Background and review of my week living an all-scooter lifestyle

Over on my personal finance blog I wrote about the range of programs offered by the so-called “micromobility” companies to provide free or reduced cost access to the scooters and e-bikes that clutter the streets and sidewalks of even the nation’s small- and mid-sized cities. Having experimented with the programs for a little over a week, I want to share my experience using dockless scooters for virtually all my errands.

Experience applying for access programs

Here’s a quick rundown of my experience applying for each of the micromobility access/equity programs:

• Capital Bikeshare for All (online signup appears to be unavailable right now): our local docked bikeshare system is actually administered by Lyft, which also administers their "Capital Bikeshare for All” program. The only program that’s not free to sign up for, once approved you’re eligible for a $5 annual membership which allows you unlimited rides up to 60 minutes. This is actually more generous than regular $95 annual memberships, which offer unlimited 45-minute rides, presumably to reduce the risk of low-income riders accidentally incurring overage fees.

• BIKETOWN for All: I spend a lot of time in Portland, OR, and happened to be there when I started working on this project, so I looked into whether their docked bikeshare program had an accessibility program. Sure enough, BIKETOWN for All, also administered by Lyft, offers an identical benefit of unlimited 60-minute rides, including ebike rides (excluded from Capital Bikeshare for All). I created a BIKETOWN account and applied for BIKETOWN for ALL on June 27, 2022, and later that evening I received confirmation I was eligible and told to sign up for an annual free membership.

• Lime Access: I applied for Lime Access on June 23, 2022, and didn’t hear anything in the “couple of days” promised, so sent a follow-up e-mail to access@li.me on July 1. Finally, on July 8, I received an e-mail confirming I’d been approved. Instead of free rides I was given discounted pricing of $0.50 per unlock and $0.07 per minute. I appreciate the gesture, but I’m not here to pay money.

• Helbiz Access: I wasn’t able to apply for Helbiz’s accessibility program online, but after e-mailing access@helbiz.com with my ID and eligibility documents on June 27, 2022, I received a prompt reply on June 29 confirming my enrollment in Accessibility+, which includes 100 free 30-minute trips per month.

• Bird Access. Like the other micromobility companies, Bird offers a confusing array of discounted and free programs depending on the city you apply from. I started by submitting a support ticket for Bird Access online on June 23, 2022, and less than an hour later received a form e-mail explaining the process of enrolling in Community Pricing (their version of Lime’s discount program). I replied by e-mail that I wasn’t interested in Community Pricing, but rather the free Access program. Again after less than an hour I received a reply correctly explaining the Access program, and asking me to send a photo of my proof of eligibility, which I did the next morning. On July 6 I sent a follow-up e-mail, and less than 30 minutes later received a confirmation that I’d been enrolled for unlimited free rides.

The rest of this post will be dedicated to my experience using Bird scooters, so I’ll just offer a few remarks on the other programs first.

I paid the $5 Capital Bikeshare for All membership fee and did a little tooling around the neighborhood, but I don’t own a bike helmet so until I get one I’m not comfortable doing longer-distance rides (subscribe to the blog to support my newfound biking hobby!). I didn’t get a chance to take any BIKETOWN rides before I left Portland.

Lime is the only dockless scooter I’d ever used before, and I thought it was “kind of neat,” but the problem is that it’s very expensive. The $1 unlock fee (plus per-minute fees) means that for rides of any length whatsoever the bus or subway will be cheaper by an order of magnitude. Obviously a discounted fare will be cheaper than a full-price fare, but for almost all trips I’d rather walk or take the subway.

I have nothing to say about Helbiz because I have never been able to unlock the cable lock now required by DC on all dockless bikes and scooters. I can start a ride, I can push the unlock button, and nothing happens. If anyone has ever successfully unlocked a Helbiz cable lock, please, reveal your secret in the comments!

This isn’t a Bird ad — let’s do the criticism first

I’ve been deliberately taking Bird scooters everywhere for the last week to get as nuanced a sense of the advantages and disadvantages as possible, and I’ve simply fallen in love with them. Since this is going to be a glowing review, let me start with the downsides, of which there are many!

First, and this is a bit silly, Bird requires you to buy a minimum of $10 worth of “Bird Cash” before you can unlock any scooters. I consider this basically a $10 lifetime membership, since I never plan on spending any of it, but it’s twice the price of a $5 annual Capital Bikeshare for All membership, so Bird Access isn’t exactly free.

Second, while I’ve had a lot more luck with Bird cable locks than with Helbiz locks (0%), it hasn’t been 100%. I would estimate around 15-20% of the time Bird cable locks fail to open, whether for mechanical or mobile connectivity reasons. Fortunately, in my city Bird scooters are fairly ubiquitous, so it rarely poses a problem, but if you’re counting on a particular scooter you see available in the app, keep a backup or two in mind because the lock may simply not pop when you need it to.

Third, and of course this is true of all the scooter companies, maintaining balance with heavy groceries requires some practice and involves some danger. This isn’t a big deal when you’re just out for a joy ride, but if you plan on doing regular grocery or other shopping you probably need to invest in a well-balanced cargo backpack (and a helmet wouldn’t hurt).

Finally, give yourself a few rides to get used to the acceleration and speed of electric scooters. Electric motors famously have almost-immediate acceleration to top speed and if you’re not used to it you will be caught off balance. Start slow, get a feel for the throttle, and drive more defensively than you have ever driven before. In my city scooters are electronically regulated to 10 miles per hour which sounds slow, and would be if you were planning to scoot cross-country, but is faster than you are, realistically, able to walk or even jog. Going uphill I regularly pass bikers, and on side streets either keep up with or beat traffic most of the time. In short, 10 miles per hour in city traffic is faster than you think.

Bird Access has been amazing

With that out of the way, unlimited free usage of Bird scooters has been awesome. The easiest way to describe it is that it lowers the hurdle to doing anything. I’m far from a homebody — I walk 5 or 6 miles a day — but when walking even I consider my direction, elevation, route, etc. Bird Access throws all that out the window.

When a 15-minute walk to the grocery store takes 3 minutes, then forgetting to pick up an onion isn’t such a big deal. When a 30-minute walk to a new takeout place takes 5 minutes, you try new takeout places. When an hour-long walk to the comedy club takes 10 minutes, you try out new comedy clubs. On a purely literal level, easy access to rapid point-to-point transportation makes the tradeoff between space and time much more flexible. Walk short distances, scoot medium distances, take transit long distances, with the definitions of “short,” “medium,” and “long” left entirely up to the reader.

Bird has an interesting feature that I had to figure out for myself, since like most apps these days, it doesn’t come with any documentation: you can “lock” a scooter without “ending” your ride. If you’ve never paid for one of these scooters that might sound like nonsense, but essentially it means you can keep anyone else from taking “your” scooter while you pop into a store to shop, so that when you’re finished shopping you don’t need to pay for another unlock fee. This isn’t terribly relevant if you’re riding for free, but it’s slightly more convenient than going through the rigamarole of “ending” and “beginning” rides every time you want to pop in for a baguette or a stir-fry (as I did the first few days until I discovered this feature).

One thing I was worried about when I adopted my all-scooter lifestyle was that I’d be getting less exercise. If scooting is so easy, surely I’ll spend less time walking. But this is a simple well-known error: increased access to (non-car) transportation on average increases physical activity, and indeed a quick glance at my iPhone’s step-tracking app doesn’t show a blip on the day I started scooting.

Conclusion: Scoot Free or Die

Bird Access has a funny feature: when you end each ride, it tells you how much you would have paid if you were paying. Over the last week I’ve take about 37 rides, which I would ballpark at around $100 (partly because I didn’t find the “lock” function mentioned above until about mid-week). In other words, you would have to be insane to pay money to live my all-scooter lifestyle. The logical, sensible thing to do would be to simply buy a personal scooter: even the high-end models top out at a few hundred bucks, after all.

But I don’t want to own a scooter. I don’t want to worry about it getting stolen, I don’t want to worry about maintaining it, I don’t want to worry about whether I’m over-charging it or under-charging it, and I don’t have anywhere to put it. What Bird Access offers is the best of both worlds: unlimited free access to scooters whenever and wherever I want them, and absolutely no responsibility for their care or maintenance. I hesitate to even call it a “business model,” since none of these micromobility companies has ever or will ever make any money, but as long as the rides are free, I’m scooting.

Heathrow Express versus Elizabeth Line

I’ve had a very interesting time over the last few months wrapping up planning my first international trip since 2020. One of the first things that surprised me when I started looking at getting to and from Heathrow was how cheap it was.

Now, there are lots of airports that offer cheap connections to downtown on public transit (the Silver Line connection from Boston’s Logan airport to South Station and travel onward on MBTA is completely free), but what surprised me was that ever since they opened Heathrow Express, the nonstop train between Heathrow and London’s Paddington Station, I’ve only heard complaints about how expensive it is. So here I was, staring at my computer screen, trying to figure out what I had done wrong. Why were they just charging me £5.50 for a 15-minute, nonstop train that drops me off at the front door of my hotel? What were people complaining about?

A few weeks went by as I finalized our return plans, then I hopped back onto the Heathrow Express site to book tickets back to Heathrow, and the price had jumped. It wasn’t extortionate, but now tickets from Paddington to Heathrow were £16.50. A price I was happy to pay, but I had to get to the bottom of it.

Fortunately this didn’t take very long: it turns out Heathrow Express runs a kind of primitive dynamic pricing system, with tickets starting at £5.50 “around” 90 days out, and increasing to £25 in roughly the two weeks leading up to your travel date. I say primitive because there appear to be a finite number of price points: £5.50, £10, £12.50, £16.50, £18, and £25, and they increase at roughly 2-3 week intervals, although sometimes prices dip and sometimes they pop, presumably around dates that are manually entered as “high” or “low” demand days.

What this means is that even if you are unsure of your travel dates, you are better off booking a couple of dates at the lowest rate far in advance than waiting until your plans are firmly settled, let alone booking a ticket on your day of arrival; if I had booked before finalizing my plans, I could have booked tickets on 3 different days for the same £16.50 I ultimately paid. Either way the tickets would be non-refundable and good only on the day of travel, but I could have preserved the optionality of a 3-day travel window, a worthy consideration given the current mess facing busy, understaffed airports in the UK and Europe.

Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Elizabeth Line

All of London is in a tizzy over the long-awaited opening of the Elizabeth Line, formerly known as Crossrail, which runs from Reading in the West to Shenfield in the East, with a spur running from Paddington to Heathrow, which reproduces the functionality of the Heathrow Express, although adding 10-20 minutes to the trip by making several intermediate stops.

My initial assumption was that the Elizabeth Line, as it is integrated into the London Underground, would be a low-cost alternative to the Heathrow Express, but oddly, this doesn’t seem to be the case, because the Underground charges fares on a point-to-point basis, and the Elizabeth Line fare is £10.80 (off-peak) or £11.50 (peak). Obviously that would be a sensible option if the alternative was paying £25, but if you’re able to plan even a month in advance, the Heathrow Express seems obviously superior in both cost and convenience.

The one wrinkle here appears to be that Transport for London caps the total amount you can be charged each day within their “zones 1-6,” which includes Heathrow and central London, at £14.10, and the £11.50 charged for the Elizabeth Line counts against that “cap.” That means if you do end up outside the cheapest Heathrow Express booking window and find yourself taking the Elizabeth Line instead, you should also use the same cap period (beginning at 4:30 am and ending at 4:29 am the next day) to explore as much of London by transit as possible, since you won’t pay more than £14.10 no matter how much you use the system within zones 1-6.

Conclusion

Given the current labor and COVID crisis in the UK I’m totally agnostic about which pieces of this trip will fly by seamlessly and which will require last-minute adjustments and accommodations, so I’m just trying to be as forearmed as I am forewarned. What else do I need to know about transit in London and the UK?

Hotels.com exemplifies the importance of redeemable intervals

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

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

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

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

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

Stamps, rewards, and the importance of thinking in tens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

Hilarious, humiliating admission by Bilt Rewards

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summer hotel promotions

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

Hotels.com for non-chain and secondary chains

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

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

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

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

Hilton 5th Night Free math

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

American Express Hilton Honors Surpass lounge access

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

Bilt Rewards

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

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

Double booking into the same Delta award space

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

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

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

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

Double booking the last available seat on Delta

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

More point transfer hijinx and England trip finally booked

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So it was back to the drawing board for me.

Success #1: transferring Marriott points between members

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Success #2: Transferring Marriott points to United

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.