What Hotel Elite Status Actually Gets You

Travel Better with Chris - Yellow Productions Podcast

Host Chris explores the tangible value of hotel elite status across major loyalty programs including Marriott, Hyatt, Hilton, and IHG. He br

Key takeaways

High-tier status can lead to significant room upgrades, such as Chris's experience at the W Sydney Hotel moving from a base room to a two-room suite.
Executive lounge access serves as a private oasis for snacks and work, particularly valuable in Asian properties like the JW Marriott Kuala Lumpur.

Main topics

Hotel Elite Status Perks
Marriott Bonvoy Membership Tiers

Notable quotes

I was really able to unlock more comfortable travel when I figured out the whole Hotel Elite status game.

Conclusion

Achieving elite hotel status is a powerful tool for travelers looking

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Hey fellow explorers, a frequently asked question that I get here on Yellow Productions is people asking me if earning elite status with hotel chains is worth it. And in order to answer that question, I have to talk about all the things that hotel elite status gets you, which is what I'm going to be covering in this episode of the Travel Tips by Chris podcast. I'm going to share with you 20 things that you'll get earning hotel elite status in general across the... four big major hotel chains, Marriott, Hyatt, Hilton, and IHG. And then after we go through those general 20, I'm going to take a deep dive in each one of those programs, share with you the pros and cons of each one, and let you know which one of the big hotel elite programs is my favorite. And so in this video, we're going to be talking about the... perks, the privileges that you get for staying in hotels a lot or being high-level elites in these programs. I'm going to focus less on the actual redeeming points for hotels because that's a given in all of them. And people kind of recognize that that's one of the things you can get. Like, if you stay in a lot of hotels, you can redeem for free nights. But what about all the other things? And honestly, I feel like in my journey as a traveler, I was really able to unlock more comfortable travel when I figured out the whole Hotel Elite status game. Okay, so we're going to start with number one thing that Hotel Elite status gets you is room upgrades. One might say this is the holy grail of Hotel Elite status. after free rooms, getting better rooms. And when you have high tier elite status, you're not just hoping for a room with a slightly better view of the parking lot, but you are hoping, angling, and receiving rooms that would cost you multiple times what you would have paid for the base room that you are in. And so this room right here, this is a room at the... W Sydney Hotel, the W Hotel in Sydney, Australia. And I booked the cheapest room in the hotel. And as a Marriott Titanium Elite member, I was upgraded to this amazing two-room suite. This room is just the living room. And honestly, there are some people who say, well, Chris, I don't need a big hotel room. I'm just there to sleep. In that case, why are you even here? Why are you here on this stream? If that's you, then you just sleep in it and you don't care if it's nice and you don't care about the perks. Go stay at the Circus Circus Manor Suites when you go to Las Vegas. That hotel is for you. This video is all about people who like nice hotel experiences and being able to unpack and come into a room like this to enjoy your stay with sweeping views of the Bay and Sydney. Whole different ballgame. And so we're going to dive into more details about room upgrades and suite upgrades as we go. But as the programs go, the kind of higher elite status you get, more complimentary upgrades you'll get to. Better views, higher floors, those sort of things. And then many of them also have these redeemable upgrade certificates that you can guarantee and upgrade into a certain suite. But with everything, there's some gotchas, and we'll talk about those as program-specific. Michael says, that room looks like it's missing a lot of furniture. Yeah, you know, I feel like that was the modern look the W's going for. And it's kind of a weird shape, so you can only put so much furniture. But this big silver thing on the side... It was actually like a bar, you know, so that was pretty cool. Okay. And let's go on to number two. The second thing that hotel elite status gets you is free or reduced price breakfast. If you got good status or good programs, free breakfast and others, some credits towards breakfast. So why is this important? Because. Hotel breakfasts at higher-end chains can cost a fortune. Think like $30 to $50 a person at higher-end properties. And so to be able to get those for free... not just for one person in the room, but for multiple people in the room, can absolutely make a big deal. Think about it. If I'm going with my wife and my daughter, $50 breakfast times three, that's $150 a day of benefit, which honestly might have been the price that we were paying just for the room. And when you're traveling with a family, or frankly even on business, just being able to walk downstairs and get breakfast. And I'll have to pay for it. It's really amazing. Because there is, you know, you can go to Denny's. You can go to the International House of Pancakes. You can go down the street and go to Starbucks. But it takes more time. You might have to wait. And so I'm not wearing the shirt. Do I have the shirt over here? Do I have my I like breakfast buffet shirt? No, I have it someplace else. I have it pinned as the shopping item to this stream. But I like breakfast buffets. And I like to. Have a good start to the morning. And so we'll talk more about breakfast buffets as we go. But this was the breakfast buffet at the W Hotel at Sydney. And honestly, every morning like this, just a wonderful start. Some chains better breakfast. Some chains worse breakfast. I'll tell you those when we dive into the details of each one. Soham, he puts his thing out there, which is high elite status is the best. Marriott is a close second. We'll see. what I say. Derek says, Chris, it's not just you. Everyone loves a good quality hotel breakfast. Kathy says, I love me a free breakfast. And this is the point. Free quality hotel breakfast. Because you can stay at the Residence Inn or you can stay at the Hyatt Place and there's a free breakfast for everybody at those hotels. But not as good. It's not as good as the hotel that you're staying at that charges. $50 for breakfast, and then you get that for free. That's this. This is a whole different ballgame. And so Michael is going to say, well, how does that free breakfast at some of the extended stay hotels compare to the higher end? Yeah, I feel like a typical extended stay hotel breakfast is very inexpensive for the hotel to put out. The eggs are instant eggs. The French toast, if they have it, is microwaved. There are... few hot items and they're the same hot items. They're not going to have anything that takes a long time to make. They're not going to have any pastries that are fresh. They're not going to have any fruit that is really fresh. You might be like, well, Chris, cantaloupe or honeydew and bananas are fresh. Those, okay, fine, maybe. But they're not going to have strawberries. They're not going to have raspberries. And so At the higher end hotels where you get the paid $50 breakfast or the free breakfast for your elite steds, you get a breakfast like this where if we make this bigger, what is on this plate? Well, at the W Hotel Sydney in Australia, because Australia has a lot to do, a lot in common, well, you know, part of the Commonwealth, you get the full English. British breakfast there with the sausage, the mushroom, the tomato, the beans. But then back in the back, we've got an Eggs Benedict. And then over there, we've got some fancy danishes. One of my favorite hotel breakfasts that I've gotten for free was when we were staying at the... Park Hyatt, Washington, D.C. as a globalist member, which is the top tier in the Hyatt program. And we could get like crab eggs benedict for breakfast. We could get bone marrow as part of our breakfast. When we ordered orange juice, they came and they squeezed it at the table. Two people came to squeeze the orange juice and it was all free. Chris, was it free because you were paying for your room? I was paying for my room. We were there in January, February. The roommates were really low. We were getting a really good value on that free breakfast at the Park Hyatt, Washington, D.C. And there is a conversation here, and this is an important point, which is the Phantom Traveler shares that IHG International Hotels are much better than domestic, especially in Japan. I honestly, I think... in general, of these big chains, Marriott, Hyatt, Hilton, IHG, Holiday Inn Group, most, honestly, their international properties, particularly in Asia, are often better than their ones in North America, particularly when it comes to elite benefits. But there is that. Like, you know, the lounge, the concierge lounge, we're going to talk about this for number three. So why don't we just move on to that. Number three is executive lounge access or concierge lounge access. We'll talk about that in a moment. What is one of these lounges? This is one of my huge unlocks in elite status when I figured out, like, what is the concierge lounge. One of my friends took me into one before I had no idea. Never, never knew frequent travelers would go into these things. But the concierge lounge, executive lounge. In domestic properties in the USA, Canada is not as good as they are in most parts of Asia. So, okay. So what is the executive lounge? You can, for a high-level elite member in all these programs, one part of it can be executive lounge access at the hotel chains in that brand. that have lounges. And you can think about it as your private oasis away from the crowds where you can grab breakfast, you can grab midday snacks, you can grab evening hors d'oeuvres, you can grab dessert at night. And it's all... It's all free. That's where you would get it. Or you could maybe just think of it as a quiet spot to come in and do some work on your laptop. This right here is the executive lounge at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco. This building, it used to be a rotating restaurant at the top that was defunct. They couldn't get enough people to come up and eat at that rotating restaurant. And so they turned it into the executive concierge lounge. And so regular people who stay at the hotel. regular people that weren't, uh, that didn't have high end elite status or didn't buy into a room that had access to the lounge, then wouldn't be able to come up here. Um, but those who did would be able to come up here, get breakfast and enjoy a, enjoy a nice view of San Francisco in the round as it, uh, rotated. So I really enjoyed that as a great way to start the morning and to go get some, uh, dessert at night. Um, we, this is honestly, if I have a single favorite perk of hotel-y status, it is the executive lounges because it's also nice. You know, you travel with a six-year-old daughter. She wants some hot chocolate or she wants some milk or she wants a cookie just to be able to go a couple floors down or just down the hallway and get a hot chocolate from the coffee machine, not have to wait in line, not worry about the gift shop is open, where the supermarket is, uh, is clutch. Be able to go get some bottled water, be able to go get some drinks. And I do like it. when I'm traveling solo as a place to go work. I might spend some time over there having some tea, having some snacks, have my laptop there, do some email, do some video editing in the lounge instead of if I had a small room, in my small room. If I had that suite at the W in Sydney, for sure, I'd be enjoying that suite. Ivy says, does this still spin? So it broke, but now that it's the executive lounge, they've actually rehabilitated it and this lounge does spin again at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco. Point Traveler says his favorite lounges are the Ritz-Carlton lounges, and their lounges in Asia are extra. insane. Michael says, do you feel that hotel lounges have become overrun by people like airport lounges have? I think it depends on the chain. And so we're going to talk about this more too as we go. But I feel like Hilton lounges have become overrun by people because Hilton lounges, you can get the Hilton Aspire credit card for a $595 annual fee and that'll give you Hilton Diamond status, which will give you access to lounges in the Hilton chain family of hotels. And so because people can just buy in, there's a lot of people that have bought in. I generally don't feel the same way about the Marriott lounges and the Hyatt lounges because you generally just can't go get a Marriott credit card or a Hyatt credit card that's immediately going to get you access into those lounges, particularly the Hyatt ones. Okay. Speaker 1 (12:38) But the other, I feel like, just unlock in the lounge. And you might go and say, well, Chris, if you're in, you know, some fancy city like Bangkok, why would you waste your stomach space eating in the lounge? Why wouldn't you go someplace else? And this goes back on the Asia hotels. Honestly, they do, like, amazing food in the lounge. Where you're like, there's like... 10 things in Bangkok I've wanted to try, and they're like all there for breakfast or evening snacks in the lounge. And so it's a great way to sample a lot of different things too. The JW Marriott in Singapore has an amazing lounge as well. Slick Silver, I agree with this one. I really like the Conrad lounges. Conrad is the high-end chain in the Hilton, one of the higher-end chains in the Hilton portfolio. And yes, the Conrad lounges are... Very nice. Databetic also enjoys a free breakfast. There's some comment in the chat from the Phantom Traveler and Dining with Derek about the Intercontinental, the strings in Tokyo, and that that was a nice one. But Derek says, I've noticed the rates have gone up a lot. Okay. The one of the big perk number four, hotel elite perk number four is late checkout. And if you've got a late flight home, nothing really puts a cramp in your last day than an 11 a.m. checkout because, well, you can't really. Enjoy that much of a day because you got to check out at 11. Like you got a beach hotel. Like wouldn't it be nice to go to the beach, have lunch on the beach, then come back and shower, then check out. But you got that 11 a.m. checkout time. Well, you could check out later, but they're going to charge you not if you're a high-level elite member. And it depends on the program, but elite status can often guarantee late checkout, sometimes 2 p.m., sometimes as late as 4 p.m. We have really valued our late checkout when we go to Tokyo. We've been talking about Japan. And when we go to Tokyo, the flights that come back from Tokyo to the USA generally are evening flights. Think 6 or 7 o'clock. And so having 11 a.m. checkout, kind of a drag because... Check out, then maybe you go see the day, and then you get hot and you want to shower before you get on your flight, before you get checked out, and you can't. Maybe you want to change your clothes, but you can't. And so having a 4 p.m. late checkout with a 7 o'clock flight, super amazing, because you can enjoy the day, come back to your room, shower off, change into your plain clothes, and then get your 4 o'clock checkout. The fifth... Speaker 1 (15:25) Great hotel elite status perk is early check-in. This is on the flip side. Arriving at your hotel at noon after a long flight someplace, only to be told that check-in isn't until 3 or 4 o'clock is really a drag. And if you have elite status, you will generally get priority early check-in, which honestly can... Another one mean the difference of having a good arrival day at your destination or a really exhausting day at your destination. And maybe while I start with noon, because maybe that's what happens a lot, this is one that happens to me a lot coming from California to Europe. I tend to end up in Europe really early in the morning. So when I go to London, when I go to Paris, my flights are often getting in at like... six in the morning, five, six in the morning. And so I'm ending up at my hotel at like 7am. And then the same thing happened to me in Australia. And I travel with people who don't always have elite status. And, you know, but when I turn up at the, uh, the Marriott in Paris, or when I turn up at the Marriott in London as a elite titanium member, guess what? 6am, they've got a room for me. It does help that I If I'm getting there that early, I will probably have called them before. And I've said, hey, on early arrival, if there's any way you could like save room for me, that'd be great. But generally my other colleagues or friends that don't have the elite status, they're not getting in the rooms. And so I'm a nice guy. I'll let them, you know, if they need to store their stuff in my room or something like that. They don't get to nap on my bed though. That's a fee. There's a fee for that.