There’s an awesome new – and free – tool that came out recently to help people make use of their $200 Amex Fine Hotels & Resorts (FHR) credits each year. It’s called MaxFHR and is brought to you by the guy behind MaxMyPoint.
It’s not all thanks to him though. Although it’s Max who published the site, it’s been coded by his daughter and it’s beautiful in its simplicity and ease of use.
What MaxFHR does is collate every hotel bookable through FHR and sorts them via the lowest price it’s possible to book them for through the end of the booking calendar. It’s automatically sorted by ascending price, but you can sort it in descending price too. I imagine though that most people will prefer the ascending price option.
As you can see, the lowest available price is displayed for each property on the site’s home page. You can scroll through all properties, but it’ll take a while – the site loads 20 properties at a time and there are 1,337 different FHR properties around the world. For people looking for sub-$200 properties though, there won’t be any need to scroll down too far as there’s fewer than 100 costing that much, although I was pleasantly surprised to find that there’s almost 200 properties costing $250 or less.
Pricing Calendars
When clicking through to a property, the site displays the pricing for every day of the current month. You can then scroll through the calendar one month at a time to quickly peruse pricing, with it changing from month-to-month lightning fast rather than taking ages to load.
Being able to see a monthly pricing calendar can be extremely useful if you’re flexible with your travel dates. If you were visiting Auckland, New Zealand in the next few days, you’d be able to book two nights at the Cordis, Auckland by Langham Hospitality Group for only slightly more than $200, thereby getting two nights out of your $200 FHR credits.
As you can see in the screenshot above, there’s a disclaimer stating that the pricing displayed might not be the most up-to-date pricing. The site is therefore presumably pulling pricing at regular intervals (perhaps once per day) which is why the pricing calendars can load so quickly as it’s not pulling dynamic information from the FHR website. In my opinion that’s worth the trade-off for a site that loads so quickly and makes it easy to check pricing at each property seeing as it’s not like a site looking for limited award inventory where live results are much more important.
For some hotels, the calendar pricing can be particularly useful in identifying cheaper dates. For example, next month The Palazzo at The Venetian has pricing ranging from $132 per night at the low end up to $1,389 per night at the high end.
Seeing the results displayed by month can help you pick a cheaper date even if you have very limited flexibility with your dates. As you can see above, if you’d searched the regular FHR website for Monday May 6, you’d likely be put off by the astronomically high price of $1,019, not necessarily realizing that the night before only costs $132.
Other Features
MaxFHR has filters for pricing, different types of FHR credit and displaying Special Offers only. Perhaps the most useful tool though (other than the Ascending Price sorting option) is the search bar at the top. This enables you to search by location in order to exclude properties elsewhere in the world.
Something worth knowing is that you need to use certain specific search terms. For example, searching for ‘USA’ displays results where the letters ‘usa’ happen to appear in the location name.
To search for properties in the US, you need to search for ‘United States’ instead. I hadn’t expected how many hotels in the US are bookable for $200 or less. I’d known about The Duniway Portland as we’ve stayed there ourselves using FHR and I knew there’d be several Vegas options. What I hadn’t expected was the ability to spend less than $200 at FHR properties in New Orleans, San Francisco, Tucson, Phoenix, Seattle, Savannah and more.
Similarly, searching for ‘England’ displays nothing, but searching for ‘United Kingdom’ displays 46 eligible properties.
I hadn’t realized before using MaxFHR that The Gainsborough Bath Spa in England was on FHR. We stayed there a couple of years ago and loved it, so it’s good to know that it’ll be available as a booking option this way in addition to hopefully being bookable via Hilton soon as it’s part of SLH. With room rates available from $254, that would be a great deal when using a $200 FHR credit.
Question
Have you used MaxFHR yet? If so, did it help you find somewhere to use your FHR credits? Let us know in the comments below.
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We are using our FHR credits in Doha at the Waldorf Astoria in early June for a rate of around $240 including taxes etc. The MAXFHR app does not include several Doha sub-$300 hotels, so the list is not an exhaustive one, though extremely helpful. When finding a good candidate on MAXFHR, I’d suggest double checking on the AMEX FHR site for others in a nearby location.
Great tool to find the low cost FHR hotels. Outside of Vegas within US I found little harder to get some reasonably lower price hotels in FHR program.
Great tool that I can’t wait to toy with. Don’t you have to prepay for these hotels? We have a Porto stay in September that I could use it for but I wasn’t sure about the prepay part. As long as it is refundable I guess it doesn’t matter. I’m just getting into the benefits that we have long ignored so I appreciate this site tremendously. TY
Yep, although you have to prepay for the stay to use the credits, they are refundable if you cancel (but be sure to double check the cancellation terms when booking just in case a particular property has some kind of weird quirk).
The FHR credit is one of my favorite perks of our Plats (4) – we have used them all over the world this will make it even easier to get good value.
One thing I did notice just playing with it for about 10 minutes is it looks like a lot of FHR proprieties drop prices for really close in bookings.
I think that FHR is better than Plat/Diamond status. The guaranteed 4PM checkout as well as the free Brekkie for two ( not measly credits) the $100-$150 Amenity credits. As well as earning (YMMV) points and elite nights and double dipping Hilton F&B credits. Made out like a bandit on a Kimpton stay.
The biggest devalue was the back-to-back bookings and getting the Amenity credit for on the first night (but that is also truly YMMV).
We are actually burning one of our FHR credits at the Duniway for my DW birthday this month – we also did a staycation there during C19 in 2021. We also checked out the Nines, and did two nights at the Kimpton Riverfront for my B-day (Cap1 VenX card promo last fall for Premier Collection with $200 credit).
The Duniway does have a $26 destination charge (but you get $26 back in F&B credit, free bike rentals and one other thing that slips my mind). The Kimpton also offers free bike rental with stay.
You were able to double dip on elite benefits at HIlton and Kimpton (IHG)?
@Anthony Yes on Hilton/IHG/Shangri-La/Bonvoy – but its always YMMV.
IHG even the Secret Password (Kimpton) stacked it was supposed to be a Coffee mug, chocolate and socks – she said they ran out when I checked in first night – offered free parking ($49) or F&B credit ($30). But for P2 a reservation switch she got the mug, socks, chocolate.
We also got upgraded to a corner riverview room it was great or watching NYE fireworks.
Also got the $10 raid the bar credits for Platinum (CC elite) – the Chase IHG card had a 10% up to $30 CB – that also stacked.
Last November, I used the short lived $200 (or was it $300?) promo credit from Cap1 for thier new Premiere Collection program on P1/P2 cards and booked back to back nights NYE/B-day (Premiere Collection allows back to back booking and amenity credit – but Cap1 has yet to match Amex Plat annual $200 FHR credit).
We got $30pp for Breakfast (no tip/alcohol). As well as the $100 amenity credit from VenX Premier Collection (Cap1 FHR program).
*PSA – the Premiere Collection is a great way to get equal or better value out of the $300 VenX annual Travel credit. But still a small foot print but we are using it in Budapest and Denmark this fall.*
The Kimpton had a $27 “resort fee” which gives you $20 F&B credit.
Also had a normal size bottle of Oregon wine and Oregon chocolates in our room. We had to wait a short time for our room to be prepared -early check-in) . We also got late check-out.
The happy hour in lobby had Sparkling wine as well as red/white and Canapés for NYE. New years it was beer and wine and appetizers (from King Tide menu).
Great tool, but I have one feature request re: “For example, next month The Palazzo at The Venetian has pricing ranging from $132 per night at the low end up to $1,389 per night at the high end.” – It would be great if the various prices could be color coded, like cheapest 1/3 = green, middle 1/3 = yellow, and most expensive 1/3 = red.
I’ve also used the Amex credit at the Duniway in the past. However, the last time I tried to do so Amex’s system regrettably wouldn’t allow a mere 1-night booking anymore. Not sure if that’s still the case, but it was a bummer at the time. Hopefully it wasn’t permanent. (I also tried booking two nights and then cancelling one night, but the system wouldn’t allow that either, at least not while keeping that one remaining night at the sub-$200 rate.)
@Thankful
It’s back to one night bookings like in 2021 – they switched to two nights minimum in early 2022 – then the Duniway was facing bankruptcy (behind on commercial mortgage) in mid-late 2022.
It’s back to sub-$200 bookings (we booked a 19th floor corner room (top room thats just below the 800 sf suite) for $207 with taxes this month.
I imagine prices will adjust for peak season June-Sept in Portland/Oregon.
The other Portland FHR are still more in line with past year pricing.
Planning on checking out the new Ritz Carlton for my B-day – its actually about same price as booking direct (not including credits/amenities) better than status as Bonvoy Elites don’t get free Brekkie or room upgrades at RC.
Oh, awesome! Thanks for the very helpful update. Guess The Duniway is back in play! We did a day-after-Christmas stay there a few years back, just to get out of the house, and loved it.
Where can I give this person money to keep making sites like this? Even ignoring prices, this is the best way to see all the FHR in a region/country ever.
Other over/under bet onAmex’s being ok with this?… I could see Amex regarding this as an infringement on their proprietary data and forcing a shutdown of this feature.
That said, I’m no legal expert. I guess we’ll see…
I was wondering that myself as I looked a bit in the past into how you can check pricing from the various luxury booking platforms – AMEX FHR, Chase Luxury Hotel Collection, Capital One Premier Collection, Visa Infinite Hotels, Virtuoso, etc. Most of them require you to login or otherwise authenticate you have an eligible card to see pricing. Using a login to pull the data almost certainly means you’d be violating the end user agreement if you use it for web scraping and could lead to an account shut down.
It does look like AMEX FHR pricing can be viewed without a login (just tried it!). It’s missing taxes and fees which is likely why you can’t see that with this new tool – it would be pulling the public data to avoid account shutdown issues. Special offers like 3rd night free get listed elsewhere on the page so I don’t think those are reflected in the MaxFHR pricing either.
Hopefully this tool sticks around! My dream was to have a tool that could pull all of the luxury hotel program pricing and benefits since hotel options and benefits vary between them all. I don’t think we’ll get there though with the login requirement blocking access to most platforms.
Been using it for the past couple of weeks, it’s a cool tool but the data is frequently out of date.
Once you actually go to the Amex FHR site and look for the same date that was shown, the price is substantially more. It must have been at one point in the past the low rate displayed, but no longer available.
That’s a shame since precision is better, but just identifying possible opportunities is extremely useful. BTW, the final price you’ll pay — just like if you start your search on the AMEX website — seems to always be a bit higher because AMEX’s rates don’t include taxes (and perhaps fees?)
The Amex rates shown are higher than the MaxFHR and excludes the additional taxes and fees. MaxFHR scrapes just the initial prices.
Regardless, it’s a nice to have compared to the old way of going property by property via Google Hotels.
The most devious of course is that FHR refuses to include resort fees and taxes up front.
Thanks. This is a super useful program for using this needle-in-a-haystack AMEX credit. I did a worldwide search for properties up to $250 and looked for hotels in the places where I know I’ll be travelling to this year. I found the Hotel Bristol in Warsaw (which is truly a 5-star hotel). I would not otherwise have thought to look for that city.
It’s definitely faster than using the Amex Travel portal to search – except you have to spell the cities correctly no suggest in search bar.
I do wish they had a map feature of properties – that would be amazing.
I used this for our Vegas Palazzo booking. It saved so much time!
Honestly this will just create an early race for the best redemptions. Probably mostly booked by influencers and bloggers. Not a fan.
gonna predict right now that you are wrong
I imagine the vast majority of influencers and bloggers will have – at most – one personal Amex Platinum card themselves. I therefore can’t imagine them being able to book up the majority of the sub-$200 rooms around the world or even in the US.
Can you add to this post , which cards have the FHR credit , is it just Platinum?
Only personal Amex Platinum cards have them, so the regular (“vanilla”) Platinum, Schwab Platinum and Morgan Stanley Platinum cards. Those with Amex Business Platinum cards can book FHR stays too, they just don’t get the $200 annual credit.
Agreed. There is zero chance of this triggering a shortage of redemption opportunities. Almost no one can do this deal more than once a year. At the same time, there is a 100% probabilty that Frequent Miler readers will now get much more out of their AMEX hotel credit.