elite night or stay credit with Hyatt. Second, they earn rewards through two separate mechanisms: through the portal you click through to Hotels.com, and through Hotels.com “stamps” and “reward nights.”

For non-chain hotels this is usually a no-brainer: a portal rebate (currently 4% cash back through TopCashBack) and a 10% rebate through Hotels.com each time you earn 10 stamps and a “reward night” equal to the weighted average of your Hotels.com rates.

For chain hotels the calculation is somewhat more complicated, since you need to take into account the value of any points and elite status you might earn, especially during particularly lucrative promotions or when chasing particularly valuable elite status.

Hilton 5th Night Free math

Hilton Honors points are almost mechanically worth between 0.4 and 0.5 cents each, although with the caveat of massive upside value at particularly expensive properties, and when using them for 5-night-free redemptions on particularly expensive nights.

There are two important things to keep in mind. Just as Hyatt conceals the total price of an award reservation unless you have sufficient points in your account, Hilton will not reveal the total price of a 5th-night-free reservation unless you have enough points to book the first 4 nights. Instead, Hilton will only show you the price of the first night of the reservation.

This raises the obvious question: is the 5th night “free” in the sense that the average price per night is reduced by 20%, or is the precise 5th night of the reservation free? The answer is that the 5th night is free, which means during periods of dynamic pricing, it’s ideal to time the 5th night of your stay to be the one charging the most points, in order to maximize the value of the benefit.

How to buy Hilton points: Points.com or Hilton reservation?

I needed about 9,000 Hilton Honors points to lock in one of our hotels in London, so my natural first instinct was to click through the TopCashBack portal to Points.com to check out how much those 9,000 points would cost me. The answer: $50, which minus the 2.5% cashback comes to $48.75.

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I then checked out the price of simply “topping up” my existing Hilton balance during the reservation process, and was quoted 34.65 GBP, or just $42.52 USD.

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In other words, it’s cheaper to top up a Hilton reservation through Hilton than through Points.com — even during a promotion, and even when clicking through a cashback portal. It’s a story as boring as it is true: if you don’t shop around, you won’t get the best price.

American Express Hilton Honors Surpass lounge access

This is a bit of a silly one since most obsessive travel hackers have at least one ultra-premium credit card that offers unlimited Priority Pass lounge access, but since I’ve returned to traveling in 2021 and 2022, I’ve really enjoyed the 10 free Priority Pass lounge visits provided by the American Express Hilton Honors Surpass card. The overwhelming majority of our trips are non-stop, but the occasional long layover or delay in Seattle and New Orleans in 2022 has been a terrific and genuinely valuable benefit at times when air travel can be stressful and overwhelming.

Bilt Rewards

Finally, earlier this year a slew of bloggers started promoting Bilt Rewards when they offered 500 supposedly-transferable points when you linked your World of Hyatt account to your Bilt account. I, like a lot of suckers, linked up all my loyalty accounts, and ended up with just 1,400 Bilt points, 600 points short of the amount they require to actually transfer your points to loyalty programs (it would have been 1,500 but I’ve never been able to successfully create a Turkish Miles&Smiles account, for whatever reason).

I’m not here to say whether Bilt is an “ethical” or “unethical,” “profitable” or “unprofitable” company. I’m only here to say that while it exists, you have to hammer it as hard as possible, and one piece of that is only linking your loyalty accounts during promotions. When Hyatt is offering 500 points, link away. When they offer 100 points per account, you will never earn enough points to get any value from the Bilt program; make them come to you.

Double booking into the same Delta award space

So-called “fare buckets” are a curious feature of the airline ecosystem. For the overwhelming majority of flyers, even frequent travelers, the wide-ranging alphabet of letters, usually shown in parentheses after the class of carriage, is simply irrelevant: most people book on some combination of convenience and price, or have little or no choice if they’re required to fly on tickets booked by their corporate travel office.

So fare buckets don’t matter at all — until they’re the only thing that matters. For example, American Express Delta Platinum companion tickets can only be used to book into the L, U, T, X, and V fare classes. If those fare classes aren’t available for the flight you want, you simply cannot use the companion ticket on that flight.

The other important use of fare buckets is for finding award space on foreign carriers, especially ones that won’t show you availability unless you have sufficient miles in your account. Expert Flyer has a paid service that allows you to see the inventory available in each fare bucket for hundreds of airlines.

It’s important to note that there’s nothing magical about fare buckets. There’s not a “fixed” inventory in each fare bucket that never changes. While I assume most if not all airlines assign inventory to fare buckets algorithmically, the algorithms were still written by humans. An algorithm might say, “if there are 6 or more seats available in First Class, make one available for awards.” If that award seat is then booked, the algorithm might run again and make another single award seat available. One of the Japanese airlines is famous for doing exactly this.

Double booking the last available seat on Delta

As I wrote last month, although I’d finally booked my outbound tickets to England with SkyMiles, the price in Mileage Plus miles had ticked back down to 30,000, and I hoped to cancel the Delta award ticket and rebook using worthless-to-me United miles.

Having successfully completed that switcheroo, and with my Delta award ticket instantly refunded, I turned to booking flights to Wisconsin for a June wedding. There’s a single nonstop flight per day, and I found a ticket available for 26,000 SkyMiles. Almost like the good old days! But when I confirmed the dates with my partner and started booking seats for two, the price had jumped to 28,000 SkyMiles each! A 4,000-mile penalty just for waiting a day to book?

You probably see where this is going: the lower-priced ticket was still available, but there was just one seat available in that fare bucket. When I searched for two tickets on a single search, I was shown the lowest fare bucket with two seats in it.

What to do? Well, as Derek Trotter would say, “he who dares, wins!” So I had my partner fire up her laptop and log into her own Delta account. With both of us searching for a single seat, we both saw the 26,000-mile award available.

We each selected a seat, plugged in our payment information, and gave it a dramatic countdown: 3, 2, 1, click!

And we both got the last 26,000-mile seat.

This is obviously, in one sense, an almost trivial anecdote. We both had 28,000 SkyMiles in our accounts so if either of our purchases had errored out with “this fare is no longer available” whoever lost would have restarted the search and forked over the extra 2,000 SkyMiles.

But upon a moment’s reflection, the opportunities begin to come into view.

First, there are lots of tickets that cost more than 26,000 SkyMiles! For example, a one-way flight to Maui from Los Angeles in First Class costs 66,000 SkyMiles on December 3, 9, and 10. But on December 9, only one seat is available for 66,000 SkyMiles — try to book two, and the price jumps to 85,000 SkyMiles each. More realistically for a travel hacker, that means 66,000 SkyMiles for the first and 85,000 SkyMiles for the second, still a difference of 19,000 SkyMiles.

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Second, lots of people travel in groups of more than two passengers. If scalable, for groups of 3 or more the savings start to look astronomical. A family of four might save 57,000 SkyMiles flying in First Class to Hawaii; almost the cost of the first ticket!

I think this is a pretty neat trick, but to bring down the temperature let me state the obvious caveats.

First, to simultaneously book awards you need multiple accounts with sufficient miles in each. For a lot of people in “two-player” mode that’s not a big deal, but if you’re trying to book your kids or parents who don’t play the game, you will quickly struggle to find enough miles in enough separate accounts. If you have friends or colleagues in the travel hacking community that’s a good option, although it will likely involve at least some Zooming and screen-sharing to make sure all the booking details are right for each passenger, plus getting the timing exactly right.

Second, I don’t know how scalable this is: maybe it works for two passengers but not three, maybe for three but not four. Presumably at some point when the cabin is actually full Delta will reject issuing the ticket, so it’s essential to select your seats (different seats!) during the checkout process to make sure there’s room in the cabin for everyone.

Finally, I have no idea if this works on partner or international awards. I was booking nonstop, Delta-operated domestic flights. Would connections break it? Would partner award availability break it? I simply don’t know.

Conclusion

Like everything in the travel hacking game, your mileage will vary. If anything comes from this post, let it be the recommendation to search for individual seats before you search for seats for your whole family, since whether or not this trick works for you, securing one or two low-level seats before paying more for more expensive seats is an easy way of saving miles anyone can enjoy.

While this trick almost won’t certainly work for everyone, on every flight, in every class of service, I wanted to pass it along because it worked for me.

More point transfer hijinx and England trip finally booked

Last month I wrote about my experience combining Chase Ultimate Rewards points between my partner’s non-flexible Freedom account and my own flexible Ink Plus account. In order to finish booking our award tickets to the UK, I needed to shuffle around a few more points and want to share that experience as well since I wasn’t able to find any accurate or recent information online.

Failure #1: transferring Ink Ultimate Rewards point to another person’s travel program

Low-level award availability was wide open on United non-stops to London, so my plan was to book one-way awards on United for a total of 60,000 MileagePlus miles. The catch is, I had 30,000 miles in my account and my partner had 25,000. I could have transferred 30,000 Ultimate Rewards points into my account, but this would have painful in two ways:

• First, I loathe United, and it would have been painful to convert valuable Ultimate Rewards points into worthless United miles when the same points could be redeemed for multiple nights at Hyatt properties.

• Second, and even more importantly, this would have created a new problem — my partner would still have 25,000 stranded United miles! That would have kept me on the United treadmill even longer, since even if we wanted to book a 25,000-mile domestic round trip on United (we don’t), I’ve have to transfer another 25,000 Ultimate Rewards points to my account.

My plan, then, was to transfer just 5,000 Ultimate Rewards points directly into my partner’s account. This, gentle reader, proved to be impossible. While my partner’s name appeared in the United dropdown box, the site simply errored out when I attempted to submit the 5,000-point transfer. Since we had to call to set up the “link” between our Ultimate Rewards accounts, I assumed something similar was happening and called the number on my Ink card.

After connecting to the Ultimate Rewards center, I explained the problem and the agent at first seemed eager to help, although she didn’t know how. After putting me on several “brief holds” to talk to her coworkers and consult her manual, she finally came back and said it was impossible to transfer points to my partner’s account because she’s not an “owner” of the company, just an “employee.” I pressed her on this but she insisted (“helpfully” suggesting that I can just transfer the points to my own United account and book both tickets from there).

So it was back to the drawing board for me.

Success #1: transferring Marriott points between members

Thinking through my options, I remembered that Marriott Bonvoy points can be transferred to airline partners (as can most hotel points, although at uniformly terrible rates. Thanks to Marriott’s loose alliance with United, there’s even a 10% bonus when transferring points to MileagePlus, so the 5,000 points we needed would only cost 14,000 Bonvoy points. Logging into my Marriott account, I was relieved to see that I somehow had earned 20,000 points over the years. Since I hate Marriott just as much as United, and had no plans to ever redeem Bonvoy points for a hotel stay, draining my account swapping one out for the other was a win-win opportunity.

However, the Marriott transfer page provides the ominous warning: “For most airline partners, your Member name on the frequent flyer program account must match your Marriott Bonvoy first and last name.” I wasn’t able to find any information online about whether this restriction is enforced, or for which airline partners, but since time was of the essence I couldn’t afford to have the points locked up in transfer purgatory.

Fortunately, Marriott also allows you to transfer Bonvoy points between members. There are a few restrictions on the number of points you can transfer out and receive per year that weren’t relevant, but there’s one restriction that had me worrying: “Both Accounts must be in good-standing and have each been open for at least thirty (30) days with Qualifying Activity, ninety (90) days without Qualifying Activity.”

The problem is, I had no idea whether my partner had a Marriott account! If not, there was no way we could trigger her eligibility in time to book our tickets. A few minutes of frantic searching through e-mails later, we discovered she did have an e-mail welcoming her to Marriott — but plugging the information into Bonvoy to retrieve her username and password had no effect. It turned out she had a Bonvoy account but had never set up online access to it! I assume this means she enrolled in-person at a conference hotel or something years ago and ignored the follow-up e-mail to set up her account.

This obviously raised the question: does the Bonvoy account need to be open for 90 days, or does online access to the account need to be set up for 90 days?

The answer is, it turned out to be fine. After configuring her online account, I called Marriott’s US number (800-627-7468) and requested the transfer. One interesting issue did come up: when the agent looked up my account, it wasn’t registered to my name. After confirming my identity in other ways, she asked for the details of the receiving account, and when I gave my partner’s name, the agent replied, “that’s the name I was seeing on your account.” I assume this is some kind of duplication check on their system’s backend; since we share an address, their algorithm might have linked our accounts automatically. Artificial intelligence, it ain’t!

While the point transfer wasn’t “immediate” (we tried logging out and back in, clearing cookies, using a different browser, etc.) the points had already arrived in my partner’s account the next morning, so I’d generously give yourself 24 hours before you start worrying your points are missing.

Success #2: Transferring Marriott points to United

This part was thankfully easy, since it can be completed entirely online. However, while I saw some old posts suggesting transfers were immediate, or at least fast, that was not our experience. The transfer was submitted on March 24, and while we didn’t check every day (I hate pestering my partner about this stuff) it didn’t finally post until a week or so later. The delay may be a “first-time” transfer issue to verify the name on your transfer partner matches the name on your Bonvoy account, or it may be a recurring “batch” process so your own delay time may depend on when you submit your request.

In any case, this isn’t very long in the grand scheme of things if you’re regularly emptying your Marriott balance into a partner airline program after every stay, but it’s something to be aware of if you need miles for a time-sensitive booking.

Failure #2/Success #3: booking tickets to England

Naturally, by the time the transfer to United did go through, my award availability was gone. Well, not quite gone: the price had ticked up by 2,000 miles, to 32,000. If I were flying alone I wouldn’t have minded the extra 2,000 miles, but there was no way I was going through that rigamarole again. It turned out Virgin Atlantic also had great partner award availability for 35,000 Delta SkyMiles, and we each had enough miles in our respective accounts, so we simply locked that in instead.

This is not ideal since SkyMiles are worth more to me than Mileage Plus miles (as they can be redeemed on Delta as well as partner airlines), and today I noticed United awards have ticked back down to 30,000 miles, so I may end up cancelling the SkyMiles tickets and rebooking on United after all.

Maybe next time my partner’s in a good mood.

Combining Ultimate Rewards points, transferring Hyatt points, and Hyatt booking follies

Today’s post is a bit of an information dump, but it combines a number of issues I’ve been working through to get my trips booked for this spring and summer and that I haven’t seen covered clearly anywhere else online.

Combining Chase Ultimate Rewards points

For those of us with multiple Ultimate Rewards-earning credit cards, combining points between our own accounts is routine: earn 5 points per dollar in a quarterly bonus category, like this quarter’s grocery store bonus category on the Chase Freedom, then transfer those points to a card that allows for transfer to Chase’s travel partners or higher-value Ultimate Rewards travel portal redemptions.

But what about combining points between new household members or employees? It’s possible, but there are a few important things you need to know.

First, combining points is always done from the “sender’s” side. There’s no way to “request” points, or “pool” points held in multiple card accounts. Each sender Ultimate Rewards account has to initiate a non-reversible transfer to a “receiver” account.

Second, adding a new receiver account can no longer be done online; you’ll need to call the number on the back of your Ultimate Rewards-earning credit card and provide the recipient’s credit card number. Since my flexible Ultimate Rewards card is a business card, in my case I chose to have my sender add one of my non-flexible Freedom cards as the receiver card. I was then able to instantly convert those non-flexible points into flexible Ultimate Rewards in my legacy Ink Plus account.

Finally, senders are only allowed to add “one member of your household or owner of the company, as applicable” as recipients.

There’s a lot to unpack here. Most importantly, it means that you should not set up you and your partner as mutual recipients, since this would use up the recipient slots of each household member. Instead, it would be ideal to keep the receiver’s recipient slot open to add an additional recipient. In this way, points could be moved and consolidated in larger and larger numbers across multiple Ultimate Rewards accounts before being transferred to a single travel partner account.

Additionally, it suggests the possible value of keeping your flexible Ultimate Rewards accounts attached to separate Chase online accounts. The logic here is that while you want to preserve the flexibility of your own Ultimate Rewards points, you also may want to have more than one household transfer target, so if you have, for example, a Chase Sapphire Preferred or Reserve and a flexible Chase Ink product, you could attach separate recipient targets to each online account.

I have not experimented with this extensively, but wanted to alert readers to some interesting possibilities they can explore further for themselves.

Chase World of Hyatt point transfers are no longer instant

Transfers from Ultimate Rewards to World of Hyatt used to be immediate: log out and log back in and your balance was already updated. Regrettably, no more. I submitted a transfer on the evening of Thursday, February 17, and my points didn’t land in my World of Hyatt account until the morning of Saturday, February 19. It wasn’t the end of the world, but since I wasn’t aware of the new delay, it certainly kept me awake for a couple nights frantically refreshing my Hyatt account.

On the one hand, if you’re planning a trip weeks or months in advance, you have nothing to worry about; your points will probably arrive in plenty of time. On the other hand, if you’re frantically booking a last minute stay, don’t count on immediate Chase transfers for your Hyatt redemptions.

Member-to-member Hyatt points transfer timing

World of Hyatt, like Hilton Honors, allows members to transfer points between each other for free using the Point combining request form. For an upcoming stay, I submitted the form on Saturday, February 19. I received an immediate automated response, and the transfer was finally completed on the following Friday, February 25.

So if you’re planning to combine points in order to book an award, give yourself plenty of time to allow the transfer to go through.

Hyatt award booking chaos

Of course, combining Ultimate Rewards points, transferring them to World of Hyatt, then combining them in another member’s account aren’t done for fun. They’re done to book Hyatt awards, and this is where I ran into the truly stupefying and genuinely serious consequences of Hyatt’s new award charts and booking system.

It’s worth reminding readers of two facts:

1. World of Hyatt properties are still defined by category;

2. Within each category, award nights are charged at either an “off-peak,” “standard,” or “peak” rate.

This has the key corollary that a Category 1-4 free night certificate is worth 50% more on a Category 4 “peak” day than on a Category 4 “off-peak” day, saving 18,000 points instead of 12,000 points.

Now let’s get to the chaos. When booking a multi-night stay, World of Hyatt will only show you the rate available on the first night of the stay, even if the property moves from “standard” to “peak” during the stay.

To find out the nightly award rate, you have to view the property’s “Points Calendar.” Here’s the calendar for the Hyatt Place New York City / Times Square:

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In this case, trying to search for a 2-night award stay will show that standard nights are available “from” 17,000 points per night.

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But unless you have enough points in your World of Hyatt account to book the reservation, it will not show you the final price of 37,000 World of Hyatt points, which might lead you to transfer 34,000 Ultimate Rewards points instead, and then find out to your horror you’d run out of time to book the award.

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Finally, and most egregiously, in order for award availability to appear online, the exact same room type has to be available for every night of your stay.

Putting it all together

You’ve made it this far so I don’t want to make you do any more homework and I’ll put the pieces together for you. When planning a Hyatt award and transferring Ultimate Rewards points, take the following steps in this order:

1. Find the property you want to stay at and click the “Points Calendar” button

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This will allow you to see the award rate for every night of your planned stay. Add those rates together and you will get the total cost of your stay.

2. Check standard award availability for your entire stay. Plug your hotel and dates into Hyatt and it will show you whether there is standard award availability in a single room type for your entire stay (although it will miscalculate the total cost of your stay if award rates vary by night). If so: congratulations! Transfer the required number of Ultimate Rewards points you calculated in Step 1 to Hyatt and hope the space is still available when the transfer is completed.

3. If standard award availability isn’t available for your entire stay, don’t despair. It may be the available room types simply shift during your stay. Now comes the boring part: check each day of your stay individually for standard award availability, and book “clusters” of nights in each room type. For example, standard award availability might be available in a two queen room for 2 nights, a one king room for 2 nights, and an accessible king room for 1 night. Book them each separately.

4. If necessary, call the hotel and ask to stay in the same room for your entire stay across all your reservations. They might not accommodate you, depending on the circumstances, but moving your crap around a single hotel is a lot easier than moving between hotels, which I’m not too proud to confess I’ve done more than once over the years.

How I think about hotel free night certificates

I gather from my RSS feed reader that American Express has launched an aggressive campaign to move more Hilton co-branded credit cards in the new year, with the highest bounties naturally being paid to those who sell the most of their ultra-premium Aspire cards. And if you’re selling Aspire cards, you naturally need to play up the value of the annual free weekend night certificate. I like free nights, I like free flights, I like free car rentals, I like free groceries: I like everything free. But that doesn’t mean everything free is created equal, and free night certificates are one of the easiest, and most expensive, traps to fall into.

A free night certificate is worth its opportunity cost…

This is the commonsense idea that you should not value any award based on the retail price of its paid equivalent, but rather the amount you yourself would actually pay under the same circumstances. This is best illustrated in cities where multiple “reasonable” booking options exist.

Take, at the high end, New York City, where the Conrad New York Midtown, a Hilton property, is located about a third of a mile from the Park Hyatt New York. On a random day in mid-June, the Conrad is charging 95,000 Honors points per night, while the Park Hyatt charges 30,000 World of Hyatt points. The equivalent flexible paid rates are $945.30 and $1,202.63, respectively.

First, let’s state the obvious: these are great redemptions! If you became a travel hacker to get a taste of luxury you could never otherwise afford, then manufacturing about $15,000 in grocery store spend on a Hilton Surpass card, or $6,000 in office supply store spend on a Chase Ink Business Cash card, for a night in the lap of luxury in the heart of the metropole is just what you’re after.

…properly understood

But that’s not a strategy, because a strategy needs to take into account your overall travel preferences and needs. Even though it’s precisely what I was looking for, I admit I was still a bit surprised when I realized that 5 nights at the “DoubleTree by Hilton New York Times Square South,” about a mile from the Conrad, is going for just 40,000 Honors points per night, or 160,000 points for 5 nights after the 5th-night-free is applied for Hilton Honors elites. A flexible paid reservation in the same period runs about $1,658 (another great Honors redemption!).

Adding a 6th night to your stay at the DoubleTree using a free weekend night certificate will only save you $332, or 40,000 additional points, a much worse value than redeeming it at the Conrad. However, the redemption allows you to avoid changing properties 1 or 5 nights into a 6-night stay. In other words, maximizing the value of your free night certificate may cost you more in wasted vacation time and family disharmony than any cash savings your mental accounting conjures up.

Free night certificates have different value as different parts of a strategy

The key to integrating free night certificates into your travel hacking strategy is to ask yourself, “where do I stay, for how long, and why?”

Over the New Year holiday, my partner and I flew to Hawaii and stayed at the Grand Naniloa Hotel Hilo, where award nights cost 50,000 Honors points. Our initial plan was to spend 7 nights there: 6 nights for the price of 5 thanks to the 5th-night-free benefit, and the seventh night using my Hilton Honors Surpass free night certificate from spending $15,000 on the card in 2021. I don’t have the cash cost in front of me, but I remember it worked out to “roughly” a 1 cent-per-point redemption.

About halfway through our stay, we decided to spend the last night closer to our departure airport, Ellison Onizuka Kona International Airport at Keahole, so I cancelled our 7th night in Hilo and made a reservation with the same certificate at the 65,000-point Hilton Waikoloa Village.

The essential thing I want to highlight is that this did not save me any money! Moving our last night from a 50,000-point property to a 65,000-point property was an absolute wash, and did not increase the value of the certificate in any way. I even got an identical $30 daily food and beverage credit at both properties.

And this is the case more often than you would imagine. Since most experienced travel hackers have lots of booking options all the time, you should not expect any one booking instrument to consistently provide outsized value. Rather, having multiple instruments available allows you to select the one that serves your needs the best in any given situation.

Are Hyatt free nights more valuable than Hilton free nights?

I’m an unapologetic defender of the Hilton Honors program and especially the American Express Surpass card. Earning 6 Honors points per dollar on grocery store manufactured spend, combined with the 5th night free on award redemptions, makes it an outstanding play for my particular travel hacking strategy.

But I’m also not an idiot: transferring Ultimate Rewards points to Hyatt is a fantastic way to get 3 or more cents per point in value from the Ultimate Rewards points I manufacture at office supply stores, and on Freedom cards during this quarter’s 5-point-per-dollar grocery store bonus category.

While World of Hyatt free night certificates can only be redeemed at category 1-4 properties, World of Hyatt also doesn’t offer the 5th-night-free benefit Hilton Honors (and Marriott Bonvoy) does, meaning I’m never “wasting” points by redeeming a Hyatt free night certificate: each free night corresponds to the exact number of points I would have had to spend on that exact night.

A Category 1-4 Hyatt free night certificate can be swapped in at any place in a trip at its exact points value, without jeopardizing the value of the overall redemption. On the other hand, a 4-night Hilton points redemption can always be extended for a fifth night, either at the beginning or end of the reservation, without incurring any additional cost.

Hilton free night certificates are therefore most valuable if you find yourself consistently making short term, expensive stays, or extending award reservations beyond 5 nights. Under those conditions, the sweetest spots will always be one-night stays and adding 6th nights to stays you’ve already redeemed points for at the most valuable properties in the system.

Conclusion: Surpass earning versus Aspire certificates

For folks with multiple players in their household, this circle is easily squared, by combining one partner’s earning ability with the Surpass and the other partner’s annual statement credits and free night certificates with the Aspire. That’s a great way to play the game. But if you’re playing solo or with a reluctant (or bored) partner, the flexibility of the Surpass’s earning ability and the value of the World of Hyatt credit card’s free night certificates far outstrip the one-off gimmicks of the ludicrously expensive Aspire.