Category: Travel Hacking

Girls’ Trip booked to Playa Del Carmen (I Guess I’ll Stay Home With The Kids)

Posted on by David Cox in Bookings, Travel Hacking, Trips

Sometime this last winter, Jenn was talking about wanting to take a Girls’ trip (with her Mom and her Sister) to celebrate a milestone birthday for her Sister. We had basically just completed booking our European vacation just a couple of months earlier and we had learned a valuable lesson from that booking that we didn’t want to repeat – don’t be dependent on one way to book.

What I mean by that is that when we booked our flights to Europe, all we had was United miles, and that was our only option. If the flights weren’t cheap enough on United, we weren’t going or we were paying cash. So the solution to this issue was to find multiple ways of booking flights on points and make sure that we stockpile points in multiple areas.

The Power of Stockpiling Points

Jenn had already begun to accumulate Ultimate Reward points by taking advantage of two 90k bonuses for Chase Ink cards as well as a 60k Chase Sapphire bonus. Since they were thinking Mexico or the Caribbean, Chase Ultimate Reward points, having the ability to transfer to Southwest Airlines or United Airlines, might make sense.

We also added over 80k points by meeting the the minimum spend on a Capital One Venture card. That’s intriguing because Capital One miles transfers to the Turkish Airlines Miles & Smiles program where booking round trip United Airlines saver flights to Mexico and the Caribbean often costs only 20k points .

Jenn also jumped on a 75k point bonus offer on the Delta Business Gold Card. When she did it, I scoffed a little because a lot of people joke about Delta Skymiles as being “Sky Pesos”. It’s a bit of a joke because Delta is notoriously expensive to fly to Europe or in business class on points. That being said, I think people might find that Skymiles could be particularly valuable for domestic and North American international economy award tickets and Jenn found that out.

In this case, Jenn received an email from Delta about a flash sale, and went on to Delta’s website, where she was surprised to find a round trip flight out of Moline Airport to Cancun in January for 26k Skymiles each. Because of the 15% award discount afforded to Delta Gold Card holders, she was able to book it for 22k Skymiles and $116 in taxes each for a total of 66K and $348. Those flights were priced at that time at $631 each, which means that this redemption was more than 2.3 cents per point which is a really good value for airline miles and definitely not worthy of being derided as “Sky Pesos”. This is particularly great, because good award rates out of the Moline Airport are usually hard to find, and typically we fly out of Chicago because of it, which usually means booking a hotel and paying for pretty expensive parking.

Because of the fact that we had significant amounts of Chase Ultimate Rewards points, Capital One Venture miles and Delta Skymiles, we were able to keep our eyes open for special rates with Delta, United, and Southwest Airlines, as well as being able to book Sky Alliance flights through Turkish Miles and Smiles or Avianca Lifemiles. I’m sure that we could get more creative than that, but honestly, it wasn’t needed in this case. Having flexibility in multiple programs allowed Jenn to be patient and wait for a great deal, and then jump on it when she had the opportunity.

The nice thing about a vacation rental is having a working kitchen, and this one looks pretty nice.

Flexibility on Booking Lodging

We had some flexibility built into our points for lodging as well. We had accumulated a decent amount of Wyndham points, and a respectable but not huge amount of Marriott Bonvoy points. However, with Jenn having a nice stockpile of Chase Ultimate Reward points, which transfers 1:1 to World of Hyatt points, that also made Hyatt a good possibility as well. Because of a status match made possible by Jenn’s Wyndham Business Earner card to Ceasars Rewards (visit Upgraded Points for more details), we also had a 4 night “free” stay available at Atlantis in Nassau in the Bahamas. The Atlantis stay would have had a bunch of extra resort fees that would have added up to over $200 a night and was quickly eliminated. Chase and Marriott were definitely possibilities, but the Wyndham-Vacasa partnership is just too good to pass up. We booked a Vacasa with Wyndham points before and got great value for that redemption.

The rental is in a complex with a pool on the beach.

Jenn decided to book a 1 bedroom Vacasa in Playa Del Carmen for 54,000 Wyndham points total for a 4 night stay. That particular Vacasa typically would rent for $1,325 for a 4 night stay in January meaning that those points were redeemed at 2.4 cents per point. This is another ridiculous value considering Wyndham points are generally valued at 1.1 cents per point. Booking a Vacasa rental with Wyndham points is a little weird because you have to call a special line to do it, but the rules are simple. Vacasa rentals cost $15k points per night per bedroom and is bookable with points as long as the cash price is under $500 per night per bedroom. For example, a one bedroom is bookable for 15K points per night as long as it costs under $500 and a 2 bedroom is bookable for 30k points per night as long as the cash rate is under $1000. Having a Wyndham Business Earner card gives you a 10% point discount on those rates. (Update – the program has recently changed and now the ceiling on cash price is $350 per bedroom per night, this changed in October 2023)

Obviously we’ll have to wait until they get there to find out if the Vacasa rental is as nice as the photos, but it looks gorgeous. It looks like Jenn did a great job booking this trip and I really hope they all have a great time (I’m sure she’ll feel sorry for me shoveling mounds of snow out of our driveway while she’s sipping a Bohemia Oscura cerveza on the beach). In the end, this was made possible because Jenn had the ability to be flexible with dates, locations and points programs. It allowed them to book what looks like a great vacation for not a lot of points and cash.

I may Have Created a Monster

When we got started with points and miles, it was pretty much me doing all of the research, listening to podcasts, reading blogs, and doing as much internet research as I could. As we started to have some success, with booking trips to Cabo San Lucas as well as our trip to Europe this summer, Jenn really started to not only get interested in points and miles, but she actually really gets it now. I expected to have to guide her on planning this trip, but for the most part, other than a couple of suggestions, she did this on her own and it was undoubtedly the best trip in terms of redemption value that we’ve made. Going forward, I think with both of us having a solid understanding of points and miles, we should have some great trips ahead, as long as she decides to come back from Mexico, of course.

The Passport Office Will Drive you Insane

Posted on by David Cox in Travel Hacking

We recently had to get passports for our kids and the process was, as my daughter would put it, batshit bananas. We probably waited a touch too long, but with the kids in extracurricular activities and school, it was difficult to set up a time at the post office where all four of us could be together to sit for a passport application appointment. We all had to be there because with Alex being only 14, that meant that both parents had to be present at the appointment. That’s apparently to keep one parent from leaving the country with a child without the other parent knowing about it. Emma was close enough to 18 where they didn’t care if a parent ran off with her.

Our appointment was set 15 1/2 weeks before we were to leave, and at the time, they were saying that normal processing was taking 8 to 11 weeks. When asked if we wanted to pay for expedited service for $60 extra each or have normal processing, we thought that we had plenty of time, why spend the extra money? That turned out to be a mistake. In the time between when we sent the application to the time that it arrived, they changed the processing time to 10 to 13 weeks. If you figure in a week on both ends for shipping, all of a sudden, we were cutting it super close.

We filed the applications and were given a website to check on the progress of those applications. After a couple of weeks, I checked the website and Alex’s passport was showing up on the site as having arrived at the office one week after it was sent but we couldn’t find Emma’s application. I thought, oh, that’s weird, but I was sure it was nothing.

Incorrect Data Hides the Application

We waited a while longer, and I checked every once in a while, but I still couldn’t find Emma’s application and with about 7 weeks before we were to leave, I was starting to get nervous. I decided to call the passport office so that we could locate her application. The passport office told me that there was no other way to look for it other than how the lookup works on the website. The website looks up applications based on the last 4 digits of the social security number, last name and birthdate. I suspected that one of those things were entered into the system incorrectly and that’s why we couldn’t locate it.

Lets back up a second. When Jenn filled out Emma’s application, she wrote down the wrong birthdate. This is unlike Jenn, she’s actually really detailed and she absolutely knows when Emma was born, but she did, in fact, write the date down wrong. That being said, the representative at the post office was extremely thorough, caught the mistake and made the correction on the form by putting a correct date above the original date with the correction initialed.

At this point, my only option was to either wait and pray, or contact my Representative’s office. Of course, I contacted our Representative. A staffer at the office emailed me back for information that they could use to contact the State Department. The staffer then called me later to ask when her birthdate was, and I told him the correct date, and as suspected, the issue was that they entered the incorrect date into the system. Even though a correction was clearly made on the form itself, when the data got entered into the system it took the incorrect date not the corrected date (I suspect they are using some sort of optical character recognition software to enter the data which probably wouldn’t be able to distinguish a correction like that). Either way, why was it possible for a staffer from my Representative’s office able to get that information, but I wasn’t able to? The State Department offers no mechanism for citizens to inquire about a potential mistaken entry other than going through their Senator or Representative. Seriously?

Emma’s passport showed up a couple of weeks later, which indicated to me that the moment that they looked it up, they must’ve decided to process it at that time. Cool! Now we just need to get Alex’s passport.

Expediting a Passport After Applying

In the time between when I inquired about Emma’s application and when she received it, I decided that it would probably make sense for me to go ahead and expedite the passports. We were about 5 weeks from travel, and I’m not great about cutting things close, it makes me extremely nervous, so for my own sanity, let’s just go ahead and spend the extra money and make sure they’ll be here in time. I called the passport office to set that up. The representative told me that they could email me an application for expedited services and they would let me know within 27 days if they could expedite the application. I said “You mean, you’ll have the application complete in 27 days?” “No,” she said “we will tell you in 27 days if we can expedite the application.” “So you’re going to charge me $60 a person to expedite my application and you might not even get to it in time?” I said “We leave in a little over 30 days.” Then she told me “It could take less time than that, and we won’t charge you unless we decide to expedite” Ok, fine, whatever, email me the form.

At this point, I’m pretty upset. What is the point of having services to expedite a passport if it takes a month to decide if you can expedite the damn passport? Then I check for the email and get utterly livid. The instructions on the email include 16 questions that I’m supposed to email back, questions that include entering all of my credit card information. I wouldn’t consider myself to be a security expert, but I’m pretty sure that emailing your credit card number, expiration date and cvv number isn’t kosher. It’s not like this is a local bakery or something, you’re the passport office. You process over 20 million passports a year and take payment for them. You don’t have a secure web payment process? You’re just taking credit card information through email? I mean, thank God nobody ever hacks email accounts! But, of course, I need the passport so I just threw my credit card information out into the ether and hoped nobody ever hacks it.

Panic Mode

At this point, I start emailing the staffer at my Representatives office on a fairly regular basis, trying to get him to pull off whatever magic he did for Emma’s passport. Honestly, I was probably being a bit of a grade A asshole to a guy who honestly didn’t deserve it and was doing his level best to assist. The problem was that once summer hit, the State Department was getting a ton of requests from every Congressperson and Senator from across the country and now they couldn’t even keep up with those requests. He was updating me when he could but you could tell he wasn’t getting updates very quickly from whoever he was in contact with.

At 14 days remaining before your trip, you are now allowed to contact the Passport Office and ask some additional questions. I told my boss that I would be coming in late and I called the Passport Office, and as expected, it took around 3 hours to get in touch with someone. When I finally did, the person on the phone told me she couldn’t get me any information because it wasn’t within 14 days. This is Friday, and we leave in 2 Fridays. That’s 14 days away. She said “We don’t count the day of travel.” Which doesn’t make any sense, but I think what she meant was that because they could actually process the passport on the day of travel then it’s really 15 days if you count the day of travel and the day of the call. Whatever, that’s some seriously insane semantics. I took 3 hours to get connected so that I could be told that 14 days isn’t 14 days. What?!! Whatever, can I at least pay for next day shipping while I have you on the phone? “No,” she told me, “I can’t look up the application until Monday, at that time you can pay for next day shipping”

I called on Monday, which is now just 11 days from when I need the passport in my hand and asked them to look up the passport. They told me that it had been approved and would be printed and shipped within 24 hours. I then asked if I could get the shipping upgraded to next day and was told that it was too late for that and that I could expect the passport in 1-2 weeks. So then I asked what I was to do if it actually took 2 weeks and I was told that if we didn’t get it before 5 days prior to travel, then I could request an in person appointment.

To be clear, I had requested next day shipping at 5 weeks prior, 14 days prior and 11 days prior and was unable to pull that off. I really wasn’t nervous at this point, however, because I’ve never had anything take 2 weeks in the US mail. It ended up being delivered in 3 days. That’s the good news, but all I can think of is just how useless all of this was. I had over 20 emails back and forth with my Congressperson’s office, several phone calls to the State Department and about half of the hair that I started this process with. Throughout the entire process, I kept reading about peoples’ experiences and I really did have one conclusion – they were always going to make sure we had the passport. If that’s the case, then, why not just do something on the customer service side to calm me down and make sure that I’m not going to get frustrated with your customer service reps and my Congressional Representative’s office? In the end, I wasted so much time for myself and so many people and it was all really preventable.

A Modest Proposal

It seems to me that a good, modern website could fix these issues and save a whole lot of labor for both the State Department and Congressional staffers. A redesign of the website to function better for applicants would make the process much smoother. Just as is does now, after filling out your application, you should be able to go to the website and check on the status. However, instead of just seeing a message that says “In Process” it should say “Based on the service requested, and the number of applications that we have, we anticipate that your application will be processed on the week of [date range]. After processing, please allow up to two weeks for shipping. If that is not soon enough, please choose from the below options to expedite processing or shipping.” Below that should be the ability to add expedited shipping or processing to a cart and you could then pay for those additional services with a credit card on a secure payment processor. Once you paid the new information should be displayed on the page with updated dates and/or shipping times. This is fairly basic and could free up so much time and effort for the State Department.

That being said, I don’t anticipate the State Department will do anything like this soon. My take away from this entire experience is that if you allow the State Department enough time to process your passport, they will get it done and you probably don’t need to make a hundred phone calls for them to do so. They know when the date of your travel is and they know it takes around 3-5 days normally to ship something. It’ll get done. I just don’t know why they feel the need to hold back information and needlessly stress citizens out. My passport is expiring in about 8 months and I’m going to apply for a renewal soon, without a planned trip, because frankly, I can’t take the stress of having a trip planned and not knowing for sure that it’s actually going to happen. I’m never going to put myself through this again and all of this stress took away from the anticipation of taking what I hope will be an incredible vacation. But now that this is over, we can concentrate on the most important thing – We’re going to Europe!

We now Have $10K in Points & Miles, What Does That Mean?

Posted on by David Cox in Travel Hacking

After really pushing every angle we could for the last 17 months, we now have accumulated 25,000 Citi Thank You points, 45,700 United miles, 80,000 Delta miles, 5,300 American Airlines miles, 58,300 Marriott Bonvoy points, 1,600 Hyatt Points, 274,900 Ultimate Reward points, 49,500 Wyndham points, 83,300 Capital One Venture Miles and $470 in Cash Back. By using the Points Guy valuations located at https://thepointsguy.com/guide/monthly-valuations/ that comes to a total value of $10,650. That sounds like a lot, but what exactly does that mean? It’s a bunch of points, but it’s spread over a ton of different programs. How useable are they, really? It turns out, that they are really useful because the real power are the transferable points that total up to around $7,500 worth of value between the Citi Thank You points, Capital One Venture miles, and the 274,900 Ultimate Reward points. Those points can either bulk up the points that you have in airline or hotel programs, or they can be transferred to a program you don’t even have points in, if there’s a great deal available. Let’s examine what these points could actually do.

United Airlines

Because Chase Ultimate Reward points are transferable to United Airlines (as long as you have a Chase Sapphire Preferred Card, Chase Sapphire Reserve Card, or a Chase Ink Business Preferred Card) the 274,900 points can be transferred to United. That means that while we have a total of 45,700 United miles, it actually means we have the potential to have 320,600 United miles. With United Airlines saver rates to Europe running at 40K right now, that means the possibility of 4 round trip tickets to Europe.

American Airlines & Delta Airlines

American Airlines doesn’t have typical transfer partners. There was a brief moment when Citi Thank You points were transferable in late 2021, but there aren’t any current transfer partners. So the 5,300 miles are basically useless unless I get an AA credit card with a sign up bonus. However, Marriott Bonvoy will transfer to AA at 3:1, so 57,000 Bonvoy points could turn into 19,000 AA miles for a total of 24,300 AA miles, with which you could probably pretty easily get a domestic round trip ticket. With Delta we have 80,000 points, so that’s a usable amount, but we don’t have any points with Delta’s only major transfer partner, American Express. There is a 3:1 transfer opportunity from Marriott, so we could transfer 57,000 Marriott Bonvoy points to Delta for 19,000 Delta miles to make 99,000 Delta miles when added to the 80,000 we already have. Neither one of the Marriott transfers would be an ideal use of Bonvoy points, but it is available. That could pretty easily get us a few domestic round-trip tickets as 16K round-trip in Basic Economy is not too hard to find.

Marriott Bonvoy Points

Transferring to Marriott can be done at a 1:1 rate from Chase Ultimate Rewards to Marriott Bonvoy. This means that there is a potential of more than 330,000 Bonvoy points by combining our Ultimate Reward Points and Bonvoy points. Since I’ve been eyeballing a trip to the Canary Islands, I found this listing which is a 3 bedroom villa with a heated pool in the Canary Islands for 43K points per night. That’s 7 nights in this villa.

Hyatt

Hyatt is known for having the most valuable hotel reward points. Because of that, Hyatt has been a favorite way for people to use Ultimate Reward points for years, since they transfer at 1:1 to Hyatt. While I only have 1,600 Hyatt points, we are able to leverage as much as 276,500 Hyatt points by transferring our Ultimate Reward Points. Hyatt points are extremely valuable. For example, if you just need a clean and comfortable room, Hyatt has some pretty nice category 1 Hyatt Places that you can routinely book for 5,000 per night. If you were to use those points that way it’s a total of 55 nights at 5,000 per night. If you want to book all-inclusive resorts, they are classed from A-F. The standard night bookings for A is 15k points per night, B is 20k, C is 25K, D is 30K, E is 40K, and F is 50K. So we would be able to book 18 nights at a class A, 13 nights at a class B, 11 nights at a class C, 9 nights at a class D, 6 nights at a class E or 5 nights at a super-swanky class F. We stayed at the Hyatt Ziva Los Cabos (which recently jumped from a class B to a class D) and we thought it was fantastic. If we were to go back we could stay for 9 nights, although my liver probably couldn’t handle it.

Wyndham Rewards

Both Capital One Venture miles and Citi Thank You points transfer to Wyndham at a 1:1 ratio, so if you total all of those points up, I have the possibility of 157,800 Wyndham points. The only interesting use of Wyndham points, for me, is to use them for Vacasa rentals. The generally accepted rule on Vacasa is that the you can basically book any available Vacasa for 15,000 points per bedroom per night as long as the normal price of the rental isn’t more than $500 per bedroom per night. In other words, these points would be worth 10 nights at a one-bedroom Vacasa rental worth up to $500 per night, or 5 days at a two-bedroom Vacasa worth up to $1,000 per night or even 3 nights at a Vacasa rental worth $1,500 per night. It’s such a good deal that we recently purchased points for a rental in Nashville and it saved us around $1000 over three nights.

Flying Blue

Ok, I have exactly 0 Flying Blue miles. Flying Blue is the rewards currency of Air France, KLM, and 4 smaller airlines. Just because I don’t have Flying Blue miles doesn’t mean that I can’t redeem them for flights, though. Flying Blue is great because they have great transfer partners and occasionally have ridiculous deals. They are 1:1 transfer partners with Chase, Capital One, American Express, Citi and Bilt. They are also 3:1 partners with Marriott Bonvoy. So if I do the math on the Capital One, Citi, Chase and Marriott Bonvoy Points, I have access to over 375,000 Flying Blue miles. On top of that, sometimes they have some awesome transatlantic flight rates. Here is an example I put together from Chicago to Paris. It’s round trip in Economy, 30K miles and less than $200 in taxes and fees. I could literally book this 12 times with the available points.

Virgin

Ok, this one, honestly, I don’t even believe this exists. Bear with me on this, again I have precisely 0 Virgin miles. Virgin has a ton of great transfer partners, similar to Flying Blue. They have Chase Ultimate Rewards, Citi Thank You points, Capital One and Amex all at 1:1 as well as Marriott Bonvoy at 3:1. In this case, it would be similar to Flying Blue with us able to covert our points to 375,000 Virgin miles, however, they also right now are offering a 30% transfer bonus from Chase, as described in this post from One Mile at a Time. With the transfer bonus, we would have access to 464,500 Virgin miles if we did complete transfers from Citi, Chase, Capital One and Marriott. Here is the deal from Virgin that would be the most intriguing to me – Virgin cruises occasionally runs sales on cruises where you can get a one week cruise for 2 people for 80,000 points. The latest special, as described by Upgraded Points, has 4 different 7 day itineraries for Mediterranean cruises to choose from. With the available points, we could cruise for 5 weeks and have points to spare. That’s just silly.

The importance of Flexibility

Obviously, a lot of these examples are ridiculous. We’re not going to stay 55 nights in a Hyatt Place, fly to Paris 12 times or cruise for 5 weeks, but they are meant to illustrate a point. If you stay on top of deals and know who you can transfer points to, you can really stretch out your points. If you can also be flexible with dates and locations, you can stretch it out even more. Keep in mind though, a typical, non-saver one way fare across the Atlantic Ocean is 70K United miles, not 40K, and business class typically runs 155K so these miles can disappear quickly if you’re not shopping around. If you try pricing out a Saturday to Saturday trip to Cancun during spring break on points to stay at an all-inclusive resort, that will probably be an ungodly amount of points, if you can even book on points at all. However, flying to Europe during spring break is off-peak and can be extremely cheap by comparison. Just like with cash, your points can go a lot farther if you are a diligent shopper.

Cash

I hope this never happens, but there is always the possibility that at some point I won’t want to travel, or can’t travel for some reason. In which case, these points are useless, correct? Well, not exactly. The credit card points do have a cash value, not the airline and hotel points, but the credit card points. The Chase Ultimate Reward points are worth 1 cent each, the Citi Thank You points are worth 1 cent each and the Capital One miles we have are worth half a cent each, when redeemed for cash. That would mean all of those transferable points have a current cash value of over $3,400. Which is nice, but probably not how I want to use the points.

What do we do now?

It’s almost strange to think about, but I just consider this to be a good base of points. We finally have enough points to utilize multiple programs (this post doesn’t even scratch the surface of great transfer partners, I didn’t even mention one of my favorites, Turkish Airlines). Our strategy moving forward will probably include a decent amount of cash back cards to fill in those gaps that points can’t, like Airbnb and taxes and fees on flights. It will also probably mean getting cards that are running elevated sign up bonuses. Either way, the next vacation we book should be easier for us to get a really good deal because of the flexibility we have built with this cache of points and miles.

Should we keep Vacasa a secret?

Posted on by David Cox in Bookings, Hotel Programs, Travel Hacking

Jenn booked 3 days in a Vacasa in Nashville for September this week and it’s a crazy good deal. I mean, it’s the kind of deal that you’re afraid if you start talking about it, the company might start to realize how much money they’re losing on it and shut it down. I’d like to think we could keep this quiet but I think this cat is getting out of the bag about this so you might as well get it while it’s still available.

What’s Vacasa?

Like Airbnb, VRBO and Marriott Homes and Villas, Vacasa is a short term vacation rental booking company. They team up with individual owners to list properties for rent and they take a portion of that rent payment for processing, advertising and managing the booking process. Like Marriott Homes and Villas, Vacasas are bookable with points, in this case Wyndham points. Unlike Marriott Homes and Villas, Vacasas have a set point chart which allows you to get ridiculously good value for those points if you choose well.

Vacasa’s Point Chart

The Vacasa point chart is extremely simple. Vacasa charges 15,000 Wyndham points per night, per bedroom. A 1-bedroom Vacasa is 15,000 per night, 2-bedroom is 30,000 points, etc. People have reported that the cash rate ceiling for a 1-bedroom is $500, meaning that if you attempt to book a 1-bedroom that would rent for $550 per night, the redemption will not go through. I don’t know what the cash rate ceiling is for it a 2-bedroom, I assume its higher, though. Wyndham points are generally regarded as being worth 1.1 cents per point, but a 15,000 point rental worth near $500 per night is over 3 cents a point. That’s a outstanding redemption for Wyndham points. (Update – The maximum redemption as of October 2023 is now $350 per bedroom per night, down from $500)

Nashville is crazy expensive!

Blame it on the bachelorette parties, but Nashville hotel prices are out of control. We saw most hotel rooms (not suites, just rooms) going for $350-$500 per night. We planned to use some hotel points or maybe a certificate or two to book a hotel in Nashville, but daaammmmnnnn, it’s overpriced. We literally couldn’t stomach what a redemption would cost near the downtown area. But Vacasa, we’ll, that’s a different story.

Cash Value of Vacasas in Nashville

Im not saying that the Vacasas in Nashville weren’t expensive, they absolutely were, but because of how the chart works, if we want to use points, a 1-bedroom rental for 3 nights is just 45,000 points, it doesn’t matter which one. The only caveat was that we needed to keep the cash rate for that 3 night rental under $1,500. Jenn found one she liked and we wanted to book it, but we didn’t have the points yet, now what?

Buying Wyndham points

Typically, you can buy Wyndham points for 1.3 cents per point and you can buy up to 60,000 points per year. Wyndham was running a special allowing people to buy up to 120,000 points as well as get a 40% bonus. As tempting as it would be to max that out and buy everything I could to get a whopping 168,000 points, we resisted the urge and bought the 29,000 points with 11,600 bonus points for $377. That gave us the 40,500 points we needed to book 3 nights in the Vacasa. I realize that yes, that’s less than 15,000 per night, and that’s because with Jenn’s Wyndham Business Earner card, she gets a 15% discount, so it’s an even better deal!

Bed 1
Bed 2

So here’s another sneaky thing about the price of these Vacasas – just because it’s a 1-bedroom doesn’t mean it’s one bed. We found this rental with 2 beds because one of the bedrooms can’t qualify as a bedroom. Maybe it’s not big enough, maybe it doesn’t have egress, I don’t know, but it’s basically an unqualified bedroom. That means, I’m basically getting a second bedroom for the price of a one bedroom. Actually, this is extremely common in the vacation rental industry because they want to say they sleep 4 or 6, so they cram in beds to try to make it more appealing to families. This normally raises their prices but with the Vacasa/Wyndham reward chart, it counts as a 1-bedroom. That’s great for me, I’m getting a second bedroom for free!

The kitchen is nice and modern, definitely good enough for a weekend.

What would this have cost, normally?

This was going to be more than $1,350 for 3 nights.

So here is what this rental would have cost normally, had we not paid with points. Keep in mind, we didn’t actually have the points, we had to buy them. In other words, we paid $377 for a vacation rental that was posted for $1,357. Essentially, we paid 28% of the listed price just by going through the steps to buy the points, then call Vacasa about what we wanted to book (points redemptions are can be done through email or phone call with them). That was it, huge discount, nice vacation rental. I can’t wait to stay in downtown Nashville, but knowing we didn’t spend a fortune makes it even better. Oh yeah, and all those taxes and cleaning fees, they are included in the redemption, which is nuts, because the taxes and fees section alone was $526!

I’m honestly not sure how or why Vacasa is doing this. It’s possible they know that they will take a loss, but maybe they’re just happy to get their name out there, since compared to Airbnb and VRBO they’re pretty small. My guess is that eventually, they will change the point chart to allow redemptions up to, say $300 per night for 15,000 points then maybe 30,000 points up to $500. This just seems unsustainable to me and I suspect a change is inevitable. That being said, there’s no harm in taking advantage of it now, but maybe we can just keep it between us, right?

Is this a scam?

Posted on by David Cox in Travel Hacking

When we started into the points and miles hobby, I didn’t think about whether I was scamming the credit card companies that much, but each time we opened an additional credit card account it bothered me more and more. What if they figure out what we’re doing? Will we be caught and put into some sort of credit jail and never be able to borrow anything ever again? Ok, that’s overly dramatic but I was worried that we’d get cut off, and we wouldn’t be able to do this anymore.

After spending way too much of the last year thinking about how and why the points and miles game works, I believe I have a theory, of sorts. It’s basically this – You’re not screwing the credit card companies over, they’re more than happy to do this, it’s a symbiotic relationship.

Relax, you’re not in control.

What? But I can only relax when I’m firmly in control!

Look, the credit card companies are in 100% total control of the points and miles world and you have zero control, but it’s fine. That’s why I’m convinced that I’m not scamming anyone. Every time I apply for a credit card, they pull my credit history, it’s literally right in front of them, if they wanted to stop me from doing this, they would, but they don’t. I’m not hiding anything, hell there are a ton of blogs and podcasts where they flat-out discuss all the ways they maximize the points and miles game and those people haven’t had their accounts shut down (ok, there have been a couple, but only when they’ve violated terms and conditions).

There is a huge difference between the value of points and the cost of points

Hands down, the greatest value that someone earning credit card rewards will get is in travel rewards. It’s way more valuable than cash back. But, I’d bet it’s also less expensive to give out. Look at the massive rewards companies are willing to give out for airline or hotel rewards. A quick glance at Chase’s website shows bonuses for co-branded hotel and airline cards easily worth between $600 and $1500. Cash back cards on the same site, however, are usually $200. That seems like an odd disconnect, unless you figure out that they want you to use it for travel and why they want you to use it for travel.

Law of Supply and Demand

The supply of hotel rooms and flights are completely inelastic. Flights have the same number of seats on Tuesday as they do on Saturday. It is the same with hotel rooms. There are days which are extremely popular and others that are not. For example, if you own a hotel by the beach, there is a good chance that you are going to be fully booked on a weekend in the summer. On the other hand, you might be completely empty on a Wednesday in the winter. On the flipside, if you have a hotel near a convention center, a weekday in April might be fully booked where a weekend might be mostly empty. Getting people in those empty rooms can make a huge difference in your profitability. The problem is that cutting your prices to fill rooms could be counter productive. Lets say you own a hotel that has 100 rooms. The typical going rate when you are busy is around $200 and you have no problem filling up at those prices. However, on an off-day, a $200 room charge only gets you 30% full. The typical thought would be that you need to cut your prices. The problem with that is that you might have to cut the price of the room to $100 just to get 50% full. Your revenue actually drops doing that.

What you need is a way to offload extra inventory without cutting the price for the people who are still willing to pay you $200. I’m sure there are a variety of ways that hotels do that, but setting up an alternative currency that isn’t really going to compete with cash is a really good idea. First of all, the hotel chain can urge loyalty by getting you into their points program. Maybe you go out of your way to stay with a certain hotel chain, because you like their points program. That’s good for them. Secondly, when someone does book a hotel on points the hotel does receive compensation for the room, although I assume it is at a much lower rate. But since so much of hotel costs are fixed, the additional room can still be profitable at that lower compensation.

Airlines are similar to hotels, the costs to operate the flight are going to be very similar whether or not all the seats are full. Yes, technically if there is more weight on the plane and if the person in that seat is getting snacks and drinks, it will cost more to operate the flight, but not a lot more. So getting some sort of marginal compensation from those points does make the flight more profitable.

Because of this, airlines and hotels work with credit card companies to develop these alternate currencies that can help fill seats or rooms on days when they wouldn’t ordinarily be full. The credit card companies make money on interest and credit card processing fees and they use the lure of signup bonuses to acquire new customers. They are literally begging you to take the points, and that’s fine, it’s good for you too. That is, as long as you follow the first commandment of points and miles.

Thou shalt not pay interest, ever.

Points and miles can be very lucrative for consumers, but the interest on rewards cards, especially, are ridiculous. Here’s the thing, I don’t know what the interest is on any of my cards, because I never pay interest. Every month I autopay the full statement balance. Set it and forget it. If you are paying interest on those cards, all of the benefits you are getting from those cards disappear very quickly.

You’re not really getting the deal you think you’re getting

Hotel and Airline programs are not going to give you awesome points and miles deals on flights and rooms that they expect to sell out. If you think you’re going to use your airline miles to get Saver rates on a flight to Cancun on a Saturday during spring break, I got bad news for you. You’ll probably be able to book with points, but those rates are probably 3x off-peak rates or higher. I looked at how much United would charge for a Saturday to Saturday roundtrip to Cancun during spring break and it was 110,000 miles, if you shifted it to Tuesday to Tuesday, all of a sudden its 40,000 miles, if you look in October, all of a sudden you can go round trip for around 25,000 miles. If you are going to get maximum value for points and miles, you will need to be flexible about when you book, because that’s what this is about. They are trying to get rid of their excess off-peak inventory of seats and rooms.

That sounds bad, but I kind of like it. We recently stayed at the all-inclusive Hyatt Ziva Los Cabos in San Jose Del Cabo in early January. We were able to book that for 43,000 points for 2 nights for a room that routinely goes for $600 a night. The hotel was about 25% full, and that’s why we got such a good deal. I actually enjoyed it more, because the pool wasn’t full and we got great service everywhere in the hotel. As it gets closer to spring break however, the availability has dropped off and the available rooms have much higher point rates per night.

I don’t think points and miles are going away any time soon

I’m convinced now that this is not going away anytime soon. I’ll be able to earn massive amounts of points and miles and use them for vacations for as long as I want. It’s because hotels and airlines have excess inventory that they want to get rid of and I’m happy to take them up on the offer. The more flexible that we can be, the more ridiculous the deals will be, and as the kids get older, we are able to be more flexible. So again, I’m not scamming the credit card companies, I’m working with them.