184. Hotel Planner Points: How to Earn Points for Any Event
Point Me To First Class
This episode of 'Point Me To First Class' explores the lesser-known concept of hotel planner points—rewards given to individuals who organiz
Key takeaways
- Planner points are often overlooked but can significantly boost travel reward earnings without requiring a credit card.
- Even non-professional event planners—like business owners or individuals organizing personal events—can qualify for planner points.
Main topics
- Hotel planner points
- Negotiating hotel contracts
Notable quotes
"Everything is negotiable and you won't get something unless you ask for it."
Conclusion
Planner points represent a powerful, underutilized opportunity to earn travel
Transcript preview
Speaker 1 (0:01) Welcome to Point Me to First Class, the only show for employed professionals, entrepreneurs, and business owners who are looking to optimize their higher-than-average expenses to travel the world. I'm your host, Devin Gimbel, and I believe that your expenses are your greatest untapped asset, if you know how to leverage them. Ready to dive into the world of credit card points and miles so you can travel more, travel better, and travel often? Let's get started. Speaker 1 (0:29) Welcome back to the podcast, everybody. Today, we're going to be looking at an entire category of points available to you that you might not even know you could earn. They're called planner points, and they can allow you to earn hotel points simply for being the person responsible for bringing an event to a hotel. So if you're planning an event at a hotel, whether that's a business conference, a company retreat, a wedding, a family reunion, or even a relatively small gathering, planner points can significantly increase your points earning potential. Today's guest, Rachel Posada-Fletcher, is going to walk us through exactly how Hotel Planner Points work. Rachel is a lifelong traveler, points and miles enthusiast, and seasoned event manager based in Seattle. She grew up traveling extensively as a standby kid thanks to her dad's career with United Airlines, and eventually she found her way into points and miles as a way to continue traveling with her own family. Her professional background in event management has also given her years of experience sourcing hotels. reviewing contracts and negotiating events, which puts her in a unique position to teach us about a part of hotel loyalty programs that doesn't get nearly as much attention as earning points from hotel stays. In today's conversation, Rachel is going to introduce us to the world of Planner Points. what they are, the types of events that can potentially earn them, who actually qualifies to receive those points, and just how many potential layers of points earning can exist around a single event. We're also going beyond the points themselves and talking about something that can have an enormous impact on the overall value you get from an event, the hotel contract. Rachel shares what you need to understand before agreeing to a hotel's proposal, where there may be room to negotiate, and why the timing of those negotiations matters. We talk about some of the things you may ask for beyond points, how to approach those conversations even if you've never negotiated an event contract before, and some of the mistakes that can cause you to leave valuable rewards or benefits on the table. And you absolutely do not need to be a professional event planner for this conversation to be relevant to you. If you own a business, organize events through your work. volunteer with an organization that hosts gatherings or have a wedding or other personal event somewhere in your future, knowing that these opportunities exist gives you the chance to take advantage of them when the right expense eventually comes along. Because maximizing your expenses isn't always about finding the perfect credit card to swipe. Sometimes it starts with knowing what else you can ask for. So let's get into it with Rachel now. Hi, Rachel. Thank you so much for joining me today. I am so fascinated by this topic because it's something that I do not have a lot of background and experience in, so I'm excited to learn from you. And I think this is going to be something that's going to open a lot of eyes for people listening to the podcast as well. So thank you so much for joining me today. How are you doing? Great. Thank Speaker 2 (3:12) you so much for having me, Devin. It is such a pleasure to be here with you. You have been in my ears for about two years now. I've been listening to your podcast every single week, every Monday. And so it is a pleasure to Speaker 1 (3:25) be here with you. Thank you. Absolutely. Now, Rachel, tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got into Points and Miles and how you ended up in event management, because that's going to become very relevant for our conversation today. Well, I have been traveling since I was a... Speaker 2 (3:39) teeny tiny baby. And so that really influenced my desire to travel. I'm actually a standby kid. My dad works for United Airlines and has worked there for many decades. And so I grew up flying standby as a kid. And so I was very privileged in that I got to go to many different places, New York, Hawaii, London, Australia. So We were able to travel for nearly free because of those travel benefits. I traveled a lot back and forth between Mississippi and California, where both of my parents were. And so it's just been one of these things that's always been a part of my life. I did have those non-rev travel benefits until my last day in college, and I graduated, and that was no longer available to me. So I knew that in my adulthood, I was going to have to figure out how to afford to travel because I still... Wanted to explore the world. And so once my husband and I got married, we opened our very first credit card and his dad told us all about it. Here's this USAA American Express credit card. You can put all of your expenses on this and earn one point per dollar with this credit card. And that's what we did. And we just thought that that was the best thing ever, right? Every few years, we could afford to fly round trip to Europe. At one point, we stayed a whole week at the Outrigger Reef in Waikiki. But in the time span of 10 years, that was two specific travel opportunities that we had. And so the style of travel that I like to do is not cheap. And so we were finding that we were just trying to save five, $7,000 for our two week trips. And it took us a couple of years to do that. I was like, how do I figure out how to make this happen? I see people traveling all the time. I'm on Instagram. I see people traveling business class for $5.60. What the heck is this? Right? And it wasn't until 2023 that I had a conversation with my very good friend Margot. And she is a small business owner. She works for herself. And she told me about credit cards and... opening credit cards strategically to earn welcome offers and doing it in very quick succession to earn lots and lots of points. She also told me about business credit cards and the 524 rule, which took months to wrap my brain around, really. But once I had that conversation with her, I said, you know what? I'm going to do it. I'm just going to open up another credit card. I'm going to put my USAA American Express in a little drawer and we're not going to use this anymore. I opened an Amex Gold. There was an elevated welcome offer and I was like, oh, okay. I opened this one credit card and like my credit score didn't tank. And I was fascinated. I would talk to my husband about it and he was like, you know what? You just do this. You don't need to involve me and my social security number in this scheme of yours. And I was like, you know what? That's fine. I will just, I'll figure it out by myself. But once we took that very first trip and we had our entire hotel paid for and our flight paid for, he was like, oh, okay. All right, I get it. And now I'm on board. And since then we've earned almost 2.5 million points. I've kept track in my Travel Freely app. And we are on track to earn a million points again this year. So I've come a long way from standby to now being able to fly business class for nearly free. And I figured it out all by myself. Speaker 1 (7:34) And I think that makes so much sense. So many of us, I think, hit a point where. you know, in our experience, the amount of travel we want to do or the type of travel we want to do is no longer compatible with the disposable income that we are willing or able to spend on that travel. And so then the problem solving of what else is out there, what other opportunities might be here for me exists. So I can relate not to all of the specifics of your story, but definitely to elements of your story. But that's kind of not. the entirety of things, right? Talk to me about how you ended up in event management. And then specifically, once you did, what did you discover as a really unique points earning opportunity that more people could be taking advantage of, even if that's not their profession? I Speaker 2 (8:17) think that event management is one of those things where if you know you want to be an event manager or you want to be in the hospitality industry, you know that from maybe by the time you're in high school. or you figure this out in college. Otherwise, it's a profession that a lot of people fall into just by accident. So I did not go to school for event management. I was a teacher for a few years, and this was something that I fell into because I took a role as a research coordinator at an education policy center here in Seattle. In that role, I was helping plan our yearly convenings. I had no idea what I was doing. I just knew that, oh, okay, there's a lot of logistics involved. We are trying to figure out lots of complicated room blocks and room sets and content for agendas. And, oh, I get to travel while doing this to go execute these events. I was hooked. Like, you're going to pay me to travel and do all these things. Great. Yes. On board. And after a few years, I started realizing that I was really good