Stacks on stacks (of points)

Howdy, friends, and welcome back to Daily Drop. Phew, that tech outage was quite a doozy, eh?

There’s a lot we can say about the situation, but I think Southwest said it best:

FYI, that’s not a real tweet… but it’s hilarious, so shoutout to a member of the Daily Drop lounge for posting it. 😉

Thankfully, Daily Drop runs purely on caffeine and credit card points, so no outages here:

• 🏃🏼‍♂️ Mike on the Move: My big hotel stack

• 💳 Spending bonus on hotel cards

• 😬 Video timelapse of flights during the outage

🏃🏼‍♂️ Mike on the Move: My big hotel stack

As I told you last week, I’m in beautiful Chongqing, China.

Choosing a hotel here was tough because there are dozens of ridiculously awesome options… so I tried out a few. 🤗

But for my last couple of nights, the choice was easy - and that’s because I had an opportunity to stack a bunch of offers to get a ton of points from a pretty cheap stay.

Here’s the lowdown:

Right now, IHG has a promotion to earn 2,000 bonus points for every two paid nights stayed.

It’s something they offer a few times a year, and it's not a bad deal if you already have some cheap IHG stays on the books.

I also recently had a birthday and received a fun email from IHG offering yet another promotion to earn bonus points.

Essentially, they offer 3,000 bonus points when you book a 2-night stay within 90 days of your birthday.

Now, there are two stackable offers on the table… so… I looked at my options in Chongqing for my last two nights and found an epic hotel right in the city center.

Specifically, it’s the Voco Chongqing, which towers over the central business district.

At $103 per night all in, it’s a bit more expensive than hotels I normally would pay cash for…

But when I was going through the booking process, I got another fun surprise.

You see, IHG often lets you buy bonus points when you book a stay for an extra nightly fee.

Generally, It’s not a good deal and costs more than $0.005 per point (the price you can regularly buy IHG points for during the 100% sales).

However, with this stay, I was offered the following:

As you can see, it lets me buy 5,000 bonus points per night for $18, which means I’m buying points for $0.0036 per point… which is a ridiculous deal and one that I’ll take any day.

And the stack gets higher… 🥞

I also own this credit card, which offers IHG Platinum status AND 10x points per dollar… in addition to the 10x points you earn from being a member.

But before I break down my points earnings, there’s one more step.

I also saw that Topcashback, a shopping portal, was offering 9% cash back at Voco Hotels.

So, my $242 stay actually becomes a $220 stay, but I still earn all of the points from the full $242 of spend… which breaks down as follows:

• 10x for being a member: 2,420 points

• 10x for credit card spend: 2,420 points

• 6x for being IHG Platinum: 1,452 points

• 5k points per night (x2): 10,000 points

• Birthday promo: 3,000 bonus points

• Other IHG promo (2k for two nights): 2,000 points

In total, I’m earning 21,292 points from a two-night stay that cost $220.

That’s a ridiculous return on spend… If we value IHG points at half a cent each (which we do), that’s a return worth about $106, or a 48% return on spend.

Not too shabby, eh? 😏

I can use those points to book a 4-night stay at a hotel in Jakarta, which, you guessed it, I have to do anyway.

And because I own the card I referenced earlier, I get every fourth night free at IHG when using points… so I’ll even have some points left over after that 4-night stay. 😎

So here’s the bottom line:

I wasn’t planning to stay at this IHG hotel in Chongqing.

But when I saw multiple opportunities to earn bonus points, I followed the stacks to maximize the return on my spending, and you should, too. 🫵

💳 Spending bonus on hotel cards

Speaking of ways to rack up tons of hotel points…

Marriott is out with a pretty compelling new offer for tons of its co-branded credit cards that will allow you to earn a bunch of bonus points.

Because they’re so clever, they’re calling this “It’s in the cards.”

Here’s how it works:

If you have a co-branded credit card with this hotel chain (you can see the list of them on the promo page), you can earn up to 10,000 bonus Marriott points after spending $7,000 on the card.

Some other terms to be aware of:

• You must register for the offer with your card by August 1st

• You must complete the spending by September 21st, 2024

• That’s it.

It’s super simple, and I like that.

Oh, and to sweeten the pot a teeny bit more, they’ll throw in 200 bonus points just for registering for this offer, even if you don’t spend a cent.

Two hundred points is nothing to write home about, but who cares - it takes one second of your time, so why not? 🤷🏼‍♂️

So, is this offer worthwhile?

As a certified Marriott Boi™️, I certainly wouldn’t mind 10,000 bonus points (plus the other points you normally earn from spending).

Assuming you earn a minimum of one point per dollar (though it would likely be a mix of earning rates), you’re walking away with a minimum of 17,200 points, which is not bad at all.

That’s enough points to book a stay at a hotel like this one in Dallas and still have thousands of points left over.

This is especially worthwhile if you’re spending a good amount of money on Marriott hotels, for which there’s no better card alternative.

Anyway, here’s the bottom line:

Take a second to register and earn 200 points.

If you divert all of your spending to your co-branded card and meet that $7,000 requirement, you’ll get a nice chunk of bonus Marriott points to use for a future hotel stay.

One last point is that, depending on the bank, you must have opened your card on or before April 1st, 2024, or June 20th, 2024.

Check out this page for all of the details.

😬 Video timelapse of flights during the outage

As you’re all aware, the recent IT outage put a hard stop on thousands of flights this past weekend…

So, to really drive home how drastic this was, check out this timelapse video of a flight radar in the U.S. 👇

@dailymail

A 12-hour timelapse shows how American Airlines, Delta, and United plane traffic was affected during the ‘most serious IT outage the world... See more

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That’s all for today, folks! I hope any of you who had travel plans in the last few days ended up getting to your destinations alright…

Take care, and see you tomorrow ❤️

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