☀️ Good morning and happy Monday.

I’m actually really excited to tell you a bit more about a crazy trick to turn almost any of your points into Hyatt points… and at pretty good value.

Let’s start off the week with a bang:

• 🤔 Transfer Capital One miles to… Hyatt?

• 🧳 Your comfiest layer, now compact

🤔 Transfer Capital One miles to… Hyatt?

I’ve been having some weird thoughts lately.

Specifically, I’m talking about the new Aeroplan and Hyatt partnership that has, quite literally, been keeping me up at night.

You see, on paper, this partnership is kinda “meh.”

But the more I think about it, the more I feel like there are a lot of people out there who could benefit from using some of the perks.

Transfer Capital One miles to Hyatt

Through this partnership, you can transfer almost every major points currency to Hyatt, albeit at a rough ratio.

Let me explain what I mean…

You can transfer almost any points currency to Aeroplan. With this Hyatt partnership, you can also now transfer those Aeroplan points to Hyatt at a 2:1 ratio. 👇

For example, the Capital One Venture Rewards Credit Card is currently offering 75,000 bonus miles after spending $4,000 in the first 3 months.

Anyways, after spending $4,000, you’ll have 83,000 Capital One miles.

You can transfer those to Aeroplan at a 1:1 ratio, then onward to Hyatt, resulting in 41,500 Hyatt points.

Then you can use those to book hotels for as few as 3,000 points per night:

So yes. The transfer ratio is terrible. But if you can book 13 free nights, is it really that bad?

The same applies to MR points and Rove Miles. Neither of them transfers to Hyatt directly.

But now, they all effectively do transfer to Hyatt… indirectly.

For example, that same math applies to MR points. You can basically now transfer them at a 2:1 ratio to Hyatt.

Let’s say you’re going to London next month and want to use your MR points for a hotel.

You can transfer to the following programs:

• Marriott (1:1 ratio)

• Hilton (1:2 ratio)

• Hyatt (2:1 ratio, via Aeroplan)

• Leading Hotels of the World (4:1 ratio)

• Choice Hotels (1:1 ratio)

Hilton has the best transfer ratio here. But the cheapest Hilton hotels in London cost 60,000 points per night for a standard award, or 30,000 MR points.

Marriott is much worse, with the absolute bottom-of-the-barrel properties priced at 49,000 points, which you can only transfer to at a 1:1 ratio.

Choice Hotels has some properties in and around London that start at 20,000 points per night, and LHW has hotels that will cost you a minimum of 40,000 MR points per night (although these are REALLY nice hotels, so the value is good).

Meanwhile, Hyatt has hotels for just 8,000 points per night.

Even with the “bad” 2:1 transfer ratio, you still only need to transfer 16,000 MR points to Aeroplan, then onward to Hyatt to book a night in London.

That’s fewer points than the cheapest hotel option using any other program that MR points transfer to.

It gets even better

Maybe the biggest no-brainer part of this Aeroplan partnership is the ability to redeem 25,000 Aeroplan points for a Hyatt category 1-4 Free Night Certificate.

With Hyatt’s new award chart, a Category 4 property could cost as much as… 25,000 Hyatt points.

So yes – this could potentially allow you to “transfer points” from Capital One Miles and MR points to Hyatt at a 1:1 ratio, or close to it.

For example…

This Category 4 hotel in Seattle costs 20,000 Hyatt points on a night where the cash rate is $628 after taxes.

Instead, you could transfer 25,000 Aeroplan points to Hyatt for a Category 1-4 free night award, then use it to book this hotel.

Again, the “effective transfer ratio” in this case is 5:4 (25,000 points becomes 20,000 points of value).

But still, those original 25,000 points you transfer from MR points or Capital One miles are worth 2.5 cents each.

Actually, they’re worth more.

Because booking with points and free night awards generally have more flexible cancellation policies than the cheapest cash rates, which are nonrefundable.

Wait… isn’t that better than transferring UR points…?

If you hold a low-fee card that earns UR points (this card or this card), your transfer ratio to Hyatt is 4:3.

So in the last example I gave you, booking that hotel for 20,000 points would require transferring 27,000 UR points.

But…

You could also just transfer 25,000 UR points to Aeroplan, redeem those for a Category 1-4 free night, and book the same hotel.

So even the bank that literally transfers directly to Hyatt can be beaten with this partnership in certain cases.

In fact, there’s also a 20% transfer bonus right now from UR points to Aeroplan… so using the Aeroplan partnership would save you even MORE points in that last example.

Of course, if you hold this premium card or any Bilt card, you can simply transfer 1:1 to Hyatt, which makes all of this irrelevant to you…

But most people don’t have either of those. 🤷🏼‍♂️

Earn 21x Hyatt points per dollar with Rove

As I mentioned earlier, this also applies to Rove Miles, which transfer to Aeroplan at a 1:1 ratio.

And here’s the fun part with Rove… when you book hotels, they can offer some insane multipliers for earning Rove Miles.

Check out this Ryokan in Nara, Japan, which is offering 42x Rove Miles when booking it with cash:

As you can see, a single night here would earn you almost 10,000 Rove Miles.

Transfer those to Aeroplan, then to Hyatt, and you’re basically earning 21x Hyatt points per dollar on this hotel, or around 5k Hyatt points per night.

That’s already enough for a free night at a lower-tier Hyatt hotel. It’s basically a buy one, get one.

Plus, I’ve seen Rove multipliers as high as 60x… but don’t bank on finding them easily. 😉

Everything I know is a lie

Gone are the days when you could simply earn credit card points and transfer them to a partner at a clean ratio without really thinking.

And honestly? That’s fine.

Because if you put in a tiny bit of effort to learn the more unique avenues available to you, you could actually save points and unlock more value than you may have previously thought possible.

So when you’re booking hotels in the future, I’d look at Hyatt every time – even if you don’t have points that transfer directly to them.

Merry Christmas, friends. 🎄

I'm curious to hear your thoughts about that Hyatt/Aeroplan situation. I knew it was useful for some niche scenarios, but now it feels pretty broadly applicable for most normal people.

Anyway, see you tomorrow. ✌️

43.6532° N, 79.3832° W

With contributions by Sam Anthony and Katie Begnoche.