Buy almost 20K Airline Miles at a Penny Each!

I shared this news on Twitter and Facebook earlier, but I want to make sure everyone is aware of this deal from Wyndham Rewards. Jimmy from Travel By Points has a great explanation of how to go about getting bonus points form Wyndham and then transferring them to your favorite airline for miles. You can get up to 19,200 miles for a cost of roughly 1 cent each.

Earlier this year, I bought 16,000 Wyndham points for just this purpose during the Daily Getaways promotion (they cost me $50). My plan was and continues to be to use these for a hit in the US Airways Grand Slam promotion by transferring them to Dividend Miles. However, if the Grand Slam doesn’t materialize–as everyone is still (im)patiently waiting for news–then I will still transfer them anyway.

I used this same logic when participating in the various Club Carlson promotions earlier this year. I now have over 100,000 Gold Points but I don’t plan to use any of them for hotels. Instead, they’ll go toward padding my balance with United so I can get even greater value out of them and continue limiting my hotel stays to my preferred programs like Hyatt. I outlined back then how you could earn enough points from Club Carlson to get a domestic award ticket for roughly $250 in hotel stays–another case of buying miles for about a penny each.

These examples demonstrate the hidden potential of some hotel loyalty programs that might otherwise be overlooked. I’m not that excited about staying at a Wyndham or Carlson hotel. I just get better benefits from my status with Hyatt, Hilton, and others. But promotions at these second-tier hotels are more numerous along with transfer opportunities to get the points out of there and into a form you are more likely to use. Jimmy even points out that Wyndham is one of the few hotels that explicitly permits receiving award credit for a “phantom stay” where you pay but never check in.

Follow this link and read B.8 under part II – “If the property requires a credit card for a reservation, the Member is a no-show, and the hotel charges his/her credit card for the first night of the no-show stay, the Member will receive points for such night as if he/she had stayed.”

Jimmy based his analysis for earning cheap miles on a post by Ric at Loyalty Traveler, one that I overlooked because it said “Wyndham” in the title, and I had no interest in Wyndham hotels. But if I had done a little digging like Jimmy, or even bothered to remember that I bought a pile of these for the same purpose, I would have found a hidden treasure!