Mr and Mrs Smith Redemption Value

This is a Voy Escape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyascape. com On today's show, the fiveive X Airline card saga continues Nick gives us more reasons to use the Southwest app We have exciting news about frontier And we dive deep into Hayatt's devaluation. Frequent Myer on the air starts now Today's main event, twelve things to Kn about Hyatt's devaluation Hyatt switched to new worse awward charts in May. And we finally got a chance to do a deep dive into the data to see How bad is the devaluation really? And when I say we dove into it, I really mean Tim. But anyway, Tim did Tim did the hard work and today on the show We got to unveil what Tim found. And if you wna jump ahead to that or you want to come back to something again later on, don't forget you'll always find the timestamps in the show notes. So just expand the description box. where if you're watching or listening, don't forget to give this a thumbs up, give us a like, leave us a review. We always appreciate hearing from you All right, let's try out this week's giant mailback. All right, this week's Giant Mail is the continuing saga of Nick having said on a show that no airline cards earn five X or more on their own airline. And Greg having not stopped me from saying that, just That's true. I just rolled with it. I didn't know better On a previous episode, we mentioned that Gary Left from View fromrom the Wing had written in saying, well, actually, Jet Blue cards earn six X flying Jet Blue. And there's a city, American Airlines Express or executive card that earns five X, but only if you spend one hundred fifty thousand dollars on it Well Lots of people wrote in after that not all No, it's not all. So we and Gary forgot about the United Club card. So the personal United Club card earns five X for United flights. So We all forgot about that David wrote in He found he reminded us that the Qatar Airways Privilege Club Infinite card earns five X for guitar flights. So somebody has that card apparently And so I finally decided to do some homework before the show and instead of just going with what w, people have told us I went through our database of cards to see Are there any others? And I did find two popular cards that earn five X. So first up, you've got the Frontier Airlines World Mastercard earns five X in frrontier And then popular always forerennial. And then the much more popular Avevelo Airlines World Elite mastercard also earns five X. So there might be some other less popular cards that earn fiveive X that we're not aware of that aren't in our database, that pretty much rounds it out. So Sh, I think we can put this topic to bed, I hope. Oh my goodness. If we had just gone to our best cards our best category bonuses page, maybe we would have stumbled on these sooner, although I suspect that the relatively low return on frontier miles may have kept it lower. although I say that it probably worth a penny each anyway. So so a decent return on any of those spending on airfare on those airlines and good to finally get the record set straight. so Thank you for that, Greg, the Frequent Miler. I you just know I just know we're gonna to have people write in with some other c. There be something else out there. Yeah. Oh my goodness, hopefully not crossing my fingers. All right, let's talk about what crazy thing? What crazy thing did Chase do this week Yeah, so a reader wrote in about points boost. So you know how the Sapphire Reserve card offers up to two cents per point on the edit properties when which you know, is better. So Ab. chase points when booking travel or in hotels through the Chase traravel portal are worth one cent each unless they are boosted. unless the thing you're looking at, the flight or the hotel that boosted, The edit properties are generally boosted at either two cents per point or one point six five cents per point and the two cents per point is becoming er and harder to find over time. They've done some promo ones that are as high as two point five cents per point. But anyway, that's the state of things. What this reader wrote in to let us know was a surprise. He was able to show that Some hotels are boosted differently whether you're looking from your Sapphire Reserve consonsumer card or your business card And Yeah, yeah. I have both cards right now, although I'm going to be canceling the business one really soon and I was able to replicate that finding. This was in Montreal, twoo properties in Montreal. he identified U I was able to see it there. I looked in a couple other cities where I didn't find any difference between the boosts. So I don't know how widespread this is, but It's I just think it's good to know, I guess that I don't know how many people would have both of these cards, but if you do, Both because you never know Yeah. well, that's's that's definitely a crazy thing because I wouldn't have expected there to be a difference there for sure. And like you said how few people would even be in position to know that there's a difference. But if you do have both, maybe maybe in a household, you've got both of them, then I think that's a really important reminder to check. I would also then wonder if are there also some properties that are boosted you know with the business card that aren't with the consumer or something? I mean, who knows because that's not something that we would have thought to compare between the two. So so interesting. Separately, some people have written in about the when when they looked at hotels through the Sapphire preferred, sometimes they're cheaper than through the Sapphire Reserve, but I think those are with like the edit properties where you'd kind of expect because Severver prefer doesn't have the edit, so it doesn't When you book their Sfare, I prefer it doesn't come with like free breakfast and other perks like that. The Sapphire Reserves sometimes might be more expensive for that reason, but I don't know. I mean, it could be too that prices are just different depending on how you log Yeah. Yeah. Well, and keep in mind that Chase has a best rate guarantee and you're not going to probably be able to file that against your Sapphire preferred pricing. But if the Sapphire preferred card sees a cheaper price then probablyably you can replicate that cheaper price somewhere else and do a price match on the Sapphire reserve. If if you have that feature attached to if you haveature that's just not Yeah the ability to do a best rate guarantee is seemems to be for all SEFers or business cards, but seems to be targeted for SEFer reserve consumer cards R should have been top of mind since I don't have the ability to file one of those, but my wife does. So good point. good point. All right, let's talk about being bonvoid who was bonvoided this week, but Aviana L Miles. And I'm as disappointed as anybody else out there about it. So lifeife miles runs a subscription service called Life Miles plus and LifeMiles pllus has several different tiers. If you subscribe to the second tier or higher, so that's the fifty dollarars per month or higher, which they confusingly call the basic plan. The light plan is twenty dollars a month, but if you subscribe to the fifty dollarars a month basic or higher Up until june twenty sixth, you got free changes and cancellations as one of the major benefits of subscribing to that. and I've mentioned it before. And in fact, I had talked about strategically waiting to subscribe until you need to change or cancel an award, waiting to subscribe at least at the basic level. Eective june twenty sixth, they eliminated that benefit. So there are no more free changes and cancellations for new subscribers if you were subscribed before june twenty sixth T the basic tier or higher, the fifty dollars per month or higher, then you'll keep free changes and cancellations for twelve months. and then they're doing away with that benefit. So that really, really sinks. The other key benefit of those subscriptions is a ten percent discount on award redemptions and that's sticking around, but losing the free changes and cancellations,s I mean that's a huge part of the reason I would consider subscribing. So that kind of kills it for me. Yeah, I mean, I've long looked at that subscription thing as like If I did get into life miles if I, you know had a bunch of them, mayaybe if I ever signed up for a credit card or whatever to get a bunch of life miles, I I would be very interested in that because U one of the things I value so much with some other programs like United, American Airlines, Alaska is free changes and cancellations and Um That would would have given Lif miles that capability for a fee, and now you can't get it Yeah, so my question for you is this, I have the fifty dollars per month subscription right now because I had to change an award this summer that I still need to cancel. So I will cancel that soon and then I'll have decent chunk of life miles. It was five passengers in business class to Europe. So Ill have a decent little chunk of life miles Do I keep this subscription in case I want to book something else with my life miles and still be able to cancel it, but have to pay fifty dollars a month for the next year Or do I just say, a 'm just gonna not changes and cancellations. What would you do? How'd you keep? Well, I mean, you're still getting that ten percent discount, right Sure, but you could do the twenty dollars a month subscription for the ten percent discount. Right, right, right, right. So So let's say the twenty dollars per month is definitely worth it to you because you have enough life miles that you're going to be saving a lot, right So the difference is three hundred and sixty dollars for a year Um How much would it cost to make a Let's say you made one change for your family usually two hundred dollars a person for international awards It's tough, tough call. Yeah I guess it comes down to how likely are you to Use that eatric. It's sort of like that old the old insurance thing that, you know you've mentioned before you're betting on something going wrong. So would I make the three hundred and sixty dollars bet that I'm going to have to cancel something? Exactly. I mean, this year, the way we've had to change and cancel plans, I feel like that's a winning bet. but Most years it wouldn't be. So anyway, yeah, I don't know, that's an interesting dilemma. if you find yourself in that situation. We don't know there's not an easy answer. Like Greg said, it really just depends how likely you think it is that you'll need to change your cancel. I'll probably try to prioritize using my life miles. so I would think that creates more opportunity to need to change or cancel So I'll probably keep it for at least a little bit and we'll go from there What I have booked, how many awards I have booked in the first few months here? Who knows All right, let's talk about awards points and more. and awards pointints and more. firstirst up, apparently Alaska wallet funds can now be used for Alaska companion fairs again Yeah, so, you know, the older versions of Alaska cards that so not the Atmas S summit but the other ones have the ability to get a companion ticket for paid fares and I'm stressing that because the new summit card gives you a companion awward . But this is for paid fares U and for a while you haven't been able to use your Alaska wallet funds to pay for that Now you can. so It's a very specialized thing, but for those who it affects, I think that's really good news Absolutely, totally agree And next up Rove has added an exciting new transfer part. U They've added frrontier as a transfer partner U And there's a twenty five percent transfer bonus to Frontier fromom Rove through the end of July. So I mean,, it's always great to have new transfer partners. A few things make this particularly interesting, I think. One is that ROve is the only transferable program that I know of that transfers to frontier And um The another thing is that frontier, the value you get for your points isn't like fixed. It's not like one cent per point, it varies a lot from uh flight to flight and from, um what bundle you pick when you're booking a flight, you can get maybe around two cents per point at the high end. I certainly saw several cases when I was just poking around of around one point fiveal cents per point, which is not bad So that's, you know, so it's not like super exciting. You're not going to get like unbelievable value from a row of points, but it's not bad. And I'll also mention that I think for some people Frontier might be more interesting than it used to be because with spirit departing, Frontier is coming and taking a route that Spirit had. So for example, I just looked last night and in Detroit, Frontier has a bunch of new routes with Spirit Gone and or they're coming up soon anyway. And so you know the chance of flying u frontier seems more likely than ever. And so if you have Rove miles and u You you're looking to book a frontier flight Look at how much value you could get from your points and if it's good value, that could be pretty exciting Yeah, you know, ye it could be a really good value. you know, I give it I gave it a sarcastic tone before, But even if you were only getting one cent per point out of your frontier miles, we wouldn't recommend transferring from frontier rather from Rove at that rate. But even if you did at one point two five cents per point, that's not the worst redemption out there. So it's not even terrible at the kind of what we would might consider to be the low end of a redemption And certainly if you had a decent one and a half two ccent and you add another twenty five percent on top, certainly could be a good deal. Also, I remember, I don't remember the details, but I remember several months ago, frontier had a promotion where they would like match your miles from another program up to five thousand miles. and so We did the match in my family for everybody. So all of my family members have five thousand frontier miles. and so the thing is that That's the low point for award tickets. They start at five thousand, but there are a lot of awards that aren't five thousand and might be a good deal. So now being able to transfer from Roe makes it possible to top that off if there's a ten thousand point award I want. And that could be, I think particularly useful for people who did that match your miles thing Okay Next up, I have a couple of quick notes about Southwest Airlines. I flew Southwest this week and a couple of the things that I thought were worth mentioning were first, I had wondered what would happen. Well, let me back up. if you have a Southwest debit card or seelect Southwest credit card, you get these annual discount codes that show up in your Southwest account. It's not really a well advertised benefit, particularly on the credit card side. But if you go into your Southwest account, you may find this under your promo codes. And I've written about those promo codes before. What I didn't know, I had to make some changes to plans this week and I had booked a flight using one of those promo codes, and then we needed to change it. We decided on something different. And I didn't know if I'd retain the discount. I didn't know if the coupon code would come back, for instance, if I canceled my initial flight. And so based on some reading I did on Reddit, I learned that if you cancel Book with a promo code like that, one of those promo codes in your account for fifteen percent off or twenty percent off based on your card. And you cancel, you'll lose the discount code. You don't get it that So it's just gone However, If you change your flight continues to apply the discount to the new flights when you're searching for new flights. And I confirmed that it does indeed work that way. It still takes the in my case, it was twenty percent off of the newly rebooked flight. in fact We changed that flight a couple of times. And so I can confirm that you will keep the discount even if you make multiple changes to your itinerary. So moral of the story. If you have got one of those fifteen percent or twenty percent off discount codes from a debit or credit card and you book something that you need to cancel, don't cancel it, change it, change it to something far in the future And then just continue to change it back to whatever you next need for the next trip in order to retain that discount Do you know if you can extend the validity of a discount that way? by booking something. So let's say it's going to expire at the end of this year. you book something. Now that qualifies but then you change it to one for next year That's a great question. No, I don't know whether that would work or not. This is the first time I've ever run into the situation where I had booked something with the code and needed to make a change or cancellation. So no, I don't know that. That's a great question might be worth trying if you've got one of those promo codes that's about to expire Sounds like a really good topic for someone to write into our giant mailbag Absolutely. abolutely. All right, second piece and this one I wrote down early in the week and said o we're middle of the week, whatever it was and said we need to put this on the show. And then the very next day, a reader wrote in on one of our posts with a comment that ran into exactly this situation. So I'm glad that it's coming up this week. So several months back written about, well, let me back this one up again, too. If you have a Southwest companion pass, and you are a credit card holder. Y credit card benefits are meant to extend to your companions. So One of my sons is my companion. As a Southwest pererformance business card holder, for instance, I get access to extra legroom seating forty eight hours before our flight. So he does too. And that's the way the benefit is meant to work It gets a little complicated if you've got two household companion passes though. And while I'm gonna to explain this as a two household companion pass problem, I'm not one hundred percent sure that that's the problem at play here. So you may listen up here anyway, even if you're only a one companion pass holder Southwest has made it difficult if you if you haveve got Both passengers to both adults, let's say the parents here in my case, my wife and I, we both have a companion pass. If we book my wife and I together under a single PNR, it's a little challenging to add both companions, her companion and my companion. But I discovered and wrote months ago that it works with the app that we can both add our companions to that single PNR that she and I are on if we each add our companion via the app. Okay That's one piece of this. The other piece of this is that I had run into a situation where one of our companions was not getting the credit card se selection benefits It wanted to charge for the extra legroom seats at forty eight hours in advance and that son couldn't even select I think standard seats right away at the time of booking. And somebody else ran into that this week. Well, I ran into that this week when we went to select extra legroom seats for a flight. and lo and behold, it occurred to me that I had actually added one companion via the Southwest website southwest. com and the other companion via the app in this case just randomly happened to have done it that way. And it was the companion I added on the desktop site who was not receiving the credit card seat selection benefit. And so because of that, I thought, well, this is weird What if I cancel the companion that I booked via desktop and re added that same companion via the app Would the seat selection benefits properly apply to his ticket? then And sure enough, they immediately did. I canceled his reservation that I had booked on the website, added him in the app and immediately was able to select because I was booking within forty eight hours of departure, was immediately able to select the extra legroom seat that we wanted. So All right. So to oversimplify If you if you're flying southwest usese the app to do stuff instead of the website as much as possible because it seems to work better It absolutely does. That is the moral of the story. so thank you for the summary on that one. All right We'll be back right after this with our main event H hope you're enjoying the Frequent Miler onn the Air podcast Did you know that Frequent Myiler is also a website at frequentmiler. com you'll find all the latest deals, news about points, miles and rewarding credit cards, the single bestest best credit cards page on the web, guides to all popular rewards programs and many other terrific resources. If you'd like to get our posts sent to your email Go to frequentmiler d. com forward slash, subscribe. and sign up for free And we're back with today's main event Wellve things to know about Hyatt's devaluation In May, Hyatt changed over from an award chart that had eight categories and three tiers of pricing within each category to a new one that still has eight categories, but now has five tiers within each category. And and higher prices sort of almost across the board within each of those tiers. So we gave it A a little over a month and we turn to our friends at Gondala that is a hotel search site and they they collect data trust All like chain hotels for like a whole year in advance and they provide us a way to dig into that data and see how valuable points are. So we had looked in depth at this data, before the changeover, and now we looked at it again afterwards And we found a lot of interesting things about this change. Yeah. so all right. Starting with number one here, the median point value dropped about ten percent already. So three months ago Reasonable redemption value of highat points. That's sort of the median point for award redemptions. That's essentially what we're using was one point seven cents. That was a three months ago. one point seven cents from point, which was already a drop from where hyat points had been valued previously. I mean, if we really back up, we were over two cents a point But now the new reasonable redemption value is one point five four cents, which we've rounded down for simplification to one point five. So our new reasonable redemption value for highyat points one point five cents per point. So no doubt, that's down. Yeah. yeep. Cherry picked awards dropped a little bit less than ten percent. So what I mean by that is We looked at the seventy fifth percentile. So if you Uh, if you only look at u the You know, basically the best twenty five percent of awards you could have booked, then the value previously was two point two cents per point you would get from your points by cherry picking at that level And that dropped to two point zero. Um At the ninetieth percentile, it dropped from two point eight to two point six and that's a seven percent drop The seventy fifth percentai want is about a nine percent drop. So you know, they dropped a little bit less than the median Um, And there's still, I mean, those are big numbers still. So there's still plenty of good value to be had from your hyat points. Yeah, and I think that's pretty interesting that if you're cherry picking your awards, you can still be getting two cents or better. Now, you know, I say if you're cherry picking your awards, obviously it's going to depend on whether or not your travel plans are even going to happen to take you to where those twenty five percent of properties are during the time when they're actually presenting great values. So there's a lot of caveats there, but there's still some good opportunities. Absolutely. Absolutely. And number three. It could have been muchuch worse. So you know, I mentioned how we went from three tiers to five tiers per category I had done a deep dive of the award chart changes before they took effect and U based on that analysis, I expected point prices to go up by at least twenty five percent. because If you look because what I did is I assumed sort of, my assumption was that The lowest award prices would map to the new lowest the middle prices would map to the new middle and the highest prices would map to the new highest. That was an assumption I made to make it possible to do an analysis basically. At that level, I mean, middle prices would have gone up by twenty five percent highighest prices would have gone up by forty eight percent And but we're seeing only a ten percent you decrease in the value of your point. So that doesn't tell you, you know exactly that you can't map that exactly to what I'm talking about, but it gives you an idea that it was not nearly as bad as it could have been. Right, which is not powerful compliment to receive. but but true. and I think we found this to be the case However, in fairness, I think know we as we'll mention, I'm sure later on We expected that early on, Hyatt would kind of ease us into this and not destroy the value all at once. So while we did make some predictions about where it was going, I think reasonably we expected that early on They would give us a lot of opportunity to say, it's not as bad as it sounded We don't know whether that'll continue to be the case for a long time We can hope, but of course, the problem is it. probably will get much worse next year, right? I mean, Hyat told us that that many more properties are going to change next year probably or not many more properties. mayaybe that's the wrong way to say it. They said that they would gradually roll this out. So they have, I think they they kind of set the expectation that they were going to slowly take away the value or at least I think more so the expectation they set was that you'd still get good value out of your points at least for a while. Yeah, yeah. and that's our number four item here is that it's probably going to get worse. So you know They no doubt deliberately mapped the old to new tiers in a way to try to minimize how awful it was in the short term for the changeover and then they'll gradually start introducing more and more properties being, you know priced at that really bad peak the new peak pricing, the new top pricing So that's our fourth point I' to bring us to number five. Number five points are more valuable with certain brands. This is interesting. I think that it would seem intuitive to you, I bet, if you're a longt time hyatt person, that there are some brands where you typically get better value out of your points. but I think the details of this are particularly interesting. Tim found that the Hyatt Centric brand has a median value of about one point six five cents per point. Park Hyatt tends to yield one point seven cents per point Lace hyatt house and JDV about one point seven five cents per point and coming in at the top, Greg Drum roll, please. High at regency at one point eight six cents per point. So I don't know, do you find any surprises in here? do you find any surprising that you tend to get Bet value at a hyatt place than you would at a park Hyatt? Are you surprised that Hyatt reggency is sort of the brand on top here Yeah. yeah, all of that's really interesting. I suspect we're going talk more in a little while about how point values vary by how high end or low end things are. And I suspect some of the advantage of higher regency is that they tend to be on the lower end, but you know, then you'd say why Why would it be better though than Hyt Place and Hyatt House? And that that is a bit surprising to me. I'm not sure what's going on there Well, my guess and this is a guess, but my guess is that highat regencies exist more often in expensive markets where you may be less likely to find a highat place. and I say that, I mean, there's highat place in a hyatt house in New York City and so obviously there are expensive markets where that exists. But I think more frequently in like a business city, you're going to find a highyat regency than a highyatt house. So maybe they have some advantage there where where cash pricing is sort of, you know t times and that presents opportunity. I don't know. I'm not surprised that the Hyatt place in Hyatt House tend to offer good opportunity for good value Most of them are lower category and at the lower categories, I think typically it's just easier to find those situations where rooms are not that cheap and value is still outstanding with the Hyatt's awward chart even with dealuation. Yeah. although that that's a good example of something that might change quite a bit once they start actually using the high end of the word chart more often It'll be a shame when that happens though because man, I that's been such a great thing, right for so long that I've known that when prices are kind of silly, I can probably lean on on a lower end hyat for Excellent value. I hope we still can, but you're right seems likely to change. All right, number six, points are less valuable with certain brands So first before I mention these specific brands, let me say that there's a bunch of brands that came in right around the median, the new one point five, one point five four area. So we're not sort of calling those out But let's call out the ones where you're more likely to get worse than median value Um from Highest to Lowest, mrter and Mrs. Smith. We've got a median of about one point four. and we're going to talk more about that at the end of the show. A bunch of the all inclusive properties, Zalara, Ziva, Zoetry, Dreams, came in at one point three or around one point three. So now it's getting pretty pretty bleak, but you want really bleak Look at Hyatt Residents Club That came in at around one point zero Oh No, I don't want really bleak. No, thank you,. Yeah, that's that's rough. That's rough. And I'm not actually very surprised to see relatively low value out of the all inclusives as they have continued to just increase pricing on the all inclusives. onnce they split them off of the regular award chart and then started increasing the pricing, I found those pretty unappealing years ago when they They were on the regular word chart. They were often outstanding value, but that really changed once they split them off to begin with. So they haven't been amazing value for a long time. So yeah, that's a bummer. So those are the brands where you're just not going to probably get a great deal out of your higha points most of the time Yeah, yeah. Um, number seven. It's also become less likely to get a great deal att the high end So this kind of bucks a trend to most points programs, especially with award charts or capped award prices. You see the best value often at the very high end. But what we're seeing is that we're where point prices are sixty thousand points per night or more We're seeing a median value of one point three Um Now That is probably driven down a lot by the all inclusives that we just talked about by Mr. Mrs. Smith that has a lot of these high end properties Um, and also by like the high super high end like category eight hotels Now I'm calling out category eight because In that case the u Award chart prices rose dramatically more than most other categories. So for example The new middle award price for category eight is higher than the old peak award price And so any category eight hotels, the pointint prices is definitely went up. considerably there Yeah, well and you look at it. I mean, sixty thousand points for more. if you're getting one point three cents per point in value, that's nine hundred dollars a night hotel. And so you know I think that probably the number of places and times where hotels are commanding that kind of a rate have to be relatively small. And so I think as you increase the point price, you're going to run into that where you're just going to run into those there's only so much the hotel is possibly going to charge somebody. So there's only so much value you're going to get out of that. And so like you said, historically, that has been where you could find the best, but now we're getting high enough that there's just a little upside left there. Although I mean, again, if you get one point If you're this is the median at one point three. So if you get better than that, if you get a seventy fifth or ninetyieth percentile, there still probably are plenty of opportunities to get Solid value there, just not quite like it used to be don't make it quite like they used to Num eight Points to become even more valuable at the lower end. And so this kind of goes along with what we were talking about before. So at the very bottom end of redemptions up to five thousand points, you're looking at about two point two cents per point on average, your redemption's in the five to ten K range, two cents per point median value and ten to fifteen thousand points per night. You're at one point seven cents per point. So those those category, what is that? fifteen thousand? is that still a category three property somewhere in the middle? A I think around category three probably Yeah, ye. So category one, twenty, three properties in general tend to yield better value. And again, that's not surprising to me because hotels in general have gone up enough in price over the last several years that even at that bottom end, properties have just gotten more and more expensive. So keeping point prices In those lower bands is going to continue to yield some good value. That's actually where I imagine I'll get the best value moving forward. I think I'll have a hard time parting with sixty thousand points or eighty thousand points or wh seventy five, whatever the top end of category eight is these days when I know that I can probably stumble into a number of good situations each year to use like fifteen thousand points or less at pretty good values. So There you have it. att the low end, you're probably going to do a little bit better with Hyatt moving forward. All right, number nine, many cities offer excellent value And I find this list really interesting because It's a mix of extxtremely expensive cities. And Prob even more very low priced cities. So because of this so it's actually it's kind of surprising that any extremely expensive cities show up, but the number one Best value city that we found in this data set Is Milan? where the median value we're looking at is three point eight. So I'm guessing here that even though award prices are probably higher than before that The Milan like average price the actual cash price is just so absurdly high that that's my guess here. I haven't looked at the actual data for that.s like seems like a good guess. Yeah. Yeah three point makes sense. That's a pretty outstanding value, especially when you consider I don't know. I haven't looked either. but The only Hyatt property that at least for a long time, the only Hyatt property there was the Park Hyatt Milan and then there were some Mr. and Mrs. Smith properties, I think. So surprising that we're at three point eight with essentially the Park Hyatt seemingly likely to be the one drawing that up. P prettytty sure there's like a hy ecentric or or something else there that Anyway, There's a bunch that offer two point five cents per point or more median. So we've got Hydrabad, India, Schomberurg, Illinois. This seems like such an eclectic list. Memphis, New Delhi. Rosemont, Houston So all those places seem to offer really good value Um And still I'm going to just give a selection for giving between two and two point a half cents per point value, there's a very long list. I'm going J less a handful of those. We've got Milwaukee, Montaggo Bay, Miami Beach, Chapel Hill, San Antonio. Tokyo and Charlotte are some of the ones in that range And then, um I'm not going there's a there's probably a lot that are around two point zero, but a couple of very popular cities that are come in at around two point zero are Chicago and New York Okay, so some of those probably won't surprise anybody, but some of them probably will. We hit a few suburbs of Chicago in there and some random places where your points tend to be nicely valuable All right Well, that's that's interesting. I don't know. So do you get any meaningful takeaway there where like why is that or how is it useful Yeah, you know, no, I mean, just sort of like as I said before, I think there's a very interesting combination of Um, places where Prices tend to be very high, that is you know, forcing the a value per point. high, even even with the new award charts And ones that have lotots of Um properties, high at regencies and high at places and stuff that tend to offer good value. So you know, I think it's an eclectic mix of those kind of things Probably U these are also this is probably also a list of places that do not have All inclusives or many Mr and Mr. Smith properties. I don't think there are too many all inclusives in Milwaukee, but I know that there is a regency at at least one high at place exact. So that definitely tracks. All right, number ten, Singapore offers surprisingly poor value for its points. O cent per point around around one cent per point is the median. at the Andas Singapore, the Grand Hyatt Singapore, the standard Singapore You know That sounds surprising Maybe I'm less surprised than you are about this because I have oftentimes been surprised on the other end that Cash prices are sometimes much more reasonable in Singapore than I would expect for the size of the city. And I've run into that a few times before. So I'm not shocked that the value is relatively poor compared to other places. I am shocked at one cent though Wow, That's stunningly bad Don't ever use your high points for that low. I mean, that's just right It's so bad for Hyatt for Hyatt. For other hotel chains, almost every other hotel chain one cent is a really good redemption, but not for hyat All right, coming in at number eleven, the worst and best values barely budge. So from the Gondala data, we can find like what is the lowest overall value per point you can get at any hotel across the world. The lowest before the DVal was zero point four cents per point value and the new lowest is exactly the same The um Old highest was eight point three, the new highest went down to eight point two. So you can get some That's really the same. And so you know there are situations out there where you can still get really spectacular value or spectacularly bad value You got to watch out, you know, don't don't book that thirty thousand points night and that would otherwise cost you fifty dollars in cash. donon't do it. Right. That is an important takeaway for sure. All right. And finally, number twelve Mr and Mrs. Smith is not as bad as we thought. And this I find maybe the most intriguing little surprise nugget out of this, even if it's not the most valuable necessarily. So originally, we had Mr. and Mrs. Smith properties all between one cent per point and one point four cents per point. That's where we found everything was shaking out. that point I was not or that value per point. I was not interesterested at all in Mr. and Mrs. Smith. I was in fact, the opposite of interested in Mr. and Mrs. Smith in large part because I was annoyed that I had even put them into the, you know into the fold, so to speak without putting them into the award chart and made them relatively poor value. So I had mostly just scrolled right past Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Even when they come up in search results, I rarely click on them. But I think you're going to tell me that that could be a mistake. I mean, it could be. So, you know, the new what we're seeing W the median values is one point four cents per point. So that's at the high end of what we previously thought. Now, let me say when we When I say previously, I mean when Hyatt first rolled out Mr. Miss Smith, we poked around, looked at a bunch of properties ourselves, but we didn't do anythingthing nearly as comprehensive as you know is what Gondola can do for us So it was just from poking around and we saw prrices are point value starting at less than a penny, and And really the high end was one point four. We didn't think. So for now for the median to be one point four That right there is really surprising U The seventy fifth percentile. so if you are just kind of careful about which Mr. and Mrs. Smith properties you're going to book and only book when the value is decent, it shouldn't be hard to get one point five two, which is It was the same as our new reasonable redemption value for hyat points. So it's not a terrible use of your hyat points at that level. And then at the ninetieth percentile, you're getting one point six cents per point where You know, it's not that much more than the the median our new RRV, but it's still better than it. And so that's where like, you know, if you're seeing that, that's kind of interesting If it's a place you wanted to stay and You're flush with hyot points. you know, suddenly it's like hey, it's not a terrible use of your points anymore. And U I think, you know, we warned at the outset here Things are going to get worse The reason things are going to get worse is because of what they're doing with the award charts. Mr. Mrs. Smith is not on the award chart. So I don't expect Mr and Miss. Smith values to get worse. I mean, it could happen as a separate thing, but there's nothing about the latest devaluation that suggests that's likely So as Other properties get worse The median is probably going to drop below one point five at someed in the future. At that point, Mrter Miss Smith stays where it is, suddenly it's going to look like good or just as good as other properties kind of thing use of your hyat points. So it's kind of u a silver lining, I guess is that, you know, the mr. Missmith, which represents a large portion of Hyatt's portfolio, but it's not on the award charts. It was so disappointing when that first rolled out Um is now at least something that those of us who care about the value of our points and how we use them You know, suddenly, it's like, okay Um, this is worth considering Yeah, and I think that that's really the biggest piece for me. Those of us that care about the value we're getting for our points can consider these now because they are in at least a good chunk of cases going to be around the same type of value you'd be getting for your other points. I think that if I'm looking at obviously there's a lot of variables here, but generally speaking, if I'm looking in a city where I can get one point six cents per point booking the Hyat Regency or one point six cents per point, booking a mister and misses Smith, there are a lot of situations where I might rather that mister and misses Smith because it's going to be kind of an interesting boutique type of a property. Now obviously, if it's million points for the mister and missses Smith getting one point six cents per point is not probably going get me to book that over a reasonably priced award at a regency. But when Award pricing is similar. I think there are more and more situations where I might say, oh that mrter and Mr. Smith, that looks kind of quirky and interesting and I'm not losing value by booking it. Whereas before, I might have said, oh, that looks kind of quirky and interesting, but I'm not redeeming my points at less than one point four ccent per point in value. So it doesn't matter how interested I am, I wasn't going to book that one Now I think I'm more and more likely to look at that or at least I should look at it and bust out my calculator and see because in those ninetieth percentile type situations, I'm okay with redeeming my highat points at that value now because I don't expect that our reasonable redemption value will continue to climb for Hyatt. So at one point six, I'm looking at those redemptions and saying, All right, I can live with that now so I don't have to live with one point three later on when it continues to devalue Yeah. Yeah. All right. this is so interesting to hear you say, Nick because I remember previous episodes where you said You're not interested in boutique hotels. You like the chain hotels or you know what to expect. Yeah they therere with kids, you don't want. But I've always been the one who's been like, yeah, I'm really into boutique hotels. so That's why I was like the most disappointed when they rolled out Mr. Miss Smith at such poor value. so surpr It's cool. It's cool that we're both in this boat of like, hey, suddenly this is interesting And yeah, I mean, you know, it's it's obviously not fun to think that your hat points now are worth less than they were before, but once you accept that fact U you could either accept that fact and say, Mr. Miss. Smith now is an okay use, especially when you could get like the ninetieth percentile, or you could not accept it and say, I'm only going to use it for those, you know, certain cities, those certain brands that get you know, over one point eight, whatever you want to choose as your level. So I'm not sure where I am in that equation right at this moment. I'm probably I'm probably around one Like what's the point value I need to feel good about using my high points now knowing with this data in hand and And I'm guessing I'm probably around one point six ish But it's which is right at that high end for Mr. Miss Smith. but I'm not sure that I've really come to a conclusion, how about you You know, first of all, I'm going to mention that I do appreciate a cookie cutter hotel more than Greg probably. But so I do I do like that predictable experience just like you mentioned. but I'm more open to the boutique properties these days than I would have been eight years ago, that's for sure or even probably five or six years ago. Anyway, where my well I have to I can say what comes to my mind, but I have to go by what I've actually done. And recently, I have redeemed Chase Ultimate rewards points for points Boost at one point six five cents per point. I redeemed a whole bunch for a luxury property at one point six five cents per point. So if I'm willing to do that with points Boost at an edit property Yeah, you're like around one point six for high. It is probably around where I I acceptable in doing that. So I think that It's unfortunate. Like if you ask me that question a year ago, it said I always target two cents per point or better for hyat points and therefore in my case for ultimate rewards points, But the writing is on the wall. you're not going to get that value forever unless you're able to constantly always cherry pck. And I know that I won't always be able to do that. So I think one point six at this point is where I'm like, okay, that's Still a good redemption. It's not as exciting as it was before, but like you said earlier point here is that it's still M more valuable than most hotel points on the market. This episode was produced and edited by Karrie Yoder, music by Annie Yoder. 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