0:01

Hello and welcome to All the Hacks, a

0:04

show about upgrading your life, money, and travel.

0:06

I'm your host, Chris Hutchins, and today we

0:08

have a bonus episode that's really part two

0:10

of my conversation on Wednesday, where Greg, the

0:13

frequent miler, and I did a rundown of

0:15

all the different tools that exist to help

0:17

you book amazing flights with your points and

0:19

miles. Today, we're going to do a similar

0:21

deep dive on all the tools for hotel

0:24

booking, so you can book the best stays

0:26

on trips as well. Also,

0:28

since we recorded this, one more hotel

0:30

search tool has launched, so I'll make

0:32

sure to cover that at the end of

0:34

the episode, but for now, let's jump into

0:36

all the best award tools for hotels right

0:38

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right. Now, we're back

3:46

to talk about hotels. Let's

3:49

jump in to the first way you think

3:51

about booking hotel tools. The

3:53

first way is basically what I think

3:56

everyone would assume a hotel award search

3:58

tool would do. which is

4:01

basically you're planning a trip and

4:03

you want to say I'm going to London

4:06

I'm going from July 1st

4:08

to the 6th. Show

4:11

me what hotels are available how much

4:14

do they cost in points. That's

4:16

what you would expect any good

4:18

hotel award search to be able

4:20

to do. Surprisingly

4:22

there's only one

4:24

that I'm aware of that's currently

4:26

available and does it well enough

4:28

for me to talk about. I

4:32

know one that's sort of in development and

4:34

I've looked at some others that are kind

4:36

of these half baked tools but they're just

4:38

not even worth talking about. So the one

4:40

that's available is called a Waze with a

4:42

Z at the end and that does all

4:44

the things I was just saying. One of

4:47

the cool things about it it searches a

4:49

lot of hotel programs so it checks the

4:51

boxes for the major ones like Marriott Hilton,

4:53

Hyatt and IHG but

4:55

it also includes a Core, Choice

4:57

and Windham and my understanding is

4:59

they're adding more so that's really

5:01

nice. I'm doing a search right

5:04

now for Paris and

5:06

a Core has so many hotels

5:08

in France that it's almost overwhelming. Even if

5:10

I just filter that out the map is

5:12

pretty full and if you zoom in there

5:14

are a lot of options. I just think

5:17

it's funny that there's three or four other

5:19

tools that we could talk about but none

5:21

of them actually do this thing which is

5:23

what most people listening probably want which is

5:25

yeah I'm going to Paris from the 12th

5:28

to the 16th of April where

5:30

can I stay and is it a good

5:32

deal. Years ago there was a tool called

5:34

a word mapper that did something similar but

5:36

that's no longer available so finally

5:38

with a Waze there's a tool that does

5:41

this thing that should be an obvious thing

5:44

that a lot of people do but no one else

5:46

currently doing it. It lets you do

5:48

things like search by star rating so

5:50

you could find the best hotels you

5:52

could sort by the cost and points

5:54

or the cost and cash. It'll show

5:57

you a best value indicator next to

5:59

each hotel. You can now sort

6:01

by that actually. I just noticed that

6:03

the sort includes point value. Yes, so

6:05

that you'll get the best use of

6:07

your point sorting to the top, which

6:09

is great. And then if you

6:11

click into a hotel, you can

6:13

view a award availability calendar.

6:16

Maybe your dates for your trip aren't totally

6:18

set, or maybe the hotel you were interested

6:21

in wasn't available for the whole set of

6:23

dates and you want to see which days

6:25

is it available. You could

6:27

use their award availability calendar, which is really

6:29

neat. I've used Aways for

6:32

almost every trip when it comes

6:34

to searching for cities and award

6:36

hotels. We actually just did a

6:38

session where the founder of Aways for the All

6:40

Hacks members did a full product walkthrough. We got

6:42

to ask questions, one of which was like, they

6:44

used to roll out city by city. So we

6:46

said, what kind of coverage do you have now?

6:48

And the answer now is all. We

6:52

asked like, when will you have all the hotels for all the

6:54

programs? And they're like, we do. And

6:56

so I think one of the earlier things was they might have only

6:58

had 100 cities to start, but they've loaded

7:01

in all the cities for all the programs. And

7:03

you just get, I think, one

7:06

of the best views of I want

7:08

to use points on these days

7:10

in this place. The only

7:12

thing missing might be some flexibility. You

7:14

know, if you were like, I'm going to Paris for

7:17

a week, kind of be a little flexible, but

7:20

you're not necessarily set on a specific hotel.

7:23

I think that's one thing you can't do

7:25

when it comes to doing that kind of search. It's

7:28

really great. Totally great. The guy who

7:30

started the company had met

7:32

with me a while back to

7:35

talk me through the app and show

7:37

me what he could do. And for a few

7:39

trips that I had planned, I tried to use

7:41

it. But each time I tried to use it,

7:44

the city I was going to wasn't available in

7:46

the tool. So I gave up until recently. Then

7:48

I looked at it recently. I was like, oh,

7:50

wow, everything is here. And

7:52

so suddenly, you know, magically, it's really good.

7:54

I will say I've run into a few

7:57

cases where it uses

7:59

catch results. that were out of date

8:01

or for some other reason it was wrong. One

8:04

where it was just flat out wrong with the

8:06

points that it said it costed I sent them

8:08

an example and so they're gonna

8:10

work on that and try to figure out what's

8:12

going on. I just want to point out it's

8:14

not perfect but it

8:17

is very good I think in doing

8:19

what it's intended to do and since

8:21

it's the only thing out there that

8:23

does exactly that it's an easy answer.

8:25

Yep I will say I just pulled

8:27

up rooms.arrow and

8:29

unlike all of the other

8:32

seats.arrow functionality their

8:34

hotel search works

8:36

a little bit more visual than

8:39

data organized. Yeah. And so

8:41

I did the same search for Paris. It's

8:43

designed for a little bit more flexibility it's

8:45

like what range of check-in dates how many

8:47

nights do you want to stay and

8:49

it shows me less hotels than

8:51

a ways because I

8:54

think they're only searching Hilton

8:56

Hyatt and IHG so there's

8:58

noticeably Marriott is missing from

9:00

that list as is

9:02

Wyndham or Choice Hotels or a CORE

9:04

but it does have better than I

9:07

thought ability. That said it immediately popped

9:09

up and said it's refreshing stale results.

9:11

It knew it had stale results quite

9:14

a bit of them but it's refreshing

9:16

them but you can't sort

9:18

by anything. So the number one result

9:20

is the Holiday Inn and the number

9:22

two result is the Park Hyatt of

9:24

which I would say those are

9:26

two very different hotels. Yeah it kind

9:29

of does it but again I think

9:31

a ways is the only tool you

9:33

can rely on for that kind of

9:35

search. Right also you mentioned that sports

9:38

IHG Hyatt and Hilton but it's important

9:40

to note it does not include all

9:42

IHG hotels all Hyatt hotels all Hilton

9:44

hotels not by a long shot. It

9:47

has a database of ones that it looks

9:50

at and that's all it does. So searching

9:52

Paris it probably hit the core of where

9:54

a lot of people are looking but if

9:56

I searched to a more obscure place it

9:58

probably wouldn't work. Lexington, Kentucky,

10:01

I bet you'll find like one hotel

10:03

or something. One hotel. All

10:07

right. So that's

10:09

the basics of Waze

10:11

and hotel trip planning. One

10:14

thing that we didn't mention when talking about

10:16

a Waze is that you can also set

10:18

alerts. So if you found a hotel that

10:20

you want to stay at, it's not available,

10:23

you can set up an alert to email

10:25

you when it becomes available. With

10:27

hotels, even more than flights

10:29

is availability does change a

10:32

lot, even more than flights

10:34

do, partially because I think

10:36

a lot of people book hotels with

10:39

free cancellations and do cancel

10:41

as you have cancellations. The word

10:43

inventory automatically goes in and

10:46

then you can book it. So

10:48

that's a really nice feature. It gets us

10:50

to the other category of hotel tools. If

10:53

you're not doing planning for a specific trip,

10:55

but rather have like a hotel in mind

10:57

that I want to stay at this hotel,

11:00

but I'm having trouble finding award availability,

11:02

that's where there's a whole host of

11:04

tools that try to help you with

11:06

that. Some of them started because

11:09

Hyatt does

11:11

not have an award

11:13

availability calendar. Unlike

11:15

Marriott and Hilton and even IHG, you

11:18

could bring up one if you know

11:20

how, there's no way with Hyatt by

11:22

itself to see for a given hotel

11:25

which days can I use points.

11:27

It'll tell you how much it'll cost in

11:30

points if it's available, but not whether or

11:32

not it's available. So these tools grew up

11:34

to be able to answer that question and

11:36

more. The first thing that most of these

11:38

tools offer is a full

11:40

year calendar of award availability. And

11:43

so we saw OAZE has that, but

11:45

there's a bunch of other tools that have that as

11:47

well. And so I

11:50

looked at award tool has a

11:52

hotels feature. I

11:54

looked at that, I looked at rooms.arrow, which we were just

11:56

looking at as well. I looked at max

11:58

my point. stay with points.

12:01

As you're saying this, I'm playing with these

12:03

tools and searching for a few different hotels

12:05

and it's just funny how

12:07

some of them have very different ways

12:09

to express a hotel. I'm looking at

12:12

one of the properties near me, which

12:14

is notably hard to stay at, which

12:16

is the Alilah Vintana Big Sur. And

12:19

I'm laughing because the award tool

12:21

says 66% available, meaning

12:24

according to them, 66%

12:26

of the dates have availability. Stay

12:28

with points says 0% available, yet

12:31

when I click on it, even though it says 0%, it has

12:34

lots of dates that show availability. I know

12:37

that's one example of a place people are

12:39

often trying to find a dream stay at,

12:42

but I'm curious whether you think some of

12:44

these tools have better coverage because I don't

12:46

do a lot of hotel searching, but my

12:48

wife was looking to book a stay at

12:50

the Miraval, which is a pretty

12:53

good Hyatt redemption in terms of cents per

12:55

point. It is a lot

12:57

of points, but for those points, you

12:59

end up getting an all inclusive high

13:01

end resort. They even

13:04

throw in $175 per person per

13:06

day of resort credit when

13:08

you book with points. But it

13:10

wasn't available on every platform. So

13:12

is one of these tools better for coverage?

13:14

Yeah, I mean, Waze has by far the

13:16

best coverage because it has all

13:19

hotels, but it doesn't do some of the

13:21

key things that we're going to talk about

13:23

in a moment of the tools that do

13:25

like more advanced stuff for

13:28

finding availability. Max my point, in my opinion,

13:30

seems to have the best coverage. I would

13:32

just completely skip over this availability percentage. I

13:34

don't know if you got value out of

13:36

it, but if you're looking on video now

13:39

or if you just want to hear my

13:41

voiceover, they say the percentage of reward nights

13:43

available to book in the following 365 days.

13:47

And I'm clicking through and in April,

13:50

it's almost every day. In May, it's

13:52

almost every day. And

13:54

in June, it's a handful. It seems like

13:56

it is available. Now what I

13:58

think it's saying is percentage. of reward

14:00

nights available to book with a standard

14:02

priced award. It doesn't say that unless

14:05

that's what it's trying to say. I

14:07

don't understand how they're calculating it, but

14:10

you did more research than me. It's funny

14:12

you called that out because that's something I noticed early

14:14

on and I just stopped

14:16

looking at it. So I haven't tried to

14:18

figure out which tool gives

14:20

a close to accurate answer on that.

14:23

I just haven't looked at that. Let's

14:25

talk about some of these things that tools

14:27

can do. We talked about that they can

14:30

all be used to look at a full

14:32

year of award availability. They're all

14:34

using cached data. So they're

14:36

all wrong to some extent. The

14:39

best ones show you when it was last

14:41

updated so you could at least know is

14:43

this reasonably good data or not. They

14:46

all let you set alerts to find

14:48

out when the room becomes available, but

14:50

that's where they vary a lot because

14:53

some of them like a

14:55

ways you have to set

14:57

a specific date range either

14:59

that hotel's available in that date range

15:01

or not. But what if you

15:04

just want to be alerted anytime

15:06

across a whole year that

15:08

there are new awards available

15:10

at this hotel? Max

15:12

my point can do that. Or what if

15:14

you want to know alert me anytime there's

15:17

five days in a row available in

15:19

December at this

15:22

Maldives resort or whatever. Stay with points can

15:24

do that. So they have

15:26

different like advanced alerting features that

15:29

can be really important in

15:31

different situations. Okay,

15:33

so do you have a favorite? Yeah,

15:36

the Max my point seems

15:39

to check most of the boxes

15:41

pretty well for this kind of advanced

15:45

searching. The ability to find these

15:47

hard to get awards at

15:50

places like Elilavent on a Max

15:52

my point. It supports all

15:55

four of the major programs Hilton,

15:57

Hyatt, IHG and Marriott. Just

16:00

to give you an example, like rooms.arrow

16:04

doesn't support Marriott and

16:06

stay with points doesn't

16:08

support IHG. Max

16:10

my point also will let

16:14

you set alerts to alert

16:16

you if the price drops. So let's

16:18

say you've booked an IHG awards day.

16:21

IHG award prices change all

16:23

the time. You'd want to

16:25

know if the price goes down and be able

16:27

to rebook it then for the lower price. So

16:30

you could set up the max my point

16:32

to let you know when that IHG

16:34

hotel has dropped in price from whatever

16:36

you booked. You just have to put

16:38

in that total. It also has a

16:40

really good filtering features on its homepage.

16:43

Let's say you've got some of

16:45

those Hilton free night certificates that

16:47

are good at any Hilton worldwide.

16:50

So what you want to do is stay

16:52

at one of these like really hard to

16:54

get Hilton properties like the Waldorf Astoria in

16:57

the Maldives or Waldorf

16:59

Astoria in Los Cabos.

17:02

Those are really hard to find. You can use

17:04

alert features to let you know when they're available

17:06

but if what you're trying to do is just

17:09

find the best hotels that are

17:11

bookable with Hilton points, you could use

17:13

max my point's homepage and

17:15

filter to Hilton, filter to properties costing let's

17:17

say between 100 and 150,000 points which would

17:19

get you to their top end hotels and

17:26

then you'll see you can sort by like

17:28

most popular and you'll quickly

17:30

see some that you might want to target.

17:33

I do not have a paid membership or

17:35

max my point which I want only because

17:37

it is the only one of these sites

17:39

that has ads all over it and I

17:42

would love to make them go away. So

17:44

that's my next investment is a max my

17:46

point membership. You know what's funny when I

17:48

first looked at max my point the free

17:51

version it had way more ads than it

17:53

does today. It was almost unusable. It had

17:55

so many ads and they were

17:57

constantly covering out what I was trying to do. Yeah,

18:00

it still has a lot of annoying ads,

18:02

not nearly as many as before. I didn't

18:04

mention that, but that is true. And

18:07

the free version, if you could stand the ads, it's

18:09

fairly capable, but the paid version might be worth it

18:11

if you do a lot of this kind of thing.

18:13

And we didn't talk much about the hotel tool from

18:15

Award Tool. Where does that fit in? It's

18:18

sort of middle of the pack, in my

18:20

opinion. It has some decent

18:23

features, but it didn't beat

18:26

out Max My Point on any

18:29

of the types of things I

18:31

looked at. I guess the way

18:33

I think about it, if you're using Award Tool

18:35

anyway for flight searches, you

18:37

might as well check whether it can do what you

18:39

want with hotels as well, because you're in there anyway.

18:42

But if it can't, then go on to another tool

18:44

like Max My Point. And I

18:46

think you probably have gone deeper down

18:49

the Hotel Search Award Tool rabbit hold

18:51

for hotels. Then I've kind of done

18:53

a lot in flights. Hotels, I'm kind

18:55

of like, I'm going to find my flight, and

18:57

then I'm going to just kind of see what's

18:59

available at these hotels and make it work either

19:01

way. Especially when you have cool things nearby that

19:03

you can drive to, or if you have a

19:05

lot of flexibility in

19:07

your travel, I feel like I'm underusing

19:09

the hotel tools. So personally, I'm excited

19:12

because this episode made me understand

19:14

that there's more I can

19:16

be doing. I love Lila Ventana,

19:18

Big Sur, and if I was

19:20

in driving distance like you are,

19:22

Max My Point has these daily

19:24

alerts, which you have to

19:26

have the paid version to do it. Every time

19:29

Award Availability change at all, it'll send you an

19:31

email saying, here's all the dates that's available. And

19:34

then I would scan it each morning and

19:36

say, oh, there's a date that I might want to go.

19:39

Let's go ahead and book it. Of course, you can cancel if you

19:41

change your mind. The idea that we

19:43

live less than two hours away, work from

19:45

home and could go on a weekday, and

19:48

still haven't been to Ventana is a little

19:51

crazy for me to think about. Maybe that'll

19:53

be on the 2024 before the end of

19:55

the year. Let's tick that box. Well, of

19:57

course, you have kids and Ventana is... adults

20:00

only. So maybe that's a getaway

20:02

for you too. And I need

20:04

to set up a Gmail filter

20:06

that forwards the Ventana alert availability

20:09

to my parents and just

20:11

say, Hey, if any of the dates align and you

20:13

want to come down and hang out with the kids

20:15

for a couple of days, if they're listening, maybe this

20:17

is too much of an offer. Well, I'll book four

20:20

nights. We'll take them for two. And then you can

20:22

go down and take the other two nights as an

20:24

exchange for watching the kids. So

20:26

is there a hotel that in the Bay

20:28

area that you've been to and you'd recommend

20:30

it's worth watching the word availability for that

20:32

one? I don't think I've stayed at a

20:35

Bay area hotel in a very long time.

20:37

I guess that makes sense. You have a

20:39

house. Yeah, we live

20:41

here. The one that I've heard a lot

20:43

about, which I have not stayed at, but

20:45

I've heard great things about the Alila and

20:47

Napa for people looking to do a little

20:49

escape to wine country. I have

20:51

stayed at the West in Verasana. I

20:54

wouldn't say it's a hotel. I would

20:56

plan an entire vacation around, but

20:59

I would say if you're in Napa and

21:01

you don't want to go for something wild,

21:03

it's a great hotel. I'm sure the Alila

21:06

is probably nicer, but it suited

21:08

every need we had when we were there before

21:10

my parents moved to Napa and we can stay

21:12

with them. Let me talk

21:14

about a special use case that

21:17

I mentioned briefly, but there's a hotel in

21:19

Michigan that I really like going to called

21:21

the Inna Bay Harbor. It's a Marriott hotel,

21:24

of course, very popular in the summertime because

21:26

it's very cold other

21:28

times. And it's right on Lake Michigan.

21:30

It's beautiful. Award availability in the summer

21:32

is very hard to find. They

21:35

don't show one night award

21:37

availability. So if you're looking just one night at

21:39

a time, you're not going to see anything. If

21:42

you use Marriott's flexible dates calendar and just say,

21:44

I want to look for one night, it's

21:47

not going to show any availability. But if you look

21:49

for two nights, then things might show up. If there's

21:51

anything there, but most of the time there's nothing there.

21:53

So there's two ways of

21:56

handling that. One is stay with points.

21:58

We'll let you. create an

22:00

alert that says show me any

22:03

time for the month of June or the month of July

22:05

when there's Two nights available anytime

22:07

in the whole month. That's one way the other

22:09

way what I did this year is I

22:12

use max my points any day alert

22:15

and It's

22:17

any day alert won't tell me when

22:20

there's summer availability What

22:22

it does tell me is when a lot

22:24

of things have changed with availability at

22:27

this Marriott So I'll see a flood

22:29

of of nights all of a sudden

22:31

open up in the spring And

22:34

so then I jump onto Marriott's website

22:37

and do a flexible date search in

22:39

the summer of Two

22:41

or more days and then I've been able to

22:43

find Awards that way so

22:45

it sort of triggers me to look on

22:47

Marriott's website when it's time That would

22:50

be a great example of a place that you

22:52

keep an eye on any other hotels that you

22:54

thought were just such Amazing properties and

22:56

good deals for the points that if people

22:58

were looking to get inspired. Where should they

23:00

go explore some of these? special

23:03

kind of impossible to find

23:05

hotel awards Yeah,

23:08

if you come to my mind, but

23:10

they're slh properties which are no longer

23:12

bookable through Hyatt But they

23:14

should become available through Hilton soon

23:17

So maybe it'll still be relevant

23:19

Hilton has taken over a partnership

23:21

with slh that Hyatt used to

23:23

have most notable That I

23:25

can think of are in Queenstown, New Zealand.

23:28

There are two Amazing properties.

23:30

I stayed at one of them, but I've

23:32

seen videos of the other one And

23:35

the one I stayed at was

23:37

just amazing. It's right on the

23:39

lake. The base rooms Are

23:42

huge suites breakfast is included and

23:44

it's incredible. They have a evening

23:47

cocktail hour where You

23:50

come in and there's like

23:52

a host there Who

23:54

asks you what you want to

23:56

drink prepares your drinks and then

23:58

asks you? if you

24:00

have any dietary restrictions and

24:03

then goes and tells the chef that we're ready

24:05

for the chef to prepare our canapes.

24:09

And so the chef then custom

24:12

creates some snacks basically while

24:14

we're enjoying the complimentary drinks

24:16

very special hotel and in

24:18

probably the most unbelievable location

24:20

in Queenstown, New Zealand that

24:22

you can get. So

24:24

that would be a great one. We've stayed

24:26

at the Conrad and the St.

24:29

Regis in Bora Bora and because

24:31

San Francisco has direct flights to

24:33

Tahiti, it's like just such

24:35

an easy place to get to. The

24:37

difference between getting a room for a

24:40

good deal on points and paying full price

24:43

can like triple the cost. I've done an

24:45

episode I'll link to in the show notes

24:47

about going to Bora Bora but if you

24:49

can find a time where United has saver

24:51

business availability, you can book with Aeroplan and

24:54

the St. Regis has pretty affordable deals or the

24:57

Conrad does, all of a sudden you're going on

24:59

a $30,000 trip for a fraction of that. If

25:04

you pick a different week, you might be going on a $30,000 trip

25:06

for $30,000 which is

25:09

not a trip I'm excited to go on. I

25:12

think if you can time the flight

25:14

and hotel award availability to Bora Bora,

25:17

you can go on just an

25:19

incredible trip that's less than eight

25:21

hours plus a short 30-minute flight

25:23

from the West Coast that

25:26

can't be beat. Yeah, no, it's

25:28

interesting. There are certain hotels like

25:30

this where it's probably

25:32

worth planning your trip around

25:34

the hotel availability whereas

25:36

there are many trips like if you're

25:39

going to a big city, you might

25:41

want to plan the trip around the

25:43

flight award availability because you know you're

25:45

going to stay somewhere nice. There's so

25:47

many options but when going to Bora

25:50

Bora, the Maldives, places like that, you

25:53

might want to find the resort first

25:55

and then book your flights. We've

25:57

never done the Maldives only because... It's

26:00

just so far away. And

26:02

I don't know how, I'm sure someone

26:04

will send me an email and tell me how much better it

26:06

is than Bora Bora, but for

26:09

being three times farther away and

26:11

not even close to a direct flight for

26:13

the majority of the long haul, for me it's

26:16

like, wow, it's not even worth it. But

26:18

the crazy thing about Tahiti is that because you

26:20

can time it, if you take two different

26:22

airlines, you can't take the same airline and make

26:24

this true, but you can take day trips

26:26

for both of them, an eight

26:28

hour flight during the day in economy

26:31

is pretty doable. It's

26:33

a couple hours longer than going to the

26:35

East Coast. If you're used to using your

26:37

miles and points to splurge on business, I'm

26:40

not even sure it's necessary. Now,

26:43

if you have enough points, why not? Whereas

26:45

to go to the Maldives, I

26:47

think the experience of flying eight hours to

26:50

Tahiti in coach is not probably the

26:52

same as flying to the Maldives almost

26:55

24 hours. I don't

26:57

know, 10 years ago with no kids, you

27:00

could have put me in the middle seat in the back of the plane, I would

27:02

have been fine to go either places. Once you played the points

27:04

game long enough, you're like, well, there's gotta be a

27:06

way I can do it for a better deal. Yeah,

27:08

I think you're getting at a point

27:10

here which is like, if you're gonna be

27:12

traveling with four people and if you're looking

27:14

at places that are really far away, then

27:17

the flight availability almost has to

27:19

be more of

27:21

the driver, right, than the

27:23

resort or hotel or availability.

27:25

For me, usually traveling just

27:27

my wife, I know I

27:29

can find something in business

27:31

class to just about anywhere. I

27:34

might have to make a positioning flight

27:36

or two to make it happen, but I

27:38

can usually find something. And I

27:40

think just for anyone listening who's maybe new to

27:42

the points in Miles' world, I

27:44

always think it's funny that when I talk

27:46

about looking for flights to places, I'm always

27:48

like, wow, I couldn't find business class, so

27:50

we're gonna find another date. Just to be

27:53

clear, I don't think I've ever spent the

27:55

five to $20,000 those business class flights take.

27:59

This is not me. speaking out of a desire

28:01

to spend on that level of luxury. It's

28:03

just that if you figure out how to

28:05

use these tools, if you figure out how

28:08

to time the card bonuses and you know,

28:10

your spend and all the other stuff that

28:12

you talk about on your show and I've

28:14

talked about on my show, you end up

28:16

getting to a point that you're somewhat spoiled

28:19

to the fact that you can find a

28:21

way to do it in a premium cabin

28:24

at a very reasonable price almost every

28:26

time. Exactly. It lets

28:28

you do things like this

28:30

routinely that you would have

28:32

never even considered forking out the cash

28:34

to do. Things like staying at these resorts

28:37

that cost like $2,000 a night. Several

28:40

of the ones we mentioned before, we didn't talk about

28:42

the prices, but would be in that range or

28:45

flying business class for, as you said, anywhere from

28:47

$5,000 to $20,000. Those

28:51

are not things I would consider

28:53

paying cash for, but Points

28:55

makes all those things accessible on sale.

28:58

That's what I love about it and we

29:00

do become spoiled. I laugh at my wife

29:02

when we flew Air France business class. It

29:04

was kind of an older plane. It was

29:06

fully lie flat, direct dial access and she's

29:08

like complaining about how it wasn't as nice

29:10

as the previous flight we were on and

29:13

I just love that we could be that spoiled. Complain

29:16

about it even though it's still incredible

29:18

luxury. And still not have to pay

29:21

anywhere near full freight, which is great. This

29:23

trip to Miraval was just

29:25

a two night stay. The

29:28

rack rate for the same dates was

29:30

over $6,000 for two nights, which is

29:33

like, it wouldn't even be

29:35

an option. Like we would just never do a

29:37

trip like that. And unfortunately on this trip, I'm

29:39

not actually going. My wife is going with a

29:41

friend of hers to celebrate a birthday. And so

29:43

I'm going to have her join on the show

29:45

sometime after she stays in April to give a

29:47

little rundown of how that trip

29:50

was and she can share with everyone. But the

29:52

only other thing I wanted to mention before we

29:54

wrap is on hotels.

29:57

If you are not finding what you want, but

29:59

you. You are still looking for a

30:02

little bit of like a perk or a

30:04

benefit in the luxury travel world. There

30:07

are a lot of different ways that you

30:09

can book a hotel and add on a

30:11

lot of different perks. Anyone with

30:13

an Amex knows that Amex has the Find Hotels

30:16

and Resorts program. Chase and Capital One have all

30:18

launched those. We launched our

30:20

own at hotels.allthehacks.com where you can

30:22

search for the higher end four

30:24

or five star hotels and get

30:27

access to perks like free

30:30

breakfast, resort credit, free upgrades, early check in,

30:32

late checkout. I would encourage everyone to figure

30:34

out how to use their points and miles,

30:36

use everything we talked about in this episode

30:38

to get your stay for free and get

30:41

all kinds of stuff. But if

30:43

you end up spending dollars and you are

30:45

staying at a nice higher end hotel and

30:47

you have to pay for it, chances are

30:50

through one of these platforms, you can

30:52

get a pretty awesome set of perks

30:54

added on for the same

30:56

as the rate you typically pay at the

30:58

website. Might not be the same

31:00

as the discounted corporate rate you have through your

31:03

employer or a last minute

31:05

hotel tonight rate. Basically we

31:07

found a partner that would help us give everyone

31:09

access to I think it's 4000 hotels.

31:13

Chase and Capital One might have 1000, Amex has two or

31:15

three and we have 4000. I

31:17

think we have a bigger selection of them but

31:19

you can get all those same perks if you

31:21

want. That's great. And is there

31:23

any fee to use that service? There's

31:25

no fee. You can book

31:28

it. You can cancel your awards. I will say to provide

31:30

this, we had to make some

31:32

UI sacrifices. So the tool

31:34

that you'd use is not the easiest to use.

31:37

If you go to allthehacks.com/upgrade, I'll put

31:39

a video if people want help walking

31:41

through the tool. Greg, because

31:43

you dive into this stuff way deeper than we

31:45

do, where can people find what you're reading, writing

31:48

and talking about on your show? Yeah. frequentmiler.com,

31:51

that's where you'll find our blog

31:53

and links to our podcast which

31:55

is called frequentmiler on the air.

31:57

You'll just find a wealth of information. We have...

32:00

resource guides about all these

32:02

things. We have the best

32:04

list of credit card offers

32:06

on the internet. Unlike most

32:09

other websites, we

32:11

only post the best offer

32:15

that we know about for the reader and

32:17

we don't list offers that

32:19

are inferior. For example, there

32:21

might be a 120,000 point Amex Platinum offer that is available

32:27

on most websites but if you go to our

32:29

website right now, you'll find 150,000

32:32

point offer listed there. We

32:34

don't earn anything from you clicking through

32:37

that offer but we think

32:39

it's the right thing to do to show

32:41

the offer that gets people the most points

32:43

rather than what would pay us. So that's

32:45

a big deal. Tons of different resources about

32:48

how to earn points, how to use them,

32:50

shortcuts to elite status, things that Chris talks

32:52

about all the time but you might get

32:54

more in-depth on the blog there. Greg's underselling

32:56

it. There is so much good stuff. Your

32:59

podcast is one of the few that I

33:01

listen to every time an episode comes out

33:03

because I love going deep on this stuff.

33:05

It gives me so much inspiration for ideas to

33:08

talk about and podcasts to do with you and

33:10

Nick and we'll see where it goes from there.

33:12

So definitely check out the podcast, the website, reach

33:14

out to either one of us if you have

33:16

questions. Absolutely. Alright. Thanks so much. Thank you, Chris.

33:20

Thank you so much for joining us for this

33:22

bonus episode. I hope it helps you get the

33:25

most value out of your points when it comes

33:27

to hotels and it makes it much easier to

33:29

find the best deals. I have links in the

33:31

show notes and at allthehacks.com to all the tools

33:33

we covered including some great deals on

33:35

a few of them and since

33:37

recording, Pointe Yat actually launched a

33:39

hotel feature on their site which

33:41

includes searching all five major hotel programs

33:44

Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, IHC and Windham.

33:46

It also includes support for looking at

33:48

Hyatt, IHC and Marriott free night certificates

33:50

and it shows the cash rates

33:52

from all the different portals Amex Chase

33:55

Capital One City built as well

33:57

as some rates booking from American

33:59

and United portals and

34:01

rates for Amex Fine Hotel and

34:03

Reserves and Virtuoso. Fortunately,

34:05

it looks like most of these features are

34:07

free. I can't quite tell because I have

34:10

a paid account and you can't use them

34:12

unless you create a free account and log

34:14

in. However, unfortunately the hotel search tool does

34:16

not include a calendar view for individual hotels.

34:19

So if you're trying to plan a trip

34:22

around availability at a very specific property, this

34:24

probably isn't the right tool. But if you're

34:26

already planning to go to a city like

34:28

Paris or London or Tokyo, and you're just

34:30

looking for the best hotel deals in that city

34:32

to use your points on, it seems like this

34:34

tool could be a great option. So

34:37

that's my recap of points. Yeah, definitely check

34:39

it out. Also check out our YouTube channel,

34:41

allthehacks.com, slash YouTube. If you want to watch

34:43

the video version of this episode where I

34:45

shared my screen and finally make sure

34:47

to check out frequent Myler on the air, Greg's

34:49

podcast. If you want to go deeper on all

34:51

things points and miles. Thank you

34:53

so much for joining me today. Podcast at

34:56

allthehacks.com. If you want to reach out, I

34:58

will see you next week.