WHICH HOTELS DO THEY HAVE?

Wyndham Rewards is the frequent guest program of several different hotel chains.

The largest presence is in the USA with over 6500 hotels.  This can come in handy if you are connecting to an overseas flights and want a budget hotel for the night near the airport.  The odds are great that Wyndham will have several hotels near most major airports with free shuttles.

They also have a number of hotels overseas, some of which are in countries that will attract eco-travelers and birders.  I have highlighted these in yellow.

HOW MANY POINTS DO YOU NEED?

It varies widely depending on the chain.  Hotels overseas tend to be more expensive than those in the USA.

For example, LAX has several hotels all ranging between 14,000 to 16,000 redemption.

Same hotels if you pay cash/credit – notice that they are not expensive!  Not a good use of points!

Now let’s look at Brazil as an example.  Most people will use Sao Paulo as an entry or exit point for Brazil and I do recommend spending your last night here to make sure you don’t miss your connection home.  Linhares is prime birding country but there are better options to stay which I will be blogging about later.  The Parana property is near Curitiba which also has good birding in the area.

HOW DO YOU EARN POINTS?

1.  Stay at Wyndham chain hotels.

2.  Get the credit card.

 

3.  Rent a car.

4.  Use their other partners.  Out of these 3, the rate for flowers is pretty bad compared to other programs.  The Energy one doesn’t look very good either.  The Liberty Mutual quote can get you 500 points within a month if you are trying to top up to another level.

WHAT IS THE BEST USE OF WYNDHAM REWARDS POINTS?

The best use, especially for eco-travelers is transferring them to an airline.  Why?  Because in most countries, the Wyndham properties aren’t too expensive and Wyndham often has bonus promos going on.  You can acquire a lot of points very quickly.  I will blog about any promos that come up.   Here is the list of redemption to airline miles partners.  3 of our top 8 frequent flyer programs are available as transfer partners – American, United and US Airways.

Airline mileage transfer rates
8,000 Wyndham Rewards points = 3200 airline miles
17,500 Wyndham Rewards points = 7000 airline miles
30,000 Wyndham Rewards points = 12,000 airline miles

WYNDHAM’S SECRET WEAPON

This is not a hack or a trick, it is in the T&Cs of the Wyndham hotel program.  What this means, is when there is a very lucrative promo running and you don’t live near any Wyndham hotels, you can simply book ANY hotel participating in the promo, give your credit card to pay for it and then simply not show up!  I have seen some really good promos in the past such as one where you get 16,000 bonus points for staying at specified hotels that could be booked for around $60.  This gives a huge discount to buying airline miles if you maximize such a promo and transfer as I said above!  I will let you know when such promos are running.

IN SUMMARY

I recommend that eco-tourists pay cash (credit card) if they are staying at a Wyndham hotel, accumulate the points and transfer to an airline.  The hotels that we would be using are generally not expensive so the airline miles are a much better value.