Welcome back to class! It’s been a few months since I’ve written anything for my series of classes. My hope is to publish at least one class every other week, wherever my classes may go.
In my last class, I introduced that I would begin the process of explaining how you earn points and miles. We’ll start with the most obvious: flying and staying in hotels.
Note that we won’t get into elite miles and elite status at this time, as that is a whole separate category. We will focus on redeemable points and miles.
Flying has some interesting nuances, so we’ll start with staying in hotels, and then I’ll go over earning points by flying.
Earning Points at Hotels
Within hotel loyalty programs, there are really three ways in which you can earn points.
The first way, and the most common way, is earning points per dollar spent. This is the primary way of earning points at the core 4 (Marriott, Hilton, IHG, and Hyatt).
How does this look like in practice? For example, within the Hyatt program, every one earns 5 points per dollar spent; this is the base earning rate. Thus, if you spend $100 on a night, you should receive 500 points.
Note that you typically don’t earn points on taxes and fees, but you typically can earn points on food, drinks, room service, etc. For example, when we take our yearly trip to Miami to stay at The Confidante, we earn a bunch of points from hanging out by the pool and ordering from poolside service.
If you have elite status, you often get bonus points per dollar spent, so that’s one reason I try to consolidate all of my stays into a single brand, if possible. There also may be bonuses due to different promotions, so always be on the look out for those. For example, Hilton is well-known for constantly offering double points promotions.
The second way is that you earn 1 credit for each night you stay, and, after a certain number of credits, you get a free night. The most prominent brand I can think of that does this would be Omni hotels, who offer you a free night at any Omni hotel after 20 nights. This can be used quite strategically. For example, if you can find a $150 a night hotel for 20 nights (like on a work trip), you could then redeem your free night at the Omni Scottsdale, where nights can go for $900. You would have spent $3000 to redeem for a $900, which is a pretty good deal if you ask me. However, this is not a common way of gaining points.
The third way is really only used by Accor, which is a European-focused brand. You get credit for staying at their hotels in terms of about 2% redemption rates. Thus, if you spend $100, you would get 2 Accor points. Similar to the previous method, this is not that common.
The method that you are most likely to encounter out in the world is the first option, where you are given a certain number of points for each dollar spent on hotels. The amount varies by chain, but it is still better to get some points than none at all.
One thing that often frustrates people is that there really isn’t an opportunity to double dip these promotions. For example, you can’t go through Hotels.com, receive a credit through their program, and also receive points from your hotels program. Thus, it is best to book directly on your hotels website (it will also make your life easier if you need to make changes or cancel). Just FYI.
Earning Points from Flying
There are two ways to earn redeemable miles from flying. First, when purchasing a flight that is on the airline that you are purchasing from, many airlines (such as American, Delta, United, and Southwest) give you a certain number of miles per dollar spent. For example, at American Airlines, everyone gets 5 redeemable miles per dollar spent on airfare. Thus, when you spend $100 on a flight, you get 500 redeemable miles. You get more if you have elite status, but we’ll get to that in a future lesson.
The second way, which isn’t as common anymore, is to earn miles based upon how far you fly, regardless of how much you paid for your flight. Within the US, the major airline that still does this is Alaska Airlines. You earn one mile for every actual mile flown. This is not dependent on how much you spend. Regardless of whether you spend $100 or $500, 1 mile flown is 1 mile earned.
You also see this when crediting your flying to partner airlines that are not the airline you purchased from. For example, earlier this year, I bought a flight to Spain on Iberia. Iberia and American Airlines are partners, so I was able to credit my flight to American Airlines. Because I bought it through Iberia, American has no idea how much I paid for that flight, so they credited me the miles based on how far I flew. We’ll get to partners and alliances in a later lesson, but it’s a good thing to know.
Conclusion
The topic of earning points and miles from flying and staying in hotels is foundational. Everyone should have a basic understanding of how they earn points and miles, and I hope that this writing helped a bit.
In the next post in this series, I’ll discuss earning miles from credit card spending, which is actually the largest source of revenue for most airlines and hotel chains. We’ll get to that in the next post.
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