Book hotels for $2.56 each

Good morning from Heihe – a small border town just feet from Russia, and one of the weirdest and most remote cities I’ve ever been to!

Yet, even here on the edge of civilization, I traveled and am staying here using points. 😎

And today, I’ve got some tips to help you get a LOT of similar free stays with your points:

• 🏨 Book hotels for $2.56 each

• ✈️ 40% sale on Southwest (points and cash)

• 🌴 Island getaways made effortless

🏨 Book hotels for $2.56 each

You know what I love?

Math. 🤓

And lately, I’ve been doing some math… I realize that when we talk about credit cards, welcome offers, points programs, and award charts, it all feels very theoretical and confusing.

Personally, crunching the numbers makes things much easier for me.

So today, I want to talk about the 100,000-point welcome offer on this card.

We’ve been hyping it up a lot (because it is, without a doubt, the best offer we have seen or will see this year), but let me tell you about how it can effectively allow you to book hotel nights for less than $3 a pop.

The points component

After meeting the minimum spending requirements and earning the welcome offer, you’ll have at least 105,000 UR points (though you might have even more depending on which categories you spend in).

You could transfer those 105,000 points to World of Hyatt, which allows you to book hotel nights for as few as 3,000 points per night.

Even with the card’s less-than-ideal Hyatt transfer ratio, that means you’ll need just 4,000 UR points per night to book these hotels.

And if you’re thinking these nights are hard to find, take a look at these:

Whether you’re traveling domestically or heading to far-flung places like Kenya, Azerbaijan, Colombia, or Thailand, cheap Hyatt hotels can be found all over the world.

In the last 3 weeks, I’ve stayed at five different Hyatt Category 1 hotels myself. So this isn’t just a theoretical possibility.

Anyway, if you’re finding hotel nights for 4,000 UR points each, your card will get you 26 nights in hotels.

Not too shabby from a single card offer… but there’s more.

The hotel credit

The same card also comes with a pretty sweet hotel credit to use through the bank’s portal.

That credit could easily get you another two hotel nights, even when traveling to more expensive and popular destinations.

For example, your credit would cover two nights at this hotel in Santorini, Greece – including all taxes and fees.

Now, this one card is getting you 28 hotel nights.

The annual fee

The annual fee is less than $100… which is awesome. But it is still something you’re paying for out of pocket.

Still, if we divide the annual fee by the number of nights the card gets you, you’re paying just $3.39 per night for hotels. 🤯

And guess what?

The card even has other credits that could make that $3.39 price tag closer to $0.00 per night if you use them.

Now I know the headline of this section is $2.56 per night, not $3.39.

That’s because if you also hold this premium version of the card (yes, you can have both), your transfer ratio to Hyatt becomes 1:1.

If you run all of the numbers the same way with a 1:1 transfer ratio, you are officially booking hotels for $2.56 each. 

Pretty cool, eh? 😏

The reality

Now, I get it – it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to book that many nights for 3,000 points each (but to be fair, I regularly book hotels at these rates).

Anyway, look at it this way:

If some nights cost 5,000 points or 6,000 points and you’re booking 20 nights with a single card… isn’t that still insane?

Even 15 nights?

The point is this:

It’s pretty much impossible to not get a ton more value from this card than what the annual fee costs.

👉 Earn 100,000 points 👈

✈️ 40% sale on Southwest (points and cash)

Southwest is out with a new flash sale that applies to both cash AND points flights, but you’ll need to act fast.

Until July 10 (tomorrow), you can get up to 40% off base fares at Southwest.

The best part? No promo code required, no major restrictions… just go to the site, run a search, and see the discounted rates.

This sale applies to flights between August and December, though there are some blackout dates (which you can read about on the sale page).

I saw plenty of great deals after running some random searches.

For example, flights between Chicago and Manchester, New Hampshire (my home state) are pricing at around $220 round trip – even during the peak fall foliage season.

That’s a $75 discount, which is pretty substantial.

As I said, this sale also applies to points deals, which makes things more exciting.

Those same flights to New Hampshire would cost 7,500 Southwest points each way, down from 12,000.

Of course, the lowest prices are for Southwest’s Basic fares, which are pretty restricted and don’t include things like checked bags.

There are two ways around that:

• Book a higher fare class and pay a bit more

• Hold a Southwest co-branded credit card, all of which come with extra benefits

We see sales like this pretty regularly from Southwest, so this isn’t the most exciting thing in the world.

Still, if you have trips coming up before the end of the year, you might as well search before tomorrow and see if you can lock in some low prices.

That’s all for today, folks. Have a wonderful day and see you bright and early tomorrow,

50.2451° N, 127.5283° E

With contributions by Sam Anthony and Katie Begnoche.