You are sitting in a lounge at JFK with forty minutes before boarding, laptop open, refreshing a draft pitch to The Points Guy. Your company just launched something real (a lounge partnership, a new transfer partner, a booking tool that saves people money on award seats), and you know the TPG audience is exactly who should hear about it. You have also sent two pitches there before and heard nothing. The problem is rarely the product. It is that most founders pitch TPG as if it were a general travel magazine, and it is not one. It is a points-and-miles publication with a specific business model, a specific review culture and a public set of rules about what its editors will and will not accept. Learn those rules and the question of how to get featured on The Points Guy gets a lot less mysterious.
Follow the money before you write a word
The Points Guy started in 2010 as Brian Kelly’s personal blog about earning and burning airline miles. It began earning affiliate revenue in February 2011, and in 2012 Bankrate acquired the brand. When Red Ventures bought Bankrate in 2017 (a deal reported at roughly $1.24 billion), TPG came with it, and it still sits inside the Red Ventures portfolio today. In June 2025 the company named Liza Landsman as CEO, a sign of how far the operation has moved from a one-man blog.
Why does this history matter to your pitch? Because the business runs on credit card affiliate partnerships. TPG earns money when readers click through and are approved for cards from issuers such as Chase, Citi, Capital One and Bank of America. Its own advertising policy states that partner relationships “may impact how or where products appear” on the site, and in the same breath says its content “is not influenced nor subject to review by any credit card company, bank or partner.” That split is the key to reading the publication. Commerce shapes the layout and the product modules. The editorial team guards the words.
So when you pitch, you are not pitching the money side. You are pitching people whose credibility depends on proving they cannot be bought. Every sentence that sounds like advertising copy works against you. Pitch the reader outcome instead: how many points a reader saves, how much faster they reach elite status, what a redemption is worth in cents per point. That is the currency the newsroom trades in.
What The Points Guy covers, and where your story fits
TPG coverage breaks into a few buckets, and your pitch has to land in one of them on purpose. The first is news: devaluations, new transfer partners, award chart changes, limited-time bonuses, route launches and lounge openings. News lives on speed and specificity, and it rewards the brand that tells the desk first, with dates and numbers attached.
The second bucket is reviews. TPG reviews airline cabins, airport lounges, hotels, cruise ships and credit cards, often in long first-person pieces with dozens of photos. A business class review walks through the seat, the meal service and the Wi-Fi; a lounge review covers the food, the showers and the peak-hour crowds. These are the pieces that travel brands covet, and they are the hardest to engineer, for reasons covered in the next section.
The third bucket is guides and evergreen service content: how to book a specific partner award, which cards earn the most at grocery stores, how to get the most from a particular loyalty program. Guides are where a lot of non-airline brands earn mentions, because a tool or product that solves a step in the process becomes a natural reference.
The fourth is the TPG Awards, which the company established in 2018. In recent years the awards have been decided by editorial expert panels judging on firsthand experience, industry expertise and value to travelers, with in-house data analysis in some categories. When Marriott Bonvoy announced in February 2026 that it had again won Best Hotel Loyalty Program, it noted it had been recognized every year since the awards debuted. Brands treat these wins as press release material.
Before you pitch, decide which bucket you are in. A hotel opening is a news item now and a review candidate later. A fintech feature is a news item if it changes earning rates, and a guide mention if it simplifies a process.
Earn a review the way TPG wants to pay for it
Here is the fact that changes most hotel and airline PR plans: TPG’s publishing standards say the team typically pays for the experiences and products it reviews. When editors do accept support, the standards say they only do so when they can guarantee complete editorial independence, that they never submit content to outside parties for approval, and that they “will disclose exactly what has been provided.”
The hotel review seals make the point even sharper. On September 15, 2021, TPG introduced two seals, TPG Recommended and TPG Top Pick. To be eligible, a stay must be fully paid for by TPG. Free or discounted stays do not qualify. A writer earns a property the Recommended seal by answering yes to whether it was good value, no to whether there were major issues, and yes to whether they would recommend it, and editorial leadership must sign off. Top Pick asks whether the writer would tell readers to go out of their way to stay there. Seals cannot be bought, and hotels may license one for marketing only after a review runs.
What does that mean for your outreach? Offering a comped suite is not the lever you think it is. A free night can disqualify you from the very seal you want, and it saddles the review with a disclosure line. If you are working out how to get featured on The Points Guy with a review, the better play is to make your property or cabin easy to review on TPG’s own dime. Make sure it is bookable on points through a program TPG readers use. Publish clear award pricing. Give the desk accurate details on the product (seat dimensions, lounge hours, amenity specs, opening dates) so a writer planning a trip can slot you in. Offer access to people and facts rather than freebies: a property tour for the writer who is already booked, a call with your loyalty lead, a photo library they are free to use.
Then accept that you do not control the outcome. A paid review is an honest review, and TPG writers will flag a broken seat or a slow check-in. If your product cannot survive that scrutiny, fix the product before you chase the coverage.
Score your pitch with the LOUNGE test
At Instant Press we use a simple scoring model before any pitch goes to a points-and-miles outlet. We call it the LOUNGE test, and it gives you a score out of 12 across six factors, each worth zero, one or two points. A pitch under 8 does not go out.
L is for Loyalty math. Does your story change the value of a point, a mile, a status tier or a card? Two points if you can state the effect in numbers a reader can check (a new transfer ratio, a cents-per-point redemption, a lower award price). One point if the effect is real but vague. Zero if there is no effect on earning or redeeming at all.
O is for Original information. Is this news to the desk, or a recap of something already on the airline’s press page? Two points for an exclusive or first look with a firm date, one for a fresh angle on known news, zero for a rehash.
U is for Usable today. Can a reader act on it right now: book it, apply, transfer, register? TPG readers are doers, and service is the house style. Two points for an action with a link and a deadline, one for something coming soon with a date, zero for vapor.
N is for No strings. Does your pitch respect the independence rules covered above? Two points if you offer facts, access and assets with no conditions. One if you mention hosting but make clear it is optional and disclosable. Zero if the pitch asks for approval, previews or guaranteed placement, which is an instant pass for a newsroom with published standards against exactly that.
G is for Ground truth. Can every claim be verified? Two points if you attach the terms, the fare rules, the screenshots or the dataset. One if the claims are checkable with some digging. Zero if the pitch leans on adjectives like “luxurious” or “unmatched” with nothing behind them.
E is for Editor fit. Did you pitch the right desk with the right format? Two points if you read recent coverage, named the section (news, reviews, guides, credit cards, cruises) and shaped the pitch to match. One for a general inbox send that still fits a section. Zero for a blast that could have gone to any travel title.
The LOUNGE test is blunt by design. It forces you to see the pitch the way an editor does: as a reader service problem, not a brand awareness opportunity. The common founder failure is real news described in marketing language, which scores well on O and badly on L and G.
How do you pitch TPG without getting ignored?
Start with reading, not writing. Spend an hour on the site in the section you are targeting and look at the last month of coverage. Note how headlines are built (they lead with the reader benefit and a number), how long news posts run, and what kinds of sources get quoted.
Write a subject line that reads like a TPG headline. “New: [Program] adds [Partner] as 1:1 transfer partner, live Nov 3” beats “Exciting partnership announcement” every time. Keep the email body short: the news in two sentences, the reader effect in numbers, the date, the proof, and the offer of a source. Put terms and links in the email itself, not in a PDF the editor has to open.
Timing matters more here than at most outlets. Points news moves fast and other blogs in the category chase the same stories. If you have a change going live on a fixed date, offer the desk an embargoed first look a few days ahead with a clear lift time. If you are a hotel opening, pitch the news of the opening and the award pricing first, and treat a full review as a later, separate conversation that the writer initiates.
Make yourself a source, not just a sender. Loyalty program managers, revenue analysts and travel data companies who answer questions fast become the people editors call when they need a quote or a number for an unrelated story.
Respect the corrections process too. TPG’s standards say it fixes errors as soon as they are flagged and lists a corrections address for that purpose. If coverage gets a detail about your product wrong, send a polite, specific correction with documentation. Do not use it to lobby for a better tone.
Finally, do not count on a single pitch. The brands that show up again and again in TPG are the ones whose products produce reader news every quarter: new partners, sweet spots, bonuses, openings, route launches. If your roadmap does not generate that kind of news, the fix is upstream of the pitch.
Play the long game with awards, data and answer engines
One TPG mention is nice. A pattern of them changes how your brand is discovered, especially now that travelers ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI answers which card to get or which lounge is worth the walk. Answer engines draw on trusted editorial sources, so a fair TPG review or guide mention can shape the answer a traveler sees long after the article’s traffic fades. For a founder asking how to get featured on The Points Guy, that afterlife is a big part of the payoff. That is the core of the AEO work we write about on the Instant Press blog.
Build toward the awards calendar. Because TPG Awards panels judge on firsthand experience, the result is decided by the year of exposure before the announcement, not the week of it. If your product is eligible, make sure editors have used it and covered it during the year.
Offer data the newsroom cannot get anywhere else. Aggregated, anonymized booking or redemption data (which routes are hardest to book on points, how award availability shifted after a devaluation) is the kind of original material that turns into a feature with your name in the sourcing. Disclose the methodology and sample size.
And keep the expectations honest. Learning how to get featured on The Points Guy is less about a clever email than about running a product that produces verifiable reader value, then telling the right desk about it on time with the proof attached. Score each pitch with LOUNGE, pitch the bucket you actually belong in, and let the paid-review culture work for you instead of against you.
Your next pitch to TPG should be the one an editor could publish with nothing but your subject line and a link to the terms.