Frequent Miler on the Air - 10 Best and 5 Worst uses of ThankYou Rewards | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep275 | 10-4-24

Episode Date: October 4, 2024

Last week we talked about how to earn Citi ThankYou Rewards, but now we'd like to discuss some of the best (and worst) ways you can use your Citi ThankYou Rewards. Catch last week's episode about accumulating Citi ThankYou Rewards here. (01:17) - In a recent podcast Greg stated that United hadn’t before offered discounted business class awards to elites. One listener writes in with a correction that Platinum and 1K have had expanded access to saver awards in business class. (04:06) - How to evaluate credit card welcome bonus offers Compare all the best credit card sign up offers here. (11:57) - Counting down the best uses of ThankYou Rewards from least favorite to most favorite... Learn more about the Citi Premier card here. (13:40) - 10. Transfer to Wyndham to book Vacasa, Cottages, etc. (15:30) - 9. Transfer to Emirates. Book Emirates 1st class for 102K (JFK to Milan, or Newark to Athens) Learn how to find and book Emirates first class awards here. (17:19) - 8.Transfer to Turkish to book 10K one-way to/from Hawaii (18:12) - 7.Virgin: fly AF/KLM Business class to Europe starting at 48,500; also intra-Europe as low as 4K (19:55) - 6.Transfer to Avianca LifeMiles to book business class to Europe for 70K without surcharges (LifeMiles+) (22:11) - 5.Transfer to Choice 1 to 2. Book Nordic hotels, Japan, Preferred, etc. (24:19) - 4.Transfer to Leaders Club. Book Leading Hotels of the World for 1.6cpp (25:24) - 3.Transfer to Qatar Avios. Book Qatar QSuites for 70K Learn more about finding award space for Qatar QSuites here. (27:30) - 2.Transfer to EVA Air Infinity MileageLands. One-way business class flights from the US to Taipei cost 75K to 80K miles (30:27) - 1.Transfer to Qatar Avios then to Iberia. Book Iberia biz class from east coast to Spain for 34K off-peak or 50K peak (33:42) - BEST USE: Transfer to Flying Blue. Book Air France/KLM biz class to Europe for 50K Learn more about viewing the Flying Blue award calendar here. (36:31) - Find out about current point transfer bonuses here. (40:18) - WORST 5: Counting down from best of the worst to worst of the worst (40:34) - 5.Buy gift cards (41:46) - 4.Book travel through Citi (43:46) - 3. Transfer to AeroMexico (or transfer to ANY program to book low-value award) (44:59) - 2. Pay with Points (0.8 cpp value) (46:44) - 1. Shop with Points (usually: 0.8 cpp value) (49:38) - Do you have tips about rental car programs and how to maximize value with car rental rewards?

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did City do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event. Frequent Liler on the air starts now. Today's main event, 10 best and 5 worst uses of thank you rewards. So last week we talked about how best to earn thank you rewards points. Today

we're going to tell you which ways we like best to use them and also which ways we recommend not using them because you'll get really bad value. And nobody wants to get bad value out of their points. Certainly not anybody listening to this show, we hope. So we're going to help you avoid those poor value ways and tell you about the ones that we think are pretty exciting that you should be looking at if you've been collecting city thank you points. If you'd like to skip ahead to that or a different segment or return to it later on, don't forget you can go to the show notes in order to find the timestamps so you can hop ahead or hop back once again and find exactly where you're going for. Also, you'll find links to various things we've written on the blog that

are related to today's topics in those show notes. So don't forget to expand that description box wherever you're listening or watching this show. Don't forget to like it. Give us a thumbs up. Leave us some feedback. Leave us a comment. Let us know what you think about whatever it is that we've been talking about today. We'll find out by the end of the show for sure. All right. Let's drag out this week's Giant Mailbag. All right. Today's Giant Mail comes from Andrew. This is in reaction. We had talked on a previous show about how we were seeing United discounts for United members that have elite status or credit cards. business class flights and with partners, which is something I hadn't seen before. And I mentioned that I didn't think that United offered those discounts even on their own flights to card members or elite members. And Andrew corrected me. So here's what Andrew has

to say. In the recent podcast, Greg stated that United hadn't before offered discounted business class awards to elites. This isn't true. Platinum and 1K, which are the top tiers of United's elite status, have had expanded access to saver awards in business class. And he goes on to say, in fact, it's in the program's published benefits. And I verified this exact quote actually is there, easily found on United's website. And it says, all Premier members have expanded access to saver awards in united business united polaris business class and united first on two cabin aircraft well there you go there you have it so apparently well that's a wea culpa we'll take the wea culpa on that one we were uh we missed that but that's

largely i i would say due to the fact that neither of us have ever had, I think, I hate to speak for you, but I think neither of us have ever had premier platinum or 1K status with United. So I had not realized that. Thank you for letting us know, Andrew. Yeah, I actually had had it for about 90 days. I had platinum, you know, for in preparation for the 40K to far away challenge. I matched from Delta Diamond, I think it was, to United, got a challenge, but it gave me platinum for 90 days, which- And you didn't notice the expanded availability to business class awards, Craig?

I did not, which for those who remember the 40K to far away, we only had 40,000 points to fly as far as we could and um so i was not spending much time looking at business class awards it was all economy for that trip right right that was that was the joke there so uh so yes thank you anyway andrew good to know that so if you do have high levels of elite status with united then you do get some more award availability even up front awesome good to know that let's move on to this week's card news. What do we got up for card news? All right. Since I am on vacation, we decided to, instead of having news because,

gosh, we don't know what the news is at this time, we decided to talk about when you see good offers or offers that look like they're good. Like let's say you get a mailer in your snail mail or in your email or whatever. How do you evaluate whether that's actually a good welcome bonus? Like, is this something to jump on? Should you be excited about it or not? And we're going to talk briefly about how we think you should do that. Yeah. This just came up in conversation for me over there the weekend before we recorded this anyway, because I was talking to an old friend that was interested in getting into credit card rewards. And I explained to them that one of

the things you should always do, if you see an offer, whether you're going to apply for it through our links or not, you should always compare whatever you're seeing to our best offers page. And the reason for that is because Frequent Miler has the policy to only display the best publicly available offers, whether we earn an affiliate commission or not. So there are situations where the affiliate offer for a card might be inferior to the best offer that we know about. So we don't publish our affiliate link in that case. We just publish the best publicly available offer. So wherever you're seeing an offer, anytime you're evaluating one of those, go to frequentmiler.com and click on the link that says best offers and look and see. Is this the same as the offer, the best offer available through Frequent Miler?

Is it inferior? And then obviously, you would probably not want to be applying for it if you know it's an inferior offer, you know, or if it's a better offer, if you truly get a better offer, then you'll know, hey, this must be targeted, and it's really good. And also, you can let us know and then we can find out if there's a way that anybody can get that offer. But we do work to keep that up to date. So that's always your best place to go to kind of evaluate and see, is this the best available offer for this particular card? That's a good starting point. Yeah. Also, take a look when you're looking at a particular card. If there's small words under the offer that say alternate offer, sometimes we know of an offer that is not available for everyone, but might be still better.

And we might list that as an alternate offer. So that's worth checking as well. But yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's what I personally do. If I get an offer in the mail, I mean, if I don't know off the top of my head, I'm gonna go check the best offers page and see see what uh how it compares for sure um the the other thing i think is equally important is do you understand what you're getting like and and can you use that thing um so just because an offer is the best available for that card does not mean it's right for you. I'm going to give one example. As we record this, the Sinesta card has a 125,000 point offer, which is great because those points are actually pretty valuable. And you're talking about well over $1,000 of hotel stays. But if you don't have plans to stay at Sonesta hotels,

then that's useless to you. Why would you go after a card like that when you might get fewer points or less valuable points from a card that offers more usable points to you? You should go for the one that's more usable for you. Yeah. And along with that is understanding the difference in value between one point system and another, because someone who's relatively new to this might look and say, oh, well, I can only get 70,000 American Airlines miles on this offer, but look, I can get 100,000 Hilton points with this

other offer. And 100,000 might sound bigger, but you have to consider what the points can get 100,000 Hilton points with this other offer. And 100,000 might sound bigger, but you have to consider what the points can get you, what the reasonable redemption value of those points are. And that's where our best offers page also can be, I think, hugely helpful to somebody in evaluating the first year value of a particular card, because each of the cards on our best offers page has a first year value next to it. And that takes into account the each of the cards on our best offers page has a first year value next to it. And that takes into account the value of the points. And again, we're not like dreaming up the best potential uses of the points and determining the value of the points. Rather, we're using what we consider to be a reasonable redemption value without putting in a ton of

extra effort to cherry pick the best awards. We're valuing the points at what we think you'll reasonably get out of them and then subtracting the cost of awards, we're valuing the points at what we think you'll reasonably get out of them. And then subtracting the cost of the annual fee and subtracting the opportunity cost of spending on that card versus the next best card in your wallet. So we have that math being done for you there so that you can compare and say,

okay, well, how much value can I get in the first year from this card or that card? But then I think you also have to consider, well, what about the benefits on that particular card? And what are those worth to me too yeah exactly um cards have a lot of benefits that first of all we don't necessarily include in the first year value um because what we try to do with the first year value calculations as use is calculate the value of perks that we're pretty confident that if you get this card you're you really are going to use that perk and um the uh and and where it has like a definitive dollar value like so for example a perk like that gives you the chance of upgrades um we're not going to value

that at all because there's no good way to estimate what is that worth to you, but it might be worth a lot to you. You might really care about that, whether it's hotel upgrades or airline upgrades, whatever. Same thing with getting a priority pass access to the lounges, things like that, that could be worth a lot to you. And we don't assign any dollar value to like priority pass, for instance. That's a great example because that certainly could be a reason you might want a particular card, but we don't include that in the first year value because that will vary from person to person as to whether that has any value at all. If you already have a priority pass from a different card, then it'll have no value to you. So we don't assign a value to that in our first year value.

So our first year values are pretty intentionally conservative. Yeah. But on each of our cards, when you look on the best offers page at any one of the cards, or if you click through, we have dedicated card pages for each of those cards. Either way, in the summary section at the top, you'll see the card's perks laid out in a whole list of all the perks that we think anyone's going to care about anyway, as well as perks that you can earn through spend. It's all right there in a nice summary format, so just make sure to read through those things, and then you can decide whether or not, you know, because especially it's worth doing when you're talking about an expensive card. Like maybe you've got a great offer for an Amex Platinum card. You see, oh my gosh, it's $695 and you have to pay that the first year.

Is it really worth it? Well, it may be not just because of the welcome bonus is really big, but also because it does offer a lot of great perks. Yep. Very good. Very good. So that's how we evaluate. When Greg said, that's how I do it, that was funny because anytime I receive a mailer in the mail with a credit card that I haven't thought about in a while, then I immediately think, okay, well, I better go to the best offers page and see, does this match our best offer? Is this better? Is it worse? So that I can make sure that A, our best offers page is up to date,

but also B, because we don't memorize the offer on every single card. So I do have to double check and I want to double check against a trusted source and that's where I go for it. So hopefully you will too. All right. I think that brings us to this week's main event.

Main event time. 10 best and five worst uses of thank you rewards so uh thank you rewards are from city bank so if you have a city premiere card or a bunch of other cards that that offer those points uh then uh you have thank you rewards points but you do need either a premiere card or uh the no longer available prestige card or the no longer available Prestige card or the no longer available AT&T Access More card in order to use the points in the ways we're going to discuss in our top 10 at least. Yeah, because of course, our favorite uses of Citi thank you points are going to be to

transfer to partners for incredible value. And you need one of those cards in order to be able to transfer to the airline and hotel partners. And Citi's got a bunch of good options here. So we'll talk about what we think are the top 10 uses. Now, these are not the only uses. They're not even the only good uses because there are other uses that might be good for you depending on your situation. We tried to pick out the top 10 that we think are most broadly applicable for most people but keep in mind that there are probably some other decent uses around for city points as well absolutely but i am going to correct one thing that nick just said which is that even without the premier card you might have the you will have the ability to transfer to certain partners

but at bad transfer ratios so to to get like one-to-one transfers to most of these airline programs to get one to two transfers to choice things like that you are going to need one of the cards we talked about uh just before and the most likely for you to have is the strata premier card all right all right let's let's get the start we're gonna we going to start from the bottom of the best. So number 10 on the countdown. Number 10 of the countdown is to transfer your points to Wyndham in order to book Vacasa Vacation Rentals or Cottages.com Vacation Rentals. What's this doing in the list, Greg? You can buy Wyndham points on sale for less than a penny a point. Why would you have this as a good transfer option? Because obviously, if you could buy the

points for less than a cent each, you'd be better off just cashing out your points at one cent per point and then transferring over. Rather, I'm sorry, buying the points that you need for Wyndham or cottages.com, rather for Vicasa or cottages.com, buying the points from Wyndham instead of transferring? Why would you transfer? Yeah, no, that's a great point. First of all, I mean, the points aren't always on sale for less than a penny each. But the other thing is they do have limits on how many points you can buy when they're

on sale. And so if you're going to be doing more than a night or two, you're probably going to need more points. And transferring from Citi could you're probably going to need more points and transferring from city could be a good way to get those points. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's what it comes down to. Vacasa vacation rentals are 15,000 points per bedroom per night or 30,000 points per bedroom per night. It depends on the cost of the property. We have a whole post about booking Vacasa vacation rentals with your Wyndham rewards points. And it can be a good use of points. You can get nicely over one cent per point out of your points when you're using them that way. However, like Greg said, you can only buy up to X number of points per year. And

so if you're booking a multi-bedroom, the cost of vacation rental or cottages.com vacation rental, you're probably going to need more points than you can buy even if they are on sale at the time that you need them. So this could be a good transfer use. So that's number 10. Next up is number nine. Number nine is one that is common for a number of other transferable currencies as well, and that's transferring to Emirates. Emirates skywards to book first class between JFK and Milan or Newark and Athens for 102,000 points one way because Emirates has high surcharges on their awards in general, but not on the routes from New York to Milan or Newark to Athens. You'll pay less than $150 in taxes and fees plus the 102,000 miles. And Emirates first class is a really blingy experience.

I mean, you got the shower in the sky, the floor in the bathroom is heated so your titsies don't get chilly. It's a pretty swanky experience. Yeah. And even aside from those things, just the service is really stellar. The food and the catering, the drink, everything is really top notch. It's an experience to, it's definitely a bucket list experience to fly Emirates first. And so the ability to do that for just barely over a hundred thousand points one way is a pretty good deal. And I haven't done this yet, but I would love to fly from Europe back to the US so that I'd be awake for the whole time and get to really enjoy the whole time. Yeah, there you go. Daytime flight would be a lot more fun if you're going to book that experience.

And I mentioned the shower in the sky, by the way, and that's, of course, on the A380, which they fly between JFK and Milan. But between Newark and Athens, they fly a 777 that does not have the shower. So if you have your choice between the two, I would recommend the JFK to Milan or vice versa, Milan and JFK in order to get the full A380 experience with the bar in the back and all that jazz. Okay. Yeah. Number eight is to transfer to Turkish Miles and Smiles, which, of course, the reason to do that is to book United domestic flights for 10,000 miles one way and specifically to book United to Hawaii or Alaska reason why this is only number eight on the list, because United has gotten much stingier with the award space that they released to partners. So this is much harder to find than it once was.

But when you can find it flying from like Newark or Boston all the way to Honolulu or Anchorage for 10,000 miles one way and just the $5.60 in taxes is a fantastic deal. Again, if you can find it. Yeah, yeah. No, exactly. All right. Number seven on the list is to transfer to Virgin Atlantic. With Virgin Atlantic, you can use your points to fly Air France and KLM Flying Blue. And specifically, one of the things we like is the ability to book

business class to or from Europe starting at as low as 48,500 miles. And weirdly, sometimes Virgin has better access to the low-priced awards than Air France or KLM does with their own program. So sometimes that's a better way of flying them. Sometimes Virgin will, at the lowest level, like flying from the West Coast to Europe, they'll charge a little more than the best possible price you can get with Air France or KLM's own miles. But if you could find availability through Virgin and not through Air France or KLM's own miles. But if you could find availability

through Virgin and not through Air France, then it's definitely worth it. Yeah, that's the thing. Sometimes they have access to space you wouldn't expect because maybe prices are higher when you're looking directly through Flying Blue and then you might be surprised that, oh, look, but it's available via Virgin Atlantic. Not always going to be the case, but sometimes it will be. So when it is, that can be a good deal. Yeah. Also a call out to using, again, Virgin Miles to fly Air France or KLM, but this time within Europe,

for as low as 4,000 points one way is a great deal. Sure is. Sure is. It can be excellent, especially when prices are high. We found that because usually flights within Europe, we have the impression anyway, that usually they're really cheap, but sometimes they're not, especially close in. And when that happens, this can be a big savior. So that's excellent.

All right. Number six, transferred Avianca LifeMiles to book business class to Europe for 70,000 miles one way without surcharges. So that's not the best price ever, but because Avianca Life Miles has all of the Star Alliance carriers, that can be a pretty good deal, probably even more so from the West Coast than from the East Coast, because you do have some other East Coast options that are even cheaper. So that's a pretty good deal. If you subscribe to Life Miles Plus, which you can do from just $20 a month, and you'll earn some miles from Avianca every month for that $20 a month, and then also get a 10% rebate on your redemptions. And so that can then drop that price to effectively

63,000 miles one way. And then there's some other unique perks of Avianca LifeMiles, like the way that they price their mixed cabin awards, which is roughly based on the percentage of the award you're flying in business class, let's say, and the percentage of the award you're flying in business class, let's say, and the percentage of the award that you're flying in economy class. They kind of take the percentage of the business class price for that distance segment, and then same thing with economy. And so the mixed cabin pricing can be really attractive. It can be significantly better than it sounds to get your long haul flight across the ocean in business class and then have a long economy class lag on either end and perhaps pay significantly fewer miles overall. Also, since they devalued,

I think they eliminated some of the old sweet spot sort of awards that used to exist that were priced differently for nobody knows what reason. But I think some new ones were created. We're seeing Newark to London on United is ringing in at just 45,000 Avianca Life miles one way. So if and when you find that available, that's quite a good deal. It's one of the best deals to your up in business class. So 45,000 miles for something like that would be another excellent use of your city points. Yeah, it sure would. And it's worth pointing out too that Citibank does not have other great Star Alliance transfer partners. So you can't transfer to Air Canada Aeroplan or to United. So really for most uses where you want to fly Star Alliance, Avianca Life Miles is probably going to be your best bet

of cities transfer partners. There you go. All right. Coming in at number five is the ability to transfer to choice privileges one to two. So for example, transfer 30,000 city points, you end up with 60,000 choice points. And choice points can be sort of randomly very valuable in the United States, like booking just regular choice hotels. Sometimes you can get well over one cent per point value, but that's kind of random. But you can also get predictable great value in certain places like the hotels in the Nordic countries that used to be called Nordic choice hotels, but now are called strawberry hotels. They're bookable through choice privileges and are usually a terrific value. There's choice bookable hotels

in Japan that are usually a terrific value. And there's the ability to book preferred hotels, which is a totally independent collection of hotels that you could book with choice points. And depending on the property, it's possible to get very good value from that. So there's a surprising amount of choice when you transfer to choice. I see what you did there.

Dad joke alert. Yes, yes there is. Well played there. Yeah, I like that. A lot of good options with choice points. Choice is one of those things that I feel like probably a lot of people ignore and it's worth keeping an eye on it because every now and then it comes in handy. When it does, it can be really handy. So keep an eye on that. The other nice thing that Greg didn't mention is with some properties, they'll let you book any room or many of the room types for the same cost. So what I mean to say here is that sometimes you can book a suite for the same price as a standard room. And that's not always the case with every property, but it happens with choice. It definitely does. And it's worth looking, even if a suite's not available, make sure you get the most deluxe whatever room, because whatever rooms they show bookable with points are all the same point price, even when the cash rates vary a lot. Number four is to transfer to Leading Hotels of the World Leaders Club and book your Leading Hotels of the World using your points and get about 1.6 cents per point in value. This is one that I know you've been bullish on. Yeah, I mean, I've been really excited because as we record this, there's a transfer bonus.

So you get even more. You get about two cents per point value. And I just really enjoy the fact that this is another collection of hotels, kind of like we mentioned preferred hotels before. This is another independent collection. But because you're actually getting Leaders Club points, you are getting benefits of booking through Leaders Club that you wouldn't get if you booked outside of it. And when I stayed in one, I think it was last year, I was surprised. I actually got good benefits, free breakfast. I got an upgrade to a suite and things like that. So I'm pretty happy about this option. That's why I came in at number four. All right. At number three, we've got transfer to Qatar Avios and book Q-suites for 70,000 Avios one way and reasonable taxes and fees. So we've written about this before. You can fly between

the US gateways and Doha for 70,000 Avios one way, which when you consider the quality of Qatar Q suites, that gets to be a pretty exciting deal. I mean, I think they market it when the marketing tagline is first in business, you know, playing the kind of double meaning there of them being the best business class, but also kind of being like a first class experience in the business class cabin, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And one of the nice things here too is Qatar sometimes has better availability for their own flights than partners that you can book the same flights with. So having the ability to transfer to Qatar here can be really valuable. There you go. And if you can get those Q suites and you can,

every now and then you might be able to get the four seats and get that four pack of seats that kind of all face each other. So that'd be really cool. I'd love to do that with my family. So like when my wife and I flew, we flew the two seats that are closest together in the middle and furthest from the aisle. And they were able to transform that into a double bed at night. They literally took away the partition, put in a sort of a padding in between and made it up like a single double bed for us.

Uh, and of course there's doors, uh, to the, um, aisles. So it's like having a little, little tiny bedroom in the sky,

which was really fun. But if you go with four people, they could do things like that and even open it up so that all four are like facing each other in like a family room kind of situation, which would be, I, that would be really fun to do. Yeah, I think it'd be fun.

One of these days, hopefully I'll get a chance to do that. All right. All right, coming in at number two, transfer to Eva Air. So Eva Air is, they fly, they're a Taiwanese carrier and they're known for having a great business class product. And they fly from various U.S. cities to Taipei for usually 75,000 or 80,000 miles one way, depending on where you're flying from, too. The reason this gets such high billing here isn't really specific about flying EVA Air,

although I've heard great things about their, I shouldn't have actually said their products as much as their service and their catering and things that are supposed to be so great. But the ability to find awards. So flying to Asia these days, especially in business or first class, finding awards has been really, really tough lately. And the nice thing here is Eva provides a lot more award space to their own members. And Citi is the only major transferable currency that transfers one to one to Eva Air. So you can also transfer from Capital One, but it's not one-to-one. So that makes it pretty darn valuable.

Yeah, yeah, that's a good one to have and to check on, you know, to search. You can search award availability on their website. I recently wrote a post about things to look out for, like gotchas and pitfalls and surprises that you may not know about if you're relatively new to booking awards. And somebody commented actually to mention that one thing that got them was that they looked it up and it looked like an award was going to be available and they

transferred over the points to book it. And then they continued forward in the booking process on the Eva website and found that the space was just waitlisted that they wanted. And so that's something to watch out for before you transfer over. You can get to that message that says that it's waitlisted. Just make sure you go through all the steps in order to get far enough in the process to know whether that's confirmable space or waitlisted space. I wouldn't probably transfer for waitlisted space because I don't have a good sense as to whether or when that may clear with Eva.

So yeah, no, that's a great point. I'd also mentioned the opposite, which is that I can't remember it off the top of my head, but they use really weird language on their website to show that an award is available. And I find that if I hadn't read up on how you know if it's available, I would have thought whatever that language was meant that it probably wasn't. But anyways, it goes both ways with that. There you go. There you go. So you got to know what you're doing. Got to know what you're doing. That's a slightly more advanced use of points only, not really because it's particularly difficult. It's just, it's not as intuitive. Their website isn't as intuitive to use

as some other booking engines. But once you get the hang of it, that can be a good one to keep in mind. All right. That was number two. That brings us to number one. Nick asked it that way because it turns out that Nick and I are not good at counting. And as we've been going down the list, we realized that we actually have 11 items on our top 10 list. So this is the number one, number one.

So the number one thing number one. So the number one thing, what we're going to call number zero. But we're not there yet. We didn't get to zero. We're going to call that zero. We're going to. Sort of number one. So the number one-ish thing on our list is to

transfer to Qatar Avios then move the points from there to Iberia Avios. And the reason you might want to do that is because you can book Iberia's own business class from East Coast-ish cities to Spain for as little as 34,000 points one way when off-peak pricing is in effect. And even when it's not, it's 50,000 points when those awards are available. So that's a good deal either way. It is. And Iberia's surcharges are reasonable. So whereas British Airways has really high surcharges through their Avios program, Iberia's are much more reasonable. You're looking at less

than $200 each way and closer to 100, I think, when you're departing the United States. So there are reasonable surcharges on those flights and 34,000 miles for business class to Europe is a slamming deal when you can find it. So if you find that off-peak pricing, then that can be great. Keep in mind, we've mentioned this before, but I always like to mention this when we mention Iberia because I think it's a safety tip that people need to know about. You can, if you book an Iberia flight, you can cancel that for a reasonable fee and get your Avios back. However, if you transfer to Qatar and move your points over to Iberia, and then you book a flight operated by a partner like American

Airlines, those awards on other partners are completely non-refundable. So if you say, oh, well, I can't find this business class Spain for 34K, but I see an American Airlines flight that's bookable through Iberia and it's only 61,000 miles, or I can't recall exactly what the pricing is for East Coast to Europe through Iberia, but whatever it may be, keep in mind that if you book an American Airlines flight with your Iberia Avios, it is non-refundable. There is not a fee you can pay to get your Avios back. You will just lose your Avios if you cancel that. So safety tip, be careful about booking partner awards with Iberia Avios. But if you find availability on Iber, you're not really stuck because you can move your Avios around to the different Avios programs. You might find that Finnair has the best pricing for that American Airlines flight. You can move to there. You might find that British Airways has the same pricing as Iberia for the American Airlines flight, and they have better cancellation rules.

Same thing with Qatar, better cancellation rules. So you should look around before you book a completely non-refundable partner award. But again, Nick already said this, but for booking Iberia's own flights, the cancellation rules are totally reasonable and not too expensive. Very good. So now our number one, number one use, our number zero use, our best use, we'll just call it our best use on our top 10-ish list is, drumroll, somebody, I hope Kerry just inserted a drumroll here, we'll see, is transfer to Air France KLM Flying Blue and book Air France KLM business class to Europe for just 50,000 miles when you find availability. 50K one way in business class from East Coast or West Coast to Europe is pretty hard to beat. It really is. And the West Coast part of it is where it's really special because we have a lot of opportunities from the East Coast to fly to Europe for around that 50K price mark. But from the West Coast, not so much.

So when that appears, that's a smoking great deal. And we think that this is also not just a smoking great deal, but sort of most applicable to a lot of people who might be listening within North America because Air France and KLM fly from so many places around North America to Paris, to Amsterdam. And so there's a lot of places where you have the potential to find this deal. Yeah, you do. And there are surcharges, but they're moderate. You'll pay less than $250 each way in surcharges. So it's obviously, it's more than I'd like to pay, but not so much that it's prohibitive. I don't think,

especially considering the fact that you do get a nice flatbed seat, good food and decent service, whether you're flying in Air France or KLM. Keep in mind that flying only to Paris or Amsterdam sometimes will show a higher price than connecting onward beyond them. So don't forget, we've talked about this before on this show, but worth a mention since we're talking about the best uses of city points here, that sometimes connecting beyond those cities will result in this 50K pricing, even when you didn't see the 50K pricing on the non-stops. So you may want to search beyond just going to Paris and look at Belgium or look at Prague or look at some other city that you can connect to beyond the gateway or beyond the hub in Europe. Absolutely. Yeah, that's a great tip and something definitely to keep in mind.

And it's something I have to be honest, I sometimes, even though I've said it a million times, I sometimes forget when I'm looking myself. And that's important because they do do that a lot where they have cheaper awards to smaller airports and things. All right. So that was our top 10-ish list with a bonus, a free bonus just for you. Speaking of bonuses, all of the above stuff that we just talked about can be made even sweeter when Citi has a transfer bonus to those programs. And so I made a list of here are the transfer bonuses we've seen already this year.

If you want to look yourself, go to our current point transfer bonuses page. You could see the current bonuses and you could scroll down and see all of the past bonuses and you can search for the word city and to have it filter out all the others. So anyway this year so far we had a 50 transfer bonus to turkish uh that was targeted i believe um we saw also a 50 transfer bonus bonus to uh a core i think is how you say it maybe um and uh 30 to qatar 25 to to LifeMiles twice, 25% to Leaders Club, Leading Hotels of the World Leaders Club. And that's going on now as we record this. So is, by the way, one of the LifeMiles bonuses. And we've also seen 25% transfer bonus to Air France, KLM Flying Blue.

And finally, 15% to Cathay Pacific Asia Miles. So that's pretty good for about two-thirds of the way through the year now, something like that, and had quite a few bonuses. And a lot of those that I mentioned were bonuses were in our top 11 list of best uses. So that makes them all, as I said, even sweeter. Even sweeter. Yeah, it's nice because all those decent deals that we talked about become really good deals. I mean, you look at that 25% Air France KLM Flying Blue, that was our top use there at 50,000 miles. We were pretty excited. And now if you get one of those 25% transfer bonuses, then you're looking at what, around 37, 38,000 ish, 40,000 miles. We were pretty excited. And now if you get one of those 25% transfer bonuses,

then you're looking at what, around 37, 38,000 ish, uh, 40,000, 40,000, 40,000. I'm sorry. I don't know why I was doing weird math there. Yeah. 40,000, uh, 40,000 city. Thank you points for business class to, or from Europe. That's, I mean, that's incredible, but then it's really special even from the East coast and special at that point point. So, yeah, very good options there. Now, those are good uses and pot sweeteners to make it a little bit nicer when you get those transfer bonuses. But we have sort of an in-between use of city thank you points. Yeah, before we talk about the worst five, we'll see whether we're really counted correctly on that list. But there's an in-between. It doesn't really belong on either list, either the best or the worst.

And that is to convert your points to cash, which you can cash out for one cent per point, but you can make it a little better if you have the rewards plus card, then up to 100,000 points that you redeem per year will be rebated. 10% of them will be rebated. So you can get up to 100,000 points that you redeem per year will be rebated. 10% of them will be rebated. So you can get up to 10,000 points back. Now that's true whether you're transferring to airline and hotel partners, like we talked about before, or if you're redeeming for cash back. And so if you end up using that combination,

you have the rewards plus card and you redeem for cash back and you get a rebate that turns out to be that you're getting 1.11 repeating cents per point uh value from your points which not exciting but it's it's certainly doesn't make the worst five right exactly it's better than the first it's that's really part of the reason reason the worst five are as bad as they are, because instead of doing some of the things in the worst five, you could just do that and end up with, again, that 1.11 cents per point on up to 100,000 points redeemed that way per year anyway. Yeah. Yeah. All right. All right.

The worst. Two, three. Yeah, it looks like there's five here. I'm pretty sure there's five. So let's talk about the worst five uses of your city. Thank you. Points counting down from the best of the worst to the worst of the worst. All right. The number five best of the worst is to use your points to redeem for gift cards. So you can, you can log into the thank you portal and find gift cards available for a value of one cent per point. And yeah, sometimes they're on sale and so you could

get a little bit better, but yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, actually I'm, I, yeah, I mean, yeah, actually, I'm now that I look at this list again, I'm not even sure that this should have been as high as the number five on the the best of the worst, because so many merchant gift cards can be bought at a discount somewhere else. doing here is sort of cashing out your points at one cent per point and paying full face value for a gift card effectively. Whereas a lot of these gift cards can be purchased for at least 10% off somewhere else. And some of the gift cards can be purchased for significantly better at Costco or Sam's Club or when you find them on sale. So you're just not getting good use of or good value out of your points this way. I would not redeem for gift cards. Yeah. Yeah. All right. What's number four on our list of the worst five? Book travel through Citi. Now, why is that number four if gift cards is number five? Can't you get better than one cent per point in value if you're booking travel through Citi? No. They no longer offer... so it used to be that you

could get like a 20 uh pay 20 fewer points with the premier card they don't have that anymore um you can get fourth night free with if you have the old city prestige card but um you get that whether you're paying cash or points through the portal so it it doesn't mean you're getting better than one cent per point value with your points. And the reason I had this as worse than buying gift cards is because the travel portal often shows really bad prices for travel.

And I'm going to give a recent example. I looked up, I had an opportunity recently. I thought I was going to book a fourth night free stay. And I looked up the price, like, you know, just wherever hotels.com or wherever. And then I looked up on Amex fine hotels and resorts, what the price would be for those four nights. And those prices weren't that different. So fine hotels and resorts would have been great because they'd get all kinds of

benefits but then i thought oh no i could get the fourth night free well they charge so much more for per night that the total price came to almost exactly the same whether i booked with the fourth night free or without it it through another channel. So that was really bad. Yeah, that's too bad. We find that to be the case a lot. Not always that bad, but it was there. Right, right, right. We often find that the pricing through Citi's travel engine, I mean, it's always been pretty poor. And so hopefully someday they'll fix that. But until they do, it's not really a good use of your points booking travel. Well, not a good use, not even not really. It's just not a good use of your points booking travel. Well, not a good use. Not even not really. It's just not a good use of your city points. All right. So that was number four on the

best of the worst. So the number three, the third best worst use of your city thank you points is to transfer to Aeromexico or really any program where you're going to book a low value award. But Aeromexico is not a good one because it's ratio one to one it's one to one yeah man that's horrible because aeromexico of course has sort of a kilometer based program and so like amex membership rewards transfer to aeromexico and i think you get 1.6 for every one you know amex membership rewards points so that's right so you're getting like 60 percent more you give yourself like a 60 transfer bonus by transferring amex points over transferring city points and we don't recommend you transfer your amex points either most of the time because aero mexico generally

has a pretty poor award chart and award values so yeah you don't want to transfer one-to-one to aero mexico no no definitely not yeah you know just elaborate on that a tiny bit is that like sometimes transferring one to 1.6 with Amex can make sense under certain circumstances, but even there, usually that's not a good deal. So here it's like a really bad deal, but yeah. All right, let's move on. Number two, worst way to use your points is to pay with points. Now, Citi has a specific meaning of what that means, to pay with points. And that is, it's like a purchase eraser that you can look at your credit card statement, basically, and use points to erase any of the charges on there. Sounds great. I'd love to erase charges so the charges on there. Sounds great. I'd love to erase charges so I don't have to pay them back.

But you're only getting eight-tenths of a cent per point value. And so that's really sad. I mean, it's almost evil because, so yeah, they're making it sort of easier to you or more fun maybe for people who like to feel like things are free but you could have cashed out those points for a penny each and paid your credit card bill with that cashed out uh you know money for one cent per point value instead here's an opportunity to get 0.8 i mean yeah yeah i mean like they're charging you for the i guess they're charging you for the, I guess, they're charging you for their freight. They're like, this is going to be expensive freight for you. We're going to charge you a

little bit more. Yeah. It doesn't make any sense at all. So do not do that. And you might be sitting there if you didn't do the math or didn't hear what Greg just said, you might say, oh, but you talking about Capital One Purchase Eraser as being okay. That's because you're getting one cent per point with the Capital One Purchase Eraser. And even that doesn't excite us. We're not wildly excited about that. We're like, it's okay. At eight tenths of a cent per point, it just does not make any sense. Do not erase your purchases with your Citi Thank You Points. Just cash them out for one cent each if you would really rather not have to pay for those purchases. Exactly. All right. But our number one worst of the worst use of your city thank you points is to shop with points.

Now, wait, doesn't that sound like paying with points? Sort of. Sure does. What's the difference here? Yeah. The difference is shopping with points means you're at a merchant, like you're shopping through amazon.com or you're at the gas station and you're offered the opportunity to pay for that purchase with points. And a lot of people really like that. But just like we said before, you're only getting

0.8 cents per point value in most cases. For all I know, there might even be worse in some cases, but I at least double-checked Amazon and it was looking at 0.8 cents per point. Now you might ask me, isn't that- Why is that? Isn't that the same as the purchase eraser? It's 0.8 cents per point either way. What makes this worse than the purchase eraser? Right. And so this one is worse because you're not earning any rewards on these purchases. You're just spending your points and not actually earning. Whereas at least with a purchase eraser, you've earned rewards with your credit card when you paid for whatever you did.

So there's not a big difference. I wouldn't look at either one and say, oh, at least you did it that way. Don't do it either way unless your goal is to supplement our hobby and make all the rest of us happy. Which case we thank you for your service. Right, right. And what I mean by that is, and I mean this totally seriously i the only reason um companies like city can afford to allow transfers to valuable airline and hotel programs because that costs them more money than than it's worth to them uh the only reason i can afford that is because a lot of people are spending their points in these suboptimal ways and so it all kind of averages out. So the people that are doing the points eraser or the shop with points, they are supporting us. They're supporting you in getting the top 11 uses of Citi Thank You Points. That's why we thank them for their service.

Thank you. Maybe that's why it's called thank you rewards. Thank you rewards. Thank you for redeeming them poorly. No, I will hopefully after today's show, at least you'll focus on the best uses of points. And if you're going to if you want to not have to pay for the things you bought, if maybe I mean, you might be in a situation where you need the cash more than you need a business class award on Air France KLM Flying Blue. There's nothing wrong with that. But then cash your points out at one cent per point. Don't use them at eight tenths of a cent per point. And then your points will go farther. They'll buy you more. So if you're in a situation where you need a cash infusion, there are better ways to go about it. All right. I think that wraps up today's main event

and brings us to this week's question of the week. This week's question of the week comes in via email from Rudy. Rudy says about 10 times a year, I have to rent a car for work. I'm oftentimes disenchanted by the rental car rewards programs. I used to be a big Hertz guy, but I've shied away ever since I got put in the slammer. No, I'm not. He didn't get put in the slammer. He shied away as of late.

I found that National seems to have the best service. You guys brought up the Avis promotion in a recent show, and I appreciated the info. Would love to hear more tips regarding rental car programs and the best way to maximize points slash value. So, Greg, A, what can you do? Is there a way to maximize value with car rental rewards? And B, I think more importantly, why don't we talk much about car rental rewards? Because we don't talk about them very much in this show.

We don't write about car rental rewards a lot on the blog. Why not? Yeah. Well, because most of the car rental rewards programs stink. That's really it. That's really it, right? Just to be really clear. I mean, Hertz actually used to have a somewhat decent one.

They kept devaluing. They took away the ability to transfer points to airline partners and just made it worse and worse. The one we both like is National. It has a very simple reward structure. And if you get Emerald Club executive something status, then you, uh, you, uh, earn a free day after five rentals instead of, I think the usual six. Um, and the free day doesn't, uh, it can be a one way, so you can get some really good value from it that way. Um, so yeah, I mean, that's my favorite. I mean, I think there's other ones that I would guess we haven't really explored very much, but I just haven't seen anything to make them exciting as way, you know, no ways to get like way outsized value. of time and focus on it because, okay, Greg said national is probably our favorite because you can earn a free rental day after like five rentals if you've got the right level of elite status.

And that can be valuable used for a one-way rental, but how valuable? The one-way rental, it depends on your situation and prices and all this stuff, but what's it going to save you? $100, $150, $200 for the one, I mean, and that'd be a really expensive one day, one way rental, right? So at most, probably you're talking about saving maybe $150. And so if you had to pay like $20 more to rent via national each time, well, it wouldn't be worth renting with national 10 times over the course of the year because you wouldn't save enough to make it worthwhile. So there's not really any exciting outsized value to be had there. It's nothing like using your points to book an

airline or hotel award where you can save hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars. With rental car awards, it's so limited in value that it's not really something that's going to drive a decision, I don't think, in most cases. I mean, I'm sure that there are some exceptions here and there. And when they run a good promotion, hey, I mean, I'll rent a couple times with one company over another maybe to get that free rental day. But I recognize that that free rental day has really limited value. And I mean, I'm happy to keep an extra $100 or $150 in my pocket if I can. But it means that every dollar that I overspend in order to earn that is making it closer to a break even. And it very quickly becomes a, it's just not that exciting. And unfortunately,

all the rental car companies have gone to that kind of model of not very exciting. So, you know, I pick rentals more so based on price and the fact that like National usually has nice cars and good service and most of my experiences. So of of course, it's not going to be the case every single time. But so I do tend to like National for those things and for the free days. So I might be willing to pay a little more because I know I'll probably get a car with leather seats. And I like that because I have kids and they spill stuff in the car. You know, so there's little things like that, but they're not things that I'm going to tell

you that you should count on every time because you can't. And so I would probably be more likely to just pick based on price and which company I'm comfortable renting with. Yeah, no, exactly. You know, you said that you found National have better service. So just stick with that. And, you know, unless the prices are widely different than than, you know, maybe you want to play with some others. But as Nick said, basing your decisions on the rewards program is probably not where I'd start. No, no. Because I mean, there's just not enough difference in value from one to the next to make it worth paying any more for one over another. It's really just going to come down to what's the best deal for you. Now, that all said,

we have mentioned a couple of times that at least for me, I've started looking at my US Bank Altitude Reserve points as my rental car rewards. And what I mean by that is because the Altitude Reserve has that real-time mobile rewards feature where you can pay for a qualifying purchase and then get a text message and ask if you want to redeem points for that purchase. I'll use my US Bank Altitude Reserve points for car rentals. So I've been using that card to pay for a car rental and then erase the purchase with the points. So that's kind of my technique for rental car rewards. And then it's very agnostic as to which program. It doesn't matter, one to the next. It's all kind of the same. Yeah. Yeah. Whereas I do gravitate towards national because with certain credit

cards, it's really easy to have that higher level elite status where you get to pick from the executive aisle. And I've just had mostly positive experiences with them. So why change? But if the price is wildly different, then I'll switch. There you go. But sense. If the price is wildly different, then I'll switch. There you go. But it would be the price that would drive that decision versus the rewards program, probably. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yep. All right, Rudy, there you have it. If you've enjoyed today's show and you'd like to get more of this stuff in your email inbox each day or each week, you want to go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list, follow us on social media, join our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group, where you can ask and answer questions like these all the time. And if you have a piece of feedback that you'd like to be considered for a future Giant Mailbag or a question that you'd like to be considered for the question of the week, you can send that to send it to mailbag at frequentmiler.com. Bye, everybody.