0:00This is a VoyageScape Podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at VoyageScape.com. Today's Coffee Break, loving Riverview Ranch. Welcome to Frickant Milders Coffee Break, where we focus on a single topic related to miles and points. Each coffee break is limited to 20 minutes or less, or your money back. I am just back from a short trip to Riverview Ranch in Montana. It is probably the single most aspirational points stay available in the United States. So I'm eager to talk about this. Wow, that's a big claim, especially with some of the properties that are out there. I mean, I know you've stayed at Ventana Big Sur, and I know the Waldorf Astoria now in New York is certainly a place that's aspirational for a lot of people, but you're telling me the Riverview Ranch in Montana is the most aspirational one. So let's go over some of the basics here. Riverview Ranch Retreat in Western Adventures is an SLH property, small luxury hotels

1:04of the world, and of course, SLH partners with Hilton will come back to that in a second. But things to know about this property are number one, it's all inclusive. So when you book a stay, everything's included. We wrote about this a long time ago. I kind of stumbled on it when I was looking for some of the SLH properties that are bookable via Hilton, and I stumbled on it and stopped for a second when I read the fact that cash rates were somewhere in the neighborhood of, I guess, now about $4,700 a night during peak season, $3,500 a night during off season. I mean, that's incredible. It's wildly expensive. Yes. But you can book these with either Hilton Free Night Certificates or with Hilton Points. It's now up to 220,000 points per night when I first wrote about it. It was significantly less, but now it's 220,000 points per night. But even still, if you bought those points when they're on sale, that's about $1,100 worth of points per night, which is a lot, it's also a lot less than $4,700 per night.

2:04So that's right. And if you do a fifth night free, then even less. Speaking of fifth night free, you usually do have to book at least three nights to find availability at this property. You can use Hilton's Flexible Date Calendar with a stay of three nights or more. So if you put in a stay a number of days that are three nights or more, you can hit the Flexible Calendar and see all of the dates that are available for check-in for three nights or more. And we have a post about how to do that. So if you're not sure, check the show notes here for a link to that. If you want to apply free night certificates, since you can't book one night at a time, you're going to have to either chat online or call Hilton if you want to use more than one free night certificate. It's pretty easy to do though. You can chat on the website. I've done this and used a couple of free night certificates on a single booking. The big gotcha with this property is the cancellation policy. So the cancellation fee is 20% of the total stay if you cancel between your booking date

3:06at 2 p.m. local and 61 days prior to arrival. So again, 61 days or more from the time you book until 61 days in advance, the penalty is 20% and after 60 days prior to arrival, that's it. It's non-refundable. You're not going to get anything back. 100% of the total stays. That's quite a big gotcha. It's huge. That's probably my biggest complaint about this place is that, man, once you lock in, you're locked in. That's the truth. So you might wonder how do I get some Hilton free night certificates? If you're not familiar with it, there are several different easy ways to get them. First of all, the Hilton Aspire card, which has a $550 annual fee, comes with an annual free night certificate every year. So it's just an automatic benefit. Then if you spend $30,000 on the card, you earn another free night certificate and you can earn yet another one at 60,000, the Hilton Serpast card, which has a $150 annual fee, gives you a free night certificate after you spend $15,000 on purchases.

4:09It's going to calendar year. Then sometimes the welcome offers for the Serpast card or the Hilton Business card also include a free night certificate. That varies, comes and goes. You got to keep an eye on whatever the current offer is. With a little creativity, you might be able to toss together a few more free night certificates. We have a post about how to maximize your Hilton cards with upgrades and downgrades to get as many free night certificates as possible. Check that post out. It's linked in the show notes if you really want to get a bunch of Hilton free night certificates. Yeah, that's a great post. I just read it myself this morning because back from this day, I'm like, I need to get more free night certificates. I need to refresh my memory of how this all works. That's a great post, great resource. Love it. All right. Let's start off. I'm going to talk about the booking process, like what led me to book this and everything. Here in the year, I noticed that I had a Hilton free night certificate that was going to expire mid-September. My wife's birthday is end of August.

5:11Here was a great opportunity to use an expiring free night certificate and do something really special for my wife. I remembered Nick's post about this place and I decided, I'll check whether I can book it. For whatever reason, for the end of this year or mid to end of this year, they were allowing two night bookings. Even though they normally require three, I found two nights and only two nights available over my wife's birthday. I went ahead and booked it with one free night award and a lot of Hilton points for the second night. I did that by online chat. It's very easy to do. I was a little bit hesitant because when you hear ranch, you think dude ranch, right? That was not on my wife or my bucket list of type of things to do.

6:12My impression of what a ranch is like and everything is a lot of testosterone and running around shooting things or whatever. If you look at RVR's website, which I'm saying RVR because that's how all the branding shows up and it's a lot easier to say. A lot easier to say. I was like, don't you try and pretend it's because that's the way they brand. If you look at RVR's website, especially under activities, it looks like that testosterone filled like shooting and everything. This is not what we're interested but I've heard from people who have actually gone and they just raved about it and not about shooting things necessarily. Not that there's anything wrong with shooting things. I'm just saying that's just not what we were in the mood to do. Not under bucket list to do. Those kind of positive reports from people really motivated me.

7:15This sounds like it'd be really special. We could combine it with a trip to one of the national parks, either Glacier or Yellowstone or Grand T-Tons. We ended up going to Yellowstone afterwards, which was great by the way. That cancellation policy really made me hesitate. I had to talk to my wife first and be like, hey, this is what I'm thinking. Here's what people were saying about it. Is this okay? Are you sure you can lock in those dates? You can't unlock them. She agreed all that so I went ahead and booked it. Then flash forward to three weeks before the stay, I got an email. It looks like a standard form email you get before your stay that invites you to look at their activities and to let them know which activities you want to basically book for your stay. All the activities are included, except for things like getting spot treatments, for

8:19example, would not be. If you have any dietary restrictions, they want you to let them know they are, they can accommodate anything. They ask for flight information because they include pickup and drop off at the local airport, which is Missoula, Missoula, Montana. I had some questions about all of this because even though I was flying into, we were going to fly into Missoula, we were going to drive out of Missoula and I originally booked a car not from the airport, but from another place in Missoula. I was like, one, could you drop us off at this other place instead of the airport? It just wasn't clear. They'd be happy too, as long as in Missoula. The other thing was I originally booked the car at 2pm pickup and the official checkout is 11am.

9:21It's about a 45 minute drive to Missoula from the ranch. You're going to depart at 11am from the ranch you want your rental car pickup to be 1145 ish. I asked about that. They were able to push me to a noon departure. That's as far as she could go. I changed my pickup to a 1245 pickup. Turned out when I re- I did a brand new search for cars and I found one that was actually much, much, much cheaper than my original booking. I actually saved a lot of money by picking up earlier and turned out at the airport is where I got that deal. It ended up dropping off at the airport anyway. I had also, I actually have free time to mention, I asked about, could we pay more to stay later? They kind of mentioned that that might be a possibility, but it really depends on whether they have guests coming or not and they did and so that wasn't available.

10:28About the activities, this was all new to me and it's not something I was able to figure out online from any of the material online or from the email. You can't schedule any of your activities on check-in or check-out day. You get to schedule activity, well like one activity for the morning and one activity for the afternoon of a day where you're there for the whole day. A two nights day is pretty awkward because that means you have exactly one day where you can schedule these activities. I really think that having that three day minimum is a good idea in general. I think that's, you want to stay there for three nights and I think that would be a good length of stay. I'd be totally happy with longer, but I think three nights would be good too. The other thing I learned is that if you want to do horse related activities, do a trail ride or any of them, they have a number of different horse related activities, they are not

11:29available on Mondays and Thursdays when the vet comes and they reshoot them and all that kind of stuff. It happened we checked in on Sunday. Monday was our activity day. No horses, Tuesday we checked out. No horses for us except for they do an evening carriage ride every day of the week. That's an optional thing. That's only a little 20 minute thing so everyone can do that. I asked her when I called, what do you recommend? What are the best activities we should schedule? Given that there are no horse activities available, she suggested these Polaris ATVs and their shooting range and archery. My wife and I decided we would try out the Polaris. She's a little two-seater off-road car thingies and archery and that's what we signed up for. Nice. So you did shoot some things.

12:30We did. With arrows. Alright, we'll be right back after this with Craig's trip report. We hope you're enjoying the Frequent Miler on the Air Podcast. Did you know that Frequent Miler is also a website? At FrequentMiler.com you'll find all the latest deals, news about points, miles and rewarding credit cards, the single best best credit cards page on the web guides to all popular rewards programs and many other terrific resources. If you'd like to get our posts sent to your email, go to FrequentMiler.com, forward slash, subscribe and sign up for free. Alright, we are back and now let me tell you about the trip itself. So we arrived on Sunday and Missoula Airport around 3pm, I wish I think it was. And one of the employees named Landon was waiting for us with an RVR sign. I'm mentioning that because I was actually surprised that it didn't have our name on it. So I thought other guests were being picked up too, but that wasn't the case.

13:30It wasn't a problem. It was just a surprise, I guess. And he drove us to the ranch and chatted with us along the way. It was very nice. And it turned out that Landon was also the guy that led our activities. So we saw a lot of Landon during the trip. And then we arrived at the ranch. And my next surprise, I don't know why I had this impression that all of the rooms, all the sweets at the ranch were like separate little buildings, separate little cabins or something, but it's not like that at all. And it's just one big lodge with the sweets in the lodge, like sort of like regular hotel rooms. Again, wasn't a problem at all. It was just different from what I was expecting. And so we go into the lodge and the general manager, Kayla, greets us. And she's sort of the host for the whole time. Very hands on.

14:31She takes us into, there's sort of a combined kitchen, dining room, living room area. It's like the great room in the lodge and chef Dave. They have a full time chef and assistant chef. Anyway, so Dave is the head chef. She introduces us to him. We talk to him a bit. She offers us drinks and whatever we want to drink. I think we took champagne and then took us to our room. So the lodge is set up with the bedrooms all in a row looking out over a small lake or big pond below down a hill. And so they're lined up, maybe five or so rooms on first level and then five more on the top. We were on the top level. And I think that was really good because I think those have much better views from a little bit higher up.

15:31We went into the room and even though it's called a suite, the room new book is called a King's Suite, it's more like a junior suite in that there's no separate rooms. It's one really big room. Very nice. It had a decent sized balcony with this cool fire pit table that you can turn on whenever you want. It, the TV was a frame TV set up with like a Wild West type of picture on it. So it really looked like artwork on the wall. And we never turned it on. So we just had that artwork on the wall the whole time, which was very nice. The mini bar snacks and non-acoolhole drinks are all included. In fact, Kayla suggested that she said they are restocked every day. So if you want to keep them, like squirrel them away, and then they'll get restocked and you could get more. So we did that.

16:33We had, they had Yeti water bottles with our names on them. And so we each got our own Yeti water bottle, which are very nice. There are cowboy hats on the wall that you can use during the stay. They have robes and slippers, of course, walking sticks. If you want to go hiking, laundry bag. This was exciting. More exciting than your normal hotel laundry bag because this one's free. You put whatever you want in it and it gets laundered for free. So I love that. Another thing I loved is there were lots of pillows to choose from. So they had a number of pillows on the bed and then a whole bunch in the closet. And they were all different in terms of firmness where they feather, where they foam and all that kind of stuff. And so I find that I can't tell whether I'm going to like a pillow just from touching it with my hand. So actually getting it laid down and try one out. I think I went through three until I found the perfect one. I just love that.

17:35Even like some really high end places have those pillow menus. But like how do you know what to order? You know, let's order them all, I guess. And that's what this is kind of like. You automatically get them all. So I like that. We had twice daily housekeeping with turn down service in the evening. And the turn down service included a like a bottle of water to drink from and chocolate mint on top of that and some small gifts. So one day was a RVR keychain. Another day was a bandana. And so I don't know what the third day would have been, but maybe next year I'll find out if we, if when we go back, anything negative. There were a couple of small negatives here. The biggest of the small negatives was the bath towels. They were big and plush, which sounds great. But for some reason they had a magical ability to not absorb water, but just kind of push it around.

18:35So I never felt like I was getting dry when I got out of the shower. It was really bizarre. In fact, the second, the second morning when I was done showering, I used a dry washcloth to dry myself first. And that did a really good job as much as it could do, a little washcloth. And then I tried to use a bath towel. It still felt like I was pushing water around. So I don't understand what's going on with those. The other thing, the other thing is either a pro or a con depending on your perspective. The window from the room outward, the view is sliding glass doors. And that's fine. I have no problem with that. There's no screen on it. And so that's nice from the perspective of it doesn't obscure the view at all. So you get it optimizes view. The sad thing is like evenings were the perfect coolness to sleep with the doors open. But there were some bugs. It wasn't a problematic how many bugs there were, but it would have been had we left the

19:39doors open overnight. So we didn't. So that's just kind of unfortunate. We loved the food. So our first meal there was dinner time. Jeff Dave comes out and chats with us and asks us if we have any dietary restrictions or what do we prefer, what we like not like. There is a menu, but dinners are set menu. So you just read what's there. And he's of course willing to make any changes that you might want. We were just happy with it as is and it was fantastic. They do focus on local ingredients and he does worry about the quality of it. Like one night he was going to do a bison filet, but he wasn't able to get bison of the quality that he wanted. So he ended up doing a different kind of filet. And I appreciate that. Breakfast and lunch you order from a menu. The atmosphere, it's in that big, great room I talked about before.

20:41The dining area, it's not one, it's not a communal dining. They have separate tables for each guest or set of guests. And you could sit wherever you want. There's not many other guests. So you really do pretty much get your pick. And anytime in that same room, there's like a bar there and there's always someone around, some staff member around who can mix the drink for you or pour you wine or whatever it is you want. That's all included. There's also if somehow you're still hungry, despite all of that stuff, there is a snack fridge outside the great room where you can get like, there's snicker bars, there's daily baked cookies, there's like trail mix type of stuff and so on. So you will not go hungry at this place at all. My kids would appreciate the snack fridge. Yeah, I was thinking about your kids actually when I saw them and I was like, man, and I

21:41just write it at kid eye level too. Perfect. Perfect. Nicker bars and cookies, right? They are. Not going to pass that by too often without opening that door. So I'll talk a little bit about the activities that we did. So archery was, it was really fun. So Landon was very patient, teaching us how to use the bow and arrows and teaching us, we started at a regular target and he kind of taught us how to adjust our follow on shots based on how much you tend towards, you know, left or right up or down. And then we walked through the woods to different animal targets, but they're, you know, they're fake animals. But you get to shoot at deer elk there, you name it. It was, it was a lot of fun and Landon is a very, it's very interesting. He told stories about his real hunting. He has a much more advanced like bow. He hunts with a bow and talked about like the ethical shots.

22:47Like he was like saying like in this situation, it wouldn't be ethical to take the shot. I would never take that shot because if you're going to wound an animal but not bring them down, you know, that would be really bad. And so it was, it was really nice hearing that and his stories about how I was curious how he's not very big guy. How if he takes down like a big elk, does he like get that back to to his truck, you know, like, and so I'm not going to go into how he does that. But it was fascinating hearing about that. For someone who's not a hunter anyway, I'm sure some hunters know all about that already. The other, the next thing we did in the afternoon, we did the Polaris ATVs, which were two cedars. So I drove and my wife rode shotgun and that was a ton of fun. I'm just driving over all kinds of terrain. There was an area where you drive like into the river and if you do it fast enough, you could get, you know, sprayed with a lot of water.

23:47There's an area where you could go off a ramp and if you managed to get it to go fast enough, you could theoretically, well, I know I saw land into it. You could get all four wheels in the air. I managed to only get the front two in the air. These things, it's tricky because these things actually have are restricted to 30 miles an hour. You can go a little bit ahead, a little more than 30, which I think you have to do before, but you have to do it at just the right moment before it restricts it, you know, while on the ramp to get the air and I, you know, that takes practice, obviously. So that was so much fun. I had no idea how much fun that would be. I'm looking forward to doing that again someday. We got so dirty, like you get so much dust. You wear goggles and a bandana over your mouth so you don't get the dust in your eyes or mouth, but clothes are covered and the cool thing is we were checking out the next

24:48morning. The laundry thing said you had to put in the laundry 24 hours in advance to get it done, but Kayla was like, oh no, just put it in a bag now and we'll rush it through and in fact the laundry was ready later that same day. So that was awesome. Nice. Nice. And that's kind of a common theme there that like they have so few guests that they can really do whatever for you. It's more like being in someone's, like being a guest at someone's home where they happen to have enough staff to do anything you want. We did the carriage ride, which was nice and pleasant. There's a herd of elk that wandered around the property, so we rode right by them. That was neat. But my wife got a massage, which you have to pay extra for. She said it was fantastic.

25:49We didn't do this, but if we had gone earlier in the summer, one of the activities you could sign up for is whitewater rafting. They actually, it's covered by your stay, but they actually pay an outfitter to take you out whitewater rafting. So that's quite a benefit right there. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, that all sounds like a lot of fun. It's interesting hearing your excitement because I wouldn't have pictured necessarily those activities for you. That's great. That's what makes this place very interesting for a lot of folks, I think. But yeah, and it's funny because, of course, I live in a very rural area. When you talk about those things, like my in-laws have a polaris side by side, and we go out very frequently. Most people I know hunt, and so ethical shots and things like that. Those are things that most people that I know are into, and certainly most hunters I know, are not relatively ethical about those things. But you wouldn't know that if you're not in that type of environment.

26:53So yeah, I can totally see where that would be a really awesome escape and something really different for a lot of people. As far as wildlife we saw, I mentioned there's lots of elk, lots of birds. We did see a couple coyotes in the distance. There are bears around. We didn't see any. So that's about what you could expect there. At checkout, that's when you pay for any massage you got. If you got any premium drinks, you don't have to pay extra for drinks in general. But if you want the premium ones, you do, you would pay then, and you can optionally pay to tip. There's no required tipping, but you can. I know people are going to ask, so I'm just going to say that I arbitrarily decided to tip $400, which is $200 per night of the day, is how I came up with that. No particular, you know, I didn't really have any idea what was appropriate, but I'm told

27:53that the tips are distributed to the staff. I paid with my business platinum card, which has a $50 per quarter hilton credit, and that got refunded right away. So that was great. If you have a hilton sur pass card, that would work too. Kayla, the GM, actually told me that she's had people pay $50 at a time for all their expenses with different cards, and she's perfectly happy to do that. So that was good to hear. A caution, if you have a hilton, a spire card, which has the resort credit, that's not going to work here, because as the Lage properties are not in the resort list. So to kind of sum up my impressions of the place, very casual, even though it's very high end price wise, don't expect fancy. This is not a fancy place. Staff, casual and welcoming, not at all over the top. I cannot stand when people in fancy places are just over the top, all of a sudden you're

28:59best friend and you can tell it's fake. There's none of that. They're just very casual. I can't say enough how private it seems when you're there. They only allow up to five rooms to be booked at a time. And so while we were there, there was a family of four that had booked two rooms. And there were two couples besides herself. So that made up all the rooms. So that's all of the guests. We hardly saw the family or one of the two couples at all. We'd only see them at their tables at meal time. The other couple happened to sign up for the same activities we did. So we spent a lot of time with them and had a great time chatting with them. But I don't know. I have mixed feelings about whether kids would enjoy this because it'd be kind of like you're just spending time with your parents. Don't expect it to be like a cruise ship where there's lots of other kids to play with.

30:01It's very unlikely that that would be the case. Yeah, all right. That all sounds pretty good, pretty interesting. My kids, by the way, love to ride any UTV. So they would probably love that part of it and going through the woods and getting dirty. So I think they'd have some fun. But interesting observation anyway, that it feels very private. So that makes a lot of sense. All right. So speaking of places that feel really cool in private and probably not necessarily ideal for kids, how does it compare to Ventana Big Sur? Because that would probably fit into the same category I would think. And I know you've really loved Ventana Big Sur in the past. Yeah. For those of that don't know, Ventana is a Hyatt property. A category eight, Hyatt. So it costs a lot of Hyatt points, but nowhere near as many Hilton points as RVR costs. RVR is a lot more private. There's so many fewer guests there. You can expect much more attentive service at RVR. Again, it's not like over the top, asking all the time what you want.

31:02But it's that there's always somebody around who's not helping another guest because there's so few guests. There's more included activities at RVR. So RVR is more active, I'd say, than Ventana, which is a bit more laid back, I'd say. Ventana though does have better views. I think that Big Sur is one of the most beautiful places in the world. And the views of the Redwood trees and the ocean from Ventana is fantastic. RVR, the ranch land is sweeping and pretty, but it just can't compare to Big Sur in my opinion. That all makes sense. Very interesting. So if you're looking for the more private getaway and the more attentive service and you want probably RVR. If you want something with those ocean sweeping ocean views, obviously, Ventana Big Sur is someplace you should be considering. All right. So Ventana Big Sur, I think, made for a good comparison point.

32:03But then at the top end of the spectrum, I know that you've stayed at Neckar Island before, Richard Branson's private island in the Caribbean. How does this compare to that? Yeah. Well, so RVR, there was no famous billionaire living there. Now I can't say you might run into a famous billionaire if you're lucky or unlucky depending on the situation. But there wasn't any while I was there that I know of. There's no lemurs. And so Neckar Island has lemurs, tortoises, other things, almost like a zoo there, which is really cool. There's a lot more social, meaning it is almost like a party atmosphere from day one. You get off the little motorboat from the airport and your handed drinks and actually your handed drinks on the boat. And there are all dining as communal, all the guests eat together.

33:10You can opt not to. But it's really, they have parties every night, dancing if you want to. Both places have a lot of activities. Neckar is more personalized. And the staff just ask you what you'd like to do today. They'll make sure it happens. Whereas RVR is more, you know, you plan it in advance. But RVR is the level of service, I'd say, was very similar. You know, in both places you have way more staff than guests. And RVR was more private. So, you know, there's just a lot fewer guests, even than Neckar Island at RVR, because there's just so few. Yeah, all right. So no lemurs, but I bet there were no elk at Neckar Island. That's true. I've never seen any elk. So that would be pretty cool. The elk aren't as cute though as the lemurs, am I opinion? I might give you that.

34:10All right. So overall, it sounds like RVR was a great property. Would you go back? Absolutely. In fact, I've already booked for next summer. This episode was produced and edited by Carrie Yoder, music by Annie Yoder. If you've enjoyed what you've heard today and you'd like to get more of this in your email inbox each day or each week, go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media. Join our frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group. And wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to like this or give it a thumbs up. If you have a question that you'd like to be considered for a future question of the week or a piece of feedback that you'd like to be considered for our giant mailbag, you can send that to send it to mailbag at frequentmiler.com.