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Welcome to Freakimilers Coffee Break, where we focus on a single topic related to miles and points.

And each coffee break is limited to 20 minutes or less or your money back.

Today's coffee break, city devalues hotel transfers.

Boo!

For many years, Chase was the only transferable points program with a valuable hotel option, namely Hyatt.

Later Bilt came along, and then there were two transferable points programs that were valuable for hotels because Hyatt points are worth a lot.

So there were and still are other transferable points programs that transfer to different hotels, but most of those situations bring you poor value

for your transferable points because most of those transfers are one-to-one, and most hotel

points other than Hyatt are worth less than a penny each. And so it's like, you know, it's worse than cashing out your transferable points for a penny each and so you so it's like you know it's worse than

cashing out your transferable points for a penny each even Hilton where where

Amex transfers one to two Hilton points tend to be worth less than a half a cent

each so it's still worse than than cashing out at a penny per point so So again, you know, Chase and Bill were the only

good options because Hyatt points were so valuable. And then City changed that in recent years

because they started offering to double your points when you transfer to choice. So

city points, each city point became two choice points.

And even more exciting, they started quadrupling points transferred to preferred hotels to their I prefer program.

So you got for every one city point transfer, you've got four I prefer points.

And so that was an exciting set of changes in the city ecosystem.

And still many people, including most of us in Freedomail, are still preferred transferring to Hyatt, but this was a great alternative.

And then recently Hyatt announced award price changes that are coming up starting in May, I think.

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