Wyndham Hotels group has more than 8,000 properties in 66+ countries. Their loyalty program Wyndham Rewards gives free night for 15,000 points (Go Free) or you can redeem for points+cash rate starting at just 3,000 points (Go Fast). So why bother about Wyndham Rewards Program?

You can reap great value from their redemption scheme of 3,000 or 15,000 points. (Note: Wyndham has been known to make changes without notice so do know that investing a lot in this program has its own risks). Below are few quick reasons why you should give a thought to their rewards program:

• ​They have hotels which usually fall in budget to mid-range and few on the high end side so it is easy to earn points in this program.
• You earn at least 1,000 points or 10 points/$ spend which ever is more for qualified stay which involves booking directly through Wyndham Hotels and paying a minimum per night rate of $25 (before taxes and fees).
• They have been expanding their brand presence like the recent addition of AmericInn hotels for earning and redemption.
• They have been running various promotions of late where just two separate one night stay (qualified stays) can earn 15,000 bonus Wyndham points (Good for 1 "Go Free" award or 5 "Go Fast" award nights). For e.g. here is the link for current promotion to earn 15,000 bonus points and you need to sign up for promotion before your stay (limit of 1 bonus point promotion per user).
• A "Go Free" award for 15,000 points can be redeemed for 1 free night at any Wyndham Hotel worldwide and thus can represent a great value. You can redeem for high end Dolce or TRYP brand hotels for the same 15,000 points.

They do have few important "cons" to consider though:

• Wyndham reward points expire after 4 years regardless of activity on the reward account but otherwise you can keep extending the life of your points up to 18 months as long as you have any activity on your account.
  
• "Go Fast" award redemption for cash+points starting at 3,000 Wyndham reward points are not available for all the hotels.
• They change their Wyndham reward program terms without any notice.

That being said below are couple of example of value from Wyndham Rewards program.

Go Free night stay at Silverado Resort and Spa, Napa for 15,000 points:
This is one of nice vacation location and the weekend nights do not come cheap. The room rates can easily run $250+/night and thus represents a great value for just 15,000 Wyndham Reward points.

Go Fast Stay at Howard Johnson Long Island City for 3,000 points:
Although not a high end hotel but still it would save you some dollars at this nice location in Long Island in lieu of 3,000 Wyndham reward points.

So, next time you are planning short 1 or 2 night stays do look at the Wyndham rewards program as you can use them for good value redemption. 

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Most of the airlines tickets today are non-refundable or carry hefty cancellation and change fees unless you are willing to shell out 2x or 3x the fare for refundable ticket. The same is not true for hotels but sometimes non-refundable hotels reservations might save you 10% or more than the refundable reservations.

So what to do when you booked that awesome flights for a great price but cannot take the flight? Or you had found a great deal on a hotel and booked it despite it being non-refundable? Getting refunded for that non-refundable hotel booking or flight reservation depends on the reason why you are looking to cancel. Below are few times you may be eligible to get refunded for a non-refundable flight ticket or hotel reservation.

Refunding non-refundable Airline fares:

Airline Schedule change:
Since all airlines like to have near full utilization on their flights they might change the schedule of the flights to align with their flight utilization capacity. This may lead to changing the schedule of the flights (very often) or cancelling them altogether (rare). What it does is opens up an opportunity for you to use it as a reason to ask for the involuntary refund without any penalty given the schedule would not meet your travel needs. 

Lot of airlines has various rules on what changes would qualify for involuntary refund but still there is a good chance you can get the entire paid fare refunded or credited for future travel without any penalty.

Medical Emergency:
Most of the airlines would refund your fare or provide credit for future use without any penalty when a medical emergency occurs to you or your close family member. While some airlines limit the refund only to the case where passenger travelling gets in to medical emergency in all cases it requires documentation from your Doctor to prove the kind of emergency to determine the eligibility for full refund.

Another situation is if you happen to book the flight ticket with a credit card that provides complimentary travel insurance in case of medical emergency. Even if you do not meet the airline criteria for refund under their rules you would still be eligible to get refund for your tickets from your credit card company in case of medical emergency. So, do check which credit cards provides this complimentary insurance and use them for your non-refundable flight reservation whenever possible.

Refunding non-refundable hotel reservation:

Ask Nicely:
Hotels are operated by either the big chains such as IHG or Marriott or they could be independently operated and that opens up gates for negotiation. You can talk to the customer specialist for big chain hotels and be ready to go higher up to supervisor and see if they can make this happen. Alternatively for independent hotels it is best to reach out to the hotel directly and explain your situation and see if they can refund your reservation.

While there is no guarantee this would always work there is a good chance it might. Also most hotels are more willing to accommodate if you are looking to change the dates rather than outright cancellation. So, if that works for you do ask for it as well.

Medical Emergency:
Similar to Airlines; hotels do consider medical emergency situation and provide full refund provided you can present proof of medical emergency. Again each big chain hotels and independent hotels are different and might have different rules on what constitutes a proof for allowing you to get full refund on your reservation.

Alternatively as stated earlier if your credit card covers you for refunding your travel expenses in medical emergency you can always approach them and get the refund for your hotel.


So, next time you are unable to travel do keep in mind you might still be able to get refunds for either all or some of your travels.

​Disclaimer: Some of the links used in the post may be referral links and earn referral to this site. We appreciate you supporting the website.

Whenever we travel by flights using paid revenue tickets we always look for the best options available including the airlines, ticket cost and flight routing. I would suggest adding one more dimension to this which is "alternate airports".

Checking alternate airports is useful as there are market forces which would create competition at a given airport and thus bringing down the ticket costs at certain time while another airport would be much more expensive. This applies to alternate airports from your "Source" as well as your "Destination" airport (Do note that we are not talking about flying the budget airline). Also the same airlines which might fly non-stop from your close in airport might be relatively cheaper when they become one-stop from airport which is not in your vicinity or one-stop away from your actual destination. 

Here are few tips you can do to check if you have selected best option:

• Check the source vicinity airports.
• Check the destination vicinity airports.
• Check alternate airports at the source which might be a short flight away, assuming you are fine with that.
• Check airports which are served by your destination airport as alternative destination airports with routing through your destination. Do check if it would be "OK" to board if the alternative destination is in 3rd country (Make sure you do not check-in your luggage in this case..)

Let's look at an example here:
You are looking to fly from SFO to ZRH one way on June, 9th 2018 with maximum one stop and prefer Swiss Airlines:  
Let's use Google Flights for this search and make sure we use the close in airports at the source in the search, which in this case is OAK and SJC. Below are the one-stop options available as per google flights:​

As you can see from above the cheapest option is Icelandair followed by Turkish Airlines and both going from our preferred airport of SFO to ZRH. You can also see that there are two expensive non-stop options on United Airlines and Swiss Airlines.

Let's use some of the tips and make some changes to our search for destination airport in 3rd country and see what happens. Here I am changing the airline to "Swiss" only and changing my destination to HKG (Hong Kong) which provides an on arrival visa to most nationals and thus would avoid any boarding issue from SFO.

As you can see from above, you are looking at Swiss Airlines with a reasonable cost of $844 serving non-stop between your intended source (SFO) and destination (ZRH). And by the way do check out for any smart tips suggested by Google Flight tool, such as above where it suggests you can get the flight for just $452 if you want to fly on June, 10th, 2018.

So in short you are just paying ~$235 more than the cheapest flight on Icelandair and are able to travel on your preferred Swiss Airlines for your preferred date and time. So, next time you are out to book flights do not discard options which might look far fetched.

​Disclaimer: Some of the links used in the post may be referral links and earn referral to this site. We appreciate you supporting the website.

If you are looking for hotel stays at any of your upcoming trip, do not forget checking out IHG PointBreaks list. IHG made changes to the PointBreaks to have three categories of redemption instead of just having one redemption at 5k IHG points. The New Redemption has hotels at 5k points, 10k points and 15k points. Although it might look like devaluation of PointBreaks program but having more hotels are different lower cost tiers is better than few hotels at one low tier of 5k points.

IHG Points can be easily earned or bought at about ~0.5 cents/points to ~0.7 cents/points based on various promotions so even if you are short of points it would be worth buying them if the stay on points is working out cheaper than paying for the hotel in cash. Do remember that staying at hotel on revenue rate would also add taxes/fees which otherwise is not present on award nights so that also adds to the saving.

Alternatively IHG runs promotion for accelerated earning of points every 4 months. Here is the one for Jan 1st to April 30th 2018. It might be useful to register and check your points earning offer as you might earn bunch of points for a cheap stay and occasionally 500 points just for downloading and logging in from IHG App. These points can certainly make PointBreaks stay cheaper.  Here is an example of how the promotional offer looks like.

The current PointBreaks list is valid from January 29th to April 30th and most of the reward stays have reasonable cancellation policy till almost a day or two before the stay. So even if you have tentative plans, check the cancellation policy and based on your comfort book those PointBreaks award as these awards are limited by hotels and the hotels may be removed from the PointBreaks list any time before the promotion ends.

They are about ~150+ hotels in the list so go ahead and see if any of those fit your current travel plans and save some money on those stays.

Disclaimer: Some of the links used in the post may be referral links and earn referral to this site. We appreciate you supporting the website.