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.

On the Justice of Squeaking Wheels: made whole by filling out an automated survey

Anybody who knows me knows, the only thing I hate more than driving is renting cars. It combines all the worst features of the travel experience: you’re charged a constantly fluctuating price (thanks Autoslash!), with ambiguous requirements (do I qualify for a USAA rate as a member, or is that for employees of USAA?), face unlimited liability for anything that happens on the road in an unfamiliar car, and are upsold at every single step of the transaction. It’s a terrible experience for customers, and I imagine an even more terrible experience for the cashiers who have to deal with a stream of furious customers all day every day.

I’ve tried to eliminate as many of these variables as possible over the years. In 2020, I bought non-owner car insurance from USAA for the first time to cover personal liability while driving a rented car. I naturally pay for my rentals with a credit card that includes insurance for the value of the car itself. And I fuel rental cars before returning them to avoid paying their extortionate fuel charges.

But that leaves one pain point: picking up and returning the car itself. Different rental car companies have tried to address this in a variety of ways: elite check-in desks, “choose your own car” gimmicks (National’s “Emerald Aisle,” Budget’s “Fastbreak,” etc). But I’m not actually that annoyed by waiting in line for a rental car. After all, I just waited in line to check my bags, waited in line to board, waited to get off the plane, waited to collect my checked bags, and waited to take a shuttle to the rental car lot. What do I care if I have to wait another 15 minutes to get the car keys?

No, what drives me nuts is how car rentals are so completely unlike any other element of the travel experience, and no lesson you learn anywhere else can be applied to understanding how rental car companies operate:

• an airline schedules a set of flights, some of which take off late and some of which land early. But one flight landing early (besides giving the pilots and flight attendants a little more time to use the bathroom or get a bite to eat) doesn’t make any other flight take off any earlier, and in fact realistically is more likely to clutter up the taxiways and gates.

• a hotel sets a check-in time and check-out time, which they’re typically willing to be flexible about if your room is ready early or you want to keep it a bit longer, assuming there isn’t another guest about to check in.

Car rental companies operate more like private jet services or love hotels. You can show up early, or check-out late, but you’re definitely paying for every minute you have possession of the car.

Getting charged for showing up early

Over the New Years holiday my partner and I flew to Hawaii where we met up with my mother-in-law (yes, I know this is also the plot of the Netflix limited series “White Lotus”). Our flight was scheduled to land around 1 pm and hers around 3, so I booked a weekly car rental at the only-slightly-off-airport Budget Car Rental site, with a pickup and dropoff both scheduled for 1 pm on Wednesdays, a week apart.

Then our flight got in early — very early. We were scheduled to arrive at 12:50 pm but were already at the Budget office at 11:30 am. We didn’t have anything else to do (the Kona airport is kind of in the middle of nowhere) so we decided to pick up the car and drive into town to explore for a couple hours.

I popped in to see if the car was ready yet, and after a few minutes in line, was asked “when are you returning the car?” I naturally replied, “I have it reserved until 1 pm,” and the cashier responded, “but you’re picking it up early. That means you need to return it early.”

And she was right!

After stressing about it for 7 full days, I managed to get the car back at 12:20 pm the following Wednesday — 40 minutes before the end of my original reservation, but 50 minutes after my 7-day “week” expired.

They stuck me with a fee that was, for one hour, a full 14% of the cost of the week-long rental.

But then they gave me my money back

On January 5, in what must have been just a few minutes after returning the car to the lot in Kona, I received one of those thousands of automated e-mails asking for feedback on my experience renting from Budget. Like any normal person, I never complete these surveys unless something is obviously amiss or an employee goes above and beyond. But since I was still steaming about this stupid “late” return charge, I went ahead and filled out the survey.

Shockingly, 5 days later, I received another message from the same generic survey provider:

Thank you for taking the time to tell us about your recent experience. We appreciate your feedback since it helps us improve our service and your rental experience.

I deeply regret that we were not able to meet your expectations regarding your previous rental. We will send in an adjustment for the extra hour charge. Please allow 7-14 business days for this to reflect on your end.

I wasn’t exactly convinced this would actually happen (the e-mail address’s domain was “app.medallia.com”), but was willing to watchfully wait. Then, as much to my surprise as yours, on January 26, 21 full days after I returned the car, Budget refunded me almost $100, which seems to actually be slightly more than they charged me for the extra hour, even accounting for taxes and fees.

Conclusion

I know this was a long way to go to complain about how terrible rental car companies are, which is why I’m trying to make a slightly different point: sometimes, somebody actually reads those surveys you submit after flying, staying at a hotel, or renting a car, and if they do, then making as specific, particularized complaints (or praise!) as possible seems likeliest to get the most favorable results.

When did content creators get to be such big whiny babies?

I have a very boring origin story as a blogger: when I was in grad school, I got into travel hacking. After travel hacking for a few months, I realized that virtually all the existing blogs were dealing misinformation to their readers in order to sell credit cards, so I wrote an eBook laying out how travel hacking really works, and launched this website to promote the book (hence the clunky URL which we have all come to know and love).

Well, the book was a dud (thanks to all hundred of you who bought and borrowed it from Amazon over the last decade!), but the site took off, and I’ve been writing here ever since. So blogging for me has always been a case of learning by doing, and the same is true when it came to “monetization.” All the blogs I followed had Amazon affiliate links, so I signed up for Amazon affiliate links. All the blogs I followed had Google Adsense widgets, so I installed Google Adsense widgets. All the blogs I followed had credit card affiliate links, so I applied for credit card affiliate links. And, just in case, I also added the option to subscribe to the blog (originally through PayPal “recurring payments” of all things) and receive occasional subscribers-only newsletters.

It turns out, just like my book sales, Amazon, Google, and credit card affiliate links were all a bust. I don’t write about random crap on Amazon so I have nothing to link to. I don’t write about any high-value Google keywords, so Google only pays me once or twice a year when I crack the $100 payout threshold. And my credit card affiliate link provider immediately shut me down when they realized I was scraping the underlying links from their “preferred” ad copy.

Subscriptions, it turned out, were a model that worked great for me. Even after PayPal shut down my account (for unrelated hijinx), over 90% of my subscribers voluntarily migrated over to my new subscription manager, which I thought was very cool of them.

All of which is a roundabout way of getting to my point: even if it’s true your users are your product, rather than your customers, doesn’t it still seem awfully rude to throw a big fit when they don’t behave as you demand?

The travel blogger crybaby lost his bottle

All these thoughts came to me as I read Gary Arndt’s elegy on leaving text-space for voice-space. Gary lays out an incredible story arc:

• “I was writing for an audience of real people who knew who I was and had made a decision to follow me. My website was an attempt to entertain and inform them about my travels.”

• “…as social media began to take off, I like many other people jumped on that bandwagon.”

• “This gave rise to clickbait and doing anything possible to grab eyeballs and clicks in competition with every other website on the internet.”

• “This meant a slavish devotion to Google and writing articles optimized for bots and algorithms, not actual people.”

• “My income dropped by 95% within a few weeks in March 2020. Traffic to my website dropped. Affiliate sales went to zero and still haven't really recovered for me. All the contracts I had lined up were canceled. An in-person event I had in the works was canceled. Reader tours I had planned were canceled as well.”

What’s astonishing about this story is the complete lack of agency Gary sees in his “downfall.” His website started off as a passion project for interested readers, but then he was forced to jump onto the bandwagon of social media by the “takeoff” of social media, forced to write clickbait to grab eyeballs, forced to slavishly devote himself to Google, and then forced to confront a sudden pandemic drop in his income.

But nobody did this to Gary. It’s not Amazon’s fault nobody uses my affiliate link, it’s not Google’s fault I don’t use high-value keywords or optimize my website for search engines (although Google also is apparently committing a lot of fraud through their Adsense auctions), and it’s not credit card companies’ fault I refuse to use their prewritten copy. My lack of affiliate income is a consequence of my own choices: that I write for the benefit of my readers.

Nobody ever stopped Gary from attempting to entertain and inform his audience about his travels! Everything that took that initial satisfaction away from him was the entirely predictable consequence of his own choices.

Matthew 6:24

Obviously I’m exaggerating a bit for comic effect. After all, I’m not a “personal responsibility” guy — after his income crashed in 2020, I hope Gary applied for EIDL and PPP loans, I hope he applied for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, SNAP, Medicaid, LIHEAP, and I hope he got all the social assistance he needed to pay his bills and stay safe throughout the pandemic.

But nobody made him reliant on social media, nobody made him reliant on search engine rankings, and nobody made him reliant on affiliate revenue. I don’t know Gary, I’ve never read a word he’s written before today, maybe he’s been doing dynamite work as a travel blogger for decades. But at the end of the day, he chose to sell his readers to advertisers, instead of selling his content to readers. That’s a choice millions of people make every day, rightly or wrongly, wisely or unwisely. But please, don’t pretend he or any other affiliate marketer is a martyr for facing the obvious, inevitable consequences of their own actions.

What you need to know about the Hilton Honors Gold and Diamond food and beverage credits

Back in December Hilton Honors announced an extension and increase of the daily food and beverage credit Gold and Diamond elites receive at their “full service” and “lifestyle” brands, e.g., the properties where breakfast isn’t automatically included for all guests.

If you didn’t read the e-mail or already deleted it, here’s the chart they attached to explain the change:

There are two changes being announced here: first, the food and beverage credit is being extended through 2022. Second, in “select markets” the food and beverage credit is being increased by $6 per person per day in the designated markets.

“Free breakfast” has never meant the same thing to everyone

Since I have seen some people complain about this change as “devaluing” the breakfast benefit, the most obvious thing to point out is that long before the pandemic, different properties around the world have interpreted the Hilton free breakfast benefit in very different ways. Four in particular stand out to me, although each has its own subtypes:

• access to the executive or club lounge. This is my favorite version of the benefit, and I’ve encountered it most frequently in Europe, where lounges will often have full buffet spreads in the morning, and then snacks, hors d'oeuvre, and sometimes cocktails in the evening. Keep in mind Hilton’s odd rule that Gold elites only have access to executive lounges if they’re upgraded to a lounge floor, while Diamond elites have lounge access regardless of their room type.

• the “continental breakfast” or “cold buffet.” I’ve seen this breakfast benefit most commonly at Hilton and DoubleTree properties in the United States. The restaurant will typically be laid out as a buffet, but separated into sections so that your “free breakfast” voucher only entitles you to pastries, fruit, cereal, etc., while the “hot breakfast” area with omelettes, bacon, pancakes, and things of that nature is monitored to make sure you’re upcharged in case you cross the cordon.

• the “full breakfast.” I don’t remember the last time I encountered this at a Hilton in the United States, but I’ve run into it multiple times in Europe, where they seem to make less of a fuss over the technical differences between a “cold” and “hot” breakfast.

• the “breakfast credit.” Far from being a response to COVID-19, I’ve seen the breakfast credit used to replace the elite breakfast benefit for years. It was typically “pegged” to the price of a continental breakfast or “cold buffet” on the menu, but properties routinely told me I could order anything and just use the value of the credit. During my 2019 stay at the Grand Wailea Resort in Maui I was explicitly told “you’ll just get a $250 credit at the end of your stay,” and we were glad to spread the credit across multiple meals and venues throughout our stay.

The “COVID” food and beverage credit is better in 3 out of 4 cases

Once we’ve broken down like this, it’s obvious that the food and beverage credit being offered through 2022 is better is all but one case. If a hotel has an executive lounge, then you’ll still be able to have breakfast, snacks, and cocktails there, depending on the property. If a hotel previously offered a continental breakfast or cold buffet, then the food and beverage credit should cover that cost, but with the added flexibility of being able to use your credit for lunch, dinner, or drinks, instead of just during breakfast. And if a hotel already offered a breakfast credit, then you’ll see one or both of added flexibility and increased value (in the “select markets”).

Only in the case of “full breakfast” properties are you likely to come out seriously behind, downgrading from either the hot buffet to the cold buffet or from your selection from the breakfast menu to a fixed continental option.

Of course, that is based on a static, short-term equilibrium of the system. Both travel hacking and hotel management are dynamic and iterative, so it’s more than possible that some “winners” will be shunted over time into the “losers” box.

Most obviously, properties that currently offer executive lounges may close them and switch to a food and beverage credit. If the general idea of hotel executive lounges was to keep down staffing costs by having a minimally staffed space to serve business travelers who didn’t want to wait for a full breakfast service, then hotels may decide they were too successful, and sending guests through the restaurant ends up more profitable.

Similarly, to the extent lounges allow families to save money feeding their kids in the morning, offering free breakfast to adults and charging for whatever the kids order is one option at least some properties will surely explore.

The “continental breakfast” or “cold buffet” is a way to cheaply finesse the elite benefit and I assume that practice will continue, with prices in select markets simply rising accordingly, and properties coming out somewhat ahead after taxes and tips.

Relevant questions going forward

There’s something inherently bizarre about the process of interrogation that happens when you’re checking into a hotel. Wifi? Parking? Late checkout? Airport shuttle? Breakfast?

Nothing about that changed with the new Hilton Gold and Diamond food and beverage credits. You still have to ask: what can you spend food and beverage credits on? Do you have to use them every day, or are they cumulative during your stay? Are any locations on the property excluded?

I think Hilton Honors food and beverage credits will prove more valuable than the previous breakfast benefit because I don’t think very many people were getting much value from the original breakfast benefit. Having a benefit, known in advance, that I can use for anything on the menu, any time of day, is simply more valuable to me than a croissant I can pick up at the breakfast bar between 7 and 10 am.

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.

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.

How I would (and might) maximize the current Series I Savings Bond deal

There’s an interesting deal available right now for folks who have extra cash lying around they are sure they won’t need for a least one year, and ideally won’t need for five.

Fixed-rate inflation-adjusted Series I Savings Bonds

When I first learned about this deal at Doctor of Credit I admit I scoffed. The high interest rate he described is on an annualized basis, but you’re only guaranteed the reported rate for 6 months, meaning you don’t even get a full year at that rate; it could drop to 0% for the second half of the year before you’re eligible to redeem your bonds, meaning you froze up to $10,000 in cash in a security earning nothing for 6 months of the year!

But, the more I thought about the deal, the more I came to appreciate the potential possibilities. So let’s take a closer look.

Series I Savings Bonds have 4 curious features:

• When issued, they have a fixed rate of interest that is known at the time of issuance and lasts for 30 years or until the bond is redeemed;

• added to that fixed rate is a variable, inflation-adjusted rate of interest that is calculated in November and May of each year and applied to outstanding bonds every 6 months (so a bond purchased in January has November’s rate until July — this will become relevant shortly);

• bonds earn interest starting from the first day of the month they’re purchased, so bonds purchased November 30 will earn interest from November 1;

• with limited exceptions, they must be held for 1 year, and redemptions are penalty-free after 5 years (you sacrifice 3 months of interest if redeemed between 1 and 5 years after purchase. I’m genuinely unsure whether the 1-year holding requirement is to the calendar date or to the calendar month of purchase — if you know, leave a comment!)

Finally, you’re limited to $10,000 in purchases through Treasury Direct per calendar year. You can purchase an additional $5,000 in I bonds through your tax refund, although which fixed and inflation-adjusted rate you get will depend on when Treasury transmits the order to the “Treasury Retail Securities Site in Minneapolis,” so you may not be able to get November’s rates if you file for an extension or your refund is delayed for any reason.

Why do I keep talking about November’s rates?

The fixed rate on Series I Savings Bonds, the minimum rate you’re guaranteed to earn for 30 years, is 0% APY, and has been for most of the last decade. But due to the method Treasury uses to calculate the inflation component of the interest rate, bonds purchased from November 1, 2021 through April 30, 2022, will earn a guaranteed interest rate of 7.12% APY.

Now be careful to understand what’s happening here: APY is calculated on an annualized (that’s the “A”) basis, but you’re only guaranteed to earn that rate for the first 6 months you own the bond. After 6 months, the inflation-adjustment will change to May’s rate, and 6 months after that (when the bond is eligible for redemption with a 3-month interest penalty) it will change to the November, 2022, rate.

Series I Savings Bonds are a highly optioned contingent bet on future inflation rates

One way of assessing a bond investment is to look at its “yield-to-worst,” which refers to the yield you would receive if, for example, a corporation or utility exercised a call option at its face value on a bond to refinance its debt at a lower interest rate before the end of the bond’s term. For a fixed-rate, zero-risk, United States Treasury bond, the yield-to-worst is simply the yield on the bond.

The inflation-adjusted interest rate and possibility of early redemption essentially means Series I bondholders are making a bet on the future of inflation rates, but one in which they have all the power.

You may believe, as I do, that May, 2022’s inflation adjustment will be sharply lower than November, 2021’s. So, what’s the yield-to-worst? Since the inflation adjustment is never less than 0%, and the fixed-rate is 0%, you would earn 0% in interest during the second 6-month holding period. In that case, your yield would be 3.56%. That’s not a shoot-the-lights-out great investment, but it’s a solid return on a completely safe investment. After 12 months, you can pull the money out (sacrificing 3 months of 0% interest) and do something else with it.

But however much you think inflation (technically the CPI-U measure of inflation) will fall between now and May, 2022, it probably won’t fall to 0%. Say it falls to 1.9%, which was fairly common prior to the pandemic — now you’ve earned 4.035% on your investment (after sacrificing the last 3 months of interest), which suddenly starts to look pretty comparable to the rewards checking accounts I regularly write about and use.

Optionality is very valuable

When you take this exercise a bit further, you can see the possibilities are even more lucrative than I’ve suggested, since after one year, you always have three options: “letting it ride,” “trading up,” or “cashing out.”

Every November and May, when the fixed rate and inflation adjustment are announced, you can see what the composite rate will be for the next 6 months:

• Let it ride: if the inflation adjustment remains higher than your other investment opportunities, you can leave the money to earn for another 6 months until the next adjustment, bringing you 6 months closer to the 5-year penalty-free redemption threshold;

• Trade up: if fixed interest rates soar and inflation crashes, then you can redeem your current 0% fixed-rate bonds and buy new, higher fixed-rate bonds;

• Cashing out: if fixed interest rates stay low and the inflation adjustment crashes, you can redeem your bonds and do anything you like with the money.

Obviously this is just another way of saying money is fungible and Series I bonds can be redeemed after one year. What makes this interesting is that this series of options continues every 6 months for 30 years!

What’s the optimal strategy to maximize optionality?

Due to the $10,000 Treasury Direct and $5,000 tax refund purchase limits, I believe the optimal strategy looks something like this:

• buy $10,000 in bonds by December 31, 2021 through Treasury Direct;

• in April, 2022, when the March CPI-U data is announced and the May, 2022, inflation adjustment is finalized, you’ll know the total annualized interest rate you’ll earn (6 months at November’s rate, and 6 months at May’s rate), and can decide whether to purchase another $10,000 through Treasury Direct based on that composite annualized rate;

• finally, by April 15, 2022, decide whether to lock in an additional $5,000 in bonds at the November/May composite rate, or file a tax extension and wait until October, when the November 2022 rate will be finalized, and decide then.

Obviously this represents a lot of corner cases and attention to detail, so it’s not for everyone. November’s rate is so high it would be perfectly rational to just lock it in with $10,000 this year and next year through Treasury Direct, and $5,000 next year through a tax refund. But since the genius of these bonds is their optionality, this is one way you can maximize that value.