#20 Points vs Cash vs Free Night Certificate: How To Decide Which to Use

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Once you've accumuluated a lot of points, it can be tough to decide if it's a good deal to use points for a purchase or not. Jamie and Spencer break down the math of valuing points.

Just take the cash value of the flight or hotel you are trying to book, divide by the number of points required, and multiply by 100 to get the cents per point valuation.

So if the hotel is $100 and costs 20,000 points to book, that's $100 / 20,000 = .005 x 100 = .5 cents per point. If this was a Hyatt booking, that would be a bad redemption because Hyatt points are usually valued at 2 cents each.

If this was a Hilton booking, it might be worth it, since Hilton points are usually valued around .5 cents each.

We also discuss when it makes sense to use a free night certificate.

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