I am in the frenzy of booking hotels for Cornell graduation next year in a non-city (Ithaca), so hotels are not so abundant.
Not only that, the few hotels that there are, budget properties like Hampton Inns and Fairfield Marriotts, completely play the capitalism game (as they should) and raise their rates to about 600-800 per night for those lower-end properties.
Unable to book a Marriott or Hilton on points because I am extremely points-poor at the moment, I decided to check out a hotel chain that I have never stayed at in the past, Wyndham.
Sure enough, there is a Wyndham Super 8 in Ithaca, and the cash price for the stay would be about $2700+! For a Super 8, no thanks!
But, Wyndham has an award chart (yay!). I did a search on points and the same property came up for 15,000 points per night. What!?!?!?
Hmm, but I had no Wyndham Rewards points.
BUT, I did have Citi ThankYou Points that I barely ever use, and Citi points transfer to Wyndham at the rate of 1000:800. And I jumped on that!
So I transferred 45,000 Citi ThankYou points to my Wyndham Rewards account, which, btw, was IMMEDIATE! and I booked the stay.
Citi points are valued at about 1.8 cents per point so in terms of value, I used about $810 worth of points for a stay that would have been upwards of $2700.
Happy graduation to me!