Wyndham Variable Pricing Now Live – Search Your Favorite Hotels
Wyndham had made their rewards program relevant a few years back by making every hotel a flat 15,000 points a night. This brought value to a program that no one cared about before then. Now it will be sliding back into obscurity. I hope that you burned all of your points recently like I did.
Wyndham’s Claims
Here is how Wyndham tried to shine up this turd when they sent out the info about the change.
- Fewer than 200 of our hotels will move to the 30,000 point tier while nearly 3,000 will move to the 7,500 point tier.
- The vast majority of our non-hotel portfolio (20,000+ vacation club resorts and vacation club rentals) remain at the 15,000 point tier. In fact, only three properties are moving to the 30,000 point tier: Margaritaville Vacation Club – Wyndham Rio Mar, Wyndham Clearwater Beach Resort and Wyndham Bonnet Creek Resort.
Those numbers don’t sound bad but you and I both know that meaningful properties in the brand were slim before this change. And you better bet that most, if not all, of them were in those 200 hotels.
The Reality of the Situation
My favorite use of Wyndham points was hotels in Orlando. Even if they tried to charge me for things they shouldn’t or tried to change the cancellation terms on me after the fact. Anyway I looked at the hotels in the area today and the Wyndham Lake Buena Vista Disney Springs is 30K a night as well as Wyndham Bonnet Creek.
The best options left at 15K are the Wyndham Garden property attached to the Lake Buena Vista at Disney Springs and the Wyndham Resort on International Drive. The problem is that these properties are routinely under $100 a night bringing you under 1 cent per point in value.
The best use of Wyndham points may be turning them into Caesars Rewards points and cashing them out at 1 cent a piece on food and drinks now. Speaking of Vegas – Ceasars, Nobu, Planet Hollywood, The Cromwell and Paris are all now 30K a night. You may be able to get some value at Flamingo or Bally’s if it is a busy weekend at 15K per night though.
How To Search
Wyndham put together a search tool so you can search areas based on points. It just was launched so it is a little buggy. If you want to waste a few hours looking for gems or value in this program HERE IS THE LINK.
Conclusion
It is as we all expected. The few desirable properties in the Wyndham just doubled in price for the most part. But hey the Days Inn in B.F.E. under the highway is now only 7,500 points a night so that is a win. I mean it is only $40 cash to begin with but they are adding value here…
If you are heading to New Orleans, Las Vegas, Lake Tahoe, Atlantic City etc. anytime soon I would seriously consider turning you Wyndham Rewards into Caesar’s reward credits. Hopefully you now have Diamond status with Caesars from status matching. You could even use them at one cent a piece on rooms in Vegas and often get a better deal than booking it through Wyndham Rewards depending on the cash prices.
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I had a different outcome. Since I was trying to book at Wyndham Bonnet Creek, a timeshare property , they wouldn’t honor the previous day’s redemption rate…
I’ll keep the Wyndham credit card as long as I’m grandfathered in for 15K anniversary points. If Barclay took that away I would drop the card (anniversary is end of May). It’s my last Barclay card since I dropped the AA card when the 10% miles used rebate went away,
When the system was down last night I called and talked with an account rep. She said she would call back today and she did so a few minutes ago. I now have 4 nights in Clearwater and 4 night at Caesars on LV.
For some reason she couldn’t book the first one from her end for the dates I wanted. So in both cased I booked them myself on the internet site at the 30K rate and she did two 60K “award courtesy” credits. I’m not sure what would happen with those if I did happen to have to cancel either if the bookings.
So in this case it’s a bad mark for the site going down at a crucial time, but a good mark for the customer service I got from the account rep. If I have to cancel I may be in better shape than I would have been had the site been working.
That is interesting on how it would play out if you cancel them. Good thing you had enough points to cover the bookings up front – not sure how they would have worked it if you didn’t.
Probably. However, I do want to keep the vaunted Platinum status that goes with the card for the myriad of benefits it may provide.
Any thoughts on any gems left to redeem at the 15k level? I feel that it’s probably best to move the max points to TR.
I have not had a chance to look into the award properties in depth much and I didn’t use Wyndham a ton to begin with so I only know of a few that used to be a great deal.
Barclay’s wouldn’t pro-rate the annual fee on my recently renewed card, but did offer me an extra additional point on gas/grocery purchases for the next few months. Better than nothing.
Could you downgrade it to a lower annual fee option to get some of the money back?
I was in the process of using up my last Wyndham points last night when in the middle of the booking the price went up from 15,000 to 30,000 (Viva Azteca AI in Playa del Carmen). Oh well. I didn’t think to bother with talking to customer service. Too bad they sold Knights Inn, can’t look forward to using my points there at the lovely I-675 in Saginaw location.
Haha I used to drive by that location all the time Bob – that is hilarious!
I was also in the middle of booking last night. I called this AM and they fixed it for me at the old rate.
Awesome – thanks for the DP. Wyndham with a customer friendly assist…say it ain’t so! 🙂
Flood of cancelations coming to the Barclay’s Wyndham visa. I’ll be canceling in about 4-5 months.
Yeah this will hurt Barclay imo
Thx for the new search tool. I’m having a hard time finding, though, if 2 br’s are now 60k WRs? Used to price out points by number of rooms but now not sure.
I am not sure Pam – I doubt they changed the set up on that so I would say it is still per room but that is just a guess.