Hotel cards – Best Western MasterCard with free sign up points!!!

Long time no posts here! 😀

Mainly because we have stayed true to our ideals of not posting garbage and wasting your time. There is really nothing exciting happening here – whether you are a freebie or veteran or just casual user of credit cards and using them wisely for some good travel. The usual cards that are listed in the good credit cards section above still stay valid. But finally, I found something that was exciting and not being covered in other blogs.

The Best Western Inn credit card.

The best western inn is a canada based inn. Similar to holiday inn or hampton inn, it is distributed pretty well geographically and can be also found in places such as Hawaii or Grand Canyon or New York area among others. So what is the big news out here? Welll till May of this year, there was no Best Western credit card to speak off for US residents. Canadian residents had some Mastercard which was giving some rewards points. The points credit and redemption with Best Western is pretty aggressive to say the least. They market their offers and rooms pretty well. If you stay there, you will get automatically enrolled and you might get multiple loyalty cards till you sign up in their website. The credits are quickly stacked similar to Marriott and in any many ways their redemption is opposite to that of Hilton HHonors which have greatly devalued their programs in recent times.

The hotels and rooms in Best Western Family themselves are pretty decent. In many places such as New York or California or Western US or in the rugged middle, you are there to witness and view things and not necessarily to enjoy the hospitality. You may want a room to essentially sleep for 8 hours and get fresh in another hour. So this 9 hour is essentially what you need a room for. For such cases, I think Best western inns are good. They are safe, secure, neatly staffed, good rooms, free breakfast and internet, not much hassles and bells and whistles. Their checkin / checkout is pretty quick and smooth. And their hotel family is vast – like any of the major chains. For more information, you can directly visit their site: https://www.bestwestern.com/rewards/

The one drawback holding me back to endorse this chain was lack of credit card. I had stayed in this hotel chain multiple times and had overall good experience. The credit card missing was a sore point. However, I checked recently and they have tied up with First Bank to offer a great credit card.

Direct link to the credit card is here: https://www.firstbankcard.com/bestwestern/landingpage/rewards/index.html

As mentioned earlier and through out this site and blog posts, we are not affilated with them or any other credit card issuer or bank per se. We do not get paid a dime for the above referrals and we are solely ad supported. However, if you do use the above links, maybe the stature of this website will grow and we can put in more useful info if such info arises.

Back to this card, it is a neat and nifty card – reminding of how Amex was once upon a  time and how Chase gives some good card offers. It is not some random paid card which gives you some free nights on days which you dont want and no free nights are available for the nights you want. It is way better than US Bank/Club Carlson family in terms of redemption offers, the credit card sign up bonus and the offers that they have put on. The cards are neatly classified into secured, personal, premier and business. On the free version, you get a 20,000 sign up points – enough for the best western inn in waikiki beach in Honolulu, Oahu, Hawaii. Then there is $59 annual fee for the premium card which gives you 70,000 points and more than makes up for the annual fee. I would strongly recommend this version of the card. Then there is the secured card and the business card with 20,000 points.

The premium card has its annual fee waived for its first year. From second year, you pay the $59 fee. The bonus points are creatively given in stages rather than just sign up bonus or spending x amount of money. For the premium card, it is

25,000 bonus points after you spend $2,500 in first 3 billing cycles²+25,000 bonus points after you spend total of $5,000 in the first 6 billing cycles²+20,000 bonus points when you spend at least $10,000 during each 12 billing cycle period.²

It is a nice mastercard to have in your wallet. The points add up quite quickly as do the rewards and the positively oriented redemption options. The spend of $10,000 does sound daunting but you are gaining quite a bit of points in return.

For similar cards in this space having such creatively staged rewards, Chase BA or American Express cards, the spending of such money does net you points in the region of about 50,000 to 100, 000. I would certainly rate Best Western points on the same scale as say SPG points, given the redemption rates in the big hotels of Hawaii or CA or NY region is pretty similar. The east coast and west coast spread of these hotel family brands are quite common and so is the availability and the point scale and category in terms of geographical locations near major parks and cities and beaches.

Going into the hotel cards space a bit, this is a very offey space. Not quite exciting as Airlines cards space. If you are a newbie, certainly accumulate airlines miles and then go for the Hotels space.

In the hotels credit cards, the big ones are Hyatt, SPG – both of them are pretty good hotels and nice points etc. Best Western Inn/ IHG family brands such as Holiday inn etc./ Hilton family such as Double tree, Hampton Inn etc. – they are all good. Better off applying this cards in anticipation of your travel. I wish they start a Airbnb card with safer guesthouses and something that is very rudimentary. As outlined in the start of the post, most people just need those 8 or 9 hours to replinish their energy levels, recharge themselves and move on. There is really no point in having anything other than basic hotel accomodations. Like other industries, hotels and likely they call themselves, hospitality services, have come to rely more upon customer services since real estate, room saturation etc have all played. Add to that, the younger millenials are gravitating towards Airbnb, couchsurfing and something similar where they share space with one another in exchange for rented services or shared services and you have a very tight industry with already tight margins who have to manage their costs in an ultra competitive market.

For a traveller, I would suggest pool in points from all major hotel brands, that would give you the flexiblity to choose and go ahead swiftly with what is available and focus more on the fun part – planning on the actual travel and executing it! The major hotel brands that offer credit cards are SPG, Hyatt, Best Western, IHG, Hilton, Club Carlson, Wyndham.. and of course there is the whole bunch of inns and chains and the simplest way is to search them in online maps, go their site, check out and apply for credit cards. Likely you might come ahead by 70 or 80 bucks. In the case of biggies such as SPG you might well come in ahead by about 400 to 500 bucks based on the cities.