First published 4/6/2016. Last updated 5/2/21: Some devaluations this year, like IKEA.
Hi everyone! It’s been awhile since you last heard from me, due to all my traveling recently. Unlike Daniel and Michael, I have a hard time keeping up with computer-related stuff while traveling. But I am back now, and have a lot of things to catch up on and things I want to share with you! I seem to have a ton of friends with birthdays in the spring, so hope this is timely for some of you.
I recently stayed at the Hyatt Centric Waikiki and Hyatt Regency Waikiki on another awesome trip to Oahu, my favorite island, and want to share my assessments, which may help you choose on your next trip if the pricing for both is similar, as it was for us. The purpose of our trip was primarily to requalify for Hyatt Globalist under their double elite night promotion, and we were fortunate to hang out with family and friends who were after the same goal. We stayed at Hyatt Centric for 4 nights and Hyatt Regency for 7 nights, both on the Healthcare Friends & Family rate (which does earn elite nights and points), and I applied my Amex Offers and Chase Offers to them.
Detailed review of Ventana Big Sur, pro tips for your stay, and suggestions for what to do around the area and along the beautiful Pacific coastline. Click the title to read more.
e* here. I just returned from a brief stay at Miraval Arizona, where I went with my husband, a close friend, and fellow miles & points blogger Miles For Two. It’s been on my bucket list for a while as many in our miles & points community have been there in recent years. Thanks to the BOGO + credit card rebate promotion, we were able to book a trip to the recently reopened resort and get away from the polluted air that we’ve been dealing with in California for the past month or two. Since we haven’t been able to safely travel internationally for a long time, this was a great way to ease back into safely traveling with the new normal.
Our itinerary was pretty tight since we planned to go from Tokyo to Fuji to Hakone all within one day. We planned to take the bus from Tokyo to Fuji Five Lakes and sightsee around the area before taking another bus down to Hakone, where we would do more sightseeing before finally checking into our hotel.
We had two carry-on rolling suitcases. The more I thought about it, the more dreadful dragging them around the whole day sounded. My original plan was to store the suitcases in lockers at Lake Kawaguchiko Station, but I didn’t know how plentiful the lockers were (although I read on Tripadvisor that people have just left their suitcases on top of the full lockers and because Japan is so safe, nobody had touched them by the end of the day) and it didn’t solve the problem of having to drag them around Hakone either.
Then I discovered the amazingness that is Yamato Transport and other transportation services that offer to transport luggage overnight for very affordable prices. Yamato is the largest door-to-door delivery company in Japan. Japanese people often use them on their own trips throughout Japan.
In a nutshell, you can send your luggage directly to your hotel, same day or overnight, for a flat fee per item based on size and distance. Click here for the details and rates. The maximum size is 160 cm length+width+height and the maximum weight is 25 kg. You can have the luggage picked up directly from your room, or you can drop off your luggage at one of their offices (for a discount!) or at a convenience store like 7-11, which are everywhere. You can even send your luggage straight to/from airports.
After our 3rd night at Andaz Tokyo, we had accumulated enough things where it became a no-brainer to use the service rather than drag our luggage around and store it in lockers on our way to Hakone. I contacted the concierge, and they filled out the paperwork for me and asked me to have my bags ready to go by 6 pm that night. I packed our essentials for the night and for our day-trip in a backpack, which would be much easier to trek around with and use lockers for, and called the concierge when I was ready. The bellhop came to the room and picked up the luggage. I charged it to our hotel bill and it was Y1700 per suitcase (less than US $15). I felt that was really quite reasonable for overnight shipping of a bulky heavy suitcase! For comparison, lockers would’ve cost Y600 per suitcase of this size.
The next day, after a long and tiring day of sightseeing around the Fuji-Hakone area, we arrived at the Hyatt Regency in Hakone and checked in. The hotel staff informed us that the luggage was already in our suite, which felt pretty awesome.
I thought that would be the only time we would need the service on our trip, but the story doesn’t end there.
My husband accidentally left his wallet and charging cable in our room at Hakone and we didn’t realize it until our train arrived back in Tokyo and he couldn’t make a transfer through the gates since his Suica card was in his wallet. The staff at Hakone had emailed me as soon as the cleaning staff discovered it, but I didn’t happen to check my email during the train ride.
I called the hotel when I discovered the items missing, and they immediately arranged for overnight delivery to our next hotel, which was a capsule hotel (First Cabin Kyobashi, great hotel, by the way) since we were leaving for the airport the next day. They provided a tracking number, and the parcel arrived by noon to the front desk. Hyatt had packed the wallet and cable in bubble wrap and placed them in a little paper shopping bag. They charged it to my card on file, and it was Y700. That’s about US $6 for overnight shipping of a wallet that contained a bunch of cash…small price to pay!
In addition to the convenience, prices, and speeds, I was also impressed by the handling. We in America are used to delivery companies like UPS and Fedex throwing our parcels around without a care in the world, often causing damage to the boxes or contents inside. I didn’t feel like that was the case in Japan. Yamato Transport handled and delivered everything with care, no matter how small or big or heavy it was.
Hopefully this information helps you on your next trip to Japan!
There were a huge range of strategies I employed on my trip to Europe (Milan, Nice, Zurich), so I figured this would be as good a time as any to share how I think about trip-planning as a travel hacker and what I ended up getting for my money.
Let’s start with the transit.
| Leg | Cost | Cost of Miles | Net Cost |
| SFO-MXP | 50,000 AS + $23.70 on AA | 0.1 cent / AS | $73.40 |
| Milan-Nice (train) | 12.40 GBP on Thello | 1 GBP = $1.45 | $17.97 |
| NCE-ZRH | 108.37 EUR on Swiss | 1 EUR = $1.14 | $123.61 |
| ZRH-SFO | 50,000 AS + $79 on AA | 0.1 cent / AS | $129 |
Whenever I plan a trip, I always deal with the endpoints first and fill in the middle as I go, as they typically are the harder ones to secure. My constraints were that I wanted to meet my sister where she was studying (in Milan) and spend a week in Europe before heading back home. That afforded me a ton of flexibility, because not only did I not have exact dates already in mind, but I could actually construct my trip itinerary around where I could find award availability.
Since I had a lot of Alaska (AS) miles, most of which came from sign-up bonuses and real flying (well, some of it was real anyway) (which gives my near-zero cost of 0.1 cent per mile), and it has numerous partners that fly to Europe (British Airways, KLM, Air France, AA, and even Emirates (EK)), redeeming them seemed like a good bet.
Because of fuel surcharges BA and EK were pretty much off-limits, and AF/KL have fairly limited availability, so in practical terms, I’d be flying AA. I was particularly keen on flying in business class, so I wanted to make sure that I could fly one of the newer, lie-flat business class products. This effectively restricted me to connecting in Miami or New York (AA flies a lot of ex-US Airways planes out of Philadelphia and its older fleet out of Chicago and Dallas). Obviously I preferred flying out of New York since I could take a stopover there and visit my family.
That out of the way, the next question was where AA flies direct out of JFK. The answers: Milan, Barcelona, and Zurich. Since I was booking in October, I had a pretty good slate of availability, and I found a Saturday redeye that would get me into Milan Sunday morning. Sold.
(If you’re curious, I wrote trip reports for my first class flight from SFO-JFK and my business class flight from JFK-MXP).
For the return, I didn’t mind flying through Miami, so that expanded my options a bit, but I didn’t want to have to get back to Milan since I’d lose a lot of travel time. Ideally I could do Barcelona, since I had wanted to make my way down the Southern coast of France anyway, but the only availability for the return flight was ex-Zurich, so I went ahead with that.
Note that at this point, I hadn’t figure out where I was actually going to visit outside of the endpoints, and this is almost always how I plan my trips nowadays. Flexibility is your most powerful ally when travel hacking, and I try to use it whenever I can.
By the time I settled on visiting Nice (Zurich was obviously forced), I compared flight and train costs (Rome2Rio is a fabulous resource) and booked the legs listed above. Since intra-Europe cash fares tend to be cheap, miles bookings are usually suboptimal, which is why I paid for them out-of-pocket.
Accommodations tend to be easier to deal with than flights, because most bookings are refundable and allow you to speculatively make them before you’ve locked in your plans. Here were mine for this trip:
| Stay | Where | Cost | Cost of Points | Net Cost |
| Milan (2 nights) | Sister’s apartment | FREEEEEE | Putting up with my sister 😉 | $0 |
| Nice (3 nights) | La Malmaison | 36,000 Choice Points | $155 via Daily Getaways | $155 |
| Zurich (2 nights) | Courtyard Marriott Zurich North | 93.40 Orbucks + $7.89 + 109.50 CHF | $0.25/1 Orbuck; 1 CHF = $1.03 | $144.37 |
Since I was visiting my sister, Milan was taken care of, but I had plenty of choices for Nice and Zurich, respectively. I wanted to treat my sister to something nice, since was the first time we had ever traveled together, and I like spoiling her, so initially, I had planned for us to stay in the Hyatt Regency Nice.
The rack rate for 3 nights at the Hyatt was 315 EUR / night, which I would never would have paid were it not for the fact that I shopped around and made a best rate guarantee claim (Hyatt offers 20% off whatever rate you can find from reputable travel agencies, if the other room details match, although it’s gotten more stringent recently), which allowed me to lower the price to 177.50 EUR / night. Combine that with my Diamond Suite Upgrades (complimentary, confirmed upgrades to the lowest-level suite for those holding Diamond status), and it was sure to be a great stay.
This is where flexibility and having options comes in. Since the rate was refundable, I was able to take advantage of the Daily Getaways deal on Choice Privileges points that I had blogged about (alas, I couldn’t get the 40,000 point offer at 0.4 cents per point, but I was able to lock in two, 36,000 point packages for $155 each), and then immediately redeem the points for three nights at La Malmaison Nice. Because I bought the points for 0.43 cents/point, I got a nearly $250 hotel room (complete with top-floor balcony, and a jacuzzi bathtub with mood-lighting):
…for a mere $51.67 a night! That was too good to pass up on relative to the $220/night I’d be paying at the Hyatt, so I cancelled the Hyatt reservation without hesitation.
Lastly was Zurich, which, to say the least, is expensive as $*^&#@%&! Even compared to San Francisco, the prices are absurd ($10-$20 for a meal at Burger King!). I wasn’t particularly willing to shell out for the top-tier hotels, even on points, so I needed a slightly different strategy. At my disposal were some Orbucks, some Marriott and IHG points, and obviously, cash.
There weren’t any reasonable redemptions in the downtown area, so I needed to widen my search a bit. I stuck to main tram lines between the downtown area and the airport, and came up with the Courtyard Marriott Zurich North, which had rates for about $100/night.
Here is where strategically paying cash comes in handy. When I say strategic, I don’t mean paying cash when redemption rates are bad; I mean paying cash when there are outsized benefits to doing so. In this case, my ace in the hole was a Marriott promotion I had signed up for offering me a free night certificate after just TWO stays (one of which I was already planning to complete in Alaska). Paying cash was therefore a no-brainer, but why pay for both nights when I could get away with paying for one of the two? No reason at all, so I made a second booking for the other night using my Orbucks (which I had acquired for about 25 cents on the dollar through best rate guarantees I had submitted last year). I wouldn’t earn any loyalty points for the Orbitz night, but it was fairly easy to have the hotel link two reservations so I wouldn’t have to check in and out twice, and it cut my cash outlay in half.
In total, I paid $643.35 out of pocket for what are normally the most expensive parts of a trip (and flew in business class, no less!), freeing me up to do all sorts of amazing things (mostly related to food :P) and really just not have to worry about money during the trip (I’m pretty strict about budgeting, as you know). That’s the real ‘value’ I get out of travel hacking. Not only did I not have to think twice about visiting my sister in the first place, but also I didn’t have to think twice about the experiences I wanted to have when I was actually on the ground. Doesn’t get much better than that.
Happy hacking!
EDIT: There seems to be more datapoints for successful matches from IHG Platinum vs. Hyatt Platinum. Please leave us your datapoints, either here or in the reddit thread!
Also, make sure you send in .JPG files for the match, otherwise Hilton will reject your request and you will have to followup to send it again, as the form won’t let you send another request.
I first reported on Hilton’s status match program last fall, when the matching process was by email. In December, Hilton added the ability to directly request a status match online. reddit r/churning is reporting that it’s possible to match to Hilton Diamond from Hyatt Platinum or IHG Platinum, as long as you have a past stay in the last 12 months OR a future confirmed reservation. This is not guaranteed, as I’m getting data points that people are being matched to Gold as well.
Just go to the Hilton status match form, upload a proof of your membership status like a screenshot or photo of your elite status card, as well as a proof of a past stay in the last 12 months. People are reporting that future bookings work as well too.
I have been enjoying my Hilton status since I first got matched from Hyatt Diamond last fall, with stays at the Conrad Tokyo, Hilton Bogota, and Hilton Dublin, getting great upgrades and club access each time.
Both Hyatt Platinum and IHG Platinum can be gotten from their respective credits cards, so this shouldn’t be too hard to do as long as you have had a stay OR have a future stay.
Personally I feel like matching from Hyatt Platinum or IHG Platinum is a mistake similar to how Hyatt was matching anyone with any status to Diamond for a period of about 8 hours. It dilutes the benefits of elite status when the floodgates to elite status open up. This is a bit hypocritical given that I obtained Diamond in both Hyatt and Hilton through status matches, but I’ve definitely noticed a shortage in suites at Hyatt after becoming Diamond. But hey, if you personally are able to obtain elite status this way, why not enjoy the benefits? Also, Hilton should be able to better absorb an increase in elite members due to their larger footprint than Hyatt.
If you are able to get matched to Diamond from either Hyatt/IHG Platinum, please leave a comment to let us know!
Hyatt Points + Cash is a great way to get a better redemption value out of your Hyatt points, while earning elite stay credit and allowing DSUs. Obviously you can find cash rates and availability easily, and it’s pretty easy also to find points availability and rates when searching over all hotels in an area. However, if you’re looking for Points + Cash availability for multiple hotels, you normally need to click into a specific hotel to see whether Points + Cash is available.
Via Will Run for Miles, now there’s an easier way to find Points + Cash availability at multiple hotels at the same time. All you need to do is put 51440 into the Corporate or Group Rate field, and search as normal. If there is availability, the rate you see on the search page will show up as the cash rate for Points + Cash redemption option. If not, it will show as something else unless the cash rate is coincidentally the same as the Points + Cash rate, which normally doesn’t happen.
For example, if it was a category 4 hotel, the rate would show up as $100 USD. Reminder, the rates are:
I just tested, and this trick also works for foreign Hyatts as well. However, the rate will show up as the USD equivalent in the foreign currency, so may not be as intuitive. If you change the currency to USD too, the numbers are slightly off as well, as I don’t believe Hyatt updates their exchange rates super frequently.
Foreign exchange rates and Points + Cash
Speaking of foreign exchange rates, according to the @HyattConcierge, Points + Cash rates are always in USD and converted to the local currency, even if the exchange rate changes between when you booked and when you check out.
Thus, even if the local currency exchange rate gets much worse or much better for you, according to Hyatt you should be paying the equivalent in USD at time of check out. I have not personally tested this policy, but good to know. Though it seems like they don’t update the exchange rates super frequently given some recent searches I did.
Comparing the value of cash, points, and points + cash bookings
Now how do you calculate the value of the various booking options? There is a new tool via FrequentMiler called Hyatt MakeUpYourMinder (tool being a spreadsheet on Google Sheets) that helps you decide on what the total cost of each booking option in, calculating the value of the points you have redeemed based on various factors customized to your preferences. Check it out!
The specific terms are: If you find a publicly available and immediately bookable room-only rate on the Internet for a Hyatt hotel (“Competing Rate”) that is lower than the room rate available for the same reservation on http://www.hyatt.com (i.e., same hotel, same type of room, same number of guests, same dates of stay and same length of stay), then within 24 hours of booking the reservation on http://www.hyatt.com, please submit your claim request online via our online claim form.
So why don’t we just ask the Hyatt?
And indeed, Hyatt confirms there has been a recent change. I believe you should still be able to book a flexible rate if there is one, but make a best rate guarantee claim against a nonrefundable rate, as there is nothing in the terms about matching cancellation policies.
So, what about those casual travelers? Can you still use miles and points to your advantage? Or more generally, when your points balances are limited, can you still save money without compromising on comfort?
Over the next week, I’ll be releasing a series of posts looking at each of the major hotel chains and how their rewards structure puts a cap on how much you should pay for a night at their properties. The programs are:
Hyatt hotels are the subject of today’s post. I’ll first note that this will only work when there is award availability for a hotel. Why? The hack that we’re going rely on is the fact that most loyalty programs allow you to purchase their rewards points at some (typically overpriced) cost. Although it’s usually not advisable to purchase these points in bulk (except at a major discount), in some instances we can use bulk points purchasing to our advantage. Here’s how.
Hyatt Gold Passport divides Hyatt properties into seven categories roughly corresponding to the quality/level of luxury and amenities that the hotels offer. They then offer you the ability to redeem your Hyatt points for stays at nightly rates corresponding to the category of the property.
Their award chart looks like this:
Most people don’t have Hyatt points, and even if they do, they’re unlikely to have that many, but that doesn’t mean they can’t take advantage of the loyalty program. As I mentioned before, Hyatt offers you the ability to purchase points from them (in increments of 1,000 points). You can purchase up to 55,000 points a year (there are ways around this, the simplest of which involves enlisting family and friends) at a rate of $24/1,000 points, or more simply, 2.4 cents per point.
Why is this useful? When looking at a stay, it places a maximum value on how much you should pay for a single night — that is, 2.4 cents times the number of points the hotel requires. Just purchase the number of points you need and redeem them for an award stay, and you’re good to go. Here are the costs based on the Hyatt award chart:
| Category | Points | Total Cash |
| 1 | 5000 | $120.00 |
| 2 | 8000 | $192.00 |
| 3 | 12000 | $288.00 |
| 4 | 15000 | $360.00 |
| 5 | 20000 | $480.00 |
| 6 | 25000 | $600.00 |
| 7 | 30000 | $720.00 |
Hyatt also offers the ability to pay a reduced number of points for a stay and substituting a cash co-pay for the remaining portion. The required co-pay, like the number of points, is fixed based on the category of the hotel. The chart looks like this:
Although points and cash doesn’t necessarily offer the best value for cases where you have an unlimited supply of points (as explained in a previous post), in this case it offers tremendous value. Calculating the maximum costs using points and cash, we get:
| Category | Points | Co-pay | Total Cash |
| 1 | 2500 | $50.00 | $110.00 |
| 2 | 4000 | $55.00 | $151.00 |
| 3 | 6000 | $75.00 | $219.00 |
| 4 | 7500 | $100.00 | $280.00 |
| 5 | 10000 | $125.00 | $365.00 |
| 6 | 12500 | $150.00 | $450.00 |
| 7 | 15000 | $300.00 | $660.00 |
Not only is it cheaper, but points and cash allows you to stretch out your annual purchasing limit twice as far!
Here’s an example at the lower end of the award chart. When looking for hotels in the Phoenix area, we see the following Hyatt Place priced at $161/night (taxes add another ~$20):
Clicking through, we see it has (tax-free) award availability at 5,000 points per night. Consulting our tables above, we see the hotel can be ‘bought’ with all points for $120 or $110 using points and cash, a savings of nearly 40%!
The math works similarly as we get toward the higher end of the award chart. Let’s take the Park Hyatt Sydney, which would be $720 for room if you paid cash:
But would be only $660 if you purchased the points needed for a point and cash redemption and paid the cash co-pay:
Obviously, this hack requires some flexibility to maximize (since the hotel has to have standard award availability), and it’s not going to be cheaper in all cases, but it’s a fairly simple way to save some money that doesn’t require much forethought. Hope it’s useful!
Happy hacking!
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