Two-day Bonvoy bonanza

Good morning from the Big Apple. The city that never sleeps. The cultural center of North America.

I’m talking, of course, about Ottawa, Ontario.

If you’ve never been, it’s about as underwhelming as you might expect… but I love it anyway.

Here’s what we got cooking today:

• 🏨 Marriott will give you 40k points per stay (VERY IMPORTANT)

• 💳 Top cards update (and why this one is so important)

• 😆 Meme

🏨 Marriott will give you 40k points per stay (VERY IMPORTANT)

Before you scroll past this section because you’re sick of hotel promotions (I get it), wait a hot second.

This is probably the single-best hotel promotion we’ve ever seen from Marriott. Period.

Now do I have your attention? 🤗

For a very limited time, you can earn 40,000 Marriott Bonvoy points per stay when booking a property through Marriott Homes & Villas.

Here’s how it works:

• Valid for stays of four nights or longer between now and September 9, 2023

• You must book your stay between May 1st (today) and May 3rd

• Only valid on cash bookings

• You’ll also earn normal Marriott point rates and elite bonuses

• You can earn this bonus multiple times (!!!)

So as you can see, the real catch is the incredibly short booking window. Still, there’s an opportunity to “mattress run” the crap out of this promotion.

Mattress running is when you book hotel stays because the benefits/rewards you earn outweigh the cost to book the stay.

If you actually need a hotel stay, even better.

As a reminder, Marriott Homes & Villas is basically their version of Airbnb, but you can earn and redeem Marriott points.

So how easy is it to maximize this promotion and rake in a butt-ton of Marriott points? Let me illustrate by showing you how I personally plan to do so.

I will be booking at least three 4-night stays, therefore triggering this bonus at least three times.

First, I have a night in Bulgaria coming up that I have yet to book a hotel for. Because the value here is so great, I’m going to book a 4-night stay even though I’ll only actually be staying here for one of the nights.

As you can see, the stay will cost me $258 in total. But since I have elite status, I’ll earn 1,908 points, plus the 40,000-point bonus, worth about $419 in total rewards.

In this instance, I’m trading $258 for $419 worth of points… and I’m getting accommodation that I need anyway.

Next, I’ll be in Jakarta later this year for about a week. Again, I’ll break up this trip into two 4-night stays (even though I’ll only be staying three nights at one of them since the extra night triggers the 40k bonus).

Here are what those two stays look like:

These two stays will cost me a total of $623. From this 8-night trip, I'll earn (between normal earnings, elite bonuses, and the two promotional bonuses) 85,082 points.

For reference, that’s worth about $851… So again, I’m paying just over $600, getting seven nights of accommodation, and earning a return of $851 of travel.

If there’s another good opportunity, I might even do this promotion one or two more times and cancel some hotel bookings. 40,000 points per stay is absolutely insane, especially when there are so many cheap properties.

Think about it—credit cards that you can only open once offer fewer points than what I’m going to earn for a few short hotel stays.

So I highly recommend running some searches and seeing if you can’t make this promotion work for you. It could be a way to rake in hundreds of thousands of Marriott points, which is something you shouldn’t ignore.

💳 Top cards update (and why this one is so important)

As you know from what we told you about last week, this month marks one of the most exciting updates to our Top Travel Cards list in a while.

I was telling a friend about it a few days ago who asked a very insightful question:

And it struck me that many of you might not understand the magnitude of just how valuable this offer is.

So, I’m going to give you a handful of examples of how by spending less than $100 on an annual fee, you can unlock a world of travel opportunities.

What it boils down to is this: You can get not just hundreds, but THOUSANDS of dollars in value from the card, which costs less than $100 per year to hold.

Here’s a quick example:

After earning the welcome offer, you could transfer those points to Hyatt and book 24 nights at a hotel like this one, which, for the nights that I’ve booked, is priced at a cool $1,224 per night.

Would I ever pay that much for a hotel? Absolutely not.

But still, the fact that you could theoretically book 24 nights here means that your under-one-hundred-dollar credit card could yield $29,376 in value just for signing up, earning the welcome bonus, and strategically transferring the points.

I mean… I don’t know what to say. It’s insane.

This is a pretty niche location and an uncharacteristically expensive property… Want a less extreme example that still illustrates my point?

You could transfer all those points to Virgin Atlantic and book eight (yes, EIGHT) individual flights across the Atlantic, which are frequently priced at just 10,000 points.

This flight is priced at $765 one-way. If we subtract the $152 of taxes you need to pay anyway, your 10,000 points are getting you $613.

If you book eight flights at this rate, you’re getting $4,904 in value.

Did I mention that this card costs under $100 to hold?

Okay, one more…

You could transfer the points you earn from signing up for the card to Aeroplan and book a once-in-a-lifetime flight on ANA’s the Room from the U.S. to Tokyo.

This flight frequently retails for well over $10,000…

The fact that a credit card can unlock any of these experiences is what gets people like me so excited about points and miles, and why I want you to get in on all the fun while you still can.

Offers like this on cards that don’t require a large annual fee are rare, so if you’re in a position to get any credit card, I’d strongly recommend you jump on this.

😆 Meme

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That’s gonna do it for this exciting Monday newsletter. I’m going to be honest with you—I was not expecting 2023 to be this jam-packed with deals and points & miles opportunities.

So many of the good deals of the last three years were a result of the pandemic travel slump, but the value has continued to flow despite the fact that travel is as popular as ever.

There has never been a better time to start your travel hacking journey, and I’m so excited that I get to be a part of it with you.

See you tomorrow and have a wonderful day,

45.4215° N, 75.6972° W