Hotels
I try to make things I don't see elsewhere, and hotels make terrible benefit charts. You have to weed through so much junk.
For example, Club Carlson lists "free award nights" (as if anyone else charges for them), or "points & cash". These aren't things that help me understand why I want status, they are just minor details of the program. Like Marriott's page lists dozens of things, including "Member Exclusive Offers", "Your preferences remembered", "Promotion Central". These are meaningless things that just make the site harder to use, and harder to find the meaningful info.
The other thing is that these benefit charts don't list alternative ways...
Read more
The end of the year is near and we've actually already been to a lot of the hotels we have scheduled from now until the end of the year (IC Warsaw, IC Vienna, IC Budapest, etc...) and so I might as well get this yearly tradition out of the way and share some of my favorite hotels that we visited in 2014. I'll only do new hotels, so if you're curious about the last two years see 2013 here, and 2012 here.
Normally I try not to glorify "luxury" as the reason I...
Read more
Continuing the theme of "sweet spots" (as I did with Best Airline Mile Sweet Spots) I wanted to do a similar thing with hotels. I've talked about a lot of these before, but many aren't obvious. When you get Marriott points or SPG points, you might not know about their "Nights & Flights" option to use a little more points for a hotel stay and get a lot more miles. This post is about little know extras like these and general best uses, for hotel points.
Without a doubt, anyone can have a free 2 week vacation. Easy. In fact, writing a post on how travel IS free, I got two reactions (well, before and after). Many people have said that travel is never free (which I ignore). And many people have essentially said, "you of all people should know that miles and points can not only be had for free, but you can do it at profit."
Yes, it's true. I know a handful of people now that make their living off of miles and points. I personally choose to not share their secrets, I...
Read more