Good evening everyone. A few hours ago, I received an email from Hyatt with the subject line of “A Mystery Offer Awaits When You Purchase 5,000 Points.” I decided to check it out and see what Hyatt mystery offer I was offered. You can check out your own offer here. You will need to enter your full name, Hyatt account number, and email address to see your mystery offer.
Updated 8/2/18 at 2pm PT: The current highest Chase IHG Rewards Premier Credit Card offer is 100,000 IHG points after spending $3,000 in 3 months + $50 statement credit after first purchase. Read this post for more info.
Good morning everyone, I hope you had a great weekend. I wanted to give a special thank you to the members of the Front Range Travel Hackers meetup group in Denver. I had a great time speaking with you guys on Saturday afternoon. I have a few other posts about Denver, but today, I wanted to talk about my mini July App-O-Rama. Last Wednesday, I applied for 2 new credit cards: the American Express Hilton Honors Business Credit Card and the Chase IHG Rewards Premier Credit Card. Let’s talk about the first card now.
Good morning everyone, I hope you had a great weekend. I recently went through all the links on my buy miles / points page and noticed that a few promos are ending in the next week or two. I don’t recommend buying miles and points unless you have an award ticket or award night stay in mind, but if you do need some extra miles / points, it’s better to buy them when they are at a discount or offering a bonus. Without further ado, here are the 4 promos ending in the next few days.
United Airlines seems to run buy miles promos often. A 100% bonus was the highest I’ve seen recently, so an 85% bonus is almost as good. This is a tiered bonus, so your price per mile (PPM) will depend on how many miles you purchase.
Good morning everyone, I hope you had a great weekend. After a short stay in Athens (post 1 and post 2), we had the pleasure of visiting Crete. It is the largest of Greece’s islands, but doesn’t get as much love (or tourists) as Santorini or Mykonos. I didn’t know anything about Crete, but I knew I wanted to visit. I looked up chain hotels on Crete and only found the Radisson Blu Beach Resort in Milatos, Crete. I booked 3 nights using a bunch of Radisson Rewards Points. The property is an all-inclusive, but there are different tiers of “all-inclusiveness.” As a Radisson Rewards Gold Elite Member (thanks to having a few US Bank Radisson Rewards credit cards), we received complimentary breakfast every day.
Even though the beach resort is beautiful, with a nice beach cove and several crystal clear hotel pools, there is a great little fishing village just around the corner. Laura and I walked over to the fishing village twice during our stay. There are several restaurants and a small market in town. We had a delicious lunch, grabbed some snacks at the local market, had a fish dinner (during our second visit) and walked back to our hotel. In this post, I will show you the beautiful Radisson Blu Beach Resort and share some photos from the small fishing village. In tomorrow’s post, I will share some photos of my amazing ATV tour around Crete… stay tuned!
Image source: https://www.radissonblu.com/en/resort-milatos
Good morning everyone, I hope you all had a great Fourth of July holiday. Lately, there has been a lot of news about new Chase credit cards and upgrade options for 3 Chase hotel credit cards. I have all 3 Chase hotel credit cards (Marriott, Hyatt and IHG) so I had to decide if I wanted to upgrade any, all or none of my credit cards. The old and new credit cards are good for some people, but everyone’s situation is different. I will share my thought process about keeping or upgrading each credit card. Since everyone travels differently, you may agree or disagree with my decisions.
Before I share my decisions, here is where I stand on hotel loyalty programs. I am very loyal to chain hotels and would rather stay at a chain hotel than an independent hotel or Airbnb. But I do not have loyalty to a specific hotel loyalty program. I consider myself a free agent and do not care about hotel elite status unless it is given to me free for having the credit card. Lastly, I spend 1-2 nights a year at Marriott, 4-8 nights a year at Hyatt, and 5-7 nights a year at IHG (I divvy the rest of my hotel stays between Hilton, SPG, and Radisson Rewards). I use points and free night certificates for the stays as much as possible, unless the cash rate is cheap. Without further ado, let’s get started.
