I wanted to share a personal story from this week, not because the ability to leverage miles and points resulted in some luxurious dream trip (those are good too!), but because sometimes there are situations where the alternatives all stink and knowing how to find a way to make it happen can really save the day.
When I think about what the opposite of a luxurious hotel stay looks like, I think this might be it; the Days Inn by Wyndham Penn State, in State College, Pennsylvania. So why am I so excited to have booked this property with points?? Let me explain:
Reason for the Trip
Our daughter, who will be playing soccer and attending Penn State University in 2026, was invited by their amazing coaching staff to visit campus this fall with family along with the other committed players in her class to spend time together and attend a women’s soccer game and a men’s football game that weekend. As a big sports fan, this was especially exciting for me but as the family travel planner it presented a major dilemma.
Our Challenge
Supply and demand. Like many college towns with small populations and big-time football programs, State College has limited hotel options and over 100,000 people who will be attending the football game. Friday and Saturday nights with home games experience the equivalent of Uber “surge pricing” and still get sold out far in advance.
In searching for a hotel, my first stop was the Hyatt Place which is right next to campus. Sold out for Saturday night and over $1100 for Friday night. Yeah, no. Hilton had a Graduate property available on points for the low, low price of 817,000 points per night. Hard pass. Same with the Marriott properties. Cash prices for hotels that would normally be available in the $90-120 range were all $600-1000 per night or sold out.
Resigned to having to say in an even smaller town 30+ minutes away with only somewhat-inflated price, I decided to at least set up an award alert on pointsyeah.com in case by some miracle the Hyatt Place opened a room up for award redemption.
Our Solution
There are certainly other tools I could have used, but I like pointsyeah.com’s map view and I wanted to see if perhaps there was a smaller property I may have missed. Sure enough, there were two properties very close to campus available on Wyndham points for 15,000 per night with availability that weekend. With cash prices in the $700 range per night, I was still surprised to see several rooms available on points but was very happy to take advantage of it.
Now, how to book it? If I had Wyndham points already that would be the easiest way, but I currently don’t have any in my account. I could also have transferred points from either CapitalOne or Citi and I almost did that as the points value is quite high compared to the cash price at 4.7 cents per point (cpp) value. However, I took another approach. While I try to redeem my transferrable points for over 2cpp and never below 1.5cpp value, there was another option that made more sense. I could buy Wyndham points for 1.3cpp for a total of $390 for the two nights.
With that alternative available as my new cash price opportunity cost, I would be redeeming my transferrable points for 1.3cpp if I made the transfer, which is below my target redemption value. It could have been even better as Wyndham often has points available on sale that takes the cost below 1cpp and I will definitely consider that for future visits. Another benefit of the points booking was cancellation up to 24 hours before arrival vs 30 days with the cash rate, in case of any last-minute change of plans.
Now, I am not saying getting an otherwise ~ $100 per night room for effectively $195 cash is a great deal, but in this case, it was far superior to the alternative options. For me, that is part of the beauty of the miles and points hobby. Being able to leverage different options to access travel that would be otherwise prohibitive is a huge win in my book.
TL;DR: Faced with an awesome opportunity to attend some college sporting events this fall but outrageous cash prices on local hotels, points saved the day for my family. In this case, buying points turned out to be an even better option than using transferrable points and 30k Wyndham points allowed us to book two nights compared to a cash price over $1400!
