Category Archives: Hotels + Points

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Hyatt’s Fall Promo: Hit the Snooze Button!

Being the Hyatt fan girl here at TWG I take my responsibility of keeping readers up to date on all things Hyatt pretty seriously. But this fall promo……… let’s just say I’m pretty seriously disappointed. Let me lay out Hyatt’s fall promotion and then I’ll tell you why it’s a snoozer.

Promo Offer

The promo time frame is between September 1, 2018 and November 30, 2018. It’s a tiered promotion so the more nights you stay, the more points you’ll earn.  Hyatt offers bonus points for every 5-10 nights you stay at a Hyatt property. Stay five nights, get 2,500 points. After another five nights, get another 5,000 points for a combined total of 7,500. After that you earn between 10,000-25,000 Hyatt points for every 10 nights you stay during those 3 months. Staying 40 nights before the promo ends earns 60,000 bonus points.

Tiers for Hyatt Fall Promo 2018 Continue reading

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Marriott’s NEW Free Night Award Chart is Live!

Keeping track of Marriott’s free night awards just got easier! Take a wild guess how many hotels are now in the Marriott Rewards program? I was way off. Marriott Rewards combined program brings together 6,700 hotels. That’s a lot of hotels to keep track of.

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Which Password Do You Use to Sign Into Your New Marriott Account?

Over the weekend I received a bunch of calls and emails from friends and family members telling me they couldn’t sign in to their newly combined Marriott account. If it had only been one or two people I might not have thought much about it. But with this much confusion going on I wanted to dig deeper and see what the issue was.

I hadn’t logged into my own account for a few days, and sure enough when logging into my account after a few failed attempts I realized what the issue was. I’m sharing this just in case you or someone you know is having trouble or is confused. You may want to grab a shot of espresso because this is confusing.

Marriott/SPG linking accounts instructions

Is anyone else confused by this??

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Track Credit Card Sign Up Bonuses, Annual Fees & 5/24 Score with TravelFreely

Good morning everyone, I hope you had a great weekend.  A few weeks ago, I was in Denver and went to the Front Range Travel Hackers Meetup Group.  At the meetup, I met Zac, the founder of TravelFreely, a website he created to track credit card sign up bonuses (deadlines to complete the minimum spending requirements), track credit card annual fees, calculate your 5/24 Score, and make it easy for you to track your credit cards along with your spouse / companion’s credit cards.  And by the way, the service is completely free and you can set up your account in a few minutes (unless you have 30+ credit cards like me, in which case, it could take a little longer).  Without further ado, here is how TravelFreely works.  To get started, sign up for your free TravelFreely account here.  Enter your name, email address, and click the Get Started button.

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Why I’m Giving the New SPG Luxury Card a Pass

I’ve been on the fence about whether or not to apply for the new Amex SPG Luxury card and I’ve finally decided to pass. I’ve been a long time Amex customer and have had both the SPG personal and business cards for many years. I used them both, and put as much spend on them as I could. For years all my non-bonused spend went on the personal SPG card and the business card saw heavy use, too.

I really appreciated the Sheraton lounge access that came with the business card. SPG was for many years my number one hotel chain and until the SPG/Marriott merger, SPG was always in my top two. I’ve had multiple amazing SPG hotel stays on four continents.

I never got to Platinum status but did maintain Gold year after year and always felt my Gold status was acknowledged in many generous ways. The merger with Marriott was not one I would have voted for, but then my vote didn’t count :) My SPG cards came out of my wallet and my last Sheraton stay was 8 months ago. Continue reading