Las Vegas and Atlantic City can be fun, but expensive vacations. Even if you were lucky enough to secure a cheap hotel room, between the casinos, dining and entertainment, the bill can add up quickly. One way to keep costs down, is to gain higher status in your favorite casino program, which could lead to discounted or free hotel rooms, shows, buffets, waived resort fees and more. The traditional way to do this is by gambling or spending money through hotel stays or dining at your favorite property, hopefully you are lucky on the casino floor!
There is a shortcut, however, to reach upper tier status in Caesars (Total) Rewards and ultimately other programs in both Las Vegas and Atlantic City without any significant spend. This post is going to detail four easy steps for you to request a status match in order to first obtain Caesars Rewards diamond status, as well as upper tier status in other casino programs such as MLife. Before we begin, we recommend starting this process at least one week before your next Las Vegas or Atlantic City visit, but the status match can happen as quickly as 48 to 72 hours.
STEP 1 – Have upper tier status with another hotel loyalty program
Wyndham Rewards hotel program has an ongoing partnership with Caesars (Total) Rewards and the programs allow for reciprocal status matching. The highest tier status of Diamond in Wyndham Rewards will allow you to match over to Diamond status in Caesars Rewards, the second highest tier of status in the program.
What if you do not have Wyndham status though? You are still in luck as Wyndham offers a very lucrative status match themselves from other hotel chains, including all the way up to Wyndham Rewards diamond status. While Wyndham allows for status matching from 8 different hotel chain programs. We will focus on the four most popular hotel programs and the status you need for each to match over to Wyndham Rewards diamond.
The 4 major hotel chain programs and status you need to match to Wyndham diamond:
IHG Rewards: Platinum or above
Hilton Honors: Gold or above
Hyatt’s World of Hyatt: Globalist
Marriott Bonvoy: Gold or above
With 3 of 4 four programs, if you do not have the appropriate status needed, you can actually apply for a co-branded hotel credit card with American Express or Chase and be automatically elevated the status needed to match to Wyndham Rewards diamond. For IHG Rewards you will need to apply with Chase for the IHG Rewards Club Premier credit card which will automatically elevate you to Platinum status with IHG. The card carries an $89 annual fee, but comes with a free night award at IHG beginning on the first anniversary of holding the card,along with other great perks and bonus points for hitting a certain spend.
American Express offers the Hilton Aspire credit card (for Hilton diamond status), the Surpass credit card (for Hilton gold status) and the Marriott Bonvoy Brilliant credit card (Marriott gold status). The Hilton Aspire and Bonvoy Brilliant have an elevated $450 annual fee, but each has a generous spend bonus along with increased perks. With that said, the Hilton Surpass credit card gives you Hilton Gold for a $95 annual fee, and Gold provides you with free breakfast worldwide at Hilton along with other perks (and a solid sign up bonus), it is probably the best value card to sign up for and we did our match through Hilton as well.
You can apply for any of the American Express cards by clicking this link! (http://refer.amex.us/STEVEIxDQb?xl=cp33)
Unfortunately, Hyatt does not allow you to make it to Globalist through their credit card, but it does give you Discoverist status, which you can match to a different casino program at a lower tier which we discuss in depth further down in this article. With that said, the Hyatt credit card does provide credit towards earning Globalist status, so if you are committed to the Hyatt program, this may be a worthwhile credit card to have.
(https://www.referyourchasecard.com/205a/5L4TTCX5V4)
Of course before applying, please read all of the terms carefully to understand them and make an informed decision as to which credit card may be best for you!
STEP 2 – Request a status match Wyndham Rewards
Once you have obtained or already have the appropriate status with one of the eight programs, you are ready to do a status match over to Wyndham Rewards. You can either login to your Wyndham account or create a new one within a few minutes. You can sign in to your profile right away and click through to the explore the program page to member levels and scroll down to status match.
Once you are on the status match page, click in to the drop down menu and select the hotel program you have status with. In the box below you can fill in which status you have. Below that you will need to upload a picture to confirm your hotel program status. For example, Hilton has a digital membership card under your online profile which you can submit.
It’s that simple and then you click submit. Wyndham will tell you it could take several business days to a week to get back to you, but we received an email back within 24 hours from a Wyndham representative confirming our status match to Wyndham diamond from Hilton.
STEP 3 – Status Match from Wyndham Rewards Diamond to Caesars (Total) Rewards Diamond
After matching to Wyndham, you can turn around right away and head over to Caesars Rewards website. The same concept applies, if you need to create an account with Caesars you may do so within a few minutes and continue on with the process.
Once you login there is a partners tab to click on and then you can scroll down to Wyndham. Once in the Wyndham page you can match your Caesars status to Wyndham and vice versa. For our purposes, we need to click on a status match from Wyndham to Caesars, enter in our Wyndham Rewards number and submit our request to status match to diamond Caesars status.
Caesars will inform you the match could take up to a week, but we were matched from Wyndham Rewards diamond to Caesars Rewards diamond in just over 48 hours. Once you are matched over to Caesars diamond, you can walk up to a Caesars Rewards desk in Caesars Palace, Bally’s, or Harrah’s in Las Vegas or Atlantic City (or the other Caesars Vegas properties) and obtain your new Caesars diamond card.
Caesars diamond opens up a plethora of goodies, including an annual $100 Caesars diamond celebration dinner, discounted rooms, free shows and more.
STEP 4 – Match to other casino programs in Las Vegas and Atlantic City
After picking up your Caesars diamond card, you can walk over to MGM in Las Vegas or Borgata in Atlantic City and request a status match to MLife Gold status. In Atlantic City this would give you $100 in gambling credit, a free hotel night within 90 days of matching, free comedy shows and buffets.
Additionally in Atlantic City, you can match to Hard Rock’s Rock Royalty and Ocean Casino Resort’s Platinum status. These upper tier status have similar perks to the MLife Atlantic City match above, so you may want to stagger them over multiple trips to Atlantic City to enjoy several different free night stays.
The one catch about the above three matches is that you must be new to those programs and sign up for the first time with them.
BONUS – MLife status match to Hyatt’s World of Hyatt program
Finally, if you have done the additional match to MLife Gold you can do a bonus status match to Hyatt’s World of Hyatt program. MLife and Hyatt have their own partnership just like Wyndham and Caesars, and you can take your MLife Gold status and match it to Hyatt Explorist status if you did not already have Hyatt status, its second highest tier status. This is also true in the reverse and we have matched from Hyatt Discoverist to MLife Pearl, both a tier below Explorist and Gold respectively.
To summarize, by following along these four easy steps and getting a boost from a credit card as needed, you can wind up with a bunch of perks which more than make up for the annual fee on those credit cards with both the hotel chain along with Las Vegas and Atlantic City casinos. If you have any other questions or comments, please let us know down below and we will be happy to answer them!
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