At the beginning of the year, Caesars Rewards announced a change to its Wyndham tier match promotion. Effectively, you used to be able to use the January end date of Caesars’ program cycle and the December Wyndham program cycle end date to pass your status back and forth, called by some the tier match Merry Go Round.
In March, Caesars announced that you had to outright earn status at one or the other company each year; if you do so, you can then match to the other. If you just passed your status back and forth without earning it, you won’t be allowed to match back another time until you do.
With that in mind, this question came in to my inbox recently:
Hello can’t people just stay a few nights at Wyndham or credit a cheap Caesars stay at the Rio or Flamingo to their Wyndham account to prove they are staying at Wyndham properties in order to get around the Ceasars restrictions?
In essence, no. It’s not about having any activity, it’s about having enough activity to outright earn the status.
Because so many people were leveraging the status merry-go-round loophole, Caesars had to tighten it to ensure that people weren’t using it to save hundreds of dollars a year on resort fees and so on without having earned the status. So they added the requirement that you had to earn it on one side or the other.
Wyndham traditionally requires you stay 40 nights a year to get Diamond. Like many hotel programs there may be ways to lower that number through various specials or connected offerings. And it’s not unusual for those deep into these loyalty programs to find cheap nights to burn through the requirements as cost effectively as possible to get status.
Whether doing that with Wyndham is the best approach for you will depend on if you already use Wyndham for hotel stays or it works out to be the cheapest way to achieve Diamond, but you’ll have to earn it on one side or the other to be able to match across the aisle.
