It’s the end of the year, so it’s time for all those procrastinators with unused $200 Amex Platinum Fine Hotels and Resorts credits to feverishly search for ways to use their 2024 credit to book a stay in 2025.
There’s an awesome 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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This is fantastic, because I find the FHR website so dang hard to use. The search function isn’t great, and even the layout of their website leaves so little room for exploration. Excited to try this out and actually use my credits!
Looks like the Gainsborough Bath Spa in England is up on Hilton for 60k a night.
I had my entire hotel credit available, so as a birthday gift for my wife, I decided to use MaxFHR to book an excellent hotel for a staycation during the holidays. The hotel truly lived up to the FHR standard, and I was thrilled with the fabulous price of just $287 in total. We utilized the dining credit at their award-winning restaurant, and our bill ended up being just $1 over the credit amount. The following morning, we enjoyed a delicious breakfast at another one of the hotel’s restaurants, which was also completely covered by the hotel credit.
All in all, this grand staycation only cost $110 because I used maxFHR. One of the best deals in 2024!
This fall we did the Viceroy in Chicago, great hotel. They were running a deal on Amex pay for 2 nights get a 3rd free, minus the $200 credit, it was a great deal. Perfect location.
Now I still haven’t used my 2024 $200 plat credit. If I book something today 12/31/24 for a stay in 2025 the $200 credit isn’t likely to post in January. Will that be my $200 credit from 2024 or 2025?
Credit is based on when the charge hits. Buy on 12/31/24 and then you still have $200 for 2025.
So long as it posts a transaction date of December 31 (even if that doesn’t happen until January) it’ll use your 2024 credit. You’d want to book that ASAP though in case it ends up posting with a transaction date of January 1 despite you booking on December 31.
[…] just read about MAXFHR on Frequent Miler, and it’s exactly what so many people that have Amex Plat have been wanting: A way to search […]
Will the resort fees be waived for Globalist booking through Amex FHR at Hyatt property ?
usually yes.
Wow, that is pretty slick. So much easier than searching on the clunky Amex Travel site. Maybe 2025 is the year I finally manage to use an Amex hotel credit.
Ah, thanks – I am one of those procrastinators. I have been using Amextravel for the last week trying to find a reasonably-priced night that fits in with my travel plans over the next few months with no luck. But the Royal Palms Resort in Phoenix will be a fine staycation for someone who lives 100 miles away. I found the prices on the tool to be very accurate for my small sample testing.
We really enjoyed the university arms in Cambridge. The $100 credit will cover a nice dinner in the on site restaurant, though you can easily exceed it if you get starters, dessert and/or multiple alcoholic beverages.
The lack of FHR on the East Coast that are reasonably priced is discouraging.
Used this tool on Saturday to book our stay at the Waldorf Astoria in New Orleans. We are staying for three nights…one FHR, second night on a reward, and on January 1st, I hope to book night three with FHR. That way it isn’t back to back…and we will hopefully get the FHR benefits for the two nights we booked.
I’ve been using MaxFHR occasionally since this post was published. It’s still useful for quickly searching FHR properties in a given area and seeing what benefits they offer. However, the prices now appear to be completely unreliable.
excellent – would be even better if they also included the hotel collection!
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.