How I saved more than 50% at Wyndham Hotels!

You would never stay at a Wyndham, Ramada or Days Inn hotel? I never did until I noticed that they started to move their hotels upscale, overhauled their rewards program and launched aggressive promotions. Their sale of up to 30,000 points during the Daily Getaway event sealed it for me – I could stay at any of their more than 8,000 hotels for $150/night – there must be a way to make good use of those? Find out how the Wyndham promotions turned out to be some of the most rewarding I’ve ever participated in – and why you should take another look, too!

What made this promoti0n so useful for me was the fact that Wyndham had three promotions in parallel that allowed me to use points and great rates to best effect:

  1. Wyndham Points Sale
    Wyndham allows you to purchase up to 5,000 points per year to top up your account at 1.1 cents/point. But during the Daily Getaway you can buy up to 30,000 points for 1ct/p. Wyndham Rewards introduced a radical award chart – with all hotels available for a flat rate of 15,000 points/night without any blackout days. While $150 sounds like a lot for a Days Inn or Super 8, Wyndham also has a number of upscale Dolce resorts around the world (like the Silverado Resort Napa), as well as the Wyndham Grand and Wyndham brands of hotels.
    I used one of those nights at the Wyndham Santa Monica for a summer beach trip. Santa Monica is very popular with locals and visitors and rates are sky-high – at $495/night, the rate of 15,000 points was a great deal, cutting my price into less than half and offering a value of 3.3 ct/p.
    CAL WyndhamStMonica Bed1But while many bloggers have written about this flat-rate deal, the even better deal is the GoFast award that allows you to book any Wyndham hotel with 3,000 points and a cash co-pay. That works especially well in destinations with huge seasonal rate swings. Many hotels on the California coast are empty in the rainy winters – and packed on summer weekends. So I was able to book several stays at cash & points rates that undercut the sky-high rates drastically, for points values as high as 5.3 ct/pt! You will have a hard time to get this type of value out of Hilton, IHG or Marriott points! I booked two stays that are “pricey” for Wyndham at rates of $99 and $119 (plus tax) and earned 12,190 points total!Good news for you – this promotion has been extended through September 30th, so you can quickly earn points on your own!
  2. Wyndham Giftcard Promotion
    Each of these two promotions would have been a great deal on its own, but you could combine it with another promotion Wyndham offers on a regular basis: For any two stays you earned $100 in gift cards for future stays. While that sounds awesome, there is a lot of fine print: You actually earn 4 gift cards of $25 each and you can only use one per future stay and within a short time frame, so you have to stay twice to earn the cards and 4 times to use them.
    I did earn those gift cards from the same paid stays above, so I earned a total of $222 after paying only $218 (plus tax).

Wyndham is clearly making a huge effort to move their brands and reward program forward. The introduction of the flat-rate GoFree awards and cash & points GoFast awards has created big opportunities for generous rewards and high-value redemptions.
In total, these promotions (without the gift cards) enabled me to save 52% of my Wyndham hotel stays compared to the cash rates at the time of booking and I got an average value of 3.4 cents/point  – 3.4 times what I payed for them! See the details below:

Wyndham Promo 2016 Details TableThis type of value has helped Wyndham earn the title of Best Hotel Reward Program (read more here) and I now understand why – 
there are a lot of reasons to look at Wyndham for some hotel stays. The Wyndham Rewards program is a great value option! BUT, you might say, do I really WANT to stay at a Wyndham hotel? I think you might. I had never stayed at any of them and was surprised at what -at least some of them – have to offer. Check out my reviews of the Wyndham hotels I stayed for this research and see what make sense for you:
Wyndham Santa Monica
Days Inn Morro Bay
Super 8 Monterey
Howard Johnson South Lake Tahoe
Days Inn San Francisco


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