My short, boring COVID-19 infection, treatment, and recovery

Since the beginning of the pandemic, my family has taken the novel coronavirus just about as seriously as anybody we know. In one way this was made easy since the United States imposed virtually no restrictions during the entire course of the plague, and we were already used to working remotely, so office closures didn’t make much of an impact on our day-to-day routines. And, at least in the period since rapid testing became free and easily available, we managed to avoid contracting the virus to the best of our knowledge.

Until now! For readers who have similarly been dodging raindrops since 2020, I thought a quick breakdown of my infection and recovery might be interesting.

Background: vaccinated, boosted

Since the initial rollout of vaccines, I’ve been eager to get to the front of the line, and received Pfizer doses on March 13 and April 13, 2021, plus a Pfizer booster on November 19, 2021. I had no reaction to my initial dose and booster, but the second dose left me with aches and pains and a very low fever for around a day afterwards.

Infection: possibly Saturday, August 27, 2022

As I said, my family is extremely diligent about wearing high-quality masks indoors, and if I had to guess I’d say mask wearing indoors in our area is roughly 30-50%. On Saturday I went to a crowded, hot, outdoor farmers market, and while I wore my mask much of the time, essentially no one else did.

First symptoms: Monday, August 29, 2022

I’ve been spending a lot of time at our outdoor community pool lately, since it is scheduled to close today, and on Monday started to feel pretty rough. I thought it was some combination of dehydration and heat stroke, and when I got home my partner seemed worried I was a bit out of it. Overnight I began coughing, and woke up with some chest pain.

First positive test: Tuesday, August 30, 2022

It didn’t occur to me to test Monday night, but on Tuesday morning I took one of the dozens of rapid tests in my linen closet, and it came back an immediate positive. It turns out you don’t really need to wait the full 15 or 20 minutes to get your test result: if you’re positive, the test will show it almost right away.

Since I had a pantry full of tests, I promptly took a second one, which if anything came back even faster. I had COVID-19.

Paxlovid telemedicine appointment: Tuesday, August 30, 2022

My city has contracted with a telemedicine provider to prescribe Paxlovid, the anti-viral medication that’s under emergency use authorization from the FDA to treat COVID-19 in high-risk adults. After a few minutes of fretting, I decided to go ahead and request an appointment. The nice lady on her couch in Arizona asked me a few questions, confirmed I was eligible, and said she’d send my prescription in to the pharmacy of my choice. Within 15-20 minutes I was notified my prescription was ready for me at my nearby Safeway pharmacy.

Now, you may have already foreseen an obvious problem here: the pharmacy is inside the Safeway. But I’m a highly infectious carrier of the novel coronavirus. But because this is America, there was nothing to do about it. I walked into the pharmacy, asked for the prescription, and the pharmacist recoiled in horror: “You cannot be in here! You are putting all of our lives in danger!”

Well, no shit lady, that’s why I need the pills. She ended up relenting, and thus my Paxlovid journey began.

(Failed) quarantine

During the first 3 days of my positive tests, my partner and I did our best to maintain an in-house quarantine. We knew I was positive, and we knew she was exposed, but she was still testing negative, so our logic was the more we could do to isolate, the higher a chance we could keep it that way. On Friday, 3 days after my first positive test, she finally tested positive as well. Given the near-certainty I was the source of the infection so we weren’t risking any radical mutations in the virus, at that point we broke down the quarantine and started a Lord of the Rings marathon.

Paxlovid treatment: Tuesday PM - Sunday AM

The Paxlovid treatment is pretty simple: 3 pills, twice a day, for 5 days. I only had two side effects, diarrhea on the first two days, and Paxlovid Mouth the entire time. For obvious reasons, I’ll focus on the latter.

Paxlovid Mouth is strange because it began almost as soon as I took the first evening’s round of medication, and is only completely wearing off now (about 30 hours after my last dose). If you’re not familiar with the term, it’s an extremely widely experienced side effect of Paxlovid that gives the entire inside of your mouth a single, rather unpleasant, bitter flavor. I compare it to the moment after you swallow a bite of grapefruit, when the sweetness is gone and your mouth is left tasting only the underlying bitterness.

It’s not that bad to begin with, if you’re expecting it, and after a while you get used to it, but it doesn’t really go away the entire time you’re taking the drug — except when you’re eating and drinking. If it bothers you a lot there’s not really anything to do but have a range of sweet and savory snacks lying around to suck on, since as long as you’re eating or drinking, the sensation goes away entirely.

First negative test: Saturday, September 3, 2022

As I said, since I have a closet full of rapid tests, I didn’t see any reason not to test every day. Between Tuesday and Friday all my tests were positive, but Saturday morning I got my first negative rapid test, and had the same result Sunday and today, so my total tested positivity period was just 4 days (although if I had tested Monday, August 29 I’m sure it would have been positive as well).

I’m now feeling fine, although mindful of the possibility of a “rebound” like Biden and Fauci experienced after their own courses of Paxlovid treatment.

Conclusion

I am perfectly aware that it’s impossible to say anything apolitical about the pandemic, and I am not going to try.

I got vaccinated and boosted as soon as possible.

I wear high-quality masks indoors and on transit.

I began Paxlovid immediately after testing positive.

I quarantined.

I had a short and uneventful experience with the disease.

Other people who took none of those steps had the same outcome.

Other people who took all of those steps died.

But I’m happy I took the steps I did and happy I had the outcome I did.

Interest rates are starting to get more interesting

One of my favorite resources is DepositAccounts, which performs the simple, essential function of aggregating interest rates across a vast array of savings products. As you’d expect, the site is financed by ads and affiliate links, but in my experience the data is extremely accurate, so they’re a great first-stop when you’re exploring what’s the best place to put your money. All of that is just to say, most of the datapoints below come from DepositAccounts, not any original research of my own.

Yes, higher interest rates are passed along to (vigilant!) customers

There’s a stale cliche that when oil prices rise, gasoline prices jump immediately, but when oil prices fall, gasoline stays elevated. Of course there’s no mystery there: when gas prices rise satellite vans park outside gas stations doing live interviews with regular folks complaining about the price of gas, and when gas prices fall the media move on to the next crisis.

Most people are even less conscious of how prevailing interest rates change over time. If you only buy a few houses in your lifetime, your awareness of mortgage interest rates is limited to may four or five snapshots in time. Even someone who replaces a car as often as every 3 or 4 years has much less awareness of auto loan interest rates than they do the price of gas.

Finally, most people don’t shop around for higher interest rates on their savings even as much as they do for lower interest payments on their loans. That’s why whenever I hear people complain that banks don’t pay anything on savings anymore, I ask them, “have you checked?”

Series I Savings Bonds are already interesting

A lot of folks have written about this deal already (myself included), but to summarize, Series I bonds have their interest rate for the next 6 months set twice a year, in May and November, but each reset is known several weeks in advance. For example, we’ll know the November, 2022 interest rate on October 13, 2022, when September’s consumer price index reading is announced.

This creates two opportunities, in April and October, to know the interest rate you’ll earn on new Series I bonds for an entire 12-month period. My favorite tool, although I’m sure there are many others, for tracking these interest rate adjustments is the very primitive Tipswatch. There you can see the rate you’re guaranteed to earn for 6 months on all Series I bonds purchased through October 31, 2022 (9.62% annualized), and the 4 known monthly components of the November rate adjustment, which you’ll earn for the second 6 months of your first year.

I have mixed feelings about long-term holding of Series I bonds, but I have unalloyed positive feelings about using them for medium-term savings in April and October, when you know the interest rate you’ll be paid for the entire initial 1-year holding requirement.

Rewards Checking accounts for high rates, benefits, and liquidity

While I was cruising around DepositAccounts I checked, as usual, what rates they were reporting on Rewards Checking accounts. These are federally-insured, fully liquid checking accounts that, when you perform a series of requirements each month, offer elevated interest rates and usually a few other potentially-valuable benefits, like refunded ATM fees (which can be worth more than the interest during months you’re traveling extensively!).

I was immediately confused because my beloved Consumers Credit Union Rewards Checking account, which has been at the top of the list as long as I’ve been checking it, no longer appeared at all!

Thinking I might have missed an e-mail announcing they were no longer offering those accounts, I hurried over to Consumers’s website and immediately discovered the reason for the omission: the site had been updated with new, even higher interest rates, and the new page must have broken the scrubbing tool DepositAccounts was using.

The highest rate is now 5% APY on balances up to $10,000, which is not quite as high as the 5.09% on up to $20,000 the account could earn when I first opened it, but still higher than any other accounts we’ll be looking at today. The requirement for 12 debit card transactions and $500 in ACH credits or mobile check deposits, plus $500 or $1,000 in Consumers credit card spending for the highest two rates, remains the same.

The next highest rate listed is 4% APY on up to $20,000 at Elements Financial. Besides the usual gimmick of requiring 15 debit card transactions, there’s one huge asterisk: you’ll only earn that rate for 12 months, before it drops in half to 2% APY. If you have $20,000 you want to keep liquid and an easy way to automate your 15 monthly transactions, that may be worth doing for a year (no direct deposit is required), just be sure to set a calendar reminder for 12 months from the day you open your account!

Certificates of Deposit are on the verge of being interesting

Next I scooted over to DepositAccounts’s CD page, which besides scraping rates off countless bank websites, also groups them by term. You can see how obviously helpful this would be when building a CD ladder, since it makes it instantly obvious which CD-issuer you should choose for each rung of your ladder. One thing to note is the system does group CD’s into approximate terms. This is important because many of the highest-earning CD’s are of odd durations, but DepositAccounts engine sensibly lumps a 49-month “special term” CD in with the 4-year CD’s instead of breaking it out separately.

With all that said, let’s look at what’s going on with CD rates by looking at the highest rates offered in each of the DepositAccounts term buckets:

• 3-month: 3% APY at TotalDirectBank (note the very high minimum)

• 6-month: 4% APY at Sun East FCU (9-month also available at same rate)

• 1-year: 3.14% APY at Lafayette FCU

• 18-month: 3.75% APY at NASA FCU (15-month CD)

• 2-year: 3.59% APY at La Capitol FCU (26-month CD, includes option of one-time interest bump)

• 3-year: 3.55% APY at Bread Savings

• 4-year: 3.85% APY at NASA FCU (49-month CD)

• 5-year: 3.65% APY at Bread Savings

• 6+-year: 3.25% APY at Marcus, Evansville Teachers FCU, and Discover (terms up to 10 years)

A few obvious things jumped out at me here.

First, in nine term buckets, there are nine unique institutions, so if were purchasing CD’s for multiple terms from a single issuer, you would be virtually certain to be leaving some interest on the table.

Second, these interest rates are almost high enough to begin looking competitive with rewards checking accounts. Earning 5% APY on $10,000 in liquid cash is great, but if you have somewhat more money you’re unwilling to risk losing, and are willing to give up just a little liquidity, earning 4% APY on 6-month and 9-month CD’s from Sun East is at least worth thinking about long enough to decide if it’s the right move for you.

Third, this combination of terms and rates has a peculiar feature: the longest-term rates are lower than the shortest-term rates, while the medium-term rates hover in a tight range. I say it’s peculiar because commonsense would say that long-term deposits are more valuable to a bank than short-term deposits, so banks should be willing to pay more interest to lock in those funds for longer. Instead, over the longer term we see rates collapse.

The reason is simple: when banks guarantee interest payments on a deposit, they’re not just betting that they’ll be able to make a profit while paying that interest rate today, but that they’ll be able to make a profit paying that rate across the entire term of the deposit, in other words, on the future course of interest rates.

Since the cost of your money is fixed (the interest they pay you), the profitability of the deposit depends on how much it earns them (the interest their borrowers pay them). If interest rates go up, the cost of the deposit remains the same, but interest revenue and profits increase. If rates fall, then your deposit earns the bank less money, but costs them the same to hold.

Limiting the premium they’re willing to pay long-term depositors is a way of hedging that bet on interest rates. If banks expected rising interest rates over the medium and long-term, they’d reduce their hedge and be willing to pay more to lock in long-term deposits at today’s (compared to the future) cheap rates. The more worried banks are about falling interest rates, the shorter a period they’re willing to commit to paying today expensive rates for.

Treasuries may already be interesting in high-tax states

I was glancing over the Vanguard Fixed-Income page and was genuinely a bit surprised at how much rates had risen recently:

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Over the short-term these rates are already close enough to compare favorably to CD’s, especially if you prefer to keep all your fixed-income in one place like a brokerage account rather than scattered all over the country.

But even over the longer term, remember that the interest treasuries pay, unlike CD’s, is taxable only at the federal level. In a high-income-tax state, a slightly lower interest rate may leave you with more disposable income after taxes.

Conclusion

To offer some quick takeaways:

• Both higher and lower interest rates are passed through to customers.

• Shop around. No one financial institution is going to have the best version of every product.

• The interest rate structure shows that banks are betting on flat and falling interest rates in the long term. If you think they’re wrong and that rates will rise instead, then keep your money in higher-interest shorter-term accounts to take advantage of those rising rates. If you think they’re right and that rates will in fact fall, then lock in today’s relatively high rates for as long as possible.

Leaving money on the table: you can use Railcards for Heathrow Express, too

I was playing around doing some research for my recent posts on my trip to the United Kingdom and made a discovery that left me equally pleased (that I get to share it with you) and frustrated (that I didn’t realize it at the time): you can and should use Railcards on the nonstop Heathrow Express service between London’s Paddington Station and Heathrow airport. It’s not exactly “tricky,” but you do need to know what to look out for.

As a brief refresher, Railcards offer savings on all National Rail services in Scotland, England, and Wales. They can be purchased online in advance, are typically valid for between one and three years, and they are virtually never checked by conductors on-board (although supposedly if you get caught without the applicable Railcard you have to pay a “penalty fare” or buy a full-price ticket).

My error was simple, although hopefully readers will find it excusable: Heathrow Rail, despite only operating a single 15-minute route between two stations, still belongs to National Rail, and consequently Railcard savings do apply to these tickets — and the savings can be substantial.

Add your Railcard on the Heathrow Express search results page

Unlike the other National Rail booking engines I looked at, which allow you select your Railcard up front, Heathrow Express’s own booking page only allows you to add a Railcard after searching for tickets. You’ll find the option on the right-hand column of the search results page:

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Adding a Two Together Railcard to a £50 one-way itinerary reduced the price by £17 — over half the price of the Railcard itself, meaning the Railcard would pay for itself with a single round-trip ticket for two at that price.

Since Railcards offer a percentage discount, the savings are naturally lower on cheaper tickets booked further in advance, but the point is the same: if you’re traveling by rail in Great Britain, it’s simply irresponsible to do it without a Railcard!

Heathrow Express tickets can be booked through some (but not all) National Rail companies

In my previous post I highlighted how each National Rail booking engine differs in subtle ways, including how accurately they code the precise requirements for each Railcard. The example I used was that Greater Anglia correctly requires a child ticket to be added to a reservation in order to apply the Family & Friends Railcard, while Avanti West Coast would price out the discount with an itinerary consisting solely of adults (violating the requirements for that Railcard).

Once I realized Heathrow Express participated in National Rail, I naturally wondered if tickets could be booked through those other booking engines. The answer, it turns out, is “sometimes.” Greater Anglia and Northern Railway (which seem to share a backend, with only a modestly different branding), will not apply a Family & Friends Railcard to Heathrow Rail booking at all, but will apply a Two Together Railcard (I have a theory for this I’ll explain in a moment). Avanti West Coast will show schedules, but will not allow you to book Heathrow Express tickets at all.

When you can (and can’t) book Family & Friends Railcard tickets on Heathrow Express

It’s going to sound obvious once I say it, but it took me a few minutes to figure out so I hope you’ll indulge me: children under the age of 16 ride free on Heathrow Express (although they seemingly must be accompanied by an adult). That means when the third-party National Rail engines try to validate the conditions for the Family & Friends Railcard on Heathrow Express, it fails the requirement to purchase a children’s ticket!

Fortunately, when booking through Heathrow Express directly, they seem to have identified and fixed this issue. To test this, pick a date and search for 4 adults without a Railcard, 4 adults with a Family & Friends Railcard, and 4 adults plus one child with a Family & Friends Railcard.

In the first two cases the price is the same (because the Railcard’s conditions aren’t met), and in the third case the base price won’t increase (because children ride free) but the conditions of the Railcard are now met and the price drops by the expected 34%.

Conclusion

It would be tiresome to say that this illustrates the importance of interrogating systems by looking under the hood and examining how they really work instead of relying on the nonsense put out by their public-facing organs.

Instead, I’ll simply conclude that entry and exit from the Heathrow Express is automated, and no one is there to check whether you actually have a child, or a Railcard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further considerations

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

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

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

Deconstructing a point-to-point hiking tour

[update 8/13/2022: I heard back from the luggage transfer service I mention below and they quoted me a total of £60, substantially less than I guessed from their website]

A popular way to explore the United Kingdom among outdoor enthusiasts and lunatics alike is the hiking tour. The UK is positively saturated with public walking paths and rights-of-way across private property, so the possibilities are almost literally endless. For part of my recent holiday in England and Scotland, we booked a prepackaged 5-day point-to-point hiking tour in the Lake District.

What’s a hiking tour?

There are a number of companies that sell prepackaged tours; the one we happened to book was the “Lake District Short Break” through Macs Adventure. This 5-day tour consisted of 4 nights at 3 different bed-and-breakfasts (the first 2 nights were spent at the same B&B), and 3 days of hiking. The first hike day we made a loop arriving back at our B&B in the evening, and the second two hikes took us to two new towns. On the two days we moved, Macs Adventure arranged to pick up our suitcases in the morning and deliver them at the next town by the time we arrived (this is not particularly impressive, since the towns are only 20 or 30 minutes apart by car, despite being 5 or 6 hours apart by foot). We paid a total of $1290, although it seems the price has gone up since then to $1420 for two adults.

The tour we took is not bookable as a solo traveler (this will become important shortly).

Deconstructing the hiking tour

That’s the trip sold as a single package. But it doesn’t take a genius to see that the package consists of a few discrete parts, which makes it easy to break down the actual value of the package:

• 4 nights lodging

• 4 breakfasts for two

• 2 luggage transfers

• walking directions / GPS-supported map (built into Macs Adventures’ fairly cumbersome app)

Two nights in the cheapest room at the Brantfell House costs £192 ($233), a night at the Old Water View £120 ($145), and a night at The Beeches £90 ($109), although I was unable to verify that final number with a sample booking.

It seems that all three properties include breakfast with all their rates, so let’s assign that a value of $0 for now.

Macs Adventures obviously doesn’t handle luggage transfers themselves; they sell tours all over the world and aren’t going to own a fleet of minivans in every country. In our case, they contracted our luggage transfers out to Brigantes Walking Holidays and Baggage Couriers. They don’t have prices listed for our exact itinerary, but it appears their minimum charge is around £80 per person, or £160 ($194) for two (I put in a quote request for our exact route and will update this post when or if they get back to me).

Finally, while walking directions are free from a variety of websites and apps, it is nice that Macs curates specific routes for each day, and the downloadable maps (for offline use) and GPS integration are worth something too, so let’s assign that a generous $25 in value.

So the total value provided by Macs Adventures, should you book the component parts separately, is about $706, which is actually somewhat more than the per-person cost of the trip ($645). Of course, that brings us back to the point I highlighted above: this trip can’t be booked for solo travelers, so we paid $1290, or $584 more than the trip would have cost à la carte.

Obviously that’s not to say Macs Adventures made $584 in profit; presumably they negotiate bulk rates with their hoteliers and luggage transfer services, so their per-trip profit is somewhat higher than that.

Other alternatives

Above I broke down how to recreate an existing point-to-point package tour to save money, but there are a few obvious alternatives it’s worth briefly mentioning.

First, we needed a baggage transfer service because we were spending a week in the UK before and after our tour, but if you’re a serious hiker and that’s all you plan to do on your holiday, you can simply pack a backpack with everything you need, and indeed many of the people we passed on the trails had the heavy duty backpacks you’d expect to see on the John Muir or Appalachian trails. In Ambleside I even found a laundromat to wash my first week of clothes, so packing light doesn’t have to mean wearing soiled clothes or washing them in the sink every night.

Alternatively, instead of a point-to-point hiking tour where you check out of one room and into another every day, you can avoid the need for luggage transfers by setting up a base of operations in a town with a variety of nearby trails. And remember, you don’t need to walk all day: on our first walking day we took a ferry to our starting point and then walked back to our B&B. Likewise, there’s no shame in walking out from your B&B and taking a bus or taxi back.

Conclusion

This was our first hiking tour, and it was plugged into the middle of an already-complicated itinerary, so I was grateful that we were able to pay someone to arrange everything for us, and it turned out to be a wonderful time, albeit with a few hiccups we would have encountered either way.

Having said that, we’ll almost certainly never book a packaged tour like this again, since all the tour company did in this case was stitch together pieces that could easily be booked on their own. There are exceptions, like tourist attractions that can only be visited as part of a package tour, but in most cases the savings are significant enough that it’s worth recreating almost any tour simply by breaking it down into its component parts.

Beginner's guide to UK passenger rail

[Note to the reader: in this post I’m using specific examples of specific cities in the UK, but I am not bothering to give any information about them because it’s irrelevant to the post. If you want to know where Saxmundham is, Google is just a keystroke away.]

For the last 3 weeks I’ve been on vacation in the UK, and will be sharing some interesting, valuable, and/or fun lessons I learned along the way. In today’s edition, I want to dump everything I learned about booking and saving money on passenger rail in England and Scotland.

What is Network Rail?

To give a mostly-accurate potted history, the UK nationalized their rail industry after World War II. In the 90’s under New Labour, they privatized the operation of freight and passenger rail, but kept ownership and management of the tracks and stations in a public entity. That public entity is now called Network Rail (it had some other names in the past).

What is National Rail?

National Rail is the public-facing brand of the privatized passenger rail companies. Why National Rail matters is that it operates “underneath” the private operating companies and creates a kind of interoperability between them. This has the potential to be convenient, a bit like the baggage interline agreements that allow airlines to check bags through on connections operated by other carriers, although there are some important pitfalls to watch out for, which I cover below.

What are Railcards?

The second, much more important reason that National Rail matters is that they sell Railcards. There are several different Railcards, but they all operate roughly the same: when you purchase a National Rail ticket, select which Railcard you have, and you’ll receive a discount, usually 1/3 of the price, if the fare is eligible. Virtually all trips after 10 am and on weekends and public holidays are eligible for the discount, as are some trips beginning before 10 am. There are basically 3 buckets Railcards fall into:

1. Group-based. “Family & Friends” and “Two Together” Railcards provide discounts when traveling in specific group formations.

2. Age-based. There are Railcards for 16-17 year olds, 16-25 year olds, 26-30 year olds, and seniors.

3. Status-based. People with certain verified disabilities and veterans of the UK Armed Forces are eligible for status-based Railcards.

These are listed very roughly in order of money-saving potential, and as you can see, most people are eligible for one of these “good” Railcards, with the exception of adults between the ages of 31 and 59 who always travel alone. They are still eligible for the generic Network Railcard, which offers discounts only in “London and the South East.”

Finally, it’s essential to note that you can have more than one Railcard, and use a different Railcard for different trips depending on what generates the most savings.

How do Railcards work?

This is the easy part. Whenever you’re booking a train in England, Scotland, and Wales, you’ll see a dropdown box allowing you to select your Railcard. Here’s an example from Greater Anglia:

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The price shown on the booking page will then reflect your Railcard discount. Here’s the exact same trip for 2 adults between London Liverpool Street and Saxmundham before and after applying a “Two Together” Railcard:

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As you can see, the Two Together Railcard saves £7.50 on a single short trip. For longer trips, Railcards can pay for themselves in a single reservation. Advance tickets for two adults from London to Glasgow on an Avanti West Coast service, for example, cost £65.60 without a Railcard, and just £43.20 with one. On close-in reservations the savings can be much higher: the same two tickets booked for tomorrow cost £285.20 without a railcard and £188.20 with one!

Most Railcards are good for an entire year, but my Two Together Railcard paid for itself several times over in less than 3 weeks.

The Family & Friends Railcard is the most gimmicky of the Railcards, but offers the most potential savings. Each £30 Railcard can have two named adults; one of those adults must be traveling on any ticket purchased with the Railcard (the Two Together Railcard requires both named people to be traveling on the ticket). Up to 3 additional adults can travel on the ticket. In addition, at least one child aged 15 or younger must be traveling on the ticket. The adults receive the standard 1/3 discount, and the children a 60% discount. A roundtrip ticket on the same Avanti West Coast service as above for 4 adults and 4 children ages 5-15 would cost £314.40 without a Railcard and just £222.40 with one.

Note that children’s tickets in general are pretty cheap; most of the savings being realized here are on the more expensive adult tickets. However, you do need one ticketed child in order to unlock those larger savings on the adult tickets.

Do you really need a Railcard?

Everything I said above is based on the rules laid out in black and white on the Railcard website. In fact, it is not clear to me that you need a Railcard at all in order to realize these discounts. That’s because ticketing is available online, tickets can be picked up at unattended kiosks, and most importantly, British ticket inspectors do not appear to me to care at all about the rules.

Of the 8 trains we took in the UK, our tickets were only inspected 3 times, and not one conductor asked to see my digital Railcard. Like a dumb American I volunteered to show my Two Together Railcard on the first train, but didn’t even bother doing that on the rest. If you lived in the UK and traveled frequently with adult friends and minor children, or with your adult partner, then you may as well buy a Family & Friends or Two Together Railcard since they’re so cheap and the savings are so significant, but if you’re just visiting and taking a train or two, you’re probably safe bluffing it.

Should you book “direct?”

Remember up top when I mentioned that train operators are private companies in the UK? Thanks to National Rail, all or most of the passenger rail companies in Great Britain can sell tickets on each other’s services, and there are no price differences on any of the routes I checked. This is roughly the equivalent of United allowing Delta to sell tickets on United for the same price as United charges when booking directly.

But this does not make the booking channels interchangeable. There are three big differences between the various booking channels.

First, seat reservations. The only trains we took with reserved seats were on the Avanti West Coast line between London and Glasgow, and because I booked our tickets through Greater Anglia (because they operated the first leg of our trip), I was not able to select our seats. If I had booked the ticket directly through Avanti West coast, I would have been able to pick them before even booking the ticket to make sure our seats were together, facing the right direction, etc.

Second, routing. While pricing is uniform across booking channels, unsurprisingly each operator’s routing algorithm works better on routes it actually serves. This came up on our trip when Greater Anglia booked us on an Avanti West Coast train from London to Preston in order to change to a Northern Railway train to Windermere. Plugging the origin and destination into Avanti West Coast directly gives the much preferable change at Oxenholme Lake District. Fortunately, the conductor on our Avanti train told us to just wait until Oxenholme to change, but if the conductor hadn’t asked what our final destination was and taken the trouble to sort us out, we would have tried to change to the slower Northern Railway train earlier than we needed to and risked our connection.

Finally, to circle back to Railcards, while pricing and discounts are uniform, the validation algorithm varies widely in quality, which may work to your benefit. For example, Avanti will (incorrectly) price out a Friends & Family Railcard discount for a reservation with 4 adults and no children, while Greater Anglia’s otherwise much less glossy booking engine will not, instead (correctly) returning pricing for four full-fare adult tickets.

Ground transit add-ons

Depending on your origin and destination, you may be offered the option to prepay for a bus or subway connection at the beginning or end of your trip.

For example, if your train originates in London, you’ll be offered the chance to buy a Travelcard that works on the London Underground and buses on the day of your departure. Unfortunately, the Travelcard costs £14.40 or £20.30, the maximum that can be charged for Zones 1-4 and 1-6, respectively, when using London’s Oyster payment cards. If you travel any amount less than the maximum, you’re overpaying.

On the flip side, arriving in Glasgow on a Railcard ticket lets you pay £2.70 for a PlusBus card that lets you take buses all around Great Glasgow on the day of your arrival, which offers at least a modest discount over an all-day bus pass.

In other words, savings are possible at specific destinations, when you’re purchasing tickets using a Railcard, but don’t assume booking your rail and transit tickets together will automatically save you money.

A final note on routing

I mentioned routing above in the context of the different passenger rail companies’ ticketing engines, but there’s a slightly separate issue that’s worth mentioning: it can be hard to figure out what your origin and destination are even supposed to be, especially when you plan to make connections by bus or taxi instead of rail.

I don’t have an easy solution except brute force: use Google or Apple Maps to search your origin and destination, then narrow in on the pieces operated by National Rail, then plug those routes into a few different operators’ websites, keeping in mind you might need to book legs separately or through different operators in order to get the best available routing and discounts.

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.