Leaving Las Vegas, comparing booking portals, choosing Hyatt milestones and more (Week in Review)

This week on the Frequent Miler blog…

Booking a paid hotel stay: A card collector’s case study…

As the chief card collector on the Frequent Miler team, Greg recently ran a little case study determining his best option for booking a paid hotel stay. I read this with interest because I recently ran into a very similar scenario when we pivoted from plans to visit Park City to an extended stay in Las Vegas. Like Greg, I was surprised to find the pricing through Bilt to be significantly better than most other booking channels for the particular stay that I needed. That definitely doesn’t match my past experience with Bilt, and it definitely isn’t consistent, but it was a good reminder to check Bilt when I find myself in those types of scenarios.

All that said, I have to say that I hate the amount of time I now need to spend searching in order to compare my options and decide which of my many hotel credits to use. Hotel booking has become more time-consuming than flight award booking, which seems completely backwards from the way things were when I first got into award travel.

Free parking (and drinks) and avoiding resort fees on the Las Vegas Strip with elite status & matching

As mentioned above, we have recently found ourselves in Las Vegas for about a week and a half. Given the extended amount of time we’ve spent here, parking fees would have really added up. With the daytime temperatures consistently hovering around 110 degrees outside, we haven’t wanted to do much walking. Having access to free valet parking has been absolutely huge.

Thankfully, we were able to get that complimentary valet parking at Caesars properties with my Caesars Diamond Plus status, and then we were able to use my Caesars status to match around and get free valet parking on most of the Las Vegas strip. We also used my status for a number of free drinks (without gambling), including non-alcoholic mocktails and milkshakes.

What are hotel free night certificates worth?

Many hotel credit cards come with free night certificates. Deciding whether it makes sense to keep or cancel a particular hotel card often depends on how much value you assign to the free night certificate. Since hotel points frequently change in value and hotel award charts and redemption rules change as well, we regularly update this post to maintain a current valuation for free awards. Keep in mind that you can obviously redeem free night awards for less value or potentially get far more value depending on how well you cherry-pick awards. With Las Vegas freshly on my mind, I have to point out that free night certificates can be highly valuable for weekend nights in Las Vegas when cash rates often climb to outrageous levels, but free night awards can sometimes score you a room, potentially even for the whole family.

6 underrated states to visit for a domestic vacation

I’ve always hoped to see all 50 states in my lifetime, but Stephen Pepper and his wife actually made it a priority to do just that.  Having spent about eight years visiting all fifty states, Stephen has become an authority on interesting places to go and things to do across the United States. In this post, he lists his six most underrated states and some of the reasons why he finds them to be underrated. What are your favorite states in the list? Which ones do you think are the most underrated for a domestic trip?

Which Hyatt Milestone Reward should I pick? | Coffee Break Ep113 | 7-7-26

I was on vacation this week, so Tim filled in for this week’s Coffee Break to discuss Hyatt Milestone Rewards with Greg, including which rewards to pick at each of the various milestone levels. While some choices will vary from person to person, there are some levels with clear “winner” picks. Listen to this week’s episode to hear Greg and Tim discuss them.

Do we book speculatively, hoping for a schedule change? | Question of the Week…

Airlines change schedules periodically. When they do, there is sometimes an opportunity to change your itinerary to a different flight. In this question of the week, someone asks whether we ever make speculative bookings for travel far in the future with the intention to change to the flight we really want. Hear our answer on this short podcast episode and share your own experience in the comments.

What is Delta elite status worth?

Greg has maintained elite status with Delta Air Lines for many, many years. He is therefore well-positioned to speak to the usefulness of elite benefits, but the valuation of benefits can be a personal decision. In this post, Greg tries to assign conservative value to the various status perks so that you can decide whether it is worth chasing Delta Medallion status.

That’s it for this week at Frequent Miler. Keep an eye on this week’s last chance deals to make sure you catch those due to end soon.

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