Category Archives: Chase

The Three Best Credit Cards for Free Luxury Hotel Nights

Posted on April 25, 2013 by | 46 Comments

For me, first class flights would be out of reach without miles. I can’t spend $10,000 for a first class flight on an airline like Emirates.

Luckily I don’t need to because I have plenty of miles, and I could fly economy class in a pinch.

Fancy hotels are similar. I can’t pay $1,000 a night for a hotel like the Park Hyatt Sydney.

And luckily I don’t ever need to stay in fancy hotels. When I travel, all I need is a roof and a pillow. But for those special occasions when I want to indulge in absolute luxury, I can by opening a single credit card.

What are the three best credit cards for luxury hotel experiences?

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Posted in Chase, Citi, Hilton, Hyatt

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Anatomy of an Award: Roundtrip from Los Angeles to Buenos Aires with a Free Oneway

Posted on April 24, 2013 by | 18 Comments

The second you move abroad, you become a lot more popular! That far flung country looks a lot better to family and friends as soon as they know they’ll have a free bed and tour guide. My sister wanted to come visit me in Argentina in mid-May, so we set out to find her the best award ticket possible. Only one minor problem. As of two months ago, she had zero miles.

We ended up booking her n roundtrip from Los Angeles to Buenos Aires for a weeklong trip for 60,000 United miles. We even added a free oneway to Hawaii for next year for no extra miles and only $2.50 in taxes. This Anatomy of an Award should illustrate how to get from zero miles to a dream trip in two months, United free oneways, United’s hold policy, and the secret United award space open to United card holders.

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Posted in Anatomy of an Award, Chase, Rookie Alli, United

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3 Ultimate Rewards per Dollar on First Friday Dining with Chase Sapphire Preferred

Posted on April 23, 2013 by | 3 Comments

The Chase Sapphire Preferred will offer three Ultimate Rewards per dollar on dining expenses on the first Friday of each month until the end of 2013. Those are some nice free points.

As an award booker, I love Ultimate Rewards for their flexibility. Ultimate Rewards can be transferred 1:1 to United, Southwest, British Airways, Korean, Virgin Atlantic, Hyatt, Amtrak, and many more.

I eat out a lot, and especially on Friday nights (and especially on First Fridays when I am in Honolulu!), so this deal will be great for me. I also notice that most of my bar spending is coded as dining by the Chase Sapphire Preferred, so it will earn 3x points on First Fridays also.

But in the scheme of things this promotion is unlikely to earn you more than 1,000 Ultimate Rewards, so it doesn’t make a huge difference to the value of the Chase Sapphire Preferred. In fact, I can think of 10 better reasons to get the card. Continue reading →

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Free First Class Next Month: Transferable Points Program Basics

Posted on February 3, 2013 by | 8 Comments

This is the eleventh post in a monthlong series that started here. Each post will take about two minutes to read and may include an action item that takes the reader another two minutes to complete. I am writing this for an audience of people who know nothing about frequent flier miles, and my goal is that by the end, you know enough to fly for free anywhere you want to go. Previously An Easy Way to Meet Multiple Minimum Spends at Once.

Transferable points programs are loyalty programs, usually run by banks, that allow a person to earn points that can be transferred to several different airline or hotel programs. The three most important programs are American Express Membership Rewards (MR), Chase Ultimate Rewards (UR), and Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG) Starpoints.

First I’ll describe the basics of those three programs, then I’ll talk about how to make the most of your transferable points.

American Express Membership Rewards

American Express Platinum, Gold, Green, Centurion, and Corporate cards earn Membership Rewards points.

Points are transferable to dozens of air and hotel loyalty programs including Delta (1 MR to 1 SkyMile), British Airways (1 MR to 1 Avios), Singapore Airlines (1 MR to 1 KrisFlyer miles), and SPG (3 MR to 1 Starpoint)

There are near constant transfer bonuses, which temporarily improve the transfer ratios of certain programs.

Membership Rewards can be frustrating if you want premium international travel because Delta has the worst award space of major US carrier, and the other airline transfer programs charge huge surcharges on redemptions.

There are ways around these frustrations, depending on where you want to go. Tahsir and I are in the process of publishing a series on Membership Rewards transfer options, so you can better understand your options. The first post was about transferring to Singapore Airlines.

Your Membership Rewards can be transferred to anyone’s loyalty account. This is why when I sometimes do giveaways on Twitter, I give away Membership Rewards that I transfer to the program of choice of the winner.

Chase Ultimate Rewards

The Sapphire Preferred, Ink Bold, Freedom, and other Sapphires and Inks earn Ultimate Rewards.

Points earned on the Sapphire Preferred, Ink Bold, and Ink Plus are transferable to several air and hotel loyalty programs including United, Southwest, British Airways, and Hyatt–all at a 1:1 ratio.

Points earned on the Freedom and other Sapphires and Inks are not transferable to those loyalty programs, but they are transferable to your other Ultimate Rewards accounts. So you could transfer your Ultimate Rewards from Freedom to your Sapphire Preferred, and then from there to United.

Chase has not gotten into the transfer bonus game yet.

Ultimate Rewards can be combined among your Chase accounts and your spouse’s. You can also send the points to your airline or hotel accounts or your spouse’s. But Chase prohibits sending points to anyone else and has shut down accounts for transfers that don’t comply with Chase’s rules.

SPG Starpoints

Starwood Hotels’ loyalty program is a much-loved transfer program. Many hotel loyalty programs let you transfer your points to airlines, like many airlines let you transfer your miles to hotels. However, it is almost always a bad deal. By contrast, SPG points transfer to airlines at a good rate, so it is an outlier.

The SPG AMEX card earns 10,000 Starpoints on first purchase and 15,000 more after $5k spending in the first six months.

A complete list of airline transfer partners is here. Notable 1:1 transfer partners include American, British, Delta, US Airways, Alaska, and Hawaiian.

And the reason everyone loves SPG points is that you can do better than 1:1 on airline transfers.

For every 20,000 Starpoints you transfer, you get a bonus 5,000 miles in the transfer partner’s miles. Example: If you transfer 20,000 Starpoints to American, you receive 25,000 AAdvantage miles. Thus if you transfer in exactly 20,000 Starpoint increments, all the 1:1 transfer partners are really 1:1.25 transfer partners!

Starpoints can be transferred to anyone’s loyalty accounts.

Now that you know about the big three, let’s talk about how to get maximum value from transferable points programs.

1. Keep you points in the transferable points program until you have an award in mind, then transfer. Holding on to your points in the transferable programs retains your option value: you can still transfer them to any of the partners. Once you transfer, that option value is destroyed, so don’t transfer until you have an award in mind. Membership Rewards and Ultimate Rewards make following this easy because points transfer instantly to most partners. Starpoints do not transfer instantly, so you have to transfer with some anticipation, but still you should hold those as Starpoints as long as you can before transferring.

The one exception to this hold-the-points approach is if you close your last Ultimate Rewards or Membership Rewards earning card. The points disappear in that case, so send them out first.

(This is not a worry with the SPG AMEX and Starpoints because those points are in your SPG hotel account. Nor is this a worry with airline cards like the Citi American Airlines Visa because your AA miles are in your AA account.)

2. Make sure the award you plan to book with your transferred points is worth more than your other transfer options. For instance, you can transfer UR points to United and Southwest. Checking the Mile Value Leaderboard, we see that a Southwest Rapid Rewards point is worth 1.69 cents. If you’re transferring to United for an award worth less than 1.69 cpm, and you should check that at the Mile Value Calculator, you’re probably making a mistake and could get more value from a transfer to Southwest.

3. Make sure the award you plan to book with your transferred points is worth more than your other non-transfer options. For instance, your other best option with Starpoints is hotel stays. Many people report getting several cents per point from using their Starpoints for hotel awards using the Cash & Points option–even after its recent devaluation.

4. The best use of a transferable program is often topping up an account that is just short of an award. If you’ve got 85,000 United miles and want to book a roundtrip business class ticket to Europe, your miles are practically useless. Transferring in 15,000 UR points to reach 100,000 provides immense value, taking you from having no ticket to having the business class ticket in hand.

And this is often the best way to think about the transferable-points programs. Don’t get the Ink Bold thinking it’s 50,000 more United miles or 50,000 Southwest points. Instead pursue strategies to get huge amounts of United and Southwest miles other ways, and use your 50,000 UR points when you’re just short of the miles needed for an award in one of its partner programs.

I love transferable points programs for their flexibility and immense value. They should be a key component of any miles enthusiast’s strategy for exploiting frequent flier miles.

Continue to Category Bonuses.

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Posted in Chase, Free First Class Next Month, Membership Rewards, SPG

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Are No Foreign Transaction Fee Cards a Scam?

Posted on January 8, 2013 by | 25 Comments

A reader wrote to me:

For credit cards, HSBC is by FAR the best for foreign purchases but not sure if it is because it is HSBC Premier rather then regular HSBC. HSBC Premier gives me the same exchange rate as what they get when exchanging money between other banks with no mark-up. It is crazy how much I save. I’ve found Chase to be the most expensive and American Express somewhere in between. The difference in exchange rates negates any benefit from earning miles etc even though all the cards say no foreign transaction fee.

Many American credit cards charge a 3% fee when the origin of the charge is foreign. This is frustrating, and swamps the value of the miles you earn usually since one mile is rarely worth three cents.

You’ll get hit with the fee even when the charge is in dollars, as I found out when I paid a 3% fee on the taxes charge on an Avios booking made at BA.com in dollars.

But there are several cards that advertise no charge for foreign transactions. The Chase Sapphire Preferred, Ink Plus, and Ink Bold all mention the benefit in their marketing.

But there are two ways banks make money on foreign charges. The first is the fee they might charge. The second way banks make money on your foreign purchases is by converting the purchase into dollars at a bad rate for you. This is what the emailer suspected Chase was doing.

To test out how much of that was happening, I’ve made two purchases with my Ink Plus in New Zealand.

The first purchase was NZD 260 for a 440 foot bungee jump. The second was NZD 109 for a Milford Sound cruise. In both cases, those amounts were the exact amount charged to me since New Zealand follows the enlightened practice of including all taxes in quoted prices.

Both are showing as pending in my Chase account online.

Doing a little math, the conversion rate was 1 NZD to $0.8289. (I’ll be using “$” to denote US dollars and “NZD” for New Zealand dollars.)

How does this compare to the prevailing rate? The easiest way to check is to google “1 NZD to USD.”

Google says I would need to spend 84 cents to buy 1 NZD. Chase sold me 1 NZD for less than 83 cents! For whatever reason, Chase offered me a better deal than the prevailing rate.

Maybe you could see this more easily if we look at one $1 should buy me according to google and Chase.

Google: $1 = 1.19 NZD

Chase: $1 = 1.21 NZD

Chase is clearly giving me an incredible deal. Even more so when you compare it changing money on the street.

Street Rate

Banks throughout Auckland and Queenstown show their prices for buying and selling dollars. The one I saw today in Queenstown would sell NZD for $0.8815. This is about 4% worse than the prevailing market rate according to google. (Remember the fewer dollars we spend for 1 NZD, the better.)

If I had taken dollars to a New Zealand bank and changed them to NZD to book my tours, I would have needed 369 NZD total. That would have cost me $325.27 at the bank. Chase charged me only $305.86.

Conclusions

Today in Queenstown, New Zealand, I was way better off paying for tours with my Ink Plus than I would have been changing American dollars or using another card with a 3% foreign transaction fee.

I’ve made that conclusion very specific because I am very surprised by the results of my experiment. I expected Chase to offer me about the same rate than if I had changed at a bank.

Clearly my results were different than the emailer’s experiments of splitting foreign charges halfway between Chase and American Express cards. He found both to offer a bad rate with American Express offering a slightly better exchange rate.

I do think New Zealand’s banks and change houses offer bad rates for cash, implying about a 3% fee. I generally notice rich world countries offer way worse exchange rates than developing countries. For instance, in Arequipa, Peru there are dozens of change shops that have only a 1% spread between their dollar buy and sell prices, meaning they are only shading about half a percent on each side.

Recap

Today in New Zealand dollars, I got a better deal by charging to my Ink Plus than I would have gotten from an exchange house. Your exchange rate may not be as good when you use a credit card for a foreign transaction.

But I was very happy to see that a “no foreign exchange fee” card like the Ink Plus didn’t try to make up for that lack of a fee with a bad exchange rate. A reader’s email made me fear that “no foreign exchange fee” cards might be a scam, but in my experience they aren’t.

I got a great exchange rate and paid no foreign exchange fee.

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Anatomy of an Award: How to Book an Award on Southwest

Posted on October 18, 2012 by | 8 Comments

The other day I helped a friend book a roundtrip Southwest award from Los Angeles to Denver for 11,761 Rapid Rewards and $5, taking advantage of a 1,000 Ultimate Rewards transfer to make up a shortfall of points in her account. For some people, this post will be very basic. But this post touches on some topics of interest to all, including the valuation of Southwest points–not 1.67 cents as commonly thought.

Most of my friends know that I am miles obsessed–perhaps because I wear MileValue tank tops and t-shirts to dodgeball pretty frequently. They generally combine jealousy of my trips with indifference or skepticism toward my methods. I only hear from them a few weeks before a trip: “How can I get a cheap ticket from XYZ to ABC in a few weeks?” I always suggest using kayak.com, and applying for a credit card now for their next trip.

So when my friend Allison said she wanted to go from LAX to Denver in a few weeks, and she had Southwest points, I was happy to help someone whom I could actually help. We signed into her account, and she had 11,659 Rapid Rewards. That’s about $200 worth of travel, so we searched for flights to see what we could do.

Rapid Rewards Primer

Southwest has a very different frequent flier program than the legacy carriers’ programs you may be more familiar with. Southwest has a revenue based program. Purchased Wanna Get Away fares earn 6 Rapid Rewards per dollar of base fare plus excise taxes. (10-12 if you buy a more expensive fare type.) Then you can use those points on any Wanna Get Away fare at a rate of 60 Rapid Rewards per dollar of base fare.

That means that the program basically amounts to a 10% credit on purchased fares, which can be used on future flights.

The 60 Rapid Rewards per dollar formula also means that you can score domestic awards for way fewer than 25,000 miles, the rate that the American legacy carriers charge. A $100 roundtrip from Los Angeles to Las Vegas would be fewer than 6,000 miles.

And I want to mention as many times as I can that Southwest domestic awards are temporarily capped at 19,200 points per roundtrip, subject to availability, because of a trick that exploits Southwest’s merger with AirTran. See How to Exploit the Southwest-AirTran Merger. This trick is useful when roundtrips are over $330 or so. It was not useful in Allison’s case.

How to Book a Southwest Award

Once signed into your account, perform a regular flight search on the home page, typing in your cities and dates.

On the results screen, you can toggle between seeing fares in dollars and seeing them in points.

If you’re happy with the prices or your dates are inflexible, you can choose the best flight for you. If you are flexible, click on the dates above the results for the fares on those dates. Or click Try our Low Fare Calendar to see a month-long view.

The total price of Allison’s preferred flights was 11,761 Rapid Rewards and $5. Allison only had 11,659 points, so she needed 102 more.

Southwest sells points directly for 2.5 cents per point with a minimum purchase of 2,000 points for $50.

This might be a decent deal if you need to top off for an award, and you have no other options. But in general 2.5 cents for a Rapid Reward is steep.

Luckily, there is a better option. Chase Ultimate Rewards transfer to Rapid Rewards instantly at a 1:1 rate. After clicking on your Ultimate Rewards balance after signing into your Chase account, select a transfer to Southwest.

Ultimate Rewards can be transferred instantly to your Rapid Rewards account in increments of 1,000.

The points transferred instantly, and we ticketed the award in a matter of moments.

For 11,761 points and $5, she had her flights to Denver booked. For comparison, the cash ticket on the same flights would have cost $217.60.

And here’s how that $217.60 breaks down:

Only $196 was the base fare plus the excise taxes. $5 was the 9/11 Security Fee. The rest was Segment Fees and Passenger Facility Charges. From taking a close look at Southwest award pricing in previous posts–see How Much is a Rapid Reward Worth?–I know that the award price is calculated as 60 times the base fare plus excise taxes. 11,761 points equals 196 times 60 (plus a phantom 1 that seems to be a part of all the awards I price on Southwest.com lately.)

Here’s where some confusion occurs. Rapid Rewards are often valued at 1.67 cents because 60 of them equals $1 of flying. But awards don’t include some fees and charges that cash tickets do include, and that valuation doesn’t take into account that paid flights don’t earn points.

For Allison’s flight 11,761 Rapid Rewards + $5 equaled a cash ticket that cost $217.60 and would have earned 1,176 Rapid Rewards. Typing those numbers into the fields of the MileValue Mile Value Calculator, we find that she earned 1.64 cents per point from her award. (Plug in 217.6, 5, 11761, 1176.)

Ticket Value ($)
Taxes and Fees ($)
Miles Used
Miles Foregone

In general, the way to get a higher CPM on Southwest flights is to book cheaper awards where the avoided Passenger Facility Charge and Segment Fees represent a higher proportion of the ticket cost or to use the merger-exploiting trick previously mentioned.

But Southwest points are very close to being fixed in value, so I recommend using them for domestic flights when Southwest has the cheapest fare, and you don’t need to earn status miles on a legacy carrier. Or when you need to check two bags each way, since those fly free on Southwest.

Recap

Booking an award on Southwest is very easy since all Wanna Get Away fares can be purchased as awards at a price of 60 times the base fare plus excise taxes. Awards are made even easier by the fact that you can top up a deficient Rapid Rewards account with instant transfers from an Ultimate Rewards account.

Southwest points aren’t completely fixed in value. You get a little more value out of awards on cheap fares and awards that are capped at 19,200 points than you do out of $200 to $300 fares.

If you have the chance, help a friend or family member book an easy award. It’s easy for you, but not for them. You can make someone’s day, and hopefully convert them to the miles religion. If more of your friends have miles balances like yours, you can have more companions on your next trip!

 

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Posted in Anatomy of an Award, Chase, How to, Rapid Rewards

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What I Learned at the First MileValue Dinner

Posted on September 10, 2012 by | 23 Comments

Friday night 12 readers and I met at Guelaguetza Restaurant near downtown Los Angeles for the first ever MileValue dinner. Eating, drinking, and socializing lasted the better part of three hours.

Before, during, and after the dinner I had a chance to talk with everyone about their upcoming trips, miles-redemption strategy, and miles-earning tricks.

Amazing tips were circulated by readers. One person brought a pen and paper to take notes, and I think we all wished we had. Two tips in particular stood out to me. One that I’ll blog later this week, and one which is not suitable for blogging because it’s a mistake that would be fixed upon being identified.

Because of how fun and informative the dinner was, I will definitely be hosting more in the future. (I’m looking at December 1 for the next one in LA.)

I encourage everyone to try to meet other travelers in person. Beyond the fun, the interchange of information is fantastic and qualitatively different than what you get in a forum or blog.

And if you’re a blogger like many of my readers are, why not host your own meet up in your city? You’ll be glad you did.

Here are a few pictures of the evening. I’m not much of a photographer.

Not sure what it is exactly, but I want one!

The most popular dish was the restaurant’s famous chicken mole, and the most popular drink was the house margarita made with mezcal instead of tequila.

The most common method of payment was the Chase Freedom, but I saw some Sapphire Preferred, and some prepaid cards.

We were at a Mexican restaurant during the Mexico-Costa Rica World Cup qualifying game, and a Spanish-speaking LA-based TV station was filming the patrons watching the game. Presumably it was for a piece on the game, and they wanted reaction shots of Mexico’s goals.

Later a reporter interviewed some of the diners, but I had no luck being interviewed. It’s a shame because I would love to add an “As Featured on Telemundo” to this blog’s header.

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Posted in Chase, Meet Up

Nuggets 7/20/12

Posted on July 21, 2012 by | Leave a comment

I’m busy preparing for the first ever live MileValue.com seminar in Honolulu that starts in 10 hours, so I’ll summarize a few interesting nuggets you may have missed.

We all get jealous when we hear that other people have been targeted for better sign up bonuses than the best publicly available credit card offers. Thepointsguy has a way to check whether you’ve been targeted for any Chase offers lately. It’s a good back up in case you’ve tossed a great offer as junk mail accidentally.

Frequent Flier Bonuses flags 2,500 free Avios for signing up your children for an Iberia frequent flier account. After 90 days those free Avios can be transferred to a BA account, which can be linked to your household BA account. So you can get those 2,500 Avios ($42.50) for yourself.  Cue jokes about your kids finally paying you back.

Finally, if you don’t already have one, open yourself an Iberia frequent flier account here. Why? After it’s open 90 days, you can transfer BA Avios there at will, which will let you fly from North America to Europe without the crippling surcharges on BA Avios awards. More info on Iberia Avios to Europe redemptions in a future post, but for now sign up for an Iberia account to get the 90 day clock started.

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How to Book Any PointBreaks Hotel for $35/night

Posted on May 25, 2012 by | 30 Comments

This post will tell you how to book any hotel on the list of Priority Club’s PointBreaks for only $35 per night.

Whenever Priority Club announces its new list of PointBreaks hotels, the miles’ world pays attention. The hotels on the list that may ordinarily cost hundreds of dollars a night go for 5,000 Priority Club points for a limited time. The new list is valid for stays through July 31.

As loyal readers know, I’m not big on hotel rewards programs; I usually get a better deal pricelining as I explained here. But PointBreaks are a great deal since Chase Ultimate Rewards transfer 1:1 to Priority Club (not instantly, in about 14-19 hours). And you can also transfer Amex Membership Rewards at a 1:1 ratio until June 30 when the relationship ends.

I value 5,000 MR at $127.50 until the 50% Avios transfer bonus ends on May 31 and 5,000 UR at around $100. Those are pretty low prices for some of the PointBreaks hotels, but we can do better. We can stay at any hotel on the PointBreaks list for $35 just by exploiting one loophole!

The basic premise is that Priority Club lets you buy its points for 0.7 cents each when booking an award night with cash and points. Then you can immediately cancel the award night you purchased with cash and points. Instead of refunding your cash, Priority Club will let you keep the points you just purchased for 0.7 cents.

Hopefully this example will show you how you can book any PointBreaks hotel for $35/night:

I scoured the new PointBreaks list to see if any of my travel plans coincide with any of the hotels, and they did in one case: I will be in Krakow, Poland and the Holiday Inn Krakow City Centre is on the list.

I’ll be in Krakow June 6 – 9, and I didn’t have a hotel booked. While the Krakow Holiday Inn is hardly the nicest property on the PointBreaks list, its cheapest room June 6 is 531 Polish Zloty, which is $153.

As a PointBreaks hotel, the same room that night is 5,000 Priority Club points. Having no Priority Club points, I could transfer in 5,000 Ultimate Rewards, book the hotel room, and be satisfied by saving a few bucks. But we can do even better than booking this property for 5,000 Ultimate Rewards; we can book it for $35!

To do that, we need to buy Priority Club points for 0.7 cents, which you cannot do through ordinary point buying. The way to buy Priority Club points for 0.7 cents is to make a cash and points award booking then cancel it. To make a cash and points booking, you need to have some Priority Club Points, so I transferred 5,000 Ultimate Rewards into my new Priority Club account. The transfer took about 14 hours to post.

Once I had a Priority Club account with 5,000 points, the next step was to book a 15,000 point award. Why? When booking a 15,000 point award, you are given the option to purchase the 10,000 point shortfall for $70, which is 0.7 cents per point. Here is such an award:

As you can see, this award costs 15,000 points or 5,000 and $70. Having only 5,000 points in my account, I selected 5,000 points and $70 and paid for the award. The confirmation screen made it very clear that the $70 was going towards buying 10,000 points that would be immediately used to book the award.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After booking, I immediately cancelled the reservation online by following a link from the booking confirmation page. That brought me to this screen:

As you can see, my reservation has been cancelled. As you can also see in the top right, the points immediately credit back to my account. My account now has 15,000 points, 5,000 that I transferred from Ultimate Rewards and 10,000 that I just bought for $70 while making a dummy booking.

The 10,000 points I just bought for $70 are enough points for two free nights at any PointBreaks hotel, meaning that you can stay at PointBreaks hotels for $35/night using this trick!

Now that I had some extra points, I went to book the night at the Holiday Inn Krakow. I would have been willing to book two nights, but while there was award availability June 6 and June 8, there was none June 7. In the end, I just booked one night June 6.

As you can see, the night cost me 5,000 points, which I had just bought for $35, and my account balance was back down to 10,000 points. I’ll be sure to use those 10,000 points if future PointBreaks lists coincide with my future travel plans!

Caveats:

You have to have points in your account to “buy” points for 0.7 cents each. Buying points is a much better deal than transferring in your UR or MR that are worth way more than 0.7 cents each, but you may have to transfer in 5,000 to start the point-buying madness.

Not all hotels are on the PointBreaks list. Not all nights are available as 5,000 point award nights at the hotels that are on the list. Check availability before buying points.

Bottom line:

I just booked a $153 hotel room for $35. And there are much nicer, more expensive hotels on the list of PointBreaks hotels. There are Intercontinentals that go for over $400/night that you can get for $35/night using the technique outlined in this post.

Which hotel will you stay at for $35/night?

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