There’s no one-size-fits-all in the points and miles game. Someone only taking one vacation a year might like to take business class flights and stay in a luxury hotel in a far-flung destination. Parents with several children might prefer to fly economy to stretch their miles further and stay in an Airbnb or similar type of vacation rental in order to have more space, as well as a kitchen to make their own meals.
Someone living in Atlanta who highly values Globalist status might choose to only fly with Delta and stay with Hyatt. People who want airline status and can generate a lot of spend might opt to divert some of that spend to American Airlines credit cards. Those lucky enough to have earned lifetime Titanium status with Marriott might want to put their hotel points-earning focus on the Bonvoy program.
Another approach is to have a large (or even not-so-large) stash of points, free night certificates, and miles across many different programs, allowing you to cherry pick award redemptions. During a recent trip to Scotland with some friends, we took advantage of this points promiscuity to good effect.
During that trip, we stayed in London, Liverpool, Falkirk, Fort William, the Isle of Skye, Inverness, Aberdeen and then Fort William again. In each of those places (other than the fact that we stayed at the same place twice in Fort William), every hotel and vacation rental was booked in a completely different way. It wasn’t even intentional that our accommodation bookings ended up this way; it wasn’t until I looked back on our stay that I realized we ended up staying in places using such a wide array of programs.
London – Great Scotland Yard Hotel (Booked With Hyatt Points)
Although much of our trip was planned in Scotland, we spent the first couple of nights in England. Our friends flew from Seattle to London Heathrow, so we picked them up from there and drove into London.
You’re spoiled for choice with hotel options in London. I’d stayed at the new Park Hyatt a couple of months beforehand (review to come soon), but I’d been intrigued by Greg’s review of the Great Scotland Yard Hotel last year.
We therefore booked a couple of rooms there for the night. The hotel is part of The Unbound Collection by Hyatt, so we booked using World of Hyatt points which had previously been transferred from Chase Ultimate Rewards. The Great Scotland Yard Hotel is, at the time of writing, a category 6 property which means it costs 21,000, 25,000 or 29,000 points per night for a standard room depending on if it’s at off-peak, standard or peak pricing. Off-peak dates are hard to come by, but thankfully our dates were standard rather than peak, so it cost us 25,000 points per room. The room rate for the night was $557.50, so that meant we got more than 2 cents per point of value.
It was a fantastic stay, but one night is far too short to experience the hotel, so we’re planning on returning at some point. During this recent stay though, we received a lovely upgrade to a room with a balcony.
The hotel is only a 20 minute walk from the British Museum, so we booked timed tickets there as we’d missed out on the opportunity to visit the last couple of times we’d visited London with our friends.
We then had an extremely fun dinner at Dans Le Noir? which is a restaurant where you eat in darkness. I don’t just mean that the lighting is dim – it’s completely pitch black in there. You’re not allowed phones, watches that light up, etc., so they’re put in a secure locker during your meal.
What makes it a particularly notable dining experience is that you don’t know what you’re eating. You choose how many courses you want beforehand and share any dietary requirements (e.g. vegetarian, gluten-free, etc.), then you’re served your meal by visually impaired servers. The fun of the experience is trying to work out what it is that you’re eating.
Don’t worry – you’re not left in suspense for the rest of your life. After dinner you’re shown photos of the various courses and a description of their ingredients; we managed to work out some of it, but at least half of what we guessed was incorrect.
Liverpool – Hard Days Night Hotel (Booked With Hotels.com Gift Cards)
Our friends are big Beatles fans, so we figured we’d stop overnight in Liverpool to do some Beatles-y stuff. By population, Liverpool is the 4th largest city in the UK, so as would be expected there’s a plethora of hotel options.
Rather than going with a chain though, we stuck with the Beatles theme and stayed at the Hard Days Night Hotel. As the name suggests, it’s a Beatles-themed hotel with lots of Beatles decor, paraphernalia, etc.
The Hard Days Night Hotel is owned by Millennium & Copthorne Hotels, but we don’t have any of their points. That’s not to say we weren’t able to maximize the stay though. We had Capital One Shopping earnings sitting there with no plans for the cashback. A downside of that shopping portal is that you can’t redeem your earnings for cash; instead, you have to redeem for gift cards. One of the gift card options is Hotels.com, so we redeemed for one of those in order to cover the cost of the two rooms for nothing out of pocket.
For what it’s worth, the rooms were $116.90 per night. The room our friends got was fine, but the air conditioning in our room was broken and so it was baking in there. Despite repeated reassurances that they’d send someone to look at it or would provide a portable a/c unit, neither of those things happened. We eventually managed to get moved to a different room, but that one was right next to a club or concert venue playing loud music until 1am, so the stay wasn’t ideal for us.
Having said that, it is in an excellent location. It’s just steps from the Cavern Club which still has live music every night of the week, so you can get a taste of what it would’ve been like to see the Beatles there once upon a time.
Falkirk – Premier Inn Falkirk Central (Booked With Cash)
Our third night had us staying in another non-points hotel. We visited Falkirk, Scotland to see The Kelpies (a pair of 100 foot tall horse head sculptures)…
…and to take a ride on the Falkirk Wheel. The Falkirk Wheel is the world’s only rotating boat lift which allows barges (narrowboats) to get from the canal below to the canal that’s 115 feet above and vice versa.
We had a bunch of stuff we wanted to fit in the next day, so we didn’t care about maximizing our time at the hotel. All we wanted therefore was a clean, comfortable and cheap hotel for the night. As I’ve written about before, the Premier Inn hotel chain in the UK meets those needs perfectly.
Premier Inn doesn’t have a loyalty program, but they do offer low rates. Our room for the night was only $63 which didn’t include breakfast which is paid for separately. Premier Inn properties aren’t bookable on online travel agencies (OTAs) like Hotels.com, so we booked directly. It wasn’t until a couple of months later that I discovered that despite their hotels not being bookable on OTAs, Premier Inn hotels can be booked through the Chase, Capital One and Citi travel portals.
It was a bit of a shame that I’d booked a non-refundable rate because we could’ve maximized the stay. My wife and I both have a Chase Sapphire Preferred card and one of its benefits is a $50 credit for hotels booked through the Chase Travel portal. We could therefore have booked a room on each of our cards to utilize those $50 credits to only pay $13 per room out of pocket.
Fort William – Inverlochy Castle Hotel (Booked With Hilton Free Night Certificates)
Our next stay was the hotel that we’d all been anticipating most of all leading up to the trip.
My wife had expressed an interest in visiting Fort William for a couple of reasons. One was that the Glenfinnan Viaduct is nearby which is the iconic bridge that the Hogwarts Express travels over in the Harry Potter movies.
The other reason was that she wanted to visit Inverlochy Castle which appeared in one of the books she’d been reading. While researching places to stay in Fort William, I discovered that Inverlochy Castle is now a hotel and, even more excitingly, was part of Small Luxury Hotels of the World (SLH).
At the time of researching our trip, SLH had a partnership with Hyatt, but that ended a year ago and they struck a new partnership with Hilton. Not all SLH properties are bookable through the Hilton Honors program, but hundreds of them are and Inverlochy Castle Hotel is one such property.
A stay at Inverlochy Castle Hotel doesn’t come cheap though. I booked our stay for April 2025 back in September 2024; at the time, it cost 105,000 points per night, although it’s a little more expensive at 110,000 points per night nowadays. The cash rate for our dates was $852 per night including tax.
We wanted to stay several nights and needed two rooms, so that would’ve cost 630,000 Hilton Honors points which wasn’t ideal. That’s where the amazing value that you can get from Hilton free night certificates kicked in.
I’d come across Inverlochy Castle shortly after SLH announced that it’d be moving from Hyatt to Hilton back in February 2024. That gave us several months to stock up on Hilton certificates before award availability would appear. By spending $15,000 on a Hilton business card, getting a certificate as part of the welcome offer on a new Hilton Surpass card with No Lifetime Language and upgrading four existing no annual fee and Surpass cards to Hilton Aspire cards, we received six Hilton free night certificates in time to make reservations before availability disappeared.
One of the (many) great things about Inverlochy Castle Hotel is that despite it only having a limited number of rooms, there are two room types bookable for a standard number of points or free night certificates – a Small Double Room which is in the castle building itself and a Small Walled Garden Room which is in a separate building on the property.
Our friend is obsessed with castles, so we let them have the Small Double Room seeing as that’s in the castle building. As it turned out, I preferred our Small Walled Garden Room as it was more spacious, had a larger bathroom and also came with a lovely patio area in the walled garden.
Inverlochy Castle Hotel is a wonderful property. It’s a stunning hotel with beautiful grounds, the service was excellent and it’s in a fantastic location to explore the local area. I’ll be writing a separate review soon, but be assured that it’s a superb use of Hilton free night certificates.
As for the local area, Fort William is a must-visit for Harry Potter fans, especially if you’ve seen the movies as many scenes from the movies were filmed in the area.
I mentioned the Glenfinnan Viaduct earlier; you can go watch the steam train passing over the viaduct, plus you can ride on the Jacobite steam train from Fort William to Mallaig and back again. Shae and I did that a week after our friends left (we sadly couldn’t get tickets for the time they were with us) and it was a lot of fun.
Other nearby filming locations include Loch Shiel (the Black Lake), Eilean na Moine (Dumbledore’s Grave), the site of Hagrid’s Hut and more.
Isle of Skye – The Two Byres (Booked With Wyndham Points Via Cottages.com)
After three lovely days in Fort William, we moved on to the Isle of Skye for its natural beauty, as well as for me and Mark to do a cask draw whisky tasting at Talisker on my birthday.
We booked three nights on Skye at an amazing cottage that we booked through Cottages.com (you can view its listing here). It’s a three bedroom house that’s incredibly well-equipped, beautifully decorated and in a quiet, peaceful location overlooking Ardmore Bay. There was a farm next door and, because we stayed there at the end of April, there were many, many newborn lambs which were ridiculously cute. One morning we even got to watch a lamb being born. We loved our stay so much, we’re already trying to find an excuse to head back up to Skye to stay there again.
One of the best uses of Wyndham Rewards points is booking vacation rental properties through Vacasa. A different partnership that flies somewhat below the radar is Cottages.com. Cottages.com only has vacation rental properties in the UK and Nick has written about his experience booking through them before. For a different kind of stay in the UK, it’s a great option.
It costs 15,000 Wyndham points per bedroom per night, so with this being a three bedroom property it cost 45,000 points per night. Staying three nights meant the total cost was 135,000 points, but it worked out a little cheaper for us. That’s because I have a Wyndham Rewards Earner Business card which offers a 10% rebate on award stays, so our net cost was 121,500 points.
I recorded a video walkthrough of the property to give a better sense of how wonderful it was.
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Inverness – AC Hotel (Booked With Marriott 35k Free Night Certificates)
We begrudgingly left the Isle of Skye after three nights and headed towards Aberdeen. We had several places we wanted to stop at along the way, so we figured that Inverness made a good halfway stopping point for the night.
We stopped for afternoon tea at Drumbuie Farm B & B and Quila Cridhe Tearoom, primarily because you can also pay ÂŁ5 (~$6.75) to feed heilan coos (highland cows).
My wife loves animal experiences and will take it to the next level if she can. She therefore decided to go Lady and the Tramp style at one point.
You might think this would be a one-off thing, but she has form for this. When visiting Olympic Game Farm in Sequim, WA last year, she fed a slice of bread to bison in the same way while sitting in our car.
Anyway, back to our accommodation bookings. Similar to our stay in Falkirk, Inverness was somewhere that we didn’t really care about how fancy the hotel was as it was just somewhere to sleep. My first inclination was therefore to check the Premier Inn website, but room rates were surprisingly expensive (by Premier Inn standards) as they were ~$175 per night.
There weren’t any particularly great points options, so we used Marriott free night certificates instead. My wife had a couple of 35K free night certificates from credit card renewals that were due to expire in a few months and we didn’t have any immediate plans to use them. There was an AC Hotel in Inverness that cost 23,500 points or $368 for the night we needed, so I booked a couple of rooms there. Using a 35K certificate for a property only costing 23,500 points wasn’t ideal, but I didn’t mind redeeming them for that stay as it still felt like we got good value based on the cash value of the stay both there and how much other hotels were charging that night in Inverness.
I have lifetime Platinum status with Marriott, but my wife only has Gold status courtesy of her Amex Platinum card. Both the certificates were on her account, so we didn’t get complimentary breakfast. The hotel is in a central location in Inverness though, so it only took a few minutes to walk somewhere different for breakfast in the morning.
If you find yourself in Inverness, I’d highly recommend the Highland Malt Whisky Experience at MacGregors bar. It’s an incredibly fun evening of entertainment and includes a tasting of five different Scotch whiskys. Even though Shae and our friend Megan aren’t big fans of whisky, they loved the entire experience too.
Inverness is also home to Leakey’s Bookshop – the largest used bookshop in Scotland.
Aberdeen – Holiday Inn Express Aberdeen City Centre (Booked With IHG Points)
One of the places that I wanted to take Shae and our friends to was Dunnottar Castle which I visited on the 3 Cards, 3 Continents challenge. The castle is on a rocky outcropping and is visually striking, so I knew they’d love it.
That’s about 20 minutes south of Aberdeen and our friends were flying out of Heathrow a couple of days later. We therefore booked them a flight from Aberdeen to Heathrow using British Airways Avios and stayed overnight in Aberdeen the night before.
During the 3 Cards, 3 Continents challenge, I’d stayed at the Moxy Aberdeen Airport. That was a decent enough hotel, but this time I wanted to stay downtown. Our best value options were the Holiday Inn Express in the city center and the ibis Aberdeen Centre – Quayside which is part of Accor’s ALL loyalty program. I was tempted by the Ibis as it’s probably been a couple of decades since I last stayed in one, but the Holiday Inn Express won out seeing as it also included complimentary breakfast.
For the one night we stayed there with our friends, rooms cost 15,000 IHG One Rewards points. I have an IHG Select credit card which gives a 10% points rebate, so our net cost was 13,500 points per room. I’d bought those points for 0.5 cents per point, so that effectively meant it cost us $67.50 per room which was pretty good value versus the cash price of $88.41. That said, I could’ve probably earned ~15% cashback on a cash booking if clicking through from Capital One Shopping thanks to the seemingly endless targeted increased rates, plus I would’ve earned points on the stay, along with 10x by putting that spend on my IHG Premier card.
Shae and I then had four days to kill before heading back to Fort William (and Inverlochy Castle) in order to ride the Jacobite steam train. We’d left our plans open-ended as we’d considered heading down to Edinburgh for a few days, but we were so wiped out from being on the go for a couple of weeks that we decided to stay in Aberdeen for another four nights.
That worked out perfectly because my IHG Premier card offers every 4th night free on award stays. As a result, we booked another stay at the same Holiday Inn Express. By taking advantage of both that 4th night free benefit on the IHG Premier card and the 10% points rebate on the IHG Select card, our net cost was 11,475 IHG points per night. Once again, those points had been bought for 0.5 cents per point, so that cost us $57.38 per night rather than the cash rate of $90.03 per night when we ended up booking it at the last minute.
Final Thoughts
Being points promiscuous paid off for us during our trip to Scotland with our friends. Rather than remaining loyal to one particular chain, we were able to book some amazing properties and enhance our stays in various ways by diversifying our reservations and booking with:
- Hyatt points
- Hotels.com gift cards
- Cash (although we could’ve used the Chase Sapphire Preferred $50 hotel credit)
- Hilton free night certificates
- Wyndham points
- Marriott free night certificates
- IHG points
Focusing on one hotel chain can certainly work in some situations, but this was definitely a time when not being tied to a single chain came in handy.
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True two-way loyalty only exists at the individual property level. If a person is not going to be a regular at a specific property, I would advise free agency. We must be honest with ourselves, program level loyalty will continue its downward path.
Great post! As someone based across the pond, I am really looking forward to more UK content from Stephen. Thanks as always for the engaging read!
Really well done post. Thank you!
What – you went to Scotland without getting a Tattoo?
Great post, Stephen, especially for those of us that value economy over luxury (more trips!), and touring itineraries over a long stay at a single location. And it is timely, too, as I currently am sitting down to binge-book 6 stays before I leave on a spontaneous, low-cost trip that starts in less than a week…largely made possible by flight award booking tips I learned at Frequent Miler.
I see your byline has been changed to “spent” 7 years traveling around the United States. Congrats on everything you and Shae accomplished.
I have an idea for a future post that would expand on the theme here and take further advantage of your multi-continent perspective and vast hotel experience. It was triggered by your mention of Accor and ibis.
Are there other non-US hotel brands that we readers may be overlooking as redemption or loyalty opportunities for international travel? One example I used successfully was high-value Hyatt redemptions in Germany with the mid-tier Lindner hotels. (thanks again, FM.) I’m currently looking at a trip to Japan. My reconnaissance so far suggests that the U.S. hotel brands charge premium prices (cash or points) vs. Japanese brands.
Thanks! Hope you have a fun time on your trip 🙂
With regards to non-US hotel brands, there are a few off the top of my head. IHG has Regent which I think are only in Asia (although perhaps there are other properties elsewhere in the world). Hyatt has a few brands that aren’t in the US (e.g. Me and All & UrCove), I think Marriott bought a chain last year that only has properties in Mexico, plus they have Protea hotels in South Africa.
Wow, thanks for the reply…I just booked a bare-bones City Express room with a shuttle to the Bogota airport before an early flight to the next destination. 7500 Marriott points for a Marriott redemption is a unicorn.
Yes, this is the option value of a broad mix of points and credits, which is enhanced by having a set of transferable points. Just booked flights to Tashkent; Qatar Avios (previously transferred with a bonus from TYP) for a rare 85K redemption from DFW. Turkish back with an 88K United redemption with a top up transfer from Marriot (dead with Chase) all the way back to Austin. I’ll pick up a connecting flight AUS-DFW on AA using Alaska miles.
Great post and lots of food for thought.
I love being a “free agent” when it comes to earning and redeeming miles and points. Sounds like a great trip. Did you drive your own car the entire time? Driving on the left side makes me nervous.
Having just done 2 1/2 weeks driving in the UK and 6 weeks driving in Australia I can relate.
I have a couple of suggestions. First, don’t get straight off an overnight flight and straight into a rental car. If possible schedule a day or two to recover and get used to riding in cars on the left (e.g. buses or ride shares). Then when you are behind the wheel you will have had a chance to get used to traffic patters, and you will be more rested.
The second suggestion is to consider picking up a car outside of a major city so you can do your initial driving on roads in rural areas or small towns. If you do easy driving early in the trip you will probably find you are up to cities later on. If the airport is at the edge of a city you can just head out of town instead of driving straight into the city. Or you can take a train to a more remote area where rental cars can sometimes be cheaper than the airport anyway. On our recent UK trip we spent a couple of nights in Manchester, took the train to Kendal, and then picked up our car at a really nice (and cheap) Enterprise location.
One final suggestion is that even if you normally reserve a manual transmission don’t try learning to drive and shift on the left at the same time.
Yep, we somehow managed to fit four of us plus all our cases & other stuff in our new (to us) Prius. The original plan had been to just rent an SUV; that was back when we were first planning the trip and expected to still be living in the US. It made more sense to use our own vehicle though than pay $750+ for an SUV for a 2-3 weeks.
As for driving on the left side, I feel like it’s not too bad making the switch, but I also grew up in the UK. If you ever do drive over here, I’d recommend getting an automatic for your first time though. I’d guess that more than 50% of rental cars in the UK are manual, so you’ll often have to pay more for an automatic. It’s worth it though to not have the hassle, especially because you’d also have to get used to shifting gears with your left hand. When Shae moved here when we first got married, initially she found her right hand hitting the car door when going to shift as she was so used to it being on her right!
In Australia I kept turning on the wipers when I was trying to signal. Nobody knew where I was going, but my windows were clean.
Thank you Stephen, I’ve never driven a manual car, so I would definitely pay more for an automatic car 🙂
Jimmy, good tips on getting rest and driving through small towns first 🙂
Random tidbit that doesn’t really matter for you, but in the UK if you pass your driving test in an automatic, you’re only allowed to drive an automatic. You have to specifically pass your test in a manual in order to be allowed to drive them.
Back when my wife moved here, she passed her test in an automatic, so those are the cars we always had over here. She could rent a manual from a rental car company if using her US drivers license though.
Excellent post! I really enjoyed reading it.
I came to the realization recently that I needed to be more flexible in booking lodgings. For example in a recent off season trip to the UK Lake District I was so determined to use several credits to offset a $220/night hotel that I almost missed a beautiful 3 bedroom cottage on VRBO in the same town that was $90 per night including taxes and fees. On another trip I was convinced I wanted a boutique hotel only to realize a Holiday Inn Express bookable with points was exactly what I was looking for. It can be exhausting to search all the options (chain hotels, private hotels, vacation rentals, travel portals, etc.) but I have had quite a few pleasant surprises when I do.
BTW, in the UK I would add National Trust to places I would search for lodgings.
Lodging is so much more fungible than airfares I see little reason to pursue hotel points or status. It’s pretty rare when the hotel I want to stay in lines up with the points I have.
Yeah, and it is super easy to get tunnel vision. I can’t tell you how many times I got so focused on trying to use Amex hotel credits that I almost missed better deals nearby.
Agreed!
I’m in the minority (I think), but I like to value things by looking at my real world savings. For hotels, that’s not what it would cost me to book the exact same room, but rather what it would cost me to book an equivalent accommodation with cash. Or an accommodation that I would enjoy as much or more than the chain hotel. In the case you cited, I would value the credits as getting $90 worth of “stay”.
I do the same with airfares, but those are generally more identical between vendors. With hotels, you’ll pretty much always get a lower rate at an equivalent non-chain hotel and (for my tastes) often a better stay.
I book chain hotels a lot when I just need a place to stay for a night or two. But for a unique experience I often leave the chains behind. In Australia two of our most amazing bookings were an underground hotel and an off-grid house in the middle of the rainforest, neither bookable with points (although I did use a Chase Sapphire Preferred credit on the underground hotel).
$90 per night for a 3 bedroom cottage in the Lake District? That’s an incredible deal! I don’t tend to check Vrbo, so I’ll need to make a more concerted effort to including that in my research.
That’s a fantastic tip about the National Trust too – I legit had no idea that some of those attractions had lodging you could book.
The $90 rate was the weekly rate off off season. It’s probably 3X that price other times. Still it was an amazing deal and one of our favorite rentals of all time.
I agree with the insight. Sometimes, though, it’s not you that ends up being promiscuous. Favorite hotels can change brands or locations that used to be served by one brand suddenly change. Israel is a good example of this regarding IHG. There used to be a lot of good IHG properties there and now many are gone or debranded.
This was really insightful and well done!