Wyndham Rewards has launched a new Experiences portal which gives you the opportunity to book events and activities using your Wyndham Rewards points. That includes VIP golf experiences, tickets to see Lady Gaga at Madison Square Garden, Minor League Baseball tickets/experiences and more.
This is a vast improvement, if for no other reason than you can now access the experiences much more easily in the past. In the past, you had to go to the Wyndham website, log in, then click through to their previous Experiences portal in order to view what they had to offer. If you tried using a direct link, that didn’t work – you had to click through from Wyndham while logged in.
Now, you can simply go to this website and see what’s available. In keeping with other hotel and airline experience sites, there are two types of redemptions available – auction-style and redeem now-style.
The listings where you can redeem now are fixed-rate redemptions that you’re guaranteed to get, provided they’re not sold out and you have sufficient points in your account. At the time of writing this post, those options are limited to Minor League Baseball experiences; 2,500 points for two tickets to certain games, or 5,500 points for two tickets to games plus some kind of additional experience (e.g. walking out with the mascot, throwing the first pitch, doing a stadium announcement, etc.).
The auction-style listings on the other hand require that you bid your points for the experience. That means it’s not a guaranteed redemption until the auction ends and you’re the winner. Current listings are mostly for concerts, but there are some festivals and stand-up shows, while soon there’ll be the opportunity to bid on a VIP golf experience at the Wyndham Championship where you’ll get to play with two PGA Tour professionals as part of a threesome in a Pro-Am tournament, along with three nights in a hotel, two tickets to the first day of the Wyndham Championship and more.
Seeing as this is a new Experiences portal and your average person probably doesn’t have a ton of Wyndham points (versus road warriors with lots of points for Hilton, Marriott, etc.), the auctions listed at Wyndham Rewards Experiences might be easier to win. At the time of publishing this post, there are 15 sets of packages for the Beyond Wonderland Chicago festival. 10 of those offer two General Admission tickets, with bidding starting at 20,000 points and no current bids. The other 5 are VIP packages offering the following:
- Two (2) 2-Day VIP Elevated Experience Pass
- One (1) $100 Food & Beverage Credit
- Two (2) Merchandise Packages (combined value of $200)
- Elevated Experience! Skip the lines with expedited festival entry and dedicated VIP lockers, water refill stations, and restrooms
- VIP Photo Op
- VIP viewing at all 4 stages
- Kandi bracelet making
- Complimentary grab-and-go festival essentials: earplugs, hair ties, band-aids, hand sanitizer & more!
- VIP Concierge: pick up your show lanyard, laminate, venue maps and more!
- Dedicated, expedited VIP festival entrance
Bidding on those packages starts at 75,000 Wyndham Rewards points, with no bids on any of those five listings. That’s a fairly steep redemption, but the cash value seems decent enough. Somewhat similar packages are currently retailing for $460.13 per person, so that would be $920.26 for two people, thereby getting better than one cent per point of value if you’d otherwise have been willing to pay cash for that experience.
The auctions for all 15 of these Beyond Wonderland Chicago packages end on May 25, so with only a few days left and hardly anyone viewing them right now (there are stats on the site for how many people have viewed the listing), there’s probably a good chance of winning an auction for the asking price.
Other listings that might be of interest are those to see Lady Gaga at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The auction-style packages have bidding starting at 100,000 Wyndham points and you get two tickets. When checking Ticketmaster, it looks like only resale tickets are available right now and those start at $651 before taxes. If you can get two tickets for 100,000 points, that could be a great deal for the right person.
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They had auctions several years ago. In 2017 I scored two Elton John tickets in Vegas in the best seats for (I think) 30,000 points. The tickets were going for over $500 for those seats. It was great.
I saw this new “Experiences” website and clicked on it, but I was quickly bored. I’m not a big “bidding” fan — especially since I suspect some people will value these “experiences” more than I would. The fixed price opportunity could be more interesting, but I don’t have much interest in paying for minor league baseball. BTW, 100K points seems like an expensive Lady Gaga concert to me. If you have a Wyndham Earner card, you could (at any time for just about any date) get 4 nights at the well regarded “five star” TRS Coral all inclusive near Cancun for two people for 110,000 points. That retails for closer to $2000 (and includes lots of food, alcohol and entertainment) and would seem like a WAY better experience than 2 concert tickets. I would think 50,000 points would be a more plausible price for Lady Gaga.