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  • Miles And Money Blog
  • What We Do
  • Newbie Lounge
    • How to Get Started
    • FAQ - Miles & Points
    • FAQ - Money & Cashback
  • Travel Destinations
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Hyatt points back offer on redemption till Oct 8, 2020!

7/19/2020

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Hyatt reward program is one of the best reward's program for inspirational stays. Their free night redemption chart is simple to understand and it provides reasonable options to redeem for suite stays compared to cash equivalent! Currently they are running promotion where you get 15% of your points back + free parking when you redeem your points for stay, dining and more with Hyatt. If you are World of Hyatt Credit Card holder then you get 25% of your points back! You need to register for this promotion on or before Sep 1st, 2020 and your stay needs to be completed by Oct 8th, 2020. 

Hyatt has great redemption options both for standard redemption as well as for all-inclusive resort redemption!

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Redemption Rates at Hyatt Properties!
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Redemption Rates at Hyatt All-Inclusive Resorts!
As of now due to COVID-19 the entire travel industry is upended. Hotel's are coming up with various promotions to keep their ball rolling and attract the customers in the times of tough travel and lodging. Hyatt makes it real easy to explore all their portfolio properties using map option. 

You should register for this promotion even if you do not have any travel plans before Oct 8th, 2020. You never know if you might want to go for a near by getaway which has Hyatt property and you would get great value for your points redemption!!

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.
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DAILY GETAWAYS - WEEK 3 AND WEEK 4 DEALS

4/29/2017

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We are already done with Week 2 of Daily Getaways. I will list down the upcoming Week 3 and Week 4  deals which I feel could be a good value.

Week 3 (May 1 to May 5):
May 4 - Marriott e-gift card at 20% off (Good Deal): You could use these gift cards at any of the Marriott properties worldwide except all the Starwood (SPG) properties, Protea Hotels by Marriott and Marriott Executive Apartments. Alternatively you can also re-sell it to certain Gift card re-seller if you have bulk relationship with them (But you wan't earn much on in here). These are available in $100, $250 and $500 value. You will need to present the e-gift card at the time of check-out so you would not be able to take advantage of prepaid rates. The good part is that you can register the card on your email address and protect it in case of any fraud.

Week 4 (May 8 to May 10):
May 9 - Hertz points at discounted rate from ~4.24 to ~5.09 cents/point (OK Deal): So you are essentially buying points which you can redeem at standard rewards rates or anytime rewards rates. So based on the type of redemption you can get a good deal or a raw deal. Also points expire in 24 months if there is no activity on your account. For e.g. 5500 points for $280 can be used for 1 week rental (anytime reward) with no black out dates which is roughly paying about  $40 per day for standard vehicle which may or may not be a good deal based on where you can rent. The interesting part is you could redeem for the same weekly rental for 2750 points only by using "standard reward" rate which may not be available though on certain black out dates. Also you can transfer the points to your spouse or domestic partner. Do remember if you pay with points for your rental you would forego car rental protection provided by certain credit cards and might have to purchase CDW insurance from car rental company. So, depending on your plans it may or may not be for you.

May 10 - Hyatt points from ~1.03 to ~1.1 cents/point (Good Deal): Hyatt points are valuable because you can use 30k points at high-end all inclusive properties. Also if you have upgrade certificates you can use them on award stays booked with points. With this deal they are selling 24,000 to 72,000 points and there is a limit of 1 package per person. Hyatt low-end redemption starts at only 5,000 points and they have pretty decent properties even at low end. Hyatt points packages sell out fast (within few minutes) as they are limited, so if you are eyeing one of them be there at 10 a.m. PST time to try your luck at it.

There are other offers in daily getaways but you can do equally better going other routes rather than blocking your cash up-front. Be sure to perform your due diligence before your purchase any of the above package. Best of luck.

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DAILY GETAWAYS FOR WEEK OF 04/06/2015

4/5/2015

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Daily Getaways for Week-3 is here. As been the trend in the Daily Getaways most of the deals are lack luster but there are few reasonably good deals and 1 or 2 gem of a deal. Most of the week is again hotel related deals except for Monday where we have 1 reasonably good deal on Car-rental from Avis. Towards the end of the week on Friday (04/10) we have gem of a deal from Hyatt to buy Hyatt Gold passport points at a rate from 1.0375 cent/point to 1.1 cent/point. Given there is an ongoing promo for 20% of Hyatt reward redemption for Hyatt Credit Card holder who registered before 03/31 this makes the timing of the sale even more lucrative. Below is the snapshot of this week deals:

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Daily Getaways Week-3 deals
Below is the quick details on the two deals which are worth looking at in this week Daily Getaways.


Avis One-day car rental certificate - $30 - 04/06:
  • Best use of these certificate is at locations where the car rental are typically expensive (for e.g. Hawaii). Since you can use this certificate for any car-class up to a Premium (group G) car it may provide much better value. (Although there might be certain black out dates and they are not valid in New York Metro Area, Canada, Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands)
  • Purchase limit of 7 certificate per person. Can use maximum 7 certificates per reservation.
  • Coupon expires on April 30th, 2016.
  • Can be used for any car-class up to a Premium (group G) car.
  • The complete list of terms & conditions can be found here.

Hyatt Gold Passport Points - Various packages - 1.0375 cent/point to 1.1 cent/point cost - 04/10:
  • Hyatt has some pretty good properties as well as few all-inclusive properties (In total 5 all-inclusive properties which cost 20k/25k Gold passport points for standard room). Purchasing this points at 1.1 cent/point is an awesome bargain against paying the cash rates in most of these properties.
  • Since they are offering 20% off award redemption for award stays till 07/30/2015 for Hyatt branded Credit Card holders, the point purchase deal looks even more lucrative if you have any planned stay during this period.
  • There are 4 different packages on offer and you can buy 1 of each type. Usually all the Hyatt packages sell out in couple of minutes once the sale goes live. So if you want to have any chance at grabbing them start looking out for them right before 10:00 a.m. P.S.T time or 1 p.m. E.S.T time. Below are the direct links to 4 packages which will go on sale on 04/10.
  • 24,000 Hyatt Gold Passport Points for $260 (1.083 cents/point)
  • 30,000 Hyatt Gold Passport Points for $330 (1.1 cents/point)
  • 40,000 Hyatt Gold Passport Points for $415 (1.0375 cents/point)
  • 72,000 Hyatt Gold Passport Points for $775 (1.076 cents/point)

If you have upcoming stay at Hyatt properties these point purchase deals could potentially provide real good value redemption at Hyatt and you should definitely give it a look.
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DAILY GETAWAYS FOR NEXT 3 WEEKS IN JUNE

5/31/2014

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In my earlier post on Daily Getaways Return, I mentioned about the offers for the first 2 weeks of this sale. There are still few of those deals available specifically The Diamond Resort Stay, CityPass, IHG Points and Wyndham Rewards points. Although they are not great deals, they might be useful for someone's particular travel or stay scenario. Daily Getaways has announced the remaining deals for next 3 weeks and there are few hotels points and Car rental deals I want to highlight in this post. The deal which most traveler are interested would be the Hyatt Stay Deal. Let me list down these here:
  • June 4th - Buy Hyatt Gold Reward Points ranging from 0.933 cent/point to 0.99 cent/point (with Amex 10% discount): These got sold out last year within seconds, so expect the same this time around although Hyatt has done some devaluation since the last year. But compared to its peers the value of Hyatt gold points have reduced by a very small margin from last year redemption levels. The reason these points are so valuable is because the high end hotels in Hyatt chain still costs 30,000 points for standard room redemption which compares quite favorably to the revenue rates for these properties. In addition Hyatt has forayed into all-inclusive properties and they are priced quite reasonably for stay of up to 2 persons. You can find the new award chart for Hyatt here. On top of the great pricing of the Hyatt points sales there are extremely small number of these packages that go on sale, so there is high demand for them.
  • June 5th - Buy IHG Club Rewards Points ranging from 0.567 cent/point to 6 cent/point (with Amex 10% discount): As mentioned in my previous post it is quite easy to purchase these poinst at 7 cent/point whenever you need it. To top it, there are still packages available for sale from Week-1 of the Daily Getaways and thus these do not seem to get sold out. But, if you are looking at specific properties such as Intercontinental Le Moana Bora Bora that sells for $500+ but requires only 50,000 points/night this purchase would still make sense.
  • June 9th - Buy Marriott Gift Cards for 81% of the actual value: These could be useful for folks who mostly stay at Marriott Hotel chains and thus can pay during the check-out using the Marriott Gift Card. Note that you cannot book the nights using the gift cards so most non-refundable prepaid nights will still be charged to your credit card on file and you would not be able to use these gift cards during the hotel check-out. Still 19% discount on regular refundable rate is quite a bargain for regular stayers at Marriott. These also gets sold out pretty quickly so if you are looking for one of these make sure you are online at the time when these go on sale.
  • June 10th - Best Western Reward Points for 5.85 cent/point (with Amex 10% discount): Since there is no simple way of knowing in general how many points are required for award night for Best Western properties most people do not purchase these. Usually the points required to stay at most properties are in the range of 16k to 30k points. Again, Best Western is a mid-range hotel chain which has lot of presence in U.S.A as well as Australia and some of those locations could be quite expensive. So, if you are looking to stay at one of those locations or want to top up your account for that kind of stay then you might be interested in this deal.
  • June 12th - Avis One Day Car Rental Certificate for $30 (with Amex 10% discount): This deal is similar to the one they had last year and if you are one of the guys/gals who plan to rent out at expensive locations around the U.S.A, Canada, Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin island then this could be the deal for you. I have written about this deal in the past and you can access my analysis for Car Rental Daily Getaway deal here.
  • June 17th - Club Carlson Reward Points from 4.44 cent/point (with Amex 10% discount): Club Carlson do not have lot of great properties in the U.S.A. but they have really good presence in the Europe. Their reward night starts from 9,000 points in category-1 and recently they have added the 70,000 points category-7 which currently has 11 properties, most of which are in Europe. Also due to their Club Carlson Visa Credit Card in the U.S.A it's always easier and lower cost to accumulate points through their credit card rather than buying from the Daily Getaway. On top of that the credit card features 1 free night on redemption of points for a stay of 2 or more nights. Still the Daily Getaway deal is for folk's who do not have this credit card and who have specific stay planned where buying points at 4.44 cent/mile makes sense.

Note - None of the credit card links in the post earns me any revenue. Thanks for reading!

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USEFUL WEBSITES FOR HOTEL STAYS (AWARD/REVENUE)

4/6/2014

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Broadly Speaking there are three kinds of Hotel Stays:
  1. Revenue Hotel Stay paid with Cash/Money.
  2. Award Hotel Stay paid with points.
  3. Hotel Stays Paid with Points + Cash.
I would be discussing useful sites for the (1.) and (2.) kind of Hotel Stays as those are the one's most often booked for hotel stays. In general the decision for booking a hotel with Cash or Points depends on couple of factors:
  1. Are you doing the stay as part of promotion for which it has to be a paid stay through Hotel Website?
  2. Or are you looking to stay at any good hotel and just want to pay the lowest price and want to evaluate is it worth paying the cash or better booking with points?

Let's assume your intent is to "pay the lowest price". In that case this article would give you various resources which will help you making that decision better and faster (Hopefully!). Below are few websites/tools which will quickly allow you to narrow down your search to few of the hotels in your desired area.
  • Award Mapper
  • Wandering Aramean Hotel Tools
  • HotelsCombined
  • TripBam

Award Mapper:
This is a pretty useful tool where you can enter your desired hotel location and it will quickly show up the hotels and the points required to stay there. Since, it uses Google Maps as the backdrop, it is very easy to map the hotels with your desired place of stay. Currently the website supports following Hotel Chains:
  • Best Western
  • Club Carlson
  • Choice Hotels
  • Hilton Hotels
  • Hyatt Hotels
  • Intercontinental Hotels (includes all Priority Club Hotels)
  • Marriott Hotels &
  • Starwood Preferred Guest's Hotels

All you need to do is to enter your "Destination" in the search box and it will pop up hotel property names and price in award points for them. This makes it very easy to short-list the hotels and gives estimate on price you would have to pay (based on your valuation of the points) if you chose to stay on "award". For e.g. I have searched "Bali, Indonesia" below and as you can see that there are several options to select from based on where I want to stay and price I am looking to pay. Of-course there are certain limitations of this tool, as it does not list the "exact rates" for your dates as well as it does not specify the availability of award for your dates, but you at least get to know available properties and the points required which makes your selection easier.

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Award Mapper Hotel Awards for Bali, Indonesia
Wandering Aramean Hotel Tools:
This tool gives specific information about the hotels as well as comparison between the "cost of award stay" and "cost when payed with cash". The comparison does require your "Fair value of points input", but it is pretty neat in that it will only show hotels with availability on your dates. It requires you to create your "login ID" before performing the search and currently supports Rates comparison for following Hotels:
  • Wyndham Hotels
  • Intercontinental Hotels (includes all Priority Club Hotels)
  • Marriott Hotels
It does have support for "Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG)" awards, but the search is limited to availability check on "points" or "points+cash". There is no price comparison function for SPG hotels. As an example I did search for hotels in "Bali, Indonesia" for 1 night stay at Intercontinental group hotels from 3rd May 2014 to 4th May 2014 and the results show that the best value I would get from my points is for staying at "Intercontinental Bali Resort" whereas if I am looking to stay at cheapest cost then I should stay by paying cash at "Holiday Inn Express, Bali Kuta".
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Wandering Aramean Hotel Search for IHG
HotelsCombined:
Now you have done your reward stay research it's time to check if there are hotels available (may or may not be brand affiliated hotels) which are better bargain then redeeming your points. HotelsCombined is hotel aggregate site which searches for the hotels in your "desired location" and gives you whole bunch of criteria to narrow down or refine your search. The best part is it will show various "OTA as well as hotel websites" where you can book online along with their price comparison. For e.g. searching for hotels with only "5 stars" gives us prices ranging from $21 for a shared dorm to a price of $2299 for a resort room. You can further filter down on brand name and other bunch of criteria to get best bang for your buck.
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HotelsCombined Price Search
TripBam:
Enter TripBam! This is a useful tool once you have done the search through HotelsCombined and have booked a "refundable room" for your stay. You can use this "TripBam" to send you alert if the price of your reserved hotel goes up or down on your desired dates of stay. You can also set the criteria if there are other hotels of your interest where you can possibly stay if the price is within the desired range of the price you paid for the current reservation. TripBam can send you an email alert about the price changes for your set of desired hotels so you do not need to keep searching for lower price once you have booked your reservation. For e.g. you can select the set of hotels you are interested in as shown below and you are on your way to savings if the price drops below your price paid or desired price.
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TripBam Hotel selection for price check
Although there are numerous other sites which can help you search Hotels such as Kayak, but the above are just a few gem of tools which would help you make your hotel search better and faster. 
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GETTING BEST VALUE OUT OF HOTEL LOYALTY POINTS - PART 1

10/6/2013

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As you keep collecting hotel program points for reward stays it's worth understanding the value you are getting out of your investment. Everyone has a different value on points they hold and in which program the points are available. But knowing what value you can get of those points is of importance. The intend of this post is to highlight different program "sweet spots" so you know your choices and where to look before deciding to use your points for hotel award night stay. The loyalty programs we will be looking at are listed below:
  1. Hyatt Gold Passport, 
  2. Hilton Honors, 
  3. IHG (Priority Club), 
  4. Marriott Hotels, 
  5. Club Carlson Hotels
  6. SPG

This article will focus on Hyatt Gold Passport and Hilton Honors. For IHG (Priority Club) refer to my post on IHG Big Win. The value proposition for IHG (Priority Club) comes from Point Savers Award. For details on Marriott, Club Carlson and SPG do check my next article in this series.

Hyatt Gold Passport
Most hotels in Hyatt brand represent high tier and luxury class hotels. Hyatt award night starts from mere 5k points for category 1 hotels and the highest category 6 hotels cost 22k points for standard room. The reward chart representing the hotels in different categories can be found here. The category 6 hotels include Park Hyatt Tokyo, Park Hyatt Maldives and Park Hyatt Sydney that retails upwards of $900+. Thus redeeming 22k points for standard room at this hotels is extremely awesome value proposition if you are looking for Style and grand experience. On the lower end of it you could redeem 5k points for hotels such as Bali Hyatt which goes for ~$120+. So if you are looking to stay at decent to good brand hotel, I would suggest looking at Category 1 & 2 hotels to see if any hotels exits for the destination you are planning to visit which provides great redemption value for award nights rather than paying cash.

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Hyatt Award Night Categories
Hilton Honors
Although Hilton has massively devalued their program in recent time by increasing award night redemption cost's almost 2x and introducing variable points reward rate based on seasonality; there are still quite a few value hotels for budget conscious travelers who want to experience Hilton brand. You should use this useful tool here to determine how many points are required for standard room stay at the location you plan to visit. Once you know the points, you can visit the brand hotel website and scroll all the way to the bottom to see the award night rate for your stay. Look at the example below for Double Tree Hilton Goa. The Hotel's average night cost is INR 11,000 which would roughly equate to ~$180 but the points cost is only 5k points. That's awesome value proposition for Hilton Honors points.
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Hilton Points Category
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Hilton Goa for 5k Points in November and December
As you can see from above it is still a good value proposition redeeming Hilton Honor points for lower category hotels and thus maximizing value of your points for free award night stays.

So in short if you are looking for value from above programs look for lower or mid category hotels in Hyatt and lower category hotels in Hilton Honors program
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    I love traveling / backpacking. This blog focuses on below 3 aspects of travel:
    1. Maximizing your travel experience .
    2. Sharing how to travel with miles in premium class or at discount in economy class.
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