Episode Transcript
Bryce: Welcome to Takeoff, a points and miles podcast by 10xTravel. I'm your host, Bryce. Today I'm joined by Travis and Matt. Gentlemen, how are we doing this morning?
Matt: Doing good.
Travis: Doing pretty good. Just got back. Last week, we had our San Antonio and Dallas meetups. We got to meet a number of readers—I guess I should say now, kind of old habits—many of which felt strongly about our lemon and lime identification personas. Feel free to let us know what other identifying filters we need to go through to help you all understand who we are more.
Matt: For those of you that were at the San Antonio or Dallas meetups, you'll now also have a better insight into our turnaround time and lead time on when we record podcasts versus when they publish.
Travis: Really, anyone could do that. They didn't have to be attendees. They could just go and look at when they were and see, oh, I'm listening to this episode in June, but those happened in late April.
Bryce: We just pretend it's the future going forward and be like, ah, happy June 2nd. The weather is beautiful today. I just went to the pool, did other summer things, and now I'm recording.
Travis: Hopefully, it shouldn't surprise anyone too much of who's been around long enough, maybe has met us at some meetups to know. We're not expert podcast producers. We just said, hey, let's make a podcast. Really, now's the time more than ever for a little 10xTravel history lesson because why not?
We really chose to start this podcast because we still have the course, but a number of people were asking for an audio version of the course. We put it off for so long because we always said, when we heard that, we thought like an audio book. An audio book of the course just felt wrong, just felt tedious.
Bryce was trying to see if he could hire James Earl Jones or someone to narrate it, and it just wasn't happening. When finally one day we said, why don't we try to do it in a podcast version? I'm getting a little bit of insight into how the business works here.
The worst case scenario is we don't know how to podcast, it doesn't turn out good, and we have an audio version of the course for people to turn to. Best case scenario, it works and we keep producing episodes. Here we are in episode 26 now, which on our two week publishing schedule actually should mean that this is our one year episode.
Matt: Cue the confetti.
Travis: There you go. You get some fireworks. If you're watching on YouTube, you'll see us getting some fireworks in celebration. Obviously it worked out well enough, but a year later, weirdly, no one on our team has podcast producing experience. We've, for lack of a better term, just been winging it. That's why you're now hearing me talk about our Texas meetups last week that were in April whenever you're listening to this in probably June should be when this goes live.
That's some insight into you, about the business and how things work. Sometimes, we just decide to do things and see if they stick. We don't have any expertise into it. This one stuck, which also was one of the questions from our Q&A episode. Someone was asking just for some insight into the business. Sometimes that's how the business works. Throw the pasta at the wall and see how well it's cooked.
Bryce: Just sometimes?
Travis: It depends on the type of pasta it is, a whole lasagna sheet.
Bryce: We are glad that this particular noodle of a podcast stuck to the wall for a while, and we are also excited that today's episode is going to have a little bit of a different feel. We talk a lot about flying business class, swanky hotels, lie flat seats, and all the really high-end parts of travel. But we have heard your calls for redemptions and examples that might be a little bit more down to earth.
Which is why this episode is going to be all about what we call unsexy redemptions, the ways in which we spend our points and miles that won't earn us a ton of praise in the Facebook group or in the podcast comments, but made sense for us to do at the time, and paint a picture for all of you as to the other side of redeeming points and miles that isn't quite so glamorous, but is equally if not more important.
In this episode, we're each going to walk through some of our most memorable unsexy redemption stories. We're going to break down the thought process that went into them, what it might've looked like if we did it "right" to get a better value and whether or not we do it again.
Before diving into those examples, let's talk about, what are unsexy redemptions? What makes the redemption unsexy? Why should you care? I feel like I should probably toss this first to Matt since he coined the term. I believe you coined the term unsexy redemptions, right?
Matt: I suppose. I don't remember the origins, but also known as just the way most people travel. But for some reason that's unsexy and has this negative stigma over it, so we're here to try and help fight back against that.
The reality is, especially if you're new around here, you might literally be led to believe that you're not doing points and miles correctly unless you're in the Maldives for your seven nights stay in an overwater bungalow, or as we talk about a lot here, taking a shower in Emirates first class, or off to see the cherry blossoms of the Park Hyatt, Tokyo, and all that stuff.
There are so many aspirational travel styles that the world of points and miles affords to many of us, who would never dream about paying the cash money for those experiences.
There's obviously nothing wrong with that type of travel. Like we've talked about before, points and miles unlocks all this stuff. We definitely should celebrate that, but today we're here for the more realistic side of points and miles that we'd like to say that so many of us actually do, or what we refer to as unsexy redemptions.
These are things like maybe a night at a Holiday Inn Express with the airport because your flight was canceled, or going ahead and spending the night at a hotel before an early morning flight because you want to get a good night's sleep, or maybe it's a staycation at a Residence Inn or a DoubleTree in town because they have a nice pool, it's really hot, and your air conditioning broke.
There are so many more options that so many of us, especially in our Facebook communities, we see day in and day out. Those are the unsexy redemptions that we want to celebrate. We do it regularly in our group, but also here on the podcast.
There's no space for first class upgrades on a lie flat seat. Not today. If your Hyatt globalist status or Hilton diamond status got you bumped into a presidential suite, no, this is not the space for that. These are the average Joe type of redemptions as we'd like to share.
Travis: Before we get into that, I have to ask. That call out on Emirates First Class Shower was very specific. I'm trying to go through the editing history of our outline to see who chose to put that there, and I'm wondering who it might have been.
Matt: It could have been me.
Travis: The world will never know. In preparation for this, I actually wanted to share something really interesting. I'm with Bryce. Matt is the one who coined unsexy redemptions. I remember that and Matt being really enthusiastic about this idea.
Let's face it, a picture of your, like Matt said, overwater bungalow—and we'll go with Bora Bora instead of the Maldives—is a lot easier to get attention because it seems so desirable. Or your first class seat.
That's why when you see people whether it's in in our Facebook group or you know reviews, et cetera, that's why those tend to get so much more attention because they seem so much more aspirational, but it can lead people to feeling like they're not doing this right if that's not the type of travel that they're pursuing.
We want to quash that. We want people to understand that there's not a right or wrong way to travel. There's not a right or wrong way to use points. At the end of the day, you're doing this to get more unique travel experiences that you otherwise wouldn't have gotten.
You're going to see people engaged much more if someone posts a nice business, first class flight, or staying at a five star hotel somewhere, than someone who's staying at a Holiday Inn in DC, where they're just going sightseeing around our nation's capital.
That doesn't mean that doing that is any worse than the other. They're all equally good because you're still accomplishing the same goal. You're saving on travel. As part of my little rant I've gotten on here, I was curious actually about what travel statistics look like. I did some research.
Matt: We got data.
Travis: Yeah, we got data. It's not so specific to unsexy redemptions because if you search for unsexy travel redemptions, you don't really get the best results.
Matt: There's an SEO keyword really that we can own.
Bryce: Here we go, yeah.
Travis: How I broke this up was, and this isn't a perfect representation of this, but I wanted to look and see what percentage of people are actually traveling internationally each year versus domestically in the US.
It's not that traveling domestically in the US can't be unsexy, and it doesn't mean that traveling internationally has to only be sexy. But I think that in general, in the points and miles world—I know I'm guilty of it—I sometimes forget about some of the travel options we have domestically and think of it as a little less glamorous than an international trip.
Matt: I'm 100% guilty of it. I unintentionally downplay like, oh, I'm just going to California for four or five days. If it's not Alaska or Hawaii, it just seems like it's just not a big deal. There are a lot of people in this world that go on one trip a year, if that, and they might go drive six hours away to go to the beach. You're maybe crossing the country, going five hours, or whatever it might be. But that's still a big deal.
Travis: Yeah. I think about some of the great trips I've had in the US like Siesta Key. We're going to get into more of them later, but Siesta Key in Florida outside of Sarasota is one of my favorite little beach towns to go to. Or driving down, I'm in Houston, I'll drive down the road to Galveston.
I know that Charles Barkley just went on a rant about Galveston again when we're recording this. Please go look at his rant. It's not the best beach in the world, but you know what, it's 45 minutes from my house. It's a wonderful little beach town with its own vibe. We forget about the value of these trips that they might not be the most picturesque, but still play an important part in our lives.
I'm going to ask you all. According to this survey, what percent of people preferred traveling domestically over going abroad? The survey is from 2022, to be fair, but what percentage of people in the US preferred domestic travel over international travel?
Bryce: I'm going to go 60%.
Travis: 60%. All right.
Matt: I'm going higher. I'm going 86%.
Bryce: Did you google it?
Matt: Nope. Sure didn't, but anecdotally, travel is stressful for almost everybody. Even a domestic trip doesn't require passports, drastic time zone changes, or just a lot of logistics. I think they'll scare a lot of people off if they're not experiencing used to it. I think that might impact these statistics. Who knows though? I bet we're about to find out.
Travis: One of you is within 1% of the correct answer.
Bryce: Sixty-one?
Travis: Eighty-seven percent.
Matt: Hot dog. All right.
Travis: Eighty-seven percent of people in 2022 preferred traveling domestically over going abroad. I think you hit the nail on the head, Matt. The logistics of doing it are so much easier.
Probably unexpectedly, it drops off with age. The younger people prefer international. Once you get into 30 to 44, it basically cuts in half to domestic and then slowly tapers off from there, which I guess also makes sense once you maybe have kids, which for most people is happening in their later 20s, into your 30s. It does become more of a challenge. But 87% of people.
I wanted to share that just to help really hit home. Again, it's maybe not the perfect metric, and it's probably not fair to say domestic trips are unsexy because there are some fantastic redemptions you can do domestically. But in general, a picture from Yellowstone, which is probably a beautiful park I haven't been to, is just as easy, is just as beautiful of a location as the French Alps. I don't know. I had to pick something. I've never been to the French Alps, so I don't know why I picked it.
Matt: That feels like Nashville Memphis compared to [...].
Travis: I wanted to stress to people how if you feel that you see people taking these glamorous trips and getting a lot of attention for it, that's actually more of the exception than the norm of the type of trips people are taking, and why it's so important to be sure to celebrate these unsexy redemptions.
Bryce: That is what brings us to this episode here. Before we dive into some specific examples from each of us, I want to ask each of you to try and define, what is an unsexy redemption? How do you draw the line? Make an analogy if it would help. I'm into those sorts of things. What qualifies as an unsexy redemption for you?
Matt: For me, defining an unsexy redemption is almost prioritizing utility over the actual potential luxury options or whatever. It's a comparison on luxury versus practicality. I always circle back to positioning flights, airport stays, or something like that just because it's easy. But it doesn't necessarily have to be that.
We've talked before about how a lot of times travel styles—Travis, I know you're big on this, I'm not that far off—your end goal is a destination. Maybe it's a city or a location, so it's not always a hotel. You might literally go stay at a Marriott Courtyard. Not a knock on Courtyards, but they're very fine hotels, middle of the road, no frills. You're not going to get anything crazy, but it's also going to be a fine experience anyway.
You might pick a Marriott Courtyard over a full service Marriott because of the price, how close it is to your destination, or whatever. One could very easily argue that that's an unsexy redemption because you're going to some city and you're just sleeping in the hotel or something like that. I think factoring in the utility over maybe the luxurious experience potential is some way in there to try and define it.
Bryce: Well said. Travis, how about you?
Travis: I think Matt was pretty much just as accurate as he was on his guess of 86% there of, I've dialed in today, folks. There's not a perfect gauge of what is unsexy, but it's not flashy. It's more of a, I know it when I see it.
I think the idea of prioritizing your destination over the way you get there and where you stay is a very good barometer. I don't know if I'm just making words up. It's a good way of gauging whether or not it's a sexy or unsexy redemption.
Like Matt alluded to, when I go to cities, don't get me wrong, sometimes a city hotel that's luxurious is really nice, but it's harder for me to justify spending those points in a city because my whole plan is to not be spending my time at the hotel. I just need a safe, comfortable place to sleep. I might pick a Courtyard over the Ritz, the St. Regis, or even the W, which is a pretty common brand in cities, or a DoubleTree instead of a Hilton.
Matt: Yeah, but then you're just doing it for the cookies. We know.
Travis: I wish they were brownies instead though. I'm not a huge cookie guy. I like my cookies to be soft, not crunchy, and too often they're crispy. But before we get on a whole episode of sweet treat preferences, that's what it is to me. It's those times when quite frankly, if you post about it, you're probably not going to get a lot of attention. That sucks, and that's why we're trying to pay attention to it.
You're not getting that attention because your trip isn't the flight in the hotel experience. It's what you're doing on the ground. Those are a little bit more priceless moments. I guess that's what you're prioritizing, your experience at your destination, like Matt said, over the way you get there or where you're staying when you're there.
Bryce: When I was looking through the research for this episode about unsexy redemptions, something I noticed is that unsexy redemptions tend to be unanticipated redemptions.
You didn't start points and miles thinking, I'm going to plan to have to go to a wedding of one of my spouse's friends who we haven't caught up with in a while, and they're getting married in this particular area with few options, and okay, now we have to travel.
Or we're going on a trip with friends who have to take a particular flight, or stay in a particular place that I didn't anticipate, so I'm going to use points in a way that might not be ideal. That's what brings these up, I think, for a lot of folks. It's something to be aware of as you're getting started into the points and miles hobby.
Everyone starts with a dream destination, it seems. It's usually someplace like the Maldives, Paris, or something really glamorous, but you don't think about the family emergencies, bringing your spouse on a work trip, the spontaneous weekend getaways with your kids that come up that you do end up planning with points and miles. That ends up being a lot of the unsexy redemptions that I'm going to share here in a minute, and I think that's another factor to be aware of how they come up.
Really, one of the most common overlaps with unsexy redemption that we see is portal bookings, just booking at a fixed cents per point valuation through one of the travel portals of the many banks who have cards with them. I wanted to talk real quickly about how to think through those because this is a common question.
I think what we see all the time is people throwing out the word never like, oh, you should never do a portal booking. That's a bad idea for reasons one, two, three. There are certainly downsides, but I wanted to quickly toss it out to the two of you, and I'll weigh in as well. What do you think about portal bookings, and what are the high level things that people should be aware of when considering one?
Matt: First thing that comes to mind echoes what you're saying. I don't like absolutisms especially in points and miles because you can always make a case for almost anything, whether it's a card choice, a redemption choice, or whatever. Generally speaking, portal bookings come with their challenges potentially, but there are also plenty of times that they work out just fine. It's to have this absolutist mindset that no, never do that, I don't love that. I'm getting off my soapbox for a second.
Biggest thing about portal bookings is flexibility. You have the ultimate flexibility. You can pick just about anywhere you want to go, anywhere you want to stay, rental cars, sometimes activities, excursions, and things like that, which for saving money, which is a goal of pretty much anyone in points miles. But to be able to, hey, I did this and had zero out of pocket costs, and the only thing I had to give up was just a baseline points redemption amount, it's hard to argue against that for a lot of people. The thing you give up is just the upside or the outsize potential on those points, but you're still getting to do literally what you want it to do, and that's awesome.
Travis: When I see people talking about not doing portal bookings, it usually comes down to one of two things. One is value, the other is problems. The easiest way to get around the value issue, I've talked about this before, but it's just changing your mindset. Change your mindset to a minimum redemption value that you want to get for your points. For me, it's usually what I can get in a portal. I would love to do better, obviously, but if not, this value is good enough for it to be worth redeeming my points.
It helps flip the switch on chasing an infinite goal of, okay, well, I want to get at least two cents. Once you're getting two cents, I want to get three cents, and I want to get five, and I want to get ten, then I want to get a hundred, then I want to get a thousand, and then I want to get a million. You're pushing that all the way up versus, what's the minimum value? If it's more than that, cool, I'll take it.
It is just so freeing, I think, and can open up you to accepting doing portal bookings. That's why so many people don't want to is because they think they can get a better value for their points. Maybe you can, but if it means you're not taking a free trip, the whole reason we're here is to take the trip, so take the trip. Ignore the value.
The second thing is just problems that people hear people having issues, less so with flights, particularly with hotels where there ends up the reservation not being made. I've done dozens of portal bookings, and I've never had an issue. I have actually had an issue with a direct booking.
I once showed up to a hotel that wasn't built. It was under construction that I booked directly with Hilton. They never bothered to notify us before that the hotel was still under construction. Keep in mind, it was a graduation weekend in Austin, Texas, so there weren't many hotel rooms readily available. But have I ever had a problem with a portal booking? No, I haven't. They do happen. They're easily solvable. Just call the hotel the next day after making the booking or send them an email to confirm that it got made. Problem solved.
Matt: We should clarify that there's probably a difference in problems with hotel portal bookings versus flight because the flight one is the one that just super inconvenient, because you can't work with the airline to come up with a solution. You literally have to work with the customer service of the travel agency you booked with, which oftentimes is like an Expedia, maybe it's a Chase Travel, or something like that. We should just throw that one caveat in there that flight problems through portal bookings is really frustrating.
Travis: That's fair, yeah.
Bryce: For portal bookings, it seems like the flight issues are around schedule changes and needing whether voluntary or done by the airline. The hotel ones are around just the disconnect of making a booking and it going through. Name is correct, dates are correct, property's correct. You just want to verify all those things before you show up at an unfinished hotel or some hotel that says, hey, we don't have you on our list for tonight.
Overall, I think it's overblown. You see a lot of posts about it in the Facebook group because of course, when these things happen, people post about it, but no one says, hey, I had a ho-hum portal booking trip and everything went fine. I would guess it's less than 2% anecdotally that run into these issues, but it is something to be aware of. It's an unsexy redemption, but it works out.
Travis: There are great ways to get hotels when maybe you're traveling somewhere that doesn't have points, hotel options, or the Courtyard is charging 35,000 points a night, but it's also $125, so you could get the same hotel for 10,000 points in the portal. Why would I pay 3½ times the amount of points for the exact same hotel?
I might not get my status benefits, or I might not earn points on it, but I wasn't earning points on it anyway if I was redeeming points. It's a great place to get a lot of value, especially when there's a discrepancy between the cash price and the redemption price on the hotel’s award pricing.
Bryce: Bottom line, things to know with portals, never say never. You'll see the three of us saying right now that we've each done them before. There are plenty of reasons that one should do them. It's not a bad choice or something that you shouldn't even consider, despite what some folks would tell you in the space. They're worth considering.
Do I dare say sometimes they're not unsexy? There are some sexy portal bookings that you can have out there. It's just something to look into each time, just be aware of the potential downsides and also the potential downsides of saying sexy portal bookings with your voice on a podcast. This is a place in my career I did not think I would ever be. Let's keep moving right along.
Let's go to the specific examples that someone's put together of unsexy redemptions that we've done. Either noteworthy or recent, I'll toss it to the two of you. Does anyone want to go first and walk us through your unsexy redemptions?
Travis: I'll go. I saw Matt's mute there. I hear Tucker.
Bryce: Just give us one we can just round robin. Travis, give one, Matt, give one. I'll jump in as well.
Travis: One of mine, and it's when I go back to pretty much year after year after year, is my wife and I are really big fans of the Austin City Limits Music Festival. We met in grad school in Austin. I went to undergrad in Austin. It's just something that we really enjoy. But if you've ever been to any music festival anywhere, what you end up finding is that accommodations during the events skyrocket in price.
In Austin during ACL week, hotels can run $500-plus, unless you want to be at least 45 minutes to an hour away and then have to drive in, deal with all of the traffic, and pay for parking. We don't like to do that. We like to be downtown close to Zilker Park, take the shuttles, and just make it a less stressful experience for us overall, but those hotel prices really sting.
The $500 is for non luxury stuff. The JW Marriott is frequently $800–$1000 plus per night during the festivals. Of course, what do the hotels do? They tweak the names of the rooms so that way they're not their standard rooms anymore. Now they're charging you 300,000 plus points per night. I'm going to share with you what I do, which means it'll probably be killed by some of you, but that's okay. I guess I'm here to make sacrifices.
We have found the Hyatt House in downtown Austin just a great value for points during this. It's 15,000 points per night. Of course it's a peak time for the hotel, but we're getting 15,000 points for a hotel. Even there, it's usually charging $400–$500 a night. It's not the nicest hotel. It's not Park Hyatt, a Thompson, or one of Hyatt's more luxurious upscale brands.
Again, I'm wanting to be downtown close to the event without having to pay a ton of money. I don't need it to be somewhere luxurious, I just need it somewhere safe, accessible, comfortable, quiet is a nice one. It's not on some of the main downtown streets. It's a few blocks pulled away, so you also get to avoid a lot of the rowdiness that happens in downtown Austin during ACL week.
It's one of my favorite go-to unsexy redemptions. No one's going to be excited that you're staying at the Hyatt House in downtown Austin. They're going to be excited that you went to Austin. But if I posted pictures of, wow, look at my 15,000 point redemption to the Hyatt House, I don't think it's going to get a lot of engagement.
Would I do it again? Of course. I've done it multiple years in a row, and I plan to do it every single year that I go, so long as they don't start playing games with the availability. Sure, those 15,000 points a night are halfway towards one night at the park Hyatt in the Maldives, but it's unsexy, but I like it.
Bryce: The question of will I do it again, you said, yes. That's also assuming there's now a word space left after you just shared that with the audience here. Be sure to say hello to everyone else who copies that strategy next year and goes to ACL.
Travis: Yeah.
Matt: I think a big takeaway is to take from that. How good of an opportunity points and miles make it for accommodations around sporting events, concerts, and just other big events to literally fight off price? It's not gouging. It's market dynamics. I get it, but a lot of times, especially hotel brands that still have award charts, you can still book them at those same award category prices, assuming there's availability.
You don't really care what the cash price is other than, wow, it makes it look like you're really getting insane value. But I bet if you look next week, that high house is $120 a night or something like 60% or 70%, maybe even higher percent less than during the event. Pro tip, if you're going to a Taylor Swift concert, Superbowl, whatever, use points and miles for your hotel. Obviously book in advance cause they do sell out, but you can get some insane value.
Bryce: Matt, do you have an example to share of an unsexy redemption?
Matt: I could not isolate just one. I bet if I were to try and tally up my luxury stays versus unluxury or unsexy stays that it's probably close to 50/50. It might even be more on the unluxury side.
I love nice hotels. I love Egyptian cotton sheets with really high thread count, plush robes, slippers, the chocolates on the pillow, the room service included, and all that. Trust me, I thrive, but I'm also perfectly fine realizing that a lot of my actual travel is Hyatt House, Hyatt Place, Courtyards, mid-tier, average hotels that I used to earn some of the points and stuff to make those luxury ones.
A lot of those, I do a ton of those average days, which is general travel, but things like positioning flights. To me, because we have to position so much, Travis, I know you don't know what this is like for the most part living in a mega hub, so use this as a learning experience.
Travis: You can always move.
Matt: Yes, but we have to fly to Chicago, New York, DC, maybe a couple of other spots to position to catch flights to Europe or wherever we're trying to go on these trips. Like I've talked about before, we try to get there the day before just to protect against, as much as we can, anything going wrong that might cause us to miss the actual trip because it's on a separate ticket and all that stuff.
We use these to use a free night certificate to come on cards just to get close to the airport. If we go to New York City, we might splurge and stay in the city for a night, spend the afternoon, and then make it out to the airport. But more often than not, we're using points or free night certificates to stay at hotels right before we're about to go somewhere.
Our flight home from Italy last month, we flew into JFK, arrived at 8:00 PM or 9:00 PM and then continue on to get home. We spent the night. We literally took an Uber from JFK over to the Hyatt Place right near LaGuardia because our flight out the next morning was from LaGuardia, because I can't get to JFK from my home airport, which is a side note and frustrating, but we literally hop off of a very nice first class flight to go straight into a Hyatt Place that I paid 8000 points per night for.
We were there for eight hours, had the first flight out the next morning. That literally is unsexy, but it's highly utility.
Travis: It saved us some Hyatt Place.
Matt: Yeah, it's great.
Bryce: Somehow the fact that you come off of a first class flight into that makes it seem even more unsexy because of that Uber ride. It takes you to a different part of your trip, if you will, but that's a perfect example.
Matt: We splurged and got an XL.
Bryce: Okay. Did you use points for it?
Matt: No. No Uber points, but XL ride all the way from JFK LaGuardia. That helped us step down from first class into a standard Hyatt Place.
Travis: Had to get a little intermediate in between.
Matt: Exactly.
Bryce: My first example is actually similar to yours, Matt. I'm going to Greece this summer with my family. We're flying on Emirates business class both ways on that direct flight from Newark, but we have to reposition as well.
Matt: This feels like an asterisk.
Bryce: Maybe. We have to reposition to and from on either side. I did both of those bookings through the portal. Got some flights on it. I think it's United. We just made sense. There's not a lot of gamesmanship you can do points wise with those little short, cheap domestic flights. We also got hotels on both sides.
When we land in Newark again, it's just some base level Marriott that we booked. Also on the other side in Athens, before going island hopping, we just got a hotel as close to the sites as we could because ground transportation when you have multiple young children is difficult in Europe. We wanted to be able to walk and just booked something through the portal. I was totally fine with it.
I feel like I used to feel this feeling of FOMO. I'm redeeming points for this mid-level hotel in Athens that I could have used for an ANA first class flight to Japan. I've gotten over that now. I hope a lot of other people are along that same journey too. You just book it, you don't look back. That's what worked for me, and I think it was the right decision. I'd absolutely do it again.
Travis: I want to take the time here to highlight for people. One of the important things that I'm seeing between all three of our examples is in all three of our examples, we had the opportunity to step up to that more luxurious, nicer, higher value option, but that we're choosing not to because we are prioritizing what we want out of the trip. We're not letting the hotel or the flight dictate the type of trip we're having.
That's really important because people can often end up choosing these nicer flight options and particularly nicer hotel options that don't actually fit their needs and their desires that they want on this trip.
Like Bryce said, I used to have that exact same FOMO of, oh, man, I could be using these points for another trip instead, but instead I'm using them to get the experience that we want. What we all prioritize, I prioritize the location. I could have had luxury and been farther out. Matt prioritized the hotel near LaGuardia for his flight the next morning. He wanted to be close. He sure could have gone, stayed at the Park Hyatt in Manhattan, and been 45 minutes to an hour away with the stress of traffic. He said, no.
Matt: That breakfast, oh, man. No regrets.
Travis: Bryce could have chosen a more inconvenient routing to get there all in business class and could have chosen super nice hotels, but maybe their location wasn't what he wanted. Instead of letting the trip be dictated by just flights and hotels, there's so much more to your trip than just the flights and hotels.
We don't talk about it as much because points and miles don't necessarily, they can, but don't necessarily unlock the experiences that you're having on your trip. They're just unlocking the things you have to do. You have to get there and you have to have somewhere to stay, but you can still choose to not go for the ultra lux option and instead have these more unsexy redemption options to be able to build the trip that you actually want. It's not something you see all the time, but it's something that's incredibly valuable to realize.
Bryce: Do you hear that, Matt? I think that we're complimented on how good we were at being unsexy redeeming points, so I'll take it. Nice job. I feel like another area of points and miles that is peak unsexy redemptions is Southwest and the Companion Pass.
When you're opting to earn the Companion Pass, redeeming points on Southwest, or really just generally fly Southwest, that is probably going to be an unsexy redemption of some kind. Your route's probably not going to be as good as you could have gotten on other airlines. Of course, on the plane, there's not even a first class product. It's not quite what you'd get on some other airlines, but it is a wonderful choice for so many readers, including myself until recently, I guess, the recent episode we talked about, but it's bulk travel. It's getting you to the places you want to go.
I feel like one of the most common scenarios we see with Southwest in unsexy travel is wedding season. A lot of people go through that period in your life, usually in your 20s, when seemingly there's a wedding every weekend in a different city. All your friends decided to get married in the same summer. You end up doing five, six, seven, eight trips all just for weekends usually to places that you didn't anticipate going in the Southwest points, and all their unsexiness are there to help you on those trips, save money on the flights, especially if you tack on the bachelor, bachelorette parties, or other types of events that are around weddings. It's a perfect use of points and miles, and it's one that I've done very much myself.
Travis: I had the companion pass for four years. I also don't have one this year, and sometimes I don't want to go so far as to say regretting it, but there are definitely times when it would have made some of my recent trip planning a lot easier. Go to Southwest, book those flights, use my companion pass. Easy, done.
It's a good example. Sure, they do fly to some destinations now. But admittedly, the only time you get people paying attention to you flying Southwest is usually when you get that exit row seat that doesn't have the seat in front of you.
Bryce: Does that cross the line into where it could become a sexy redemption, or is there just no option on Southwest for us to consider that?
Travis: Sexy-ish.
Bryce: Sexy-ish, okay. This is our barometer that you mentioned earlier. We're getting there.
Travis: Yeah, we've added a new tier. Next week's episode, sexy-ish redemptions.
Bryce: Any other examples of recent or noteworthy unsexy redemptions that either of you have done?
Matt: Too many to list.
Travis: Weddings, like you've mentioned, I've done portal bookings in Austin. I've done portal bookings to upstate New York. Do I talk about my flights or my hotels there? No. What do I talk about? I talk about Seneca Farms ice cream. Maybe if I had figured out how to get the chicken there, I would talk about the fried chicken too, but I definitely talk about Seneca Farms ice cream.
Matt: #Notsponsored.
Travis: Not sponsored, but if you guys want it open in Texas, I wouldn't go. Tons of overnight stays at hotel airports because I do occasionally reposition. They're just as valid ways to travel and just as valid ways of using your points.
Matt: I have homework for our audience. You need to hop over on YouTube and tell us how you've done some unsexy redemptions lately. What's either your most recent or your most memorable one? Leave in the comment on the video and maybe we'll pull out and highlight some favorites.
Bryce: Also, maybe our video is going to get demonetized because we've said the word unsexy 30 times, all the comments are going to mention it, and we're going to get flagged or something.
Travis: I do have one that I went back and forth on sharing, but I'm going to put this one to you all to vote on. Is this an unsexy redemption or not? Let's find out. Sorry, I'm laughing before I'm even starting to share it. When we go to the Maldives, a lot of times...
Matt: Disqualified.
Bryce: Yeah, unsexy redemption done.
Travis: A lot of times the flights land in the afternoon.
Matt: It's your business class or first class flight, right?
Travis: Right.
Bryce: You get off so early on the plane that it's still the afternoon actually. Everyone else gets there in the evening.
Travis: By the time you get your seaplane or boat transfer to your resort, usually you're there late in the evening, and it always feels like such a waste to me. It feels like a waste to me to get there and burn all of those points just to sleep versus staying in Malé in the capital, waking up the next morning, and getting to the resort early. I don't know why, but this has become the way that we do this.
Matt: Regular Maldivian traveler, correct?
Travis: Yeah. When I was looking, I saw two portal bookings for this hotel in Malé, we stay at the same one every time. It's called H78. It's $90, the rooms are small. They have air conditioning, but it never fully cools the room down like you want because of course they don't run it when you're not there.
They have shuttle to and from the airport and free breakfast. I've done two so far because I didn't do it on my first trip, but two portal bookings to stay in the capital instead of going straight to my resort at a hotel that's $90 a night. That's my other example. It's essentially doing a night at a hotel before a repositioning flight.
Matt: You're just positioning at the destination, not at the point of origin. It pains me, but I agree. I would classify that as an unsexy redemption because you also layer in the strategery of waiting till the next morning. That's a smart move there.
Travis: I'm like, why drop another, if it's a Hyatt, 30,000–35,000 points, if it's a Marriott, another 80,000–100,000, just to get to the resort and go to sleep? It just feels rough to me.
Matt: Bravo, sir. Well played.
Bryce: I concur. I think that meets the criteria. Unsexy redemption confirmed.
Travis: What I am hearing is that you can have an unsexy redemption, even in the Maldives.
Matt: Yes. You heard it here first.
Bryce: We'll have to link that hotel in the show notes as well as the Hyatt House, Austin. Their managers were going to get a note like, hey, good news, we were mentioned on a podcast. Oh, cool, what's it called? Unsexy Redemptions. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? They're like, oh, I don't know, they both voted for it as being unsexy.
Matt: I just pulled up their website. It's a pretty sexy-looking hotel, I'm not going to lie.
Travis: The H78?
Matt: Yeah, it looks good.
Travis: They do a good job with the pictures.
Bryce: I'll mention one more use case for unsexy redemptions that I've noticed lately. It's using points and miles for other people when you're flying your family to come to your hometown, or you're bringing friends along to a trip.
You might not want to go out and try to spend all the time and effort for award space or super premium products for everyone. You just want to do a nice, simple booking through a portal. That is a great use of unsexy points to make travel dreams come true.
That's one that I'm doing more and more as well as I get older and fall into the 87% of people who are doing more domestic travel. It's something to be aware of as well.
Travis: Not 60%, you undershot.
Bryce: We don't have to keep revisiting how far off I was. It was close. It was directionally correct. Anything else on unsexy redemptions before we wrap this thing up?
Matt: Celebrate them. Don't hide from them. You're traveling, you're doing stuff. That's what's to be celebrated and not how good or not good you think it may or may not appear on Instagram.
Bryce: Agree. Stop apologizing for them. It almost irks me these days when I see posts or I get emails and it's like, I know this isn't the greatest use of points, but you can just skip that entire first section. Just tell us what you did. We're happy for you.
Most other people can be happy for you. The ones who aren't are, you don't have to worry about them. Ignore them. Ignore the haters, but we love them here at 10xTravel and we're always happy to hear more about them. We'd love it. Drop some examples in the YouTube comments and send them to us. Keep sharing them on Facebook. We'd love to see those more real down-to-earth uses of points.
Another place that you could share those is at a meetup. If you come to one of our upcoming 10xTravel meetups, which we're going to be doing a few of them across the country here this summer and fall, you can find more details on those linked in the show notes or at 10xtravel.com/events.
Be sure to sign up for 10xTravel+, our paid membership program where you can get access to one-on-one consults with our team, as well as a free award booking each year. Check out our free tool, My10x to manage all of your points and miles and make it easier to do your unsexy redemptions, including a My Next Card feature that takes all the guesswork out of finding the next best card for your exact situation.
Last but not least, be sure to join our Facebook group, now over 330,000 people coming together to share their points and miles knowledge, answer questions, and weigh in on whether your redemption was sexy or unsexy. That'll have to be a new weekly thread that we do.
Anyway, for all of us here at 10xTravel, I'm Bryce Conway. Thanks for joining. We will see you next time on Takeoff, a points and miles podcast by 10xTravel. Bye.
