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Most hotel loyalty programs provide the opportunity to transfer your points to airline partners at below sub-optimal rates. Wyndham Rewards is currently running a promotion that’s giving a bonus when transferring your points to United MileagePlus which improves the ratio from below sub-optimal to simply being sub-optimal. That said, there could be some people out there where this promotion could make sense.
The Deal
- Receive double United miles when transferring Wyndham Rewards points to your MileagePlus account.
- 6,000 Wyndham points = 2,400 United miles
- 16,000 Wyndham points = 6,400 United miles
- 30,000 Wyndham points = 12,000 United miles
- Direct link to offer.
Key Terms
- Expires September 10, 2024.
- Qualifying Activity: A member may transfer Wyndham Rewards points in increments of 6,000, 16,000 or 30,000 into United MileagePlus award miles in a single transaction. Transactions will not be aggregated for purposes of calculating miles.
- Miles Conversion: For purposes of this Offer, 6,000 Wyndham Rewards points equals 2,400 United MileagePlus award miles, 16,000 Wyndham Rewards points equals 6,400 United MileagePlus award miles, and 30,000 Wyndham Rewards points equals 12,000 United MileagePlus award miles.
- Once the miles transfer request is initiated it cannot be reversed.
Quick Thoughts
Wyndham points normally transfer to United at a 5:1 ratio, so 6,000, 16,000 or 30,000 points ordinarily become 1,200, 3,200 or 6,000 MileagePlus miles respectively. This promotion therefore doubles those numbers to 2,400, 6,400 or 12,000 miles respectively, making it a 2.5:1 ratio.
Our Reasonable Redemption Value (RRV) for Wyndham points is 1.01 cpp (cents per point), while for United it’s 1.3cpp. If that’s how you value both sets of those points/miles too, that means you’re theoretically converting 2.53 cents of points for 1.3 cents of miles which is why I said this was a sub-optimal opportunity.
However, there are some exceptions where it could make sense to take advantage of this promotion. One of those is if you have orphaned Wyndham points that you don’t have any plan of using. Wyndham points expire after 18 months of activity and 4 years after they were earned – regardless of activity in the latter case. While there are ways to extend their expiry date, if you’d rather not fuss around with that then transferring to United might make sense.
Another scenario is someone who wants more United miles but doesn’t have any Chase cards that either earn United miles or Ultimate Rewards that can transfer to United. Due to Chase’s 5/24 rule, it might also not be possible for them to get one of those cards.
To determine your 5/24 status, see: Easy Ways to Count Your 5/24 Status. The easiest option is to track all of your cards for free with Travel Freely.
If that person did have a Wyndham Rewards Earner Business credit card though, they could try to rack up spending at gas stations as that card earns 8 Wyndham Rewards points per dollar. That would effectively make the card a 3.2x United card. The biggest downside with that approach is that you wouldn’t have much time to rack up the spend because there’ll only be one more statement closing date before this double miles promotion ends.
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Choice sometimes has promotions to transfer United at 5000:2000 ratio. So that you can convert 2500 TYP or WF points to 2000 United. Still suboptimal, but better than Wyndham.
It’s even better if stacked with United hotel transfer bonus if it overlaps the Choice promotion like it did first half of October last year. 2500 TYP became 2600 United, roughly 1 to 1.
Citi currently has a 20% transfer bonus to Wyndham. So 25k TYP become 30k Wyndham, which could become 12k United. If you had a Rewards+ attached to the TYP account, and had not used up the 10% rebate, that could effectively be 22.5k TYP becoming 12k United miles. Still not worth it to me, but at least that brings it below a 1:2 ratio.
Even if Wyndham doubled the transfer bonus to United again, it still wouldn’t be worth it 🙁
At 30,000 Wyndham points = 24,000 United miles, this would make sense for me.
I have more Wyndham points than I have a known good use for, want to keep my Chase for Hyatt, and United miles work for some trips where * partner miles will not.
With the current Citi to Wyndham transfer bonus, this would also make TYP : United nearly 1:1.
I got good use by transferring 60K WR to 60K Caesars Rewards and getting $600 off my Caesars hotel stay.
I initially swore off Vacasa when they devalued the award with the $250 avg nightly cap for 15K WR points, but I am trying to change my view to using 30K WR points for a $500 avg nightly cap, especially for some of the properties in Hawaii.