If you’ve been following along with our road trip stats each month, you’ll have seen that we have a ton of hotel points.
After publishing our stats for June 2018, I totaled them up out of interest and was surprised by quite how many we have.
2,580,279.
More than 2.5 million hotel points. That sounds like a lot – and it is – but it wouldn’t necessarily get you as many free stays as you might think.
That’s because hotel points aren’t created equal. World of Hyatt points are more valuable than Marriott Rewards points which are more valuable than Hilton Honors points. 60,000 points in each of those three loyalty schemes would get you a vastly different number – and quality of – free nights.
I therefore thought it’d be helpful to write a post showing how we plan to use our points during our 5 year, 50 state road trip. Be aware that we try to maximize our points as best as possible. If we stayed at each chain’s top properties instead, 2.5 million points would only get us a few free nights with each chain.
A few things to note before we start:
1) Categories
Most hotel chains place their properties in different categories, usually based on the brand of hotel, its location, price, etc. Lower categories require fewer points while higher categories require significantly more points.
2) SPG / Marriott
If you totaled the numbers from my June 2018 stats post, you’ll see they came to just under 2.5 million. That’s because at the time of publishing that post, our SPG points were listed separately to our Marriott Rewards points. In August 2018, the SPG and Marriott Rewards schemes are merging and SPG points will be converted on a 1:3 basis. That means our 116,353 Starpoints will become 349,059 Marriott Rewards points, thereby giving us more than 2.5 million points.
3) Brands
You might not recognize the names of some of the loyalty schemes below, but you’d probably recognize some of their brands. You might therefore find the following post helpful: Which Brands Are Part Of Each Hotel Chain?
IHG Rewards Club
We currently have 387,649 IHG Rewards Club points. With IHG’s PointBreaks list, you can book properties from only 5,000 points per night. Unfortunately they changed the PointBreaks scheme in early 2018, so there are now far fewer properties available each quarter costing 5,000 points per night.
During the road trip, I’m expecting that we’ll most often book properties costing 10,000 points per night. There’ll be times where we’ll be able to take advantage of the 5,000 PointBreaks offers, along with occasions where it’ll make sense to use 15,000 points per night.
For example, we recently spent 15,000 points per night at the Candlewood Suites La Crosse in Wisconsin as room rates at all the hotels in the city were much higher than we were willing to pay.
So I’m expecting we’ll pay an average 10,000 points per night when staying at IHG properties. In reality though, it should cost us fewer points than that thanks to the two IHG credit cards that I own. The old version of the card offers a 10% rebate on redeemed points, so those 10,000 points per night would get 1,000 back, costing a net 9,000 points.
My new IHG credit card offers the fourth night free on award stays, so a stay of four nights at a 10,000 point property would cost a net 27,000 points once the 10% rebate and fourth night free are taken into account. That means it’d cost 6,750 points per night.
I doubt we’ll always stay in chunks of four nights at a time – it’ll sometimes be five or six nights – so I’ll assume our average nightly cost will be 7,000 points.
At 7,000 points per night, our 387,649 points will get us 55 free nights.
Hilton Honors
Between both mine and Shae’s accounts, we have 749,880 Hilton Honors points. Hilton used to allocate each hotel to a specific category, but they did away with categories in 2017.
They now offer somewhat dynamic pricing. That means properties can charge more during more expensive periods and can reduce the cost in points during quieter periods.
I recently wrote a post on Frequent Miler listing all the Hilton properties in the US that only cost 10,000 points per night during some point in the year. In an ideal world, we’d only ever use our points at those properties. Unfortunately many of those hotels aren’t pet-friendly and we have our dog Truffles with us on the road trip. We’ll therefore tend to stay in properties costing 10,000 – 20,000 points per night.
On the positive side, Hilton offers a fifth night free on award stays to anyone that has status. You can get Silver status with a no annual fee Hilton credit card, so you don’t need to have stayed any nights in order to take advantage of that.
Based on our experience in the first six months of the road trip, I’m estimating 2/3 of our stays will cost 20,000 points per night, with the other 1/3 costing 10,000. I’m also assuming we’ll always stay five nights at a time when using points.
That means we’ll average 13,333 points per night when paying with points. With 749,880 points, we’ll be able to get 56 free nights.
Marriott Rewards
As mentioned earlier, I’ll include our SPG points here seeing as they’ll be automatically converted in August. Based on the 1:3 conversion rate from SPG to Marriott, we’ll end up with 662,551 Marriott Rewards points.
As frequently as possible, we’ll stay in category 1 properties which cost 7,500 points per night. I’m sure there’ll also end up being occasions where it makes sense to use points for category 2 properties which will cost 12,500 points per night from August.
Marriott Rewards offers the fifth night free on award stays to all members – not just those who have status. Similar to Hilton, I’m anticipating that all our award stays will be booked in five night chunks to take advantage of this benefit.
At a guess, I’m going to say that we’ll stay at three category 1 properties for every one category 2 property. Taking into account the fifth night free, that means we’ll redeem our points for stays costing an average 7,000 points per night.
With 662,551 points, we’ll be able to get 94 free nights with Marriott Rewards.
World of Hyatt / Chase Ultimate Rewards
When putting together our stats for June, we had 15,474 World of Hyatt points which isn’t many. However, that’s because most of our Hyatt points are actually saved up with Chase Ultimate Rewards.
The Ultimate Rewards scheme has several travel transfer partners which includes Southwest, United, Hyatt, Marriott and more. In most cases, they transfer on a 1:1 basis, so 1 Ultimate Rewards point is worth 1 Southwest Rapid Rewards mile, 1 United MileagePlus mile, 1 World of Hyatt point, etc.
For us, transferring our Ultimate Rewards to World of Hyatt can be very worthwhile. That’s because pretty much all our award stays with them are in category 1 hotels which only cost 5,000 points per night. That’s great value given that paying for stays there would normally cost ~$100+.
It’s unlikely that we’ll end up transferring all our Ultimate Rewards to our Hyatt accounts during the road trip. For the purposes of the post though, we’ll assume we will.
World of Hyatt has so many category 1 hotels, there’s a good chance that we’ll only ever redeem points for stays at those properties. With a combined 372,503 points between World of Hyatt and Chase Ultimate Rewards, we can get 74 free nights.
Radisson Rewards
Radisson Rewards used to be known as Club Carlson until they rebranded this year. At the time of writing this post, they have seven category levels ranging from 9,000 points per night up to 70,000 points.
They only have one category 1 US-based hotel, so we can’t maximize our points for 9,000 points per night. There’s a better selection of category 2 properties though which only cost 15,000 points per night. Many of those don’t accept dogs, but we should be able to still use our points at enough category 2 properties.
With our existing stash of 327,783 Radisson Rewards points, we’ll be able to redeem those for 21 free nights.
Choice Privileges
Our current balance of Choice Privileges points is 34,913. The plan for now is to use them at properties that cost 8,000 points per night.
It’s hard finding properties that cost that few points that also aren’t super-dodgy hotels that we wouldn’t want to stay at. That said, there’s the occasional jewel in the rough. For example, we needed somewhere to stay overnight back in May on our way from Ohio to Vermont. Enter the Econo Lodge Arena in Wilkes-Barre PA. It had good reviews and cost just 8,000 points per night.
Given that we have relatively few points to use at Choice Hotels properties, we’re in no hurry to use the points balance needlessly. It’s therefore fairly safe to assume we’ll use the points for stays costing 8,000 points per night. That means we’ll get 4 free nights.
Wyndham Rewards
This is an easy equation. The Wyndham Rewards loyalty scheme is unlike the other schemes above as they don’t have category levels. Instead, every single one of their properties costs 15,000 points per night. A scummy Howard Johnson hotel in a crime-ridden neighborhood costs 15,000 points. Similarly, the Wyndham Garden in Brooklyn, New York only costs 15,000 points despite sometimes costing $300+.
We earned 45,000 Wyndham Rewards points for attending a timeshare presentation during our time in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Check out my post on Frequent Miler to find out what that was like.
At 15,000 points per night, our 45,000 points will get us 3 free nights.
Hotels.com Welcome Rewards
When booking stays with Hotels.com, you forgo earning points in the loyalty scheme of the hotel you’re staying at. Instead, you earn a one night credit with Hotels.com’s own loyalty scheme – Welcome Rewards.
That one night credit is worth 10% of your pre-tax room rate. i.e. If your room cost $100 before tax, you’d get a one night credit worth $10. You can’t use credits until you’ve stayed a total of ten nights, so you’re effectively getting your 11th night free.
We currently have 14 credits which means we have enough for 1 free night.
Total
So that’s how we plan to maximize our points in each hotel’s loyalty scheme. Here’s a summary of how many free nights we’re expecting to get from our 2.5 million hotel points:
- IHG Rewards Club – 55
- Hilton Honors – 56
- Marriott Rewards – 94
- World of Hyatt & Chase Ultimate Rewards – 74
- Radisson Rewards – 21
- Choice Privileges – 4
- Wyndham Rewards – 3
- Hotels.com Welcome Rewards – 1
That means we can expect to get 308 free nights with our existing points balances. That’s enough for exactly 44 weeks of free stays in hotels.
Given that accommodation costs are such a significant part of our budget, free stays go a long way towards mitigating those costs.
If we were able to truly maximize our points and stay in the very lowest of categories in each hotel’s loyalty scheme, we could probably stretch those points to last us closer to 500 nights. That’s sadly not a viable option though seeing as many of those properties aren’t pet-friendly. In some cases – like Hilton – they also don’t have any US-based properties in their lowest category.
Still, almost a year’s worth of free hotel stays isn’t too shabby. I just hope we’re able to maximize our points in the ways listed above and that the loyalty schemes aren’t devalued much further.
If you’d like to know how we racked up so many points, check out this post where I explain in more detail how we earned so many.
This is a great post; thanks for sharing all the math. I just analyzed our accounts and came up with 1,366,000 points, which means 157 nights based on the programs we use. HOWEVER, 320k of the Marriott points are intended for 10 nights in Costa Rica next year. So that leaves only 111 nights at the rates you mention. It’s amazing how few nights you get on resort redemptions…
Agreed – we’ve sometimes used our points at more expensive properties, but it pains me to do that when I think of how many further free nights we’re missing out on.