I didn't participate in last year's Daily Getaways and have been pretty skeptical of this year's, judging by what's been announced so far. I mean, $345 for a 2-night stay in a second or third rate Las Vegas hotel and steakhouse dinner for two, when you could stay at a true 5-star hotel instead for the same cost? I'll pass.
One that's a bit more interesting though is on April 23, when 5 different Wyndham points packages go on sale. If you just looked at the calendar, you'd be excused for yawning–who wants to stay at a Super 8, Days Inn, or even a Ramada? Fortunately, you don't have to–you can pick up the Wyndham points and transfer them into airline miles. It's somewhat amazing that all the airline mile packages seem to be the same: 2.5 Wyndham points per airline mile (China Eastern or Southwest miles, anyone?) For me at least, the most interesting are American AAdvantage and United MileagePlus miles.
There are 5 different points packages, and right away I noticed that the most expensive package, for $165, gives 48,000 Wyndham Rewards Points-fewer than the $143 package, which is for 50,000 Wyndham Rewards points. So I did a quick chart to see which packages offer the Wyndham points most cheaply.
The 28,000 point package is cheapest, at $76, which works out to 0.27 cents per point, or just 0.24 cents per point if you use an AMEX card to get 10% off your purchase.
The 50,000 point package is next best, at 0.29 cents per point, or 0.26 cents per point with 10% AMEX discount.
That said, look at the total number of points packages available for sale and the presale numbers: 350 and 75 for the 28,000 package and 300 and 60 for the 50,000 package. Those will go very quickly, so you may be best off trying to buy a couple of the 16,000 point packages, even at the slightly higher per point cost.
Plus, as far as I can tell, you have to transfer Wyndham points in packages, e.g. 30,000 Wyndham points to get 12,000 American AAdvantage or United MileagePlus miles, 17,500 Wyndham points to 7000 miles or 8000 Wyndham points to 3200 miles. So unless you already have some Wyndham points, you might want to get a couple packages of 16,000 points to have enough to transfer over to get 12,000 miles, and have your spouse or friend do the same (if you're both lucky enough to get them–these packages tend to sell out quickly). The reward? AAdvantage or MileagePlus miles at 0.61 to 0.77 cents per mile, assuming you bought using the AMEX 10% discount, and depending on which points packages you bought.
To put this in perspective, if you were to buy American AAdvantage miles right now, even with the 30% bonus on purchased miles (if you buy more than 20,000 miles) you'd be paying 2.2 cents per mile. So, while you probably weren't going to do that anyway, you're getting them this way at less than a third of the cost.
If you do want to get in on the Presale, make sure you check the Wyndham Facebook page the morning of April 23, where a code will be posted to enable you to access the presale between 12noon and 1pm.
You'll also need to have a Wyndham Rewards number for the points purchase; if you don't have one yet, you can sign up here for Wyndham Rewards.
Personally, since I have a good number of Ultimate Rewards points that can transfer 1:1 to United MileagePlus, I'm most interested in this for American AAdvantage points. Although back in November Ben analyzed What a Mile is Worth and United was tops, since then both Lufthansa and Swiss have pretty much eliminated advance first class awards (see How to Deal with No More Lufthansa Advance First Class Availability) which is especially hard for families like mine, that plan their international travel months in advance. Now, it's great that Singapore Airlines Business Class Awards are Bookable on United; but first class awards remain expensive and elusive–generally only last minute availability as well. So to my mind, American AAdvantage miles, at least if you want to use them to travel first class to Asia on Cathay Pacific, are now worth relatively more than they used to be. That said, it's not as if Citi is pumping out AAdvantage credit card offers the way Chase is with the varioius Ultimate Rewards cards.
As you can see on our Best Travel Credit Cards page, the best offers are currently the 50,000 AAdvantage miles each for the Citi Platinum Select AAdvantage Visa and Citi Select AAdvantage AMEX cards; there's also a third CitiBusiness AAdvantage Visa, also for 50,000 points (I do not receive a referral for any of these cards). While they can be churned, they can't be churned quickly, so unless you're doing a lot of flying on American, building up a ton of AAdvantage miles for a family isn't so easy. So I may well try to pick up some Wyndham points. How about you? Will you be buying Wyndham points, and if so, how do you plan to redeem them?
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