Originally Posted by
Superorb
Also the $95 AF needs to be factored in as well, so you're essentially "buying" a free weekend night for $295 (plus whatever it costs you to MS $10k if you did it that way). Still a nice discount at somewhere like the HKG Conrad or Samui.
That is why folks should really look at their future travel needs to determine what works best for them. If one has no plan to stay at HKG Conrad (a highly overrated property in my opinion, including the Exec Lounge.) or Samui, then where one could get back the "investment", or rather, in truer accounting term "dead cost" (the annual fee and the MS cost) plus the "opportunity cost" (the 2% cash back), plus the limitation of the cert could only be used for weekend stay, outside a handful of locations in the world?
In a way, the current state of hotel cards require you to do future trip planning BEFORE you decide what cards to get so to fund those future stays. You can no longer blindly get a card and think you would be able to use the perks in the future.