How business owners can spend their way to premium perks

When business owners start earning travel rewards from their spending, their first goal is usually to rack up enough points to take a family vacation.

But there are extremely valuable rewards — in addition to those points and miles — you could be earning with your loyalty. In some cases, the volume of spending a business generates can unlock some pretty cool perks that a traditional road warrior might have to spend over 100 nights on the road to achieve.

Let’s take a look at some of these options.

World of Hyatt Milestone Rewards

The World of Hyatt program is unique among major hotel programs in that it offers Milestone Rewards for the qualifying nights you earn. These start out simple, like 2,000 bonus points on your next stay at certain brands, but they get a lot more valuable as you progress through the milestones. For example, you can earn free nights at some of the most luxurious resorts in the world or American Airlines AAdvantage Platinum status (in addition to your World of Hyatt status).

You start earning Milestone Rewards after your first 20 nights, with new milestones every 10 nights, up to 150 nights per year. All the nights you book for yourself directly with Hyatt (or through another qualifying channel) count toward milestones — even award nights.

And while you might think you’d need to spend a lot of nights away from home to earn Milestone Rewards, World of Hyatt credit card holders get some highly useful spending-based shortcuts.

The World of Hyatt Credit Card (see rates and fees) comes with a head start of five qualifying nights each year, similar to some other popular cobranded hotel credit cards. It also earns two qualifying nights for every $5,000 in qualified spending on the credit card.

And the World of Hyatt Business Credit Card (see rates and fees) will help you spend your way up the milestones even faster. This card awards five qualifying nights for every $10,000 in spending.

Spending $300,000 on a credit card just to earn a bunch of Milestone Rewards may sound a bit extreme (or not, depending on your business’s cash flow). But you could at least use this benefit to close the gap on whatever milestone you’re trying to achieve. Plus, you’ll earn the most valuable hotel points in the process.

For instance, let’s say you’ve accrued 50 qualifying nights and you’re not traveling anymore this year but would really benefit from hitting the 60-night milestone, which earns you Globalist status, a Category 1-7 free night award, two suite upgrade awards, two Guest of Honor awards and access to My Hyatt Concierge. You could just shift $20,000 in spending to the World of Hyatt Business Credit Card (or $25,000 to the World of Hyatt Credit Card) to earn the additional 10 nights you need.

American Airlines Loyalty Point Rewards

The American Airlines AAdvantage program offers another unusual way to earn additional rewards. Similar to Hyatt’s Milestone Rewards program, AAdvantage’s Loyalty Points program offers rewards for some pretty significant levels of spending.

Loyalty Points can be earned by flying on American Airlines and its partners, but there are so many other ways to earn Loyalty Points — and many of them are right up a business owner’s alley.

The easiest way is to make purchases with one of the American Airlines cobranded credit cards. On top of any AAdvantage miles you earn for credit card spending, you’ll earn Loyalty Points. And the Citi® / AAdvantage® Executive World Elite Mastercard® (see rates and fees), specifically, is the best card for earning Loyalty Points because you’ll get 10,000 bonus Loyalty Points after reaching 50,000 Loyalty Points in a qualification year. You’ll get another 10,000 bonus Loyalty Points after reaching 90,000 Loyalty Points in that same qualification year.

You can also stack up Loyalty Points by booking hotels through the AAdvantage Hotels portal. It’s important to note that you might not earn points or elite status nights with the hotel’s program on these bookings. However, you can earn thousands of AAdvantage Loyalty Points, which may be worth more to you than hotel points in certain situations.

In addition to hotels, you can book car rentals, vacations and cruises through AAdvantage booking portals to earn Loyalty Points. AAdvantage also has a shopping portal and a dining program that allow you to earn Loyalty Points.

Rewards tiers start at 15,000 Loyalty Points, with basic perks such as preferred seat coupons, bonus Loyalty Points and a luggage tag. At 100,000 Loyalty Points, things get more interesting, with rewards such as Avis President’s Club status, a 30% bonus on Loyalty Point earnings with certain AAdvantage partners and World of Hyatt Discoverist status.

And if you really turbocharge your earning to reach at least 175,000 Loyalty Points, you can cash in on highly lucrative rewards like systemwide upgrades, $200 (or more) trip credits and mileage rebates.

Alaska Airlines Atmos Rewards Global Companion Awards

The recently launched Alaska Airlines Atmos Rewards program (the merged loyalty program for Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines) debuted some new credit cards — and one has a pretty amazing benefit. The Atmos™ Rewards Summit Visa Infinite® Credit Card comes with an opportunity to earn two Global Companion Awards.

You’ll earn your first Global Companion Award each anniversary year you hold the card. This effectively provides a 25,000-point discount on any Alaska, Hawaiian or partner award ticket — and there are very few restrictions, unlike other companion awards.

Where a business owner can really up the game is by spending $60,000 or more on the card in an anniversary year to earn a 100,000-point Global Companion Award. That could easily cover a one-way business-class flight to Europe or Asia.

Honorable mention: Bilt Cash

Bilt Rewards only recently revamped its credit card portfolio, and there’s an interesting opportunity for business owners who can put a lot of spending on those credit cards.

In addition to earning Bilt Rewards Points, your credit card spending also earns a new currency: Bilt Cash. Somewhat similar to AAdvantage Loyalty Points, this secondary currency can earn you a variety of rewards, including Lyft ride-hailing credits, discounts on hotel bookings through the Bilt travel portal, higher earning rates and even Blade helicopter transfers from major airports.

Because the list of Bilt Cash redemption items is so long, business owners with a lot of credit card spending can rack up a variety of rewards throughout the year.

Each new Bilt credit card earns 4% Bilt Cash on everyday spending in addition to the points you earn. Plus, you’ll earn $50 in Bilt Cash for every 25,000 points you earn (up to $100 of Bilt Cash earned rolls over to the next year), and Bilt says it will be rolling out other new ways to earn Bilt Cash in the future.

Bottom line

My staff likes to say I have a lot of “isms” — that is, sayings that I repeat over and over. One of those is “crawl, walk, run.”

When business owners first dip their toes into the world of earning points and miles, the main objective is generally to earn enough points for a dream vacation. Moving from “crawl” to “walk” usually means adding another card or two to maximize your different types of recurring expenses.

Where we get to the “run” phase is maximizing something like Hyatt Milestone Rewards or AAdvantage Loyalty Points without giving up too much value.