The most flexible way to book hotels

Hey there, friends. Welcome back to Daily Drop, the fine wine of newsletters. We only get better with age.

Today’s edition has notes of hotel hacks and dirt-cheap flights, so let’s take a sip (or a big gulp, no judgment):

• 🏨 The most flexible way to book hotels

• 💸 TODAY only: Book Breeze flights for $39 one-way

• ✈️ First-class Friday: My new favorite aria

• 🎗️ Donate miles to help people in Hawaii

🏨 The most flexible way to book hotels

When booking a hotel room, we’re constantly faced with an important decision: pay with cash or points? It’s a question that’s stumped philosophers for eons… one that’s caused many a travel hacker to descend into madness.

Thankfully, the team over at Hyatt has cracked the code by developing “Pay my Way,” allowing travelers to pay in a highly flexible way for many of Hyatt’s best properties around the world.

Here’s the deal:

When checking out at a hotel in the Hyatt app or on their website, you’ll occasionally see certain rates with a button that says “Pay My Way.”

If you choose this, you’ll have the option to pay for each night of your stay with any of the following methods:

1. Cash

2. Points

3. Free Night Awards

4. Cash and points

This is REALLY cool… I often see hotels that are priced in such a way that they’re too expensive to pay for with just cash, but that I also don’t want to burn a TON of points on.

This solves that problem entirely.

It also allows for opportunities to squeeze some extra value out of your points and/or money.

Let’s look at an example.

Check out this stay at the Hyatt Place Kyoto, a hotel I’ll be staying at later next week. As you can see, some nights cost more points than others, though the cash price is exactly the same for each night.

With Hyatt’s Pay My Way, you could pay cash on the nights that are priced higher and use points for the cheap nights.

You could even throw a free night award into the mix if you wanted to be extra saucy.

In the end, I could book a 4-night stay by using 9,000 points, a free night award, and under $300 in cash, which is a great way to take an otherwise expensive hotel stay and spread out the cost.

The big kicker here is that not every hotel and not every rate allows you to use this feature, so don’t be surprised if it doesn’t show up…

Generally speaking, it looks to be available on standard room rates. So if a hotel is almost full or you’re booking at the last minute, it may be hard to find the Pay My Way feature.

Still, I think this is just another example of why Hyatt has the best hotel program in the biz, and something I love taking advantage of when possible.

💸 TODAY only: Book Breeze flights for $39 one-way

You know what I love more than any other travel hack out there? Dirt-cheap flights. It really doesn’t get any better.

Thankfully, Breeze Airways, a low-cost domestic carrier in the U.S., is offering a flash sale for TODAY ONLY to book all kinds of flights for as little as $39 one-way.

Here are the deets:

• You must book by TODAY at 11:59 PM Eastern time to get the discount

• Discounted rates will be reflected in the search

• Travel can take place between August 30th, 2023 and January 9th, 2024

• There are some blackout dates to be aware of

If you aren’t familiar with Breeze, their flights aren’t always the most convenient. They fly to a lot of smaller cities and more obscure routes.

Still, for such a low price, it could be worth the small inconvenience.

For example, if you live in Boston and need to travel to Cincinnati, you could instead fly on Breeze from Providence, RI, for only $45 one-way.

Like I said, many of these routes are pretty niche.

But if you live in a city with a lot of Breeze flights like Charleston, SC, for example, you could get a lot of value out of this deal.

I found plenty of flights out of Charleston for $39 one-way, which is definitely a great deal.

So if you live in the U.S. and have any domestic travel plans over the next six months, definitely take a look at Breeze today - don’t forget that you only have until midnight tonight to book at these low rates.

✈️ First-class Friday: My new favorite aria

As many of you know, I used to be an opera singer.

As an opera boy, I love me a good aria. Jonas Kaufmann singing La fleur que tu m'avais jetée, Pavarotti singing Ah, si, ben mio, or the legendary Diana Damrau singing Queen of the night.

It’s all incredible.

But there’s a new aria in town. And it puts all of those other arias to shame… (well, maybe not the Pavarotti one… 😉).

I’m talking about the new Cathay Pacific Aria Suite, which is real dark and sultry. Like clutch your pearls dark and sultry 😮

Obvi, I doubt the whole cabin will be that dark, but Cathay is just being an absolute tease right now by withholding a lot of the deets 🙄

Here’s what we do know from the short promo video they released:

• You’ll find these redesigned business-class seats on their Boeing 777-300ERs

• They appear to be in a 1-2-1 configuration

• They look like they’ll have hella storage, privacy doors, and wireless charging

• They’ll be departing for the skies in Q2 of 2024

And… just stay tuned. That’s what Cathay tells us…

🎗️ Donate miles to aid with the Hawaii fires

As many of you know, Hawaii is currently being devastated by really intense wildfires, which is terrible to watch unfold.

First of all, I hope you are all staying safe (both those of you who live there and anyone who may have been visiting).

For everyone else, you can play a part in helping others in need by donating Hawaiian Airlines miles.

Until the end of the month, Hawaiian will match all donated miles up to 30 million miles total.

You’d be surprised how useful airline miles can be right now. Aid workers need to be brought into the state, and residents need to be evacuated, and miles can help all of these people.

As a quick side note, we’ve decided to pause our Hawaii giveaway until the situation begins to improve there. FYI, anybody who’s entered to win is STILL very much eligible, and I’ll let you know as soon as we unpause the giveaway.

Hopefully, the situation begins to improve sooner than later, and I wish everyone on Maui and the rest of Hawaii all the best right now. ❤️

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That’s all for today, folks. I don’t know about you, but I’m almost always happy to go a bit out of my way to save money on flights.

Take care, have a great weekend, and I’ll see you Monday morning.

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