Book hotels for 1,400 points

Good morning from beautiful Arusha, Tanzania – my home away from home.

I’m excited to be back in my comfort zone (sub-Saharan Africa), and I’ve got some epic travel tips for you. So let’s get into it:

• 🏨 50% transfer bonus to Accor Live Limitless

• ✈️ Buy airline miles, get cheap premium flights

• 💳 Video: Why this $95 card offer is so good

🏨 50% transfer bonus to Accor Live Limitless

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve begun to value convenience and simplicity when it comes to points and miles.

With all of the credit cards, earning rates, transfer partners, award charts, devaluations, elite status, etc., it gets pretty overwhelming.

But that’s why I’ve been really leaning into Accor Live Limitless over the last year.

As you know, it’s super simple. 2,000 Accor points = 40 Euros off your hotel bill.

Room rates, food, parking, spa services, and anything else you charge to your room can simply be wiped off your bill at a flat rate during checkout.

And right now, there is a 50% transfer bonus to Accor from ThankYou points that is worth paying attention to.

The normal transfer ratio from ThankYou points to Accor is 2:1. That means transferring 1,000 ThankYou points will yield 500 Accor points.

With this transfer bonus, 1,000 ThankYou points gives you 750 Accor points.

And while that might sound pretty grim, it’s actually not.

Remember, Accor points have a flat value against cash. And since Accor has so many budget brands, even this rough-sounding transfer ratio offers good value.

For example, this Ibis Styles hotel (one of my favorite Accor brands) in Athens, Greece, costs €125 during the Summer travel season.

That means you could book it for just 6,000 Accor points per night, or 8,000 ThankYou points with this transfer bonus.

Not bad for a major European city during Summer…

Accor also has tons of SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper hotels dotted all over the world. For example, in Asia, it’s not uncommon to see budget hotels for less than €20 per night.

That’s just 1,000 Accor points or less than 1,400 ThankYou points per night, which is obviously ridiculous… but it’s very real.

I think Accor is well worth paying attention to, and I’ve been transferring points to them even without a transfer bonus.

If you don’t have enough ThankYou points for your redemption, you can always top up your Accor account by transferring from Capital One, Bilt Rewards, and even Rove Miles.

The bonus is good until July 18, so you’ve got a nice long time to take advantage of it.

✈️ Buy airline miles, get cheap premium flights

Finnair is back with another opportunity to buy Avios with a 40% bonus…

And just like last time, this could mean an opportunity to fly some amazing business-class flights for wayyyyyyy less cash.

Here’s the deal:

When you buy a certain number of Avios from Finnair, you can get up to a 40% discount. Here is what those amounts look like:

Now, before we get into whether or not this is a good deal, you can only see these discounted prices if you have at least 100 Avios in your Finnair account.

However…

You can easily transfer points to Finnair from your credit card.

Or, you can transfer British Airways, Qatar Airways, Iberia, or Aer Lingus Avios to Finnair using the online Avios transfer tool.

Anyway, once you have 100 Avios in your account, you’ll need to buy a minimum of 85,000 Avios to get the 40% discount, which means you’ll be buying them for roughly 1.3 cents each.

Now for the fun part… 😏

Fly business class to Europe for cheap

Like I mentioned earlier, you can freely transfer Avios between a bunch of different airlines.

So once you buy them from Finnair, you could transfer them to Iberia and book flights from the U.S. to Europe:

In this case, here is how much cash you’d be paying to book those flights:

• $208 in economy

• $384 in premium economy

• $527 in business class

Of course, you’ll also still have to pay the taxes and fees… but that’s still lie-flat business class to Europe for around $650 total.

Fly Qsuites for 90% off

Similarly, you could buy 70,000 Avios from Finnair and transfer them to Qatar Airways to book this 12-hour flight in QSUITES. 👇

In this case, you’ll pay $910 plus about $200 in taxes.

That’s like $1,100 for 12 hours in Qsuites, which is actually a really really good deal considering the typical $10,000 price tag.

It can work for economy flights, too

You could buy some Avios and transfer them to Aer Lingus to fly between the U.S. and Europe for just 13,000 Avios.

That’s just $169 worth of Avios at the 40% discount (though you’d need to buy them in bulk).

Even with taxes and fees, that’s still often hundreds of dollars cheaper than paying cash normally.

Stack credit card rewards on top

Typically, buying points doesn’t code as a “travel” purchase. Therefore, you’ll want to use a card that has higher earning rates on uncategorized spend.

I recommend the Capital One Venture Rewards Credit Card or the Bilt Palladium Card, both of which earn 2x transferable points.

You could also use a card like this Hilton business card, which earns 5x Hilton points on everything.

The bottom line

Buying airline miles is rarely an automatic good choice.

Even with this Finnair sale, it’s important that you crunch the numbers and account for all taxes and fees when doing the math.

But given the flexibility and wide applicability of Avios, this sale offers a LOT of good deals.

💳 Video: Why this $95 card offer is so good

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or ignoring Daily Drop 😡) for the last few days, you probably know that this $95 credit card has a new 100,000-point welcome offer.

And it’s very good. I told you about how good it was. Multiple times.

But reading sucks. So if you hate reading, we made a YouTube video about it instead… so check it out:

That’s it for today, folks. I love a newsletter where we really hit all the bases: good hotel deal, good airline deal, good credit card deal.

So let’s leave it at that.

Peace ✌️

03°23.215'S, 36°40.870' E

With contributions by Sam Anthony and Katie Begnoche.