The ULTIMATE Point Splurge – 600 Million Points for an Experience of a Lifetime

Last week, I wrote how Hyatt was announcing a partnership with IfOnly to provide experiences for World of Hyatt members to purchase with either cash or Hyatt points. This offering certainly does not match up to SPG Moments considering the cost of some of these. But, for that person who is swimming in 600 million Hyatt points, they do have exactly what you may be looking for. 😉

The Ultimate Point Splurge – 600 Million Points for an Experience of a Lifetime

Link: Balloon Expedition over Mt. Everest

So, here is how this little event works. You can spend either $4.2 million or you can burn a cool 600 million points from your Hyatt account. That’s it! After that, you can be one of the few people on the planet to actually take a ballon OVER Mt. Everest. 🙂

You can read all about it here and what it will include. It certainly sounds like quite an experience, but, all those points…

600 Million Points?!

Let’s just have some fun and look at that number of 600 million points. Since Chase Ultimate Reward points transfer at a rate of 1:1 to World of Hyatt, let’s just say that if someone had 600 million points, they accrued them through spending on Chase cards.

Spending a Minimum of $120 Million to Earn the Points?

To make it even easier, we will say that they accrued all of it with 5X spending categories (not possible with current caps – it would take a long time!). That would mean that this person had spent $120 million! Yeah, probably not happening.

Ok, let’s say that this person earned all of it through stays at Hyatt properties. As a top-tier Hyatt elite, one would earn 5 points per dollar at the base and then 30% bonus. That would translate to having spent over $92 million at Hyatt properties! Again, not likely!

55 Years at a Park Hyatt?

How about spending those 600 million points elsewhere? If you had them all in your Hyatt account, you could book 20,000 nights (or almost 55 years) at someplace like the Park Hyatt New York or the Park Hyatt Sydney.

2,600 One Ways in Lufthansa First Class?

Let’s talk airlines! Convert them to United at 50,000 to 20,000 United miles (and then earn 5,000 mile bonus for that block of points) and you would end up with 300 million United miles. Of course, you would splurge with that many, so we will go with Lufthansa First Class between the US and Europe at 115,000 miles for one way. That many miles would give you over 2,600 one ways in Lufthansa First Class! 

My comfy ride to NY – Lufthansa First Class!

Or you could mix some of the above and fly between Europe and the Park Hyatt Paris and New York and the Park Hyatt New York for like the next 20 years. 🙂

Of course, even if you did have 600 million Hyatt points, using them for this balloon trip would give you a terrible value of .8 cents per point (Hyatt points are worth at least double that). So, you would probably just want to go ahead and use the $4.8 million instead.

If you had all of those points in Ultimate Reward points, you could just redeem it for $6 million in cash and have $1.2 million left over after the balloon trip! 🙂

I have to ask – who at IfOnly thought that this was something that someone would have points for? Or, does someone really have that many points and this is Hyatt’s way of showing that? 🙂