Originally Posted by
notquiteaff
Not if you look at the effective AF. If you are able to use the $250 airline fee credit (and it shouldn’t be difficult for someone aspiring to top hotel status) and the $250 resort credit (again….), you are already earning money just by having the card. (there is also the $100 Waldorf/Conrad credit that I have never used and mentally exclude).
So, I'm going to disagree here. It is
very possible to have a travel pattern that generally just doesn't "encounter" airline fees (e.g. someone who generally pays for F/J up-front and gets
those bells and whistles thrown in to begin with, and who has status which covers most SDCs).
Originally Posted by
notquiteaff
That is a lot of spend for many, and you’d better have plenty of Hyatt stays at properties where status matters to enjoy the benefits of Glob. Would be interesting to look at the opportunity cost and how that could be used to just buy the benefits (breakfast? Lounge access?) as needed when desired.
I mean, there's the non-trivial benefit of the points themselves as well. For the sake of discussion, I'd assume that 1/3 of the spend is "regularly" bonused to 2x points and another $2500 is Hyatt-oriented spend (hotel nights and food/beverage). So call it 40,000 points off of the first batch [20k*2]; 10,000 points off of the second [2,500*4]; and 37,500 off of the rest. So that's 87,500 points. Basically, you'd have just under six nights per year at a Cat 4 off of the card spend [card+base earnings], plus two off of the consumer card...so that's probably about $2000 in benefits if used reasonably "efficiently" (since getting $250 in benefits from a Category 3-4 award should be quite doable...a lot of those can
easily land at $200+/night plus taxes).