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Old Jan 19, 2020, 5:58 pm
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sdsearch
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Join Date: Jan 2005
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Originally Posted by good_boy_1234
There are many hotels credit cards in the market with all kind of sign up bonuses but the redemption value differs considerably. Some gives you over 70K bonus but need more than 30K per room plus fees, while some you can get rooms for as low as 5K points inclusive. What do you guys recommend for someone who wants to establish a history with a hotel chain? Also, any particular cards that provide you a breakfast/wifi for free?
The redemption rate varies considerably within each hotel program, and the way it varies from one location to another varies a lot from one program to the next. For example, Hilton is somewhat related to cash price but with a hotel-specific cap for each hotel, and some hotels have a much lower cap than others for some unknown reason. Meanwhile, at Marriott the redemption rate has little or nothing to do with the cash rate, and only has to do with how popular that hotel is for points redemptions. And thus expensive hotels in parts of the world where very few people redeem points can need very few points in the Marriott program, while conversely low-priced hotels where redemption are popular in other seasons may have very high redemptions at Marriott. So it all depends very specifically where you're going to go, and also whether you want just a "good" property or only an "aspirational" one.

Meanwhile, those 5K points hotels tend to be scattered far and wide in the programs that I'm familiar with that have them.

The only cards that I can think of that give you breakfast for free are the ones for Hilton: The Surpass which gives you Gold status for $95 AF but with few offsets, and the Aspire which gives you Diamond status for $450 AF but with several kinds of offsets which may or may not lower the "effective" AF below $95 or even below $0 for you.

All other hotel cards that I'm familiar with give you too low a status to get free breakfast (except at those brands that give complimentary breakfast to everyone who stays there).

However, most hotel programs give you free wifi as long as you sign up as a member of the hotel program and book your hotel stay through the hotel program website or app. So you don't need a card for free wifi at most hotel programs. (However, the Hilton cards mentioned above may give you free "premium" wifi at some hotels.)
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