Southwest Just Nuked the Companion Pass & Amex Platinum's Hotel Credit May Be Next

Shawn Coomer (0:00)

Citi's new pop-up, Lululemon's getting petty, Hyatt Points can be transferred online, and Southwest, they finally imploded their program. All of that coming up right now on MTM Travel.

Mark Ostermann (0:11)

I mean, I think a lot of people will look back a year later and be happy that they don't have to connect in Nashville and middle of nowhere places anymore.

Shawn Coomer (0:26)

So happy Thursday, everyone. This is our Miles & Points show, but this morning as we woke up, Southwest announced a bunch of changes. So we'll do a little bit of a highlight of that, and then we'll cover it more in depth later. But let's start off. You want to go right into-

Mark Ostermann (0:40)

On the Travel show next week, not later this episode.

Shawn Coomer (0:42)

There was a debate. Can we do this publicly? There's a debate. This is the Miles & Points show. They're rehashing the loyalty. Honestly, we want to be able to give it time to be able to go more in depth in the future show. But I say it belongs on this show, and at least we should talk about it. But let's start with Hyatt. They made this announcement and they buried it in that points are finally transferable online between members and there's no fee. This is something people have been asking for for a long time. Remember previously you had to fill out a form, and I think you could email it. Could you fax it? I think you could fax it to them if you really wanted to. Yeah, you could fax it.

The catch with this is it's all being done through points.com, which is the same place you would buy Hyatt Points. So I think that this is probably the way that they figured out the easiest to integrate it. And so you do have to go to points.com. You have to share, I guess, your account information in that way, their official partners and stuff. But other than that, it looked pretty simple.

Mark Ostermann (1:33)

Yeah, they kind of buried it, and I hope they figure out a way to display it better. I was struggling to find it this morning, and I put out the article, like, hey, it's supposed to be live today. I couldn't find it, and maybe it hadn't gone out live yet.

But somebody did comment that they found it. So I went back, and I'm like scrolling, scrolling, looking where my points balance is, looking at awards, where you transfer other awards. I'm like, where is this? And you have to scroll to the bottom of the account page, and you go below even where they're listing promos and all that stuff, and it's down at the bottom. And then you have to click an arrow, to drop down arrow, to open up your options with points. And it felt almost like a terms, like they're hiding it in like a terms section. It just seems weird, weirdly placed when they were kind of patting themselves on the back for getting to like 2018 when everybody else already had this. But it just didn't seem like the best rollout, but I'm happy that it's here. I'm glad that we're finally able to do it because it has been a process and a problem.

There's many times that I had to resubmit the transfer point sheet like multiple times because it would get lost in the gum work or whatever, and then they were doing them in batches, and you never knew when the batch was going to be done. It could be done on like a Saturday at 10 PM one time, or Monday morning at 6 AM. It just didn't make sense. There's no uniformity in between transfer. Sometimes you send it to your concierge and they would do it, and other times they wouldn't. It was just a mess. So I'm glad it's like this, and other people use points.com, so it's not out of the realm. I just would have liked to see it better integrated in on their app or their website.

Shawn Coomer (3:10)

Yeah, I think they had one old lady, that Bertha, who just stood in the back, and she cranked it once in a while, and then gave the points, so she probably lost her job. The one downside to this is that it's not integrated the same way transferring awards and stuff is into the app, and it's a third-party service. But like I said, I think this is probably how they were able to do it easy, and points.com, I have no problem.

Mark Ostermann (3:33)

Why did it take this long to do it if you're not even doing the IT section? Like, you could have done this two years ago.