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Old Nov 16, 2011, 2:28 pm
  #9  
sdsearch
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Join Date: Jan 2005
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Originally Posted by needsake
I honestly don't have a specific goal in mind, but thinking about it I think airline points in general would be my preferred thing. Once I get there, I don't care where I stay.
Well, if you mean that last sentence exteremly literally (as in you don't care if you have to sleep on the street ), then you're all set.

However, once you start traveling with these miles, you'll find that sometimes you're in a place where every possible place to stay (even the not-so-nice ones) is extremely expensive, yet there are hotels available for a very reasonable number of hotel points (in one hotel program or another).

While there are some people who collect hotel points to stay in fancier hotels, there's a number of us who collect hotel points mostly to make stays simply affordable in most of the places we fly to (just like we use miles on expensive flights but pay for cheap flights with money).

In fact, if you're not after flying longhaul international in business (or first) class, then it's not even clear that miles are the best thing to collect. The thing that makes miles so valuable is that if you use them for business or first, it only costs 2x to 3x the miles as economy, but if you try to pay for that kind of seat, it easily costs 5x to 10x what the economy seat costs.

That's why miles aren't as good a value when only redeemed for economy seats.

But sometimes hotel points are a great value even when you're not looking for luxury at all, when they simply get you a room for points in a city where the rooms are super expensive with money.

Having said that, collecting meaningful numbers of points from credit card spend, in a program where it's easy to get good redemption values, that's trickier...
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