Navigating Transfer Bonuses, Hyatt Devaluation, New Card Offers and More

I just made the biggest speculative point transfer in my life, a few hundred thousand

points, moved out in one shot, and I'm still not totally sure if it was brilliant or reckless.

Today I'm going to tell you exactly why I did it, what made this particular deal so

hard to pass up, and how you should think about transfer bonuses so you can decide for

yourself when they're worth it.

I've also got a breakdown on the new Hyatt Award Chart Changes, which yes, really suck,

but might not be as catastrophic as the headlines suggest, then I'll walk through the best elevated

credit card welcome offers right now across Delta, United Southwest, and more, and I'll

share a quick update on how AI is changing the way I actually run this podcast behind

the scenes, and some of the stuff I'm working on there.

Lots of ground to cover, tons of takeaways you can put to use, so let's get into it.

I'm Chris Hutchins, if you enjoy this episode, please leave a comment or share it with

a friend, and if you want to keep upgrading your money, points, and life, click follow

or subscribe.

Alright, so let's talk about a lot of things today, but I'm going to start with something

I've been spending a tremendous amount of time on, which won't be a surprise for people

who listened to my episode a few weeks ago about AI tools, because it's just kind of really

captivated me.

It feels like I'm living in the future, and back then I was talking about how I built

this OpenClaw agent named Ted.

Since then I've spun up another seven agents, so they're kind of seven agent employees operating

in my slack on text and all kinds of areas of life, and I want to say that I've kind

of evolved how I'm using this tool in a way that I think is a little bit different than

I first thought.

At first it was I have this assistant, I can message him any time, and he can do all these

things, and I'm starting to realize that one great use case for a lot of these technologies

is repeatable work that requires context and kind of siloing it into different agents,

and I realize that you could do this in two ways.

One, you could kind of write up the background and context you want for certain tasks, and

just have any tool do that.

When you go and open up a new chat in Clawed in chat GPT and Gemini, you know, what I

used to do is I would dump in a list of every title of every episode I've ever published,

and then say, help me come up with a new title for this episode.

Here's the transcript.

Now, I have one agent who's solely focused on kind of the creative work around episodes,

and so their memory and all of their kind of context already has that.

I had them go through all of the past thumbnails, titles, and take away learnings and write

up a brief for themselves for every time I asked them to do anything, and so that agent,

her name is Spark, gets a transcript and can propose different ideas for YouTube thumbnails.

What I've tried to do is instead of thinking of it necessarily like a chat interface, I'm

taking different actions and trying to kind of tie them both to an agent and to a bunch

of context, but also to some automation.

As soon as I'm done recording, and I mark that in a project management tool, that fires

off an agent to go grab the transcript, come up with thumbnail ideas, and the next thing

that I haven't built yet, but I'm excited about, is actually working with some image generation

stuff to actually just create the thumbnails.

Haven't gotten that far right now, it uses the Gemini API to generate thumbnails with

random people that aren't me to kind of give the idea of what they would look like, but

I actually think there's a world where you could start to use your own images and kind

of piece things together.

That is one, and if you don't know how to do that, don't worry, that's where I was, and

I just always encourage people to just start talking to these tools and say, hey, I want

to build something that could generate thumbnails, how could it do this?

And you can do that for any aspect of life.

That said, the usefulness of open claw, I would say, hasn't changed, but the ability for

other tools to catch up and kind of replace a lot of what made it super valuable has.

And so if anyone uses claw, they have this tool called clawed co-work, and you can run it

on your computer, and it kind of solves some of this because they added scheduled tasks.

So you can say, hey, could you put together this briefing of sorts of whatever you want,

and then, hey, could you run it every morning at 7am?

And so you don't need to go buy a Mac Mini and install open claw to do that.

And I imagine that a lot of these tools are going to start to layer in scheduled tasks

on an ongoing basis.

And as they start building out more connections, right, in clawed, you can go in and connect

your email, you can connect things, the chat GPD has some different apps.

Once that starts to happen, you'll have very similar experiences to what you can create

with open claw.

But you can do it using the tools that you're already using instead of having to kind of

start from scratch in a little bit more of a raw way.

And so I think that's kind of the evolution of where this goes over the next probably

couple of weeks, is that more and more features like that will exist.

What's still missing is that when you have a piece of software running on a computer that

has the ability to create more software and run it on the computer as well, you can spin

up lots and lots of other things.

And I think that's where I still really value what's going on with open claw over a lot

of these other tools.

So for example, I have an Aura ring and there wasn't a Aura connector built into clawed

or chat GPD, but there are ways that you could say, hey, go spin up a skill that syncs with

Aura and pulls down my sleep data or hey, go sync with Tesla's APIs or go log into my

open snow account and give me a snow forecast for an upcoming trip or go build a way to interact

with my meal planning app.

Those kinds of things are things that you can use GPT codex on your computer.

You can use clawed code to kind of build those skills, but you need something to interact

with them and run them on a recurring basis.

I don't think we're that far from all of these mainstream AI properties or kind of software

companies from building things like this, but right now, I still think that's one of

the competitive edges that you get from playing with things like open claws that you get

to create software that does exactly what you want, runs on a schedule, and kind of interfaces

with you wherever you want.

And that's the other big thing.

I love being able to use iMessage or Slack as the medium instead of going to the chat GPT

app or going to the cloud app.

One other thing I've been playing with is I have card tool and then I also have all the

hacks.

And so I've been trying to think about how I can take all the knowledge of those things

and tie them into existing tools.

And because I have that information and it lives online in different servers, I actually

built something called a MCP, which is a model context protocol.

And it kind of sits on top of an API, which is how different applications interface with

other applications online.

I could plug it into clawed or you could go create a custom GPT and you could plug it

in there.

And it's able to access that information.

There's a really fun experiment because I started seeing another aspect of what I keep

referring to as like the future of the web and the future of all this.

And that is that when I go on clawed now or chat GPT and I open that custom GPT, I can

reference data that lives in card tool.

So I've added 41 credit cards to this app I've been building and it knows all my annual

fees.

It knows what credits I have outstanding.

It knows when the bills are due.

It knows what the balances are.

It knows everything because that's what that app's purpose is.

And up until now ish, every piece of software online is something that you interface with

using that piece of software.

So when I first built card tool and when we're talking two months ago, it never crossed

my mind that someone might use card tool without ever even going to our website.

And I think that's probably true of all kinds of pieces of software.

So for example, how would you interface with United Airlines if you didn't have the

app or the website?

I guess you could call the phone number, you could fly the planes, but how would you book

a flight?

Historically, companies have created APIs so that other companies can access them.

But it was very much not a consumer thing.

It was so that other businesses could interoperate with that business.

So maybe built travel portal wants to use United's travel booking platform to book United

flight so they create an API, but it's not really a consumer thing.

Now some of these tools make APIs available to anyone and some of them don't.

And some of them kind of make them available to anyone, but it's definitely not a straightforward

simple process.

And what I realized as I added the card tool data to Clawed and I was able to just query

it, I realized that the core thing I built was not necessarily a website or an app.

It was a bunch of information stored in a particular way that makes it more valuable

because of the way it stored and that the interface to it might not in the future be

a website or an app.

And that as I'm both simultaneously building this app and interfacing with the assistant

I've built on OpenClaw, I started to think about the future of the internet and whether

it looks a lot more like it looked 20 something years ago than it does today.

And what I mean by that is 20 or maybe 25, 30 years ago, I can't even keep track of

time.

You know, you would just go into AOL right and you wouldn't go to a bunch of websites.

The content you looked at was on one place.

Or I remember Yahoo, the Yahoo homepage, like you would spend a lot of time on Yahoo.

You wouldn't just bounce around the lots of websites.

I wonder if in the future we will all have our own interface to the web and that interface

could be one single app that we've created with some agent that looks in shapes and feels

exactly like we wanted to or maybe we don't even interface with it on an app at all.

Maybe it's just a text-based interface.

Maybe it's kind of like if you've seen the movie, it's just something you can talk to.

And that app, that interface, connects to everything else.

So do I ever need to go to my bank's website to do anything if I could interface with

it by just asking, and I'll use Siri as an example here.

But if every time I wanted, I could say, hey Siri, how much money is in my checking account?

Hey Siri, can you transfer $100 to my friend?

Imagine that world where you could just talk like that and interface with all the different

services you have.

Right?

If you have a meal planning app, you could say, hey, what's for dinner tonight?

What's the recipe?

Can you add this to my grocery list?

Can you order it on Instacart?

And all that stuff can happen, but you don't actually have to go into any of those individual

apps or go to any of those websites.

And so what that requires or what needs to happen for that to work is that everything

needs to talk to everything.

And right now, the kind of way a lot of those things happen is opening a browser window

and browsing to it.

And if you've ever synced a bank account using a Fintech app or some banking app or a

network tracking tool, most of the time you'll see Platt or Yodely or something pop up and

it says, you know, enter your login and this third party service will connect with the

bank.

Well, four or five years ago, the way that third party service worked is that they had

a little browser instance in the cloud on a server somewhere that would open up the

bank and log in, which is why if anyone used these tools, they broke all the time because

the bank would change something about the interface of their website.

And then these kind of third party aggregator tools would have to go quickly build the

tool and over and over again.

Then eventually, a lot of the mainstream banks added an OAuth service, which is you kind

of redirect yourself to the bank's website.

You log in there and it says, hey, would you like to allow this third party to have access

to this limited set of data?

And you've probably done that any time you've signed in with Google or, you know, back

in the day, if you've signed into a lot of things with Facebook, use your Facebook log in

as the way you authenticated, it would share certain piece of information or maybe you

do that with Google and now you share your calendar with a tool.

And so I think that there's going to be a lot more of that happening as people have

their own interfaces to lots of different things.

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And so that's kind of where I think we're going here is that there are lots of APIs,

MCP servers, or maybe command line interface tools that get shipped so that people can use

these software tools, these AI coding tools to build whatever they want, to engage and

control all the existing tools they have.

And so in a future, I don't see logging into my bank's website ever.

I think I'll will interface with something else.

Maybe it's a piece of software I own, maybe, you know, Claude or open AI or Google own

this kind of layer.

Maybe, and I think this is Apple's chance, but they seem to have dropped the ball every

single time on anything in AI, but like they have my phone.

They have Siri.

This is a chance they have that they are the interface to all the things.

And so I think any one of these companies could do it.

It's going to require them being very, very flexible with how you operate with third parties,

tools and services and websites.

And then all those third parties are going to need to build ways for that communication

to happen.

And in the interim, there might be tools where they just work on the web.

And so when I wanted to build this daily snow report, the OpenClaw agent I have would

on my Mac many of my house open up the OpenSnow account, would log into my OpenSnow account,

would look at the website and figure out the report and text it back to me.

So that's like the V1 version.

It's not great.

It's slow.

It breaks.

But eventually everyone will just have some way that you can communicate with their software.

And they will still have value, right?

OpenSnow's value is not the slick UI.

It's a have the best snow forecasts.

So your value is not going to be on the UI because I think there will be a lot more people

owning their UI and it'll look whatever they want.

You know, I could have my own finance management dashboard that I run for myself that looks

and feels and does exactly what I want.

And it won't ever have any of the features that I don't care about on the Chase website.

So I don't know the long-term implications of all of this.

It's just as I've been building this software, as I've been playing with it, I realize that

I feel like the world is going to look very different because you can just make anything.

You can sit down and say, I want a tool or a site or a project that works in this

way, shape, or form.

And in minutes, it works.

And if you want to keep iterating on it and making it better and better and more efficient,

you can.

And it's just not that expensive to do.

I mentioned last time that I spent a bunch of money because I wasn't paying a lot of

attention to tokens.

Now I've signed up for the Clawed Max Plan and I haven't spent an extra cent in a given

month since.

And so I think as things get cheaper, it'll be more and more approachable.

I would encourage everyone to play because I feel like knowing these tools, understanding

them is going to be really valuable, but it's also just this direction we're heading.

And we got a 3D printer for the family for the holidays this year, and now I'm starting

to see it evolve to the real world as well.

So not just can I sit up my computer and say, make me a dashboard that will show me my

biomarker blood results and my fitness tracker data and my sleep score all in one.

So I kind of have a health dashboard.

And by the way, let me query that health dashboard.

And by the way, go crawl all the transcripts of my top three sources of podcasts about

health so that when I ask a question, you're not just going to the open web.

You're going to these sources I trust and all that.

You can build that.

Like that is a simple thing to build right now in today's day and age.

But with 3D printing, now you can start to build things and just have them in the physical

world as well.

So it's like, oh, I want to think about how to reorganize my drawer.

Now go make all the things to do that.

And so if anyone's interested there, Gridfinity is this really cool platform to do that.

My father-in-law was in town this past weekend and I was thinking, what could I do?

He likes to go hunting.

What would be a fun 3D print just to kind of showcase what's possible?

And so I 3D printed a duck call.

And it actually printed in four or five parts with little tiny reads that you could use

in the duck call to four different duck sounds.

And we printed it all in an hour and put it together in a couple seconds.

And now we had this thing that cost probably less than a dollar to make, but we had it on

our own time whenever we wanted and we could tweak it whatever way we want.

And so I don't know.

It just feels like the future's wild.

We're going to be able to create lots of stuff.

And I don't know what it looks like, but I hope you all are as excited as I am.

I will continue to share as I'm learning what's going on.

So that was one of the things that's really been dominating the last week.

I'm going to do an episode with my wife Amy in a few weeks and hopefully you'll get

to hear the perspective.

She has on how dominated my life has been and kind of how that looks from the other side

because I do realize I've been down a rabbit hole and I've been so excited that it's kind

of a little bit all consuming.

In the last couple days, one thing that's been a little bit all consuming is try to figure

out how to take advantage or not take advantage of a real big transfer bonus between built

and Japan Airlines.

But I realize that's in the past.

And so talking about it is kind of useful as a case study, but more useful if I think

about it more broadly and talk about transfer bonuses in general.

And so for anyone who doesn't know what I'm talking about, if you have points with a bank

like Chase or MX or city or capital one, they all can be transferred to airlines and

hotels.

And I often say that the highest value you're going to get from them often is by transferring

to airlines and hotels and booking kind of the best deal awards in that passion.

This is not an episode on that.

I'm actually putting together an AMA episode all about award travel and all the great

questions you guys have.

If you have more about award travel, go to all the hacks.com slash AMA, submit a few.

In fact, if you have questions on any topics, submit them because I'm putting together

a lot more frequent AMA episodes to dive into all the great questions you guys have.

So what happens is somewhere, and if you look across all the different banks and points,

it seems like seven to 15 times a year, each individual bank does some type of transfer

bonus where they say, hey, normally, if you transfer one chase point, you get the

one British airways point, but right now, we're going to give you 30% more.

Now the minimum transfers are often a thousand.

So you transfer a thousand chase points, you're going to get 1,300 British airways points.

And so those transfer bonuses happen all the time.

Probably I would say at any given point in time, there's two to five of them going on.

And for every individual bank, it's kind of on the cadence of every other month-ish.

But the challenge is, I don't often encourage people to take advantage of them unless you're

booking a trip right now.

And the reason is is that one of the reason I love transferable points is that you have

lots of flexibility.

If you have 100,000 AMX points, you don't just have 100,000 AMX points, you have the ability

to have 100,000 points in lots and lots of different programs because they're all transferable.

So with AMX in particular, you've got a dozen airlines that you could transfer those

points to.

And so by taking advantage of the transfer bonus, yes, you end up with more miles.

By transferring them to an airline with a bonus, but you lose that flexibility.

And there are so many times where Air France might have been the best deal to book a trip

to Europe.

But then I go to book the next one and there's no availability on Air France.

And so having an extra 30% of flying blue miles in my Air France or KLM account does

me no good if the only availability out there is on United or Alaska.

And so I love transfer bonuses.

If you're in the middle of planning a trip, I don't usually love transfer bonuses unless

that's the case because you don't want to lose that flexibility.

And you never know if a program will devalue its currency.

So if you have a million AMX points and every year you know you spend 100 or 200,000

Air Canada aeroplane miles, I'm not going to be upset if you transfer a few hundred

thousand points to aeroplane when there's a 30% bonus because you didn't lose the optionality

because you still have a bunch of AMX points and you're really familiar with that program.

But absent those cases, I rarely rarely think it makes sense to take advantage of a

transfer bonus.

However, sometimes they're really crazy bonuses.

And the Japan Airlines one with built was just that.

It was on March 1st for rent day, which built does all the time, right?

They do these rent day promos.

Last year I think they did nine of them.

So almost every month where you got a huge bonus for transferring.

And so if you look across Chase and AMX, the average transfer bonus is often, I'm looking

right here on this spreadsheet I made, it's like 22 to 25%.

So if you look across Chase, AMX, Capital One, and City, the average transfer bonus is

between 21 and 25%.

So it's definitely generous.

It's definitely better than yet nothing, but it's not crazy.

It's not going to change anything.

The average transfer bonus on built was 100%.

Now that's looking at the top tier and built has a bunch of tiers of status.

And if you want to go deep on this, go back and listen to the episode I did on built.

I'll put in the show notes, but at their top tier of status, you can often get a hundred

percent transfer bonus.

And now with the addition of built cash, this other rewards currency, they were offering

you the ability to buy up to one tier higher of status.

And if you're already at the top, you could buy your way from 100% to 125% transfer bonus.

And this was all for Japan Airlines, which meant that instead of transferring one built

point to one Japan Airlines mile, it was one to 2.25.

Now, like I said, I never like to make speculative transfers.

But in this case, it was a currency that I was a little bit familiar with.

They had a lot of value that it was just very hard to get access to, right?

Only capital one and built for transfer partners.

And so I looked at this and thought, I feel like I should go for this.

I had a great experience using Japan Airlines to book our trip this spring to Japan.

And they have a ton of availability for their members.

And that availability at the low end is 55,000 points to go from the US to Japan in business

class each way.

And at the high end is kind of around 100,000 points each way.

And so if you find that saver availability at 55,000 points, that's a great deal compared

to anything.

At 100,000, it's a little high, but great airline, lots of direct flights, good service.

So could even make sense at 100,000.

But if you divide that by 2.25, you'd be able to book even at the high end, even in the

100,000 mile cost.

With built, it would only end up needing you to transfer 45,000 points.

Now 45,000 points each way for international business class to Japan with pretty good availability

because that's their high end of their award chart.

That's just impossible to find.

And so a part of me was like dump every built point I have over to Japan Airlines because

all the other places that built points might go, they're all partners of other programs,

right?

Chase can go to higher.

And Air Canada is a partner of so many different things, so why not dump them all over?

And so that was going through my head with the exception of Japan Airlines having a hard

36 month expiration, unless you have a ton of life status points with Japan Airlines,

which are incredibly difficult to earn, then you have a hard 36 month expiration on points.

And if you want to go down the rabbit hole, you can search into Japan life status points.

And you'll see that if you get the Japan USA card and you spent $450,000 on it, earning

just one X Japan Airlines miles, you'll be able to extend your miles to 60 months instead

of 36.

Or if you want to spend $900,000 on the card, you can get a bunch of other perks on Japan

Airlines.

I don't think anyone listening to this or maybe no more than one or two people to see

this are going to do that.

So that means you can do this.

You could transfer your points over, but you've got to use them in 36 months.

And I believe it's book by 36 months.

You don't have to fly by then, so maybe you have almost four years to use them.

But like a lot of other carriers based in Asia, they're not a program that makes it really

easy for you to book for anyone.

So I think you have to add family members as kind of nominees to your account in order

to book for them.

And so I kind of went into this thinking, gosh, this is one of the best deals I've ever

seen that I'm confident I will get a value out of.

And I'm just totally uncertain how much value I'll get out of it before these points expire.

And so I looked at our recent trip to Japan and thought, if we needed to book four tickets,

round trip and business class to Japan each way, it would be about 800,000 Japan Airlines

points.

Now, if we found them at a better deal, oftentimes you can find them in the 70 to 80,000 range

or even in the 55,000 point range, well, then you would need less.

And so I thought, what number of points will I need to book four international round

trip tickets with the expectation that we will take another trip to Japan or connecting

through Japan sometime in the next three and a half, four years.

And I decided to go for it.

And I don't know if this was a terrible decision.

We probably won't know for a few years, but I moved a little over 300,000 bill points

to Japan Airlines, which is a big chunk of the bill points I've earned over the last

couple of years.

And we'll see what happens.

I am excited because the opportunities are just there.

However, that was on March 1st.

I transferred in the morning.

It's March 2nd today.

And I noticed late last night that Rove, which is another shopping portal that has transferable

points, announced they have a 50% transfer bonus to Japan Airlines.

I don't have any remorse here because I don't really have any Rove points.

I probably have a couple thousand Rove points.

But I worry now, oh man, what happens if Japan Airlines is kind of flooding the

their own program with points by offering all these deals, all these partners, and they're

about to become a whole lot more competitive or less valuable.

And so that's again, one of the risks.

Points can devalue.

Programs can change.

This was a little bit of a wild, hail marries the wrong word, but it kind of felt a little

like that.

I couldn't actually bring myself to click, submit when I was filling the transfer format

because I was like, ah, this seems like a bad idea this year.

And I was like, I just have to do it.

I just like forced myself to click it as opposed to think through it.

Until I felt confident about it.

And so we'll see how it plays out.

But I think Japan Airlines is a great program.

I'm glad that they're a transfer partner I built.

I'm glad they're a transfer partner in Capital One.

I'm glad that they're a transfer partner of Rove, though I think it's going to be really

hard to get enough Rove miles to do a lot with them.

And I hope their program stays valuable long enough to use a lot of these points I transferred

in.

Like I said before, they're not the bulk of my points.

And so if you look at transfer bonuses with a lot of these criteria, you'll see that they're

not always as valuable as this.

And they often don't warrant any action.

And so I just quickly, I ran through the ones, the other transfer bonuses active right

now.

It's March 2nd.

City has a transfer bonus to Wyndham.

It's an extra 25%.

I don't love this.

Wyndham points are regularly on sale for about 0.7 cents.

And so at best, you know, even with a 25% bonus, it's kind of getting one cent of value

from your points.

I think a couple of weeks ago or days ago, Chase added Wyndham as a new transfer partner,

which I always get excited when you have more optionality, but not when it's one to

one transfers to a program whose points are worth less than one cent.

I think you'd be better off cashing out your Chase points and buying Wyndham points

on Wyndham's website, which you could probably put on a credit card and earn some extra

points there too, then actually transferring them.

So I don't expect anyone to ever use Chase points to transfer to Wyndham unless you've

built up 28,000 Wyndham points and you need 2,000 more for an award.

Sure.

Maybe it makes sense to transfer to close the gap.

Otherwise, I'm not really that excited about Wyndham points at all, at least not as

transfer partners, you know, that are one to one, even with a 25% bonus.

Amax has a bonus right now to Avionka for an extra 15%.

Avionka, I think, is maybe the most bonus to transfer partner I've seen.

And so I don't get excited at all about this.

I transferred some built points to Avionka when they had 100% bonus and I still haven't

used them.

You know, you can extend the expiration, but they expire regularly, so you have to kind

of stay on top of it.

There's a Chase bonus to Avios for an extra 20%.

Again, if you have Trips planned, amazing, awesome, get 20% more value or transfer less

points than you were planning, amazing.

But if you don't, the extra 20% isn't worth it.

Just like Capital One's 30% bonus to preferred hotels right now, also not worth it.

But also not worth it because, you know, at first glance, I thought, oh, preferred hotels

as a program I've actually wanted to try to use 30% bonus.

Maybe I should move some points there, even though it's speculative.

And then I forgot that Capital One transfers to preferred hotels at one to two and city

transfers from one to four.

So even 30% more is nowhere near as good a deal as using city points to go to preferred

hotels.

So hopefully that little rundown is why most of the time a transfer bonus is not something

worth looking into unless you have a trip to plan.

Now if you were thinking about planning a trip and all of a sudden you see two or three

transfer bonuses, maybe try to plan that trip before those bonuses expire so you can

see if you use those points if they make sense with that deal.

But otherwise I wouldn't do it.

And like I said earlier, one of the biggest reasons is devaluation, which is a good segue

to the next topic today, which is Hyatt's really big devaluation.

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This is probably the saddest news of the last couple of weeks.

And I don't think it is as doom and gloom as a lot of people have been saying it is,

but it's not great.

Hyatt hasn't really changed a lot of their award pricing for a while, and a lot of the

other hotels have moved to a much more dynamic pricing model where there's not a fixed award

chart.

And Hyatt has kind of said, hey, we're not going to do that, but we're going to add five

tiers for each level.

And so, you know, the range of a category for hotel will now be 12 to 25,000 points.

So there's nothing beyond 25,000, so there's still a ceiling in place.

But you know, there's a lot of stops along the way.

Instead of off-peak, standard and peak, it's now lowest, low, moderate, upper, and top.

Now Hyatt did say that while this new framework is going to take place in May, they're going

to implement the changes thoughtfully with limited hotels moving a limited number of

nights into the upper and top categories in 2026 and broader adoption in the years that

follow.

So I don't actually know what that means.

If you look at this at face value and just say, what's the worst possible scenario?

Well, the worst possible scenario is category eight hotels, which happened to be staying

at in Japan when we're going at 45,000 points was the previous peak rate, are now going

to be up to 75,000 points, which is a 67% increase, which is really, really big.

And if that's the only time you were using Hyatt points is to stay peak dates at category

eight hotels and Hyatt does end up putting a lot of those dates into the top category,

I think Hyatt points are going to be a lot less valuable to you.

That said, I think it's possible, and I don't know the answer to this, that top is really

more reserved for really prime time dates.

So big sporting events, big festivals, that kind of stuff.

And if you look at what's the change going to the upper category that's not top, you

know, it kind of all averaged out for a lot of things at 30%.

Now, 30% increase in number of points required is still a really, really big increase.

But I will also point out that most people generally thought Hyatt was the most valuable

single points currency kind of out there.

And so I know a lot of people that just viewed their chase points as Hyatt points because

transferring chase points to any other program was inherently going to be less valuable than

transferring them to Hyatt.

And I've regularly gotten two to four cents of value for Hyatt points.

And so yes, you know, having to spend 30% more of them or maybe even 50 or 60% more

of them is not great, but it might still be a better option than a lot of other things.

I looked at the hotel we're staying at in Japan, which because of the kind of ability

to use Hyatt's suite upgrade awards, we were able to book and confirm into a suite that

would have cost close to $2,000 from a point value.

It's kind of somewhere around four cents a point, which is amazing.

Now, I'm not sure if I would have spent the $1,800 a night if I didn't have Hyatt points.

So I'm not saying that's a fair comparison.

But I just want to highlight the difference is even, even if those dates were at the

highest end of the new award chart and they took 75,000 points a night, it would

still be 2.4 cents per point.

So I think there's still going to be value to be had here.

If you back off of category eight, the kind of top tier of categories, you know, it gets

a little bit better.

And then at some of the high ends, it doesn't even get that much higher.

And so if you look at, you know, staying at an all-inclusive property like Miraval, the

number of points required for double occupancy is going to be somewhere in the 17 to 30%

increase if you're going on those top dates.

But if you're going on just that upper level, it's only 6 to 11% more points.

So obviously I'd rather it go zero.

I'd rather it go down.

But I think that there is a chance that this isn't as bad as it seems.

And I saw a lot of the media was just 67% increase on points needed.

And I think that is both true in some very small scenarios and hopefully not true broadly.

Hi, it also said that in April, they're going to announce whether properties are changing

categories.

If they come out in April and now say not only is a category eight price going to go up

up to 67%, but we're moving a bunch of category seven hotels into eight.

And so now it's really a lot more like almost a hundred percent increase.

Well, then it's going to be pretty frustrating.

I think people are going to be pretty mad.

So I hope that Hyatt is going to take the April changes and think about them carefully.

So it doesn't feel like they're gutting the value of their points twice in one year.

That said, I still think the status at the top tier with Hyatt with global status, the

ability to earn sweet upgrade awards and confirm them at booking or even use your points

to confirm sweets at booking makes Hyatt a great program.

But I do think that it's from a parody value of points.

It's getting closer to a lot of other programs in terms of not being able to consistently

always get the most outsized value.

I still think it's going to be outsized value.

I still think we'll stay a lot at Hyatt and it'll probably be the primary way we use

our chase points.

But because of reasons like this, you never want to put all your eggs in one basket in advance

because you never know what's going to happen.

And so in this case, I hope it's not as bad as it seems and I'll kind of give an update

as we learn more now with all of these potential devaluations that could happen.

The question is how do you get more points?

I've covered this topic a bunch of times.

But someone sent an email that said, hey, I've got these big tax payments.

What should I do to earn a big bonus on them?

And I'll answer the first question, which is how do you think about earning more points?

Because there are a handful of outsized increased bonuses right now.

On the tax question, you know, it's interesting.

There are a lot of cards that don't earn points on taxes and they often are some of the higher

earning cashbacker points cards.

So the Robin Hood Gold card, the US bank smartly card, I think the new built palladium or

all the built cards have kind of said taxes is an excluded category.

But it turns out that when you look at welcome bonuses, the earn a hundred thousand points

after spending X thousand dollars in four months, almost every card that has a compelling

welcome offer is not on that same list of cards that don't earn points on tax payments.

Now that built palladium card is an exception, though I would say the 50,000 point welcome

offer on that card does not put it in the category of really, really compelling welcome

offers right now.

So when I think about what are the best welcome offers for earning points on taxes, the answer

is what are the best welcome offers for earning points?

There's not really any differentiation there other than certain business cards might have

higher fees when you're making tax payments than personal cards.

But if you were to pay those through PayPal, which some of the tax payment sites offer,

sometimes they don't actually code as business cards when you pay through PayPal.

So keep that in mind.

Well, again, if you want to find all these bonuses that I'm talking about, you can go

to all the hacks.com slash cards.

I try to do my best to keep that as up to date as possible.

I feel like I spend some time every day making sure that all the bonuses are there so you

can sort and view them by the best offers.

If those offers are partner links of ours and they help support us, that's awesome.

But if I find it better offer and it happens to not be a partner link, I'm going to put

that anyways.

Like I want you guys to get the most points possible.

And so we're going to put the best offers we can find.

And if they happen to be ones that help support the show, great, if they aren't great,

it doesn't matter.

I want to make sure you guys get the most points possible.

If you find it better deal somewhere else, let me know.

Use that better deal.

I'll try to update our site as quickly as I can.

But like I mentioned, there are a few kind of categories of cards that are currently sitting

on higher than normal welcome offers.

And so I just thought I'd run through them, just kind of talk about them because by the

time this comes out, they'll still be hopefully all available at that higher level.

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So the first is Delta.

This happens throughout the year, Delta increases all their offers and then they decrease them

and then they increase them and they decrease them.

So it's nothing really out of the ordinary here for these offers.

They range from 90,000 points all the way up to 125,000 points and so I'm going to say

unless you're really, really interested in Delta miles right now or you're trying to make

sure you have enough cards to earn the medallion qualifying points you need for Delta status,

there's nothing really that compelling and exciting to jump on.

But if you are in the market for a new Delta card or you want one because you have a big

redemption coming up and you know that holding a Delta card gets you 15% off award travel

then now would be a good time to get that card because the bonuses are all pretty elevated.

I think when I went through this process, which was I wanted to get that 15% off Delta offer

because we were about to book a bunch of trips.

I went for the Delta Platinum business card and I did that because I think it had the

best balance of points, doesn't show up in count towards 524 because it's a business card.

I thought the perks and benefits relative to the annual fee were probably the closest,

so in hindsight, I think maybe the gold card was probably similar though for the extra

points on the welcome offer, it probably makes sense to go higher and then later downgrade

to the gold card.

So I went for the Delta Platinum business, later I probably after one year will downgrade

to the Delta gold business, but the bigger offer on the Platinum card was worth it.

The reserve card always has the biggest offer right now, it's at 125,000 points.

The challenge there is the annual fee is really high and I don't use the Sky Club and

so if you're not using the Delta Sky Club, it's pretty hard to get your value out of that

annual fee.

They do offer other things and perks and credits, but I just think that those credits still

make it hard to close the gap.

So that's just something that I think makes it hard to justify the reserve card if you're

not going to be doing that or you're not interested in trying to earn status.

If you're trying to earn status on Delta, the reserve card is the way to spend yourself

to status because you get more MQMs per dollar spent, but I'm not trying to earn Delta status.

So that's not for me.

Next on the list is United.

I talked a couple of weeks ago about how United made a bunch of changes to their program

and it's going to get a lot more rewarding for people with United Cards and a lot less

rewarding for people without them.

So I think a lot of people out there are thinking, well, if I fly United enough, I probably

should have a United card.

I'll earn an extra three points per dollar on my travel, but I'll also get a better deal

when I'm booking flights.

And so I don't have a United card right now.

And so I've kind of been eyeing this.

And I think the sweet spot right now for me might be the United Business Card.

But if you look at all the cards and I'm going to exclude the gateway card for a second,

it's between 70 and 100,000 point welcome offers.

The United Business United Quest and United Club Business Cards all have some premier

qualifying points as part of the welcome offer.

And so if going for United status is something you're doing this year, that could be super

helpful.

And so the way I would look at these is really just to kind of evaluate whether the benefits

and perks of the card or the additional points for getting a more expensive version of

a United card justify that extra annual fee.

And so the United Business Card at 100,000 points for $150 annual fee is probably the best

balance for me.

If you wanted a consumer card, I think it's kind of a toss up between the Explorer and

the Quest.

I think the Quest card gets you 10,000 more points.

If you're going for status, it's the clear option because you get 3,000 premier qualifying

points.

If you run through all the benefits and perks, which I won't do right now because I don't

know if everyone listening is even interested in United card, you can kind of walk through

and think about which cards actually make the most sense relative to whether you're going

to get value out of the JSX credit or the rideshare credit or the travel bank credit.

I think if you force me to pick a consumer card, I'd probably go for the United Quest

card.

And if I was trying to chase United status, I'd absolutely go for the United Quest card.

But right now, I'm not going for status.

And so I think the United Business Card is probably the right balance.

That said, I need to take a look at a few of the payments we make, things like property

tax and to the extent that any of them allow for fee-free debit card payments, you can

also get all the benefits, as I mentioned a couple weeks ago, of being a United card

holder with United debit card as long as you spend $10,000 on it each year.

And so obviously, I'd much rather spend $10,000 on a credit card than a debit card if all

things are the same.

But if there are some expenses or payments I can make that otherwise would earn nothing

or would otherwise cost me a 3% fee, then the debit card might actually be the easier

play.

No big welcome offer, but also no annual fee, no card to manage, no extra inquiry on the

credit report, no hit to 524 status and all that kind of stuff.

So it's probably going to be a United debit card, a United Business Card for me.

But if you're a frequent United flyer, I feel like it is probably going to make sense

for you to hold a United card going forward.

And the United Gateway card, unfortunately, is the only no annual fee card.

But it also earns so poorly that it's probably not a great option because you've got to

spend $10,000 on it to get anything there.

So I would take a look at a United card if that's you.

And if you just are looking for a good welcome offer right now, some of these offers 100,000

points for spending 5,000 in three months is a pretty great welcome offer anyways.

Next is the Hilton cards all have some increased offers.

This happens a lot of times during the year, but about once a year it seems that they add

free nights to their welcome offers for most of the cards.

And so right now the regular Hilton card, the Serpass and the Business Card all have welcome

offers of 70, 130 all the way up to 175,000 points, but you also get a free night award.

And the great thing about Hilton free night awards is that they're not capped on category.

So any standard room, whether it's 40,000 points or 240,000 points, if you find a standard

room available, you can use your free night award.

And so we've used free night awards for rooms that would have cost 200,000 points a night.

So if you look at some of these offers and this is going to sound crazy, so keep in

mind that Hilton points are often only worth about half a cent each, and that's kind

of a common valuation.

But if you look at a Hilton honors Serpass card, you get 130,000 Hilton points for the bonus,

you only have to spend $3,000 in six months to get it, and you get a free night award.

And if you were going to state a property where that free night would have otherwise cost

you 200,000 points, then you could kind of view this offer as 200,000 plus 130,000,

or just 330,000 points on $3,000 spent, which is 110 points per dollar.

Now granted these are Hilton points, I'd say they're worth probably 30, 40% of the value

of an airline mile.

So, you know, it's not fair to call it 110,000, but it's just still crazy to think about.

Like 110,000 points per dollar for those first $3,000 is crazy.

So if you have plans or could make plans to use Hilton points or stay in Hilton properties,

I think these are some great options.

The business card actually has even more points at 175,000 and a free night.

But I like staying in the personal lane with Hilton because you get options to downgrade

to the no annual fee card, or you can upgrade to the aspire card, which has a higher annual

fee, but you get an annual free night certificate.

So you could have a Serpass for a year, then upgrade to an aspire, get another free night.

And so that's another path.

They also give you diamond status and a bunch of other kind of perks and credits to try

to make up for that annual fee.

And so I think the aspire card is one of my favorite cards to hold, but that Serpass card

with a free night award and a 130,000 point bonus is pretty interesting.

And so we already have two of these, and so if we didn't have two and we weren't sitting

on probably four Hilton free nights right now, I think we would probably get another one

because my wife is the holder of all Hilton cards, and so I haven't actually never had

any of them.

This year it's not in the cards, but another year in the future when we're traveling a bit more

to places where we might use Hilton, I think that's definitely something I'm thinking about.

And then last is Southwest, Southwest has some big offers on the personal cards in that they

will give you a free companion pass through February 28th, 2027 for hitting a welcome bonus,

which only requires three to $5,000 spend.

And then they're also going to give you 20 to 40,000 points with that on top of it.

For those not familiar, the way companion pass works on Southwest is you buy one ticket,

whether you use points or cash, and one nominated person who you designate can travel free

just paying taxes and fees. And you can change that person three times a year.

And if you have a lot of travel coming up and you're going to fly a lot of Southwest,

if you're going to spend $1,000 or $2,000 on Southwest flights in a year,

this could be a huge welcome offer, right? It's going to save you all of that cost.

So that's amazing. That said, if you're only going to travel on Southwest once or twice,

it's really not that interesting. And so I think if you are someone who's thinking you're going

to do a lot of Southwest travel, that is a path. The only thing I'll flag is that unlike a lot of

the times people use Southwest cards during companion pass. Historically, the way people did that

was they would open one or two cards, earn enough Southwest points to hit the 135,000 points you need

to hit companion pass. And when you do it that way, when you do it through earning points,

you get it in the year you earn it and the following year. And so people would open a card,

try to hit that as early as they can in a year. And so let's say you hit that in January or February,

you'd now have companion pass for that year and the following year. Now it's got a lot easier

and that you don't need to get two cards. You don't need to hit 135,000 points. You just open one

card and you've got companion pass, but you only get it through February 28th, 2027. So you don't

get it as long, but it's a lot easier to get. And so I'd say if you want to play the Southwest

companion pass kind of game, now could be an interesting time to do it because you don't have to

do as much work. And if you find that you get a ton of value out of it, well, then maybe in early

2027, whoever of your companion or you, whoever got the card now, the other person could kind of

approach it towards that time of year, maybe get one or two cards, get it early 2027 and you'd have

another companion pass from 2027 all the way to the end of 2028. So pretty interesting offers

there. If you're just looking for points, there's some kind of mainstay offers that are always

out there. The Amics Platinum, Business Platinum, Business Gold, the Chase Sapphire Reserve, Sapphire

Reserve Business, the Chase Inc. Preferred, they always seem to have 100 to 200,000 point welcome

offers. And so if you're just going for a big offer, all of those are always great offers in terms

of the ROI of your spend and the size of the offer. You know, you might be scared away by seeing,

you know, eight, nine hundred dollar annual fees. But when the size of the welcome bonus is,

you know, worth into the 1500 to 2500 dollar range, then it kind of often makes up for that annual

fee, not to mention all the credits that you get that kind of offset the fee as well. So that's a lot

of bonuses. I do try, if you're not subscribed to the newsletter, to share these bonuses anytime

they happen. I don't always have a chance to make an episode before the bonuses expire, which is

why I don't often do this type of content. But I'm experimenting today and recording a bit closer

to publish. And so if you want to check that out, all the hacks.com slash email every Saturday,

we share a ton of deals, news, stuff that's going on, interesting stuff that's happening in my life,

and that I'm reading and finding. And so definitely sign up. It's totally free. And you can check

it out, all the hacks.com slash email. One of the things we do is we share deals. And so I'll just

share two deals because this is going to come out soon enough that the deals are still alive.

And they're both for the Chase Sapphire Reserve card. I think there's a smaller version of them

for the Sapphire preferred. But I thought they were sharing because people should definitely

consider them if they have that card. And one is that I think until May, if you buy a whoop,

which is a fitness tracker, and you buy it with the pro plan, and you spend over $359. And that's

a really important thing. You have to spend $359 or more. Chase will give you $359 back.

Now, I'm sure whoop is subsidizing this. And I'm sure whoop is hoping that you buy this,

get on the $359 a year plan, and then renew it the next year. I'm not saying you need to do that.

And honestly, I wouldn't waste your time on this if it's not something you want at all,

though maybe you can sell a whoop band on the internet. But if you spend $359 or more,

you're going to get the entire purchase back up to $359. And so this does actually stack with

referral codes. And so the cool thing there is Chase is looking at the total value. And depending

on what state you're in and what shipping speed you pick, that total price is probably going to go

over $359. If you live in a state with roughly 10% sales tax, it'll go up to $389. So I'll put my

referral code in the show notes or you just go to allahacks.com slash whoop. That should take $30

which depending on the state you live in and the sales tax might be exactly what you need to get

the total purchase price right at a little bit over $359. If it's a little bit under, you can add

X, but I did shipping. I think you can add a different color band and different things. But I would

say just make sure if you're using this offer, whether using my promo code or not, just make sure

that offer goes over $359 or you're not going to get it back. And I have heard some reports online

that it's just any purchase at whoops website. So if you don't want a whoop band, maybe there's

other stuff they sell on the website that you might want as long as that purchase is over $359.

And the other one that expires at the end of this month of March is that Function Health, which is

kind of an annual subscription for a service that does a bunch of blood tests is 50% off. It's $365

for an annual membership that I at least used to include two different blood draws. I don't know

if it's still two or if it's just the one up front, but you get that for 50% off, bringing the

price down to about $180. So if that's something that you were looking at doing now is a perfect time

to do it, it does seem like it will probably work for an existing member renewing. I read the terms

and it seems to just say you have to spend $365 or more at Function Health. I do have a referral code

that would get you I think $50 off, but I would encourage you not to use it. It's at all the

hacks.com slash function, but I believe the way these promos often work is you have to spend the

full $365 in order to get the 50% off. And so I would hate for you just to use a promo code,

end up spending $315 and get nothing back. And so if you find out somewhere that it works on

purchases under $365 by all means get the extra off, but otherwise I would say do not use a referral

code or a promo code or any other discount unless you find some way to add something else to your

order. So the purchase price is over $365. So definitely check that out. I think that is it for

this week. So thank you for listening. Feedback is always welcome podcast at all the hacks.com

and go to all the hacks.com slash AMA. If you want to submit questions either for me or my wife,

we're going to do an episode together soon. Questions on award travel, which is a topic I'm going

to be recording soon, or really any other topic, money, credit cards, life, work, etc. So I'm excited

to get them. I'm excited to answer them. Thank you so much in advance. That is it for this week.

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