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.

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.

Monitoring prices and rebooking can be one of the highest-return plays

For experienced travel hackers, the game can sometimes feel a bit mechanical: you earn the most valuable points you can at the lowest cost you can, and periodically re-evaluate which points are the most valuable, and how to earn them at the lowest cost. This doesn’t necessarily make it easy (electrical engineering is also “mechanical” — but it’s still hard!), since earning and redemption opportunities are constantly changing, but when you have a framework in mind it makes it relatively simple to calculate which miles and points are worth earning and when.

But travel hacking isn’t just about earning miles and points efficiently; it’s about paying as little as possible for the trips you want to take. When business class awards are available, or hotel rooms during peak demand periods like the Kentucky Derby are bookable with points, that can often mean saving hundreds or thousands of dollars booking awards. But the cheapest way to book a room, flight, or rental car may well be with cash, and monitoring those prices can save you with a few clicks hundreds of dollars that would take hours of manufactured spend to earn.

The bad old days: Southwest, hotels, and car rentals

These are the three buckets I put the best-behaved companies from the pre-pandemic days into.

• Southwest Airlines would allow you to change or refund Rapid Rewards points into your account up until your flight’s departure, so monitoring the price of your flights from the time you book up until your flight time would allow you to shave down the price a few hundred or thousand points at a time. Paid flights were slightly more restrictive, since any price difference would be deposited in an eventually-expiring travel bank account that could only be used by the original ticketed passenger, which created some urgency to plug more money into the Southwest Airlines ecosystem.

• Hotels have long had flexible rates which require no upfront payment and cancellation policies between 1 and 5 days before arrival. This creates an obvious incentive to immediately book every hotel you’re even considering staying at. If prices fall, rebook at the lower price, and if prices rise, cancel the more expensive reservations and keep the cheapest. If you have high-level status in multiple hotel loyalty programs, this also allows you to monitor for upgrades as you approach your travel date: at the same price point, you might prefer a Globalist suite upgrade at the Park Hyatt Vienna over a standard room at the Hilton Vienna Park, but access to the Hilton executive lounge over a standard room at the Park Hyatt. Booking both in advance lets you pick the one you end up wanting more. And no, I’m not comparing the two hotels in terms of price or quality, but if a family of 4 is deciding whether to book one room at the Park Hyatt (hoping for a suite upgrade that accommodates them all) or two rooms at the Hilton, the prices can sometimes end up fairly close.

• Rental cars are even better, since they don’t even require billing information to book most rates, and Autoslash exists to both find the cheapest rates and monitor existing reservations to alert you when rates fall and you should rebook. Purely as a courtesy to the overworked rental car company staff I usually cancel my prior reservations when I rebook, but it’s not strictly necessary.

Other than those obvious examples, before the pandemic opportunities to rebook and save money were fairly limited. Mid-level airline elite status usually allowed you to redeposit awards tickets for a full refund, so if flights were expensive enough to meet whatever your threshold is to book using airline miles (and everyone’s threshold is different!), but subsequently dropped below that threshold, you could cancel your award tickets and rebook using cash.

Likewise, schedule changes that move your departure or arrival by more than an hour could be refunded to the original form of payment, so if you booked your flights far enough in advance you had a good chance of having an opportunity to request a penalty-free refund, as I did in May, 2020.

The opportunity set has greatly expanded

All of the tools I described above still exist, but the new “permanent” (where I have I heard that before?) policies adopted by US airlines have increased the number of opportunities to save money by booking early and continuing to monitor prices afterwards. However, while they sound similar and were announced around the same time frame, to take advantage of them you need to understand the key differences between airline policies.

1. Which fares are eligible? United, American, and Delta exempt Basic Economy fares from their no-change-fee policy, as Alaska does with its Saver fares and JetBlue with its Blue Basic fares. If you’re trying to play fares against each other, be sure not to book a fare that’s non-changeable and non-refundable! Note that these non-changeable fares are still eligible for refund under Department of Transportation rules if there’s a significant schedule change.

2. What happens when you cancel? For paid fares, unless you’re eligible for a refund due to a schedule change, or booked into a refundable fare class, you’ll usually be given a “flight credit” (United), “travel credit” (American, JetBlue), “eCredit” (Delta) or “Wallet” (Alaska). These funds expire, so it’s important to keep a close eye on them.

3. Who can use the ticket value? I believe (but correct me in the comments if I’m wrong) Alaska is the only airline that allows you to deposit “Wallet” funds into your own Wallet or, by requesting a voucher be e-mailed to you, any other Mileage Plan account. This is notably a way to share Companion Fares without sharing the cardholder’s credit card information, since Companion Fares can be paid for in full using Wallet funds, even if the person booking the ticket is not an Alaska Airlines credit cardholder (if Wallet funds don’t cover the full cost, any residual must be paid for with an Alaska Airlines credit card).

4. What are your expected flight needs? This is a highly individualized calculation. For example, my partner and I fly to the Pacific Northwest on Alaska and the Midwest on American and Delta at least once or twice per year, so any travel credit, eCredit, or Wallet funds I receive by cancelling a flight on those airlines is absolutely certain to be used. Conversely, it appears I have not flown on United since October, 2017 (although I may be breaking that streak this summer!), so I would never book a paid United flight as a “backup” since there’s virtually no chance I would ever use the flight credit.

Conclusion: use flexibility to your advantage, but don’t get too clever

Especially with respect to hotels and rental cars, making multiple reservations as far in advance as possible and then monitoring prices for opportunities to rebook has always made sense. But the added flexibility of pandemic airline policies makes this is a meaningful way to save money on all the main components of travel planning.

Still, as the voice of caution, I have to remind my beloved readers not to bite off more than they can chew. While rental cars don’t typically charge no-show fees, airlines and hotels absolutely do, so if you don’t trust yourself to keep a close eye on all your reservations as your travel date approaches, don’t bother, since a single no-show penalty is going to wipe out any savings you may have been counting on in advance.

Is this is the best way to get to England?

Like a lot of people, I’ve been missing international travel for the past few years, but without any actual need to travel abroad I haven’t been terribly anxious about it, instead sticking to road trips here in the mid-Atlantic and flights to visit friends and family. With the (first) omicron wave subsiding for now, however, I’ve ramped up planning for a long-awaited trip to England and the (delayed) centenary of the democratic school I attended in the 90’s, Summerhill.

More than almost any other country, possibly short of the Maldives and its mandatory local transfers, England is loathed by travel hackers for the extortionate surcharges they impose on award tickets. It’s not unusual to see cash fares that are only marginally lower than the fees imposed on top of miles redeemed for awards.

So here’s my thinking as I work through my plan to book our trip to England.

Comparing like to like

The most astonishing thing to me while searching for flights is that basic economy fares across the Atlantic no longer include checked bags. Obviously this has been the case on domestic flights for years, but it never would have occurred to me that people had started flying internationally with only what they could stuff into an overhead bin. It seems frankly barbaric.

Since our trip is planned for a few weeks, checked bags are non-negotiable, which meant the first calculation was to determine the true cash cost of our tickets. While non-stop basic economy flights were available for as little as $738 roundtrip, once the cost of checked baggage was added the price rose to $881 per person.

At $738 I might have just pulled the trigger and booked with cash. At $881 I needed to find a better way.

United award availability is wide open

For reasons known only to Rishi Sunak and the Queen, the extortionate Air Passenger Duty is only charged on flights departing the United Kingdom. Non-stop flights on United from the US to London only incur the nominal $5.60 US tax, and 30,000 MileagePlus miles. Importantly, they also include a free checked bag, making this a $440 value, or 1.45 cents per mile — whether or not you think that’s a good deal depends on whether you hate flying United as much as I do.

Since I have 30,000 MileagePlus miles in my account already, and my partner just shy of that, emptying both our United accounts in one fell stroke is a no-brainer.

That leaves the return.

British Airways Executive Club offers a backdoor to one-way tickets

If one-way tickets were available for half the cost of roundtrips, I’d just book the return with cash. But adhering to an ancient pricing tradition, one-way tickets back from England are extortionately expensive — starting at over $2,000 per person!

Meanwhile, the Air Passenger Duty makes award tickets booked through British Airways’ oneworld partners Alaska Air and American Airlines equally absurd: 32,500 Mileage Plus miles and $390, or 30,000 AAdvantage miles and $377. Out of the question.

Then I remembered British Airways Executive Club. Not only does Executive Club allow you to book one-way, distance-based tickets, but it also doesn’t require you to have the full amount of Avios in your account to book: you can “plus up” the difference between your balance and the number of Avios required for your flight. On an “off-peak” date, a “true” economy award costs 13,000 Avios and $389. However, British Airways allows you to spend just 4,550 Avios and “buy” the remaining 8,450 Avios for just $100, or 1.2 cents per Avios.

Since I plan to redeem my Ultimate Rewards points for much more than 1.2 cents each, I have no interest in transferring 26,000 points to Avios to book a “true” award. Instead, the 10,000 Ultimate Rewards points I need to transfer to book this award is essentially a way to pay a small surcharge to book a one-way ticket where it otherwise wouldn’t be possible. $489 isn’t exactly half the price of an $881 roundtrip, but it’s good enough for me. With our oneworld elite status through Alaska Airlines, checked bags will be no problem.

Any suggestions?

I haven’t pulled the trigger on any of these redemptions yet so if any of my beloved readers have a better idea how to spend as little cash as possible on a simple non-stop roundtrip to London, I’m all ears.

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.

Matching Hyatt Explorist or Globalist status to MLife Gold status in 9 words

1. Click here

2. Log in

3. Click “OPT IN”

4. Log in

Your MLife status will be matched in 10-15 minutes, in my experience, although you do need to log out and log back into MLife to see your updated status.

I’m offering these 9 words as a public service, because I don’t do any “search engine optimization” or care about the amount of traffic my site gets, and every other blog I’ve seen write about this status match takes up to 560, 713, or in one particularly extreme case, 1,088 words without describing the actual actions required to match status.

My experience using Fluz as intended

Gift card arbitrage occupies an odd position between “pure” travel hacking and extreme couponing: it’s lucrative enough that most travel hackers do it at least occasionally, but close enough to extreme couponing that they have the dignity to be a little embarassed about it. Over the years a few businesses have sprung up to smooth that embarrassment.

Raise acts as an intermediary or marketplace for folks who want to buy and sell unneeded gift cards at a fraction of their face value. Because they’re buying and selling gift cards that have already been issued, and often have had part of their balance spent down, you can find cards in a wide range of values and at various discount rates there.

The United MileagePlus X app sells newly-issued gift cards in the exact denomination you need for a given purchase. Instead of offering discounts off face value, they pay you in United MileagePlus miles. Depending on how highly you value MileagePlus miles, their payout rates can be competitive with the rewards you’d earn on a credit card.

Note that whenever you pay with a gift card instead of a credit card, you’re naturally sacrificing the purchase protections offered by most credit cards. That may be fine when you’re ordering a pizza, but probably not when you’re buying expensive, durable goods.

How Fluz is supposed to work

All of this is by way of introduction to Fluz, a gift card merchant with what I would call a “hybrid” approach. Signing up for Fluz comes with a seemingly-unbeatable offer: 3 “vouchers” worth up to 35% of your first three gift card purchases. The person who refers you also receives a voucher after you complete your first purchase (my referral code is “FREEQUENT” if you feel like signing up after reading this post).

The first thing you need to know is that the service is “app-only:” there’s no way to use it from a desktop without using a smartphone emulator like BlueStacks. This will become relevant shortly.

The second thing you need to know is that unless you build your life around it, you’ll never get any value from Fluz. That’s because unlike Raise, which sells gift cards at an upfront discount to their face value, and MileagePlus X, which awards miles based on the value of the gift card you purchase, Fluz “vouchers” don’t discount the price of the gift cards you buy with them. Instead, you earn a “Rewards Balance” that you can redeem against the future purchase of a gift card, but only once you’ve reached $26 in earnings.

Confused yet? Wait — it gets worse. The 3 vouchers you get for signing up are also capped, at $3.50 in value each. So ordering 3 $10 Domino’s pizzas will only earn you $11.40 in rewards ($3.50 plus the “base” earning of 3% on each transaction), leaving you less than halfway to the $26 threshold for actually redeeming them.

Still with me? One final point. Earnings are also based on payment method. Paying with an ACH debit earns the highest rewards, a debit card somewhat less, and a credit card or PayPal least of all.

One thing I will say in Fluz’s favor is that their “voucher merchants” include most of the food delivery services I’ve heard of: Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub, Caviar, and Seamless. I don’t use those services, but if you do, you could conceivably hit the earnings threshold relatively quickly and then redeem your rewards for additional free food deliveries.

My mixed experience using Fluz as intended

I’ve completed two transactions at “voucher merchants,” one entirely successfully and one completely disastrously.

My first purchase was for a $15 CVS gift card, while I was standing in line at CVS. This was how I, naively, believed the app was supposed to work: figure out how much your items cost, then buy a gift card in the closest possible denomination without going over. I paid for the gift card, generated the bar code, and then spent 10 minutes at the register trying to get the cashier to accept it, before ultimately failing. A bit flustered by this ordeal, it was only when I got home that I realized Fluz had attached an elaborate set of instructions to the gift card, including printing it out at home to ensure the barcode was scaled correctly for CVS’s scanners, and with the final addendum, “if none of these instructions work, ask to speak to a manager.” An app-only service that requires you to haul around a portable printer? Is this what Silicon Valley calls “disruptive?”

Thus began my first Fluz adventure: getting a refund. That process began with an e-mail I sent through the app saying I’d been unable to use the gift card. That led to this bizarre veiled threat from them:

“CVS not accepting it could be a cashier issue, which we find is what usually happens.

We can process a refund for you. I would discourage filing a chargeback as our process will involve locking your account until the chargeback has been processed with the bank.”

From my perspective this was absurd: why would I care if my account was locked with a company that couldn’t deliver a working product? A month later, I’ve now had my refund “approved” twice, although the fifteen bucks is still noticeably missing from my account.

My second transaction went much smoother, buying a $17.46 Domino’s gift card that I was able to immediately enter into the Domino’s order page to cover the exact amount of my order, earning $4.02 in rewards (which, again, I’ll never be able to redeem).

The lesson, such as it is, was simple: buy digital gift cards and use them online.

A new life awaits you in the Fluz colonies

At the end of the day Fluz is a fairly primitive data-mining gimmick dressed up in a multi-level marketing ballgown. But even I can admit it’s a handsome gown: gift card purchases are passed through Fluz while retaining the underlying merchant’s categorization, so while you may lose out on credit card protections, you’ll still usually earn bonus points when buying gift cards to restaurants, grocery stores, or gas stations with the relevant credit cards.

So what would it look like to really maximize the value of the Fluz app? First, you’d have to be absolutely insufferable in referring your friends and family. Obviously there are times we do this (you can find my personal referral links right here!), but for sane people there’s a natural limit on how many people you’re willing to pester to do what. In order to maximize the value of the data they harvest, Fluz is relatively strict about account creation and identifying details, so it’s not like a grocery store where you can spin up an unlimited number of rewards accounts by tinkering with your e-mail address.

Second, you’d need to get used to building your life around “voucher stores” in order to maximize the value of the vouchers you earn from your referrals. Dunkin’ instead of Starbucks for your coffee, CVS instead of Walgreens for your prescriptions, Burger King instead of McDonald’s for your fast food, etc. Depending on your geography you may find those restrictions somewhat onerous or not at all.

But finally, to get the most value using Fluz as intended, you’ve got to lean into the data harvesting business model and link a checking account in order to maximize your earnings. That means no credit card rewards, no credit card protections, and no chargebacks. For civilians who have one or zero checking accounts, this should be the highest bar, but in reality is probably the lowest. For travel hackers with dozens of checking accounts sitting around, it’s trivial to leave $50 in one of them in order to pay for the occasional meal at Applebee’s.

To be clear: I don’t think you should use Fluz as intended, but if you do, you’ve got to go all-in if you want to wring any value at all out of the system.

How (I think) the just 4 U double dip works

While I do my fair share of manufactured spend at Safeway, until this week I’d never actually redeemed any of their “just 4 U” loyalty points. Instead, I’ve been taking advantage of their upfront cash discounts on prepaid debit cards. Like many of you, that changed in a big way for me this week, and I’ve now redeemed enough points that I think I can explain how and why the just 4 U double dip works.

What’s a double dip?

Double (and triple, quadruple, etc.) dips represent travel hacking in its purest form: claiming credit multiple times for the same activity. For years you could claim Alaska and Delta flight credit for the same flights, for instance, so each Delta flight you flew would earn redeemable and elite-qualifying miles with both programs — a truly free lunch, my favorite price point.

You can also consider “negative” dips, the most common of which is so obvious people rarely bother to mention it: when you redeem miles or points for tickets or hotel rooms, you don’t receive the full value of the purchase, because the full value of the purchase includes the points you would have earned paying with cash! Redeeming 100,000 miles for a $1,000 flight doesn’t give you 1 cent per mile in value — it gives you 1 cent per mile minus the value of the miles a paid ticket would have earned.

People (myself included!) sometimes use the term “stacking” interchangeably, but at root there is a distinction. If you click through a shopping portal before making a hotel reservation, you’ll earn points through the shopping portal, through your credit card, and through the hotel. That’s a stack. If you click through 2 shopping portals and both of them ultimately pay out (not unheard of), that’s a double dip.

What’s the just 4 U double dip?

Once you start redeeming just 4 U rewards at scale, you quickly notice some wonky elements of the program, the wonkiest of which is that under certain conditions, the amount you owe for groceries can drop below $0 when an item triggers two different kinds of rewards.

You may occasionally be able to ask for a cash refund of the negative balance, but even if you’re occasionally successful the hassle for staff and managers is unlikely to make it a long-term cash-out strategy. Instead, you should try to spend down the resulting negative balance. Fortunately, that’s easy, because the usual rewards exclusions don’t seem to apply to these negative balances.

How does the double dip work?

I’m grateful to FlyerTalk user planetmans for pointing me in the right direction here, since the actual experience at checkout is quite confusing. There are, broadly speaking, three “buckets” of just 4 U discounts: “item” rewards (individual items that are free or discounted), “department” rewards (like the $3 produce and $7 meat department rewards currently available), and "basket” rewards which are triggered by the total price of your purchases.

Item rewards can be stacked as necessary to reduce the price of an item to $0. For example, the other day I redeemed one Reward for a free jar of pasta sauce, which was also on sale, so my receipt shows a $2.79 “Regular Price,” $0.80 in “Card Savings,” and a second $1.99 adjustment in “Grocery Rewards.” All of these are printed together and reduce the item’s price on the receipt to $0. Today I picked up the same jar of pasta sauce, no longer on sale, so the receipt just shows the $2.79 Regular Price and a $2.79 Grocery Rewards adjustment. There’s no double dip here.

Department rewards and basket rewards, on the other hand, are calculated and applied after the final price of each item is calculated. Since they are not tied to the price of specific items, they can reduce your amount due below $0. Hence in planetmans’s example, it’s essential to buy items from the produce or meat departments that are not free in order to trigger both department and basket discounts. That means the purchase of a $7.01 hanger steak will trigger both the $7 off $7 spent in the meat department reward and the $7 off $7 in basket rewards, creating a negative balance of $6.99 — the double dip.

As a side note, I can confirm the meat department Reward is triggered by vegetarian items in the meat department (Safeway carries Impossible and Beyond brand items, in addition to several I didn’t recognize). Unfortunately, there’s only so much vegetable protein slurry anyone needs, and it’s much harder to donate raw meat than non-perishable goods.

Once you understand the rules, the double dip becomes much easier to trigger. The biggest problem you’re likely to run into at scale is also the most annoying part of grocery shopping: unadvertised discounts. As in the example I gave above of the store brand pasta sauce, grocery stores are constantly fiddling with prices through “card savings” that are often not displayed prominently, if at all. You may find the perfect $7.01 lamb chop only to discover at checkout that Safeway decided to give $0.50 off the purchase of lamb chops, reducing your total meat department purchase price to $6.51 and killing your double dip. There’s no fail-safe way around this, but you can reduce your risk by checking your grocery store app and carefully inspect prices for any surprise “club savings” and things of that nature.

When free changes make it worthwhile to hunt for lower fares

If you’ve been following the airline industry at all for the last 6 months, you know that lots of US airlines have made their COVID-19 change and cancellation fee waiver policies permanent for most fare classes:

• United eliminated change fees on all but Basic Economy fares, and on award tickets;

• Delta eliminated change fees on all but Basic Economy fares;

• American eliminated change fees on all but Basic Economy fares and the redeposit fee for cancelled award reservations;

• and Alaska eliminated change fees on all but Saver fares.

There are some exceptions to these policies, mainly for itineraries originating outside the United States, but the overall picture is clear: as long as you don’t book Basic Economy or Saver fares, then you can change your itinerary up to departure by paying any positive fare difference. However, the airlines are handling negative fare differences differently:

• United states “If your new flight costs less, you’ll be able to change for free but will not receive a refund of the fare difference.”

• Delta states “Notwithstanding any rules or ticketing policies to the contrary, if the newly selected flight is for the same travel dates, for the same origin and destination, and results in a lower ticket price, then the reissued ticket will be deemed issued at the same ticket price as the original ticket (i.e., any fare difference will not be issued in the form of a credit).” This is a little bit confusing since it suggests that if you change the dates, origin, or destination of your flights, then the fare difference will be issued in the form of a credit.

• American by contrast states they allow “customers to keep the full value of eligible tickets if they change their travel plans prior to their scheduled travel. Although customers will have to pay the fare difference for a new flight, customers will not lose their ticket value if the new flight is less expensive.”

I wasn’t able to find definitive guidance one way or the other on Alaska’s website. But fortunately, back in December I booked a companion fare itinerary that had since radically dropped in price, so I decided to find out.

Alaska’s confused and confusing booking engine

One thing I love about Alaska companion fares is just how much value you can wring out of them. Their extremely generous routing rules mean you can stitch together two or three vacations with a single companion fare.

Back in December, I booked a roughly 3-week vacation in July with stops in California, Oregon, and Montana for a total of $1,792.30: a $1,664.10 primary fare and $128.20 companion fare. When I checked the identical itinerary this week, it had fallen to $1,105.04: a $943.61 primary fare and $161.43 companion fare.

Alaska Airlines offers two methods of changing an existing itinerary: you can change some or all of the flights on the itinerary, or you can cancel the itinerary and do a new search. I immediately encountered two problems: first, neither option allowed me to select the exact same flights I had already booked. This makes a certain amount of epistemological sense (how can you rebook an itinerary onto the exact same flights?).

The more serious problem was that rather than being offered a travel credit of $687.26, I was being asked to pay an additional $33.23.

The site didn’t offer any useful information beyond that, so I knew it was time to call in.

A helpful phone rep (and those 33 mystery dollars)

After a brief hold, I explained the situation to my Alaska phone rep and she immediately understood the situation. She did a search for the exact same flights on the exact same days, and came up with a slightly higher fare difference of $720.49, which she said I’d receive in my travel wallet. Meanwhile, I’d owe the exact same $33.23 in additional taxes that I saw online, which I had to pay by credit card.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, she did not see the humor in this situation, and did not see the logic in my proposal to simply use some of my $720 credit to pay the $33 in taxes. She did, however, explain that the $33 was the result of a fee that had been waived through December, 2020, but reimposed January 1, 2021. Since I’d booked my ticket in December, but was repricing it in February, I needed to cough up the difference.

Now that I know where the $33.23 online charge comes from, what I don’t know is whether the online booking engine would have automatically calculated my $720.49 credit and deposited it in my account, or if I would have permanently lost it had I gone ahead rebooking the flights online. This is obviously irrelevant when rebooking flights originally booked after January 1, 2021, but if you’re making changes to flights originally booked in 2020 be prepared to call in to be on the safe side.

Conclusion

The bottom line is, change fees are terrible because all fees are terrible, so anything and everything airlines do to reduce or eliminate them is an unalloyed good. But having said that, not all change fee waivers are made alike, and there’s a big difference between a policy that lets you keep the full value of your tickets and one that merely lets you rebook without paying even more on top of fare differences.

When individual airline policies don’t voluntarily meet your needs, remember you always have the option to watch out for schedule changes and assert your rights, instead.