Frequent Miler on the Air - 100K Vacay: Resetting the odds due to transfer bonuses | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep322 | 9-5-25

Episode Date: September 5, 2025

In today's podcast episode, Kathy tells us why the Frequent Miler team challenges are her favorite time of the year, and we discuss how transfer bonuses have already changed the 100K Vacay game.Giant Mailbag(01:50) - Two listeners share their experiences with the recent cancellation of the Honolulu to Boston route through Hawaiian Airlines.(09:11) - One listener tells us the annual challenge is her favorite time of the year...JetBlue 25/25 Update(11:33) - Nick and his family have 20+ destinationsCard News(16:55) - Updated guide to ultra-premium credit card travel protectionsMattress Running the Numbers(23:52) - Rovemiles promoBonvoyed(31:07) - Bummer: Alaska losing award partnerships with LATAM and Singapore on 10/1(33:40) - Avios transfers between British Airways, Iberia, and Aer Lingus are suspendedAwards, Points, and More(37:32) - Bilt status match to Virgin Voyages(40:00) - GHA Discovery (hotel program) status match from many hotel/airline/cruise programs: https://frequentmiler.com/gha-discovery-hotel-program-status-match-from-many-hotel-airline-cruise-programs/Main Event: 100K Vacay: Resetting the odds due to transfer bonuses(45:12) - Challenge overview(50:02) - 100K Vacay Schedule announced(57:15) - Original Odds (without knowing about transfer bonuses): 1. Tim, 2. Stephen, 3. Nick(1:01:42) - Planning Phase Transfer Bonuses(1:29:46) - Original prediction: (re: Nick) I can almost guarantee that he’s going to make some 100K magic happen in a way that no one can predict. Despite the odds, I’m betting Nick will take home the crown. What's the new prediction?Question of the Week(1:36:53) - Should we change the RRV for Alaska and Chase based on the things they've recently lost?Subscribe and FollowVisit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media.Music Credit – “Ocean Deep” by Annie Yoder

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyescape.com. On today's show, Kathy tells us why we're about to enter her favorite time of the year. And we'll talk about how transfer bonuses have changed the 100K vacay game. Frequent Miler on the air starts now. Today's main event, 100K vacay, resetting the odds due to transfer bonuses. Our annual team challenge is starting soon.

And one of the things that is going to have a big impact on each contestant is which transfer bonuses are in effect and during the planning stage of the whole challenge so that they can make their 100,000 points go further with transfer bonuses. There have been a lot this summer during the planning stage, and I think it's really interesting to dive in and see what does the landscape look like. Now that we know what most of the transfer bonuses that were available to the contestants were, who now really has the upper hand on the whole thing. Yeah, it's really interesting because I don't think it's shaking out the way that any of us would have predicted on that front. So we'll come back to more about that and how it's been different, I think, than. certainly me than I expected and probably differently than you too.

So then you expect it as well, I suppose. So we'll get into that in a few minutes. But first, remember, don't forget that you can always find the timestamps in the show notes. So if you want to jump ahead to that or you want to come back to something later on, you can always find the timestamps just by expanding the description box. Wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to give this video or podcast a like, a thumbs up, some stars, a review.

Leave us your comments. Tell us your thoughts, too. We love to hear from you. And with that out the way, let's move on to this week's Giant Mail bag. All right. Today's Giant Mail, we have three entries. The first two relate to a question we had, I think, a week or two ago about someone had booked a Hawaiian Airlines Live Flat First Class Award between Honolulu and Boston, and then that route got canceled, and we gave some advice about what they can do. And we have two people writing in about that same situation.

Heather gets to go first here. Heather says, I wanted to share with you my experience with the recent cancellation of the Honolulu to Boston route through Hawaiian Airlines. I also experienced this cancellation for my family of five, which I had booked via cash on economy tickets and then used 50,000 Hawaiian miles per ticket to upgrade to lay flat seats in business class, which, by the way, is a really cool. trick that you could do with Hawaiian miles. At least for now, we don't know if anything like that will continue once they merge into the Atmos program. As soon as I received the email from Hawaiian, I got on the phone with them to re-book. Initially, they wanted to book me on a non-direct flight to Boston with non-lay-flat seats. I told them this was not acceptable to me and requested to be sent to JFK with a specific flight that I wanted booked. They then gave me pushback that they

couldn't change the airport I was routed to. Again, insisted that I had paid for lay flat seats, and that was going to be the only acceptable alternative for me. I was positioning from Florida anyway, so I really didn't care where on the East Coast I returned. He then argued that there were no award tickets left on the JFK flight that I wanted. I insisted this was their doing and not mine, so I wanted those seats regardless. After a long time on hold, the agent came back and told me that he would put me on the flight I wanted to JFK, with lay flat seats with a connecting jet blue flight to Boston. And just aside, so that way the agent was able to keep the original ultimate routing to Boston,

but also give this person what they wanted. The agent told me, just don't take the Boston flight if you don't want it. As usual, Greg was exactly correct in his assumption that they could use a partner flight for the New York to Boston connection. It was also right that Hawaiian could book me in that class, even if a word space was not available. Okay, so a couple of things there. First, Heather, I applaud you for pushing hard on this. Sometimes that's what you need to do to get what you want

and absolutely the right thing to do in that situation. I can't hurt to try, and obviously you got a great result. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that it's worth mentioning that you need to know what you can reasonably ask for when you push. Because if you're pushing for something that is not going to be a reasonable ask or not going to be something they can do, then you may not get anywhere. And don't bang yourself, you know, bang your head against the wall.

If somebody's just not willing to help, it might be worth hanging up and calling in and trying with someone else. However, in this case, it was probably reasonable like Greg thought. I think this was exactly what Greg suggested would be possible, right? That reasonable to expect that they could give you a seat on their own flight, whether there was a word space or not. So that was a reasonable thing to keep pushing for. And well done, Heather. Good job. Yeah, absolutely. But before, Nick and I congratulate ourselves too much on giving the right advice. Let's read this email from Billy. Billy says, I wanted to respond to last week's question of the week about the cancellation

of the Boston-to-Hanolulu route by Hawaiian. I was affected by this after booking that route for only 40,000 Hawaiian miles in Live Flat First Class for April 26, which was an absolute unicorn redemption. I agree. You both mentioned that it was very unlikely Hawaiian. would rebook the reader on another airline. Well, okay, on my first call to Hawaiian customer service, agent rebooked me onto United, Boston to Chicago, to Honolulu,

with the Chicago to Honolulu segment in Liflat, first class on United 78710. It was rebooked into a revenue fair class, Jay, so I will presumably earn miles too. Well, we stand corrected, don't we? Because we assumed that would not happen. We assumed that would be the unreasonable thing that I was kind of alluding to before to expect that they would book you on another carrier,

particularly in a revenue fair, you know, where it's costing the airline more. It doesn't cost them much of anything to rebook you into a seat on their own flight, but on somebody else's flight, presumably that does cost Hawaiian something. I'm surprised. Well done. Congratulations. I'm surprised that worked. Yeah, me too.

I mean, that's a fantastic outcome. So, you know, good job. You know, I think you're obviously lucky you've got a better agent than the person that Heather talked to. But both of you, you know, it turns out that I think good results for both of you and just shows, yeah, call. And you know what? If you don't get this result the first time, hang up, call again and a third time as well. Yeah. And I think an important point here that I don't know how.

either of these calls went, but I would guess or imagine that probably both Heather and Billy were pretty polite and asked for what it was they wanted. And if it ultimately got it, I think that the moral of the story here should be ask for what it is that you want because obviously Billy got it. And I would add to that, even though we don't have this piece of the story from either of them. If you're not getting what you want, try again and don't get frustrated. Just try again maybe with another agent because maybe you'll get Billy's agent next time. and it'll be a really easy experience and just continue to be polite

and ask for what it is you want and maybe you'll get it now and then. There's no harm in asking and Billy's outcome here was fantastic. Yeah, it sure was. I want to caution Billy not to expect too many miles from United. Hopefully you will get a bunch,

but I had a situation where I had American Airlines business class flight from Chicago to London that turned around when an engine blew, and I convinced them to put me on a united business class flight to London, which that was a whole thing to get them to agree to that, but they did. And I was all excited that it was revenue fair,

but I earned, like, I don't know, a couple hundred miles or something tiny. So it must have, so it coded as a revenue fair, but at such a low cash rate that the actual earnings on my side was negligible. Yeah, you know, and I think that on the flip side, it could end up working out really well. You know, recently I had a flight to Europe with Virgin, actually, I was flying Air France booked via Virgin Atlantic, and there was a schedule change. So they had to rebook me onto something else, and that ended up in a revenue fair. And we didn't earn a ton of miles, but we turned, I think, something like 7,600 Delta miles crediting that to Delta. So it can work out.

It just depends on a total situation. You never know. Right, right, right, right. Okay. Now let's move on to Kathy. This is a totally different subject. Kathy writes in saying, My colleague and I were carpooling on a longest drive from work,

and she knows I'm into miles and points, so we got to chatting about travel. I can't remember exactly what we were discussing, but the conversation turned to Air Canada. I was talking about layovers and stopovers and started describing how Nick booked a crazy itinerary over a bunch of airlines and countries on one ticket, which caused me to explain the annual Frequent Miler Challenge,

And I'm told, I completely lit up and said, it's my favorite time of year. At which point, she totally cracked up laughing. And then as she was getting out of the car and saying goodbye, she said something along the lines of, I will never forget how happy you looked when you talked about that challenge thing. I hope one day to create something that brings people that much joy. That's fantastic. Yeah. Anyway, can't wait.

Bring it on. Season's greetings. I need a name for this festival a la Toyota Thon or Honda Days, Poinsapalooza, Milermus, award a we can all hang the socks out of our amenities kits on the mantle. The good kids will get Hyatt's sweet upgrade awards and the bad kids will get Bonvoy ones. Every time Nick gets a whole row an economy to himself, an angel gets his wings, the lapel pin kind that pilots give to kids.

Love it. Love it. You know, I, when I read this email, this brought such a smile to my face and I showed it to my wife and she got a kick out of it too. So I did see this one ahead of time and loved it, Kathy. So thank you for sharing that. And it's fun. It's fun to know that the things that we enjoy doing bring some joy and a smile to somebody else's face too, because I can imagine you must have laughed once or twice writing that email too. And that's great. I love it. yeah i absolutely just love this email and i don't know why i didn't think to to share it with my wife i i definitely need to go back and do that because she doesn't listen to our podcast she's not she's not a fan and you know my wife every now and then does surprise me and she listens to the podcast she doesn't listen regularly but every now and then she'll bring something up that came from the podcast i'll be like oh interesting you're listening there so happens to come on now and then after her other usual podcast listening i think so yeah fun one there all right let's move forward into this week's JetBlue 25 for 25 update. I don't have a lot more to add to what you probably already know

if you've been following the blog, but my family has completed 20 destinations. I'm actually at 21 because I did the Dunkin Flight with Greg, and so I have one extra destination. So we're waiting on the points, and I don't know how long it's going to be. We talked about this during this week's Ask Us Anything. There's some, I don't know, some confusion over the way the terms are written because it says that the points will post, I think it's, I thought it was two to three, but maybe it's actually, I think it's three to four now,

three to four weeks after completion. And so I took that to me and that you'd get the first 150,000 points three to four weeks after 15 destinations, and then the next 200,000, three to four weeks after you hit 20 destinations, and then the status three to four weeks after you hit 25, because I was thinking you're completing each level of that.

However, some readers have reported, that they don't think that that's the case that nobody that they've heard from so far has earned any of it until completing all 25. And so some people are guessing that JetBlue's interpretation here is that you'll get the points in the status three to four weeks after you hit 25 destinations. If you do anything less, then you'll get the points three to four weeks after the promotion ends in December. I hope it's not that because I want to know before December 31st if something didn't count and I need to fix something or follow up with customer service or take an extra flight. So I hope it's going to happen. It's been, I think now two, three, about almost three weeks

by the time this publishes anyway, almost three weeks, we're a little more than three weeks now since we completed 15. So I'm going to give it another week, week and a half and then maybe reach out to JetBlue and see what clarity I can get. Lots of people have reached out to JetBlue agents and been told things, I tend to not have a lot of faith in whatever a general customer service agent says. I want to see if these just post automatically, ideally, before following up and trying to get clarity from Jeff Blue's communications team on it because I want to know the answer for everybody. So we'll see. I think if I didn't have access to their communications team or anything like that as a participant, if I was a participant in this challenge, I think I would at least

online chat and just ask the agent, can you tell me how many destinations I've qualified for so far? Something like that. And if they're able to answer that, screenshot that. Yeah, I guess. I would have very little faith in that though, right? Because I mean, I don't know what they're going to see and what they know. Like, is there a tracker on their side or are they just looking at my past trips and counting? And if they're just looking at my past trips and counting this. Yeah. No, my point is just to get them to say that they see the 20 so that if it turns out that you didn't really qualify for 20, you have something to argue with that you have that proof. Yeah, that's a smart strategy.

Anyway, it would be really nice if Jeff Blue would add a tracker that people could see online, but I could see why they might not want to invest in that just because it's this one-time thing and, you know, why do a whole technology project around it. But still, it's got to make people anxious, especially. like in next case he's got travel plan like near the end of the year and uh if if he needs to somehow fit in extra flights um like how is it's impossible to plan for that without knowing if everything has counted so far anyway so that that's that's the situation that's too bad but anyway assuming assuming uh jeep blue does acknowledge that all you and everyone in your family

has at least 20 flights that means everyone should be earning 350,000 jet blue points, and those can all be freely pooled together. And so Nick is a, on paper, a JetBlue Miles millionaire. Well, yeah, soon to be hopefully. Just one point of clarity, not 20 flights, but rather 20 destinations. I wanted to be there for anybody who's relatively new to this. You do need to fly to 20 different destination airports with JetBlue. So, yeah, I mean, theoretically I will be. And my point, our points are already pulled. So I just keep refreshing my JetBlue app incessantly like a Madman every day, waiting for some points to post. And it hasn't happened yet. I guess I didn't mention this here. I probably mentioned it in previous discussions,

but we had pre-existing trips where the other five destinations will get picked up throughout the remainder of the year. For instance, we've got a complimentary stay at Atlantis that came from my old Caesar's Diamond status that booked before Caesar's Diamond ran out. And so, jet blue flies to NASA and I actually haven't booked our flights there back yet but that's we're going to fly jet blue because we have to get there and it counts as a destination so that we have five more of those and the last one of those is to visit family around the holidays around Christmas so so that's where I'm a little nervous that we're pushing it kind of late in fact originally we were going to have our last airport around December 28th or so and that made me too nervous so we bumped up

and and changed plans a little bit but yeah I don't know we'll see so hopefully Hopefully it all just posts as it should, and we'll have a happy update in another week or two. Right. Let's move on to this week's card news. There's a bunch of card news out this week. Well, or card news from us anyway, I should say, because you made some major updates to our guide to ultra-premium credit card travel insurance, right? Yeah. So I added several new ultra-premium cards to the post.

I added the Alaska's At Most Rewards Summit card. I added Bank of America's Premier Rewards Elite card, which actually isn't all that new of a card, but it's new to that post. And I added Citibank's new Strata Elite card. So this is a post that compares all the travel protections that these high-end, you know, $400 and up cards offer. And so here's just a very high-level summary of the results that just as before, the travel protections provided by the Chase Sapphire Reserve and the Ritz-Carlton card, which they have equal travel protections, they still lead the pack. It still has the widest selection of travel protections and, for the most part, the best terms for those travel protections, at least at the high level that I've been summarizing these things. Bank of America, which has both the Alaska's Atmost Summit card and the Premier Rewards Elite card, Bank of America is completely new to this post, but they came in probably second best after Chase. So that was really interesting to see.

They have a lot of different types of coverage that other programs don't have other than Chase. But their trip cancellation and interruption coverage is pitifully small. It's limited to $2,500, which, so if you've booked like a cruise or something and have to cancel it, your cruise, you know, in many cases it would be more than $2,500, so you wouldn't get all of your money back. That's kind of a shame with that particularly key protection. You know, that's one. All cards have some form. Almost all cards have some form of trip cancellation and eruption coverage.

And so the real key is how big is the coverage. And this one is too piddly small to be in the top. So that's a weird thing. City is relatively renewed. to the world of having travel protections. A number of years back, they eliminated them from almost all their cards, and then they added some to the American Airlines executive card

when that card was refreshed, and now the Stratelite card has travel protections. The travel protections in general aren't particularly noteworthy, except for one thing. Most of the banks, their car rental coverage, the CDW, most of them have exceptions for certain countries. Like if you're renting in Israel or Ireland, things like that, they say you're not covered in those places. Chase and City have no such exceptions.

So that kind of makes City interesting in that respect. On the other hand, if you're renting within the U.S., your rental car coverage is secondary to your regular rental, your regular car insurance. Yeah, so your regular car insurance would pay first. And most, well, at least where I live, anyway, I think in New York State it's required that your personal insurance will cover rental cars. So I imagine in a lot of other places, it probably does as well. Rental cars domestically, I should say.

So you may be covered by your personal car insurance, but at the same time, you probably don't want to make a claim with them if you can avoid it. So it's kind of a bummer. I don't really love the whole secondary insurance thing. Although if you don't have a car and you don't have car insurance, then it's primary, right? Right, right. So if you're in that boat, all the better. And I think that's true of like all, like even fee-free cards that have like very basic travel protections. I think they tend to be primary if you don't have your own coverage, I think.

Because actually secondary. That's what primary. Secondary becomes primary, right? If you don't have a primary one, that's a different one. Yep. Okay. So anyway, I guess I should also mention this is not an update to the post, but since we were talking about this topic, Chase has a weird exclusion for New York State residents where the rental car cover.

coverage within the U.S. is secondary if you have your own car insurance. So that's an exception just for New York State residents. So congratulations. Right. Well, you know, which is probably a not insignificant number of ultra-premium chase cardholders, right? I mean, you know, there's probably quite a few folks in New York that have a Sapphire Reserve card. So that's kind of a bummer that it's secondary for those of us who live in New York or Ritzcard for that matter. Yeah, yeah. I also want to mention one other thing about travel protections in general. Any kind of summary I do is going to be leaving out important stuff.

So people write in, well, what if I'm traveling with my niece is she covered? And that's going to vary based from bank to bank. Well, so I can start adding, like, you know, who's covered to this summary. but then there's like a million other very particular things that people ask questions about, I can't raise them all up to summary level, then it's not summary anymore. It'll be detail. So really you have to, unfortunately, dig into the guides to see what's really there if you have these kind of special circumstances. And it's a good idea anyway because I wouldn't trust me for understanding insurance really well, personally.

But I did try to make it as easy as possible. So there are links to all of the benefit guides in that post for all the cards that are covered. So you can quickly get to them just by clicking from that post. That's great. That's a huge ad there. So that's much appreciated because, yeah, you do have to kind of dig into those finer points sometimes. And that's a great reminder that you do have to do that and that it wouldn't be much of a summary. If you did all of the finer details for each one, it would be.

a lot to wade through so good points there all right let's do some mattress running let's mattress run the numbers with rove miles and this is a mattress run sort of a discussion so rove miles you may remember is a platform for booking travel we're going to be talking about hotel booking they also do flight booking where you can earn rove miles which is their own mileage currency that transfers to a bunch of airline programs a handful of them pretty useful programs so you can earn a thousand bonus miles when you are referred to rove miles for the first time that expires in just a couple of weeks september 17th that'll expire you can also earn a thousand miles by referring somebody else to rove plus 10% of whatever they earn for six months up to

50,000 miles per referral so if you know somebody else who's a big hotel spender then you could refer them and potentially earn a bunch of miles based on their bookings also but it gets a little better yet because if you book a hotel through Rove in the next, let's see, what does it expire next month or so, October through October 3rd, if you use promo code staycation and you spend $250 or more, you'll get $2,500 bonus miles on top of the miles that you'd earn from that stay. Or alternatively, and you can only choose one of the other here, you could use code back to school and spend $500 or more and earn $5,000 bonus miles. So, you know, you can only choose one of the other here. You could use code back to school, you could use code back to school and spend $500 or more and earn $5,000 bonus miles.

So you can only use one code and you can't use both of these. So you're going to have to decide in advance which one is going to fit you. Are you going to spend $250 or you're going to spend $500 and use the correct code in order to earn the bonus miles? So $250 for $2,500 bonus miles plus the miles that you're going to spend or $500 and you get $5,000 bonus miles plus whatever mileage you would earn. So is this worth a mattress run? Should we be mattress running this, Craig?

Yeah, so I ran some numbers. And like, I looked in Chicago. I looked at different dates and looked at what kind of point earnings you normally get, even without this promo. And on any given day that I looked at, I did find one day where there was one hotel offering 50 rove miles per dollar. Wow. But when I looked at other days, I didn't see that at all. So I don't know, yeah, I don't know what was going on with that. But I didn't use that number because it was so hard to find. Instead, virtually any date I looked at, there were at least some hotels where your earning rate was close to 40 miles. It was just under 40. So most of them are much less than that.

But there's always like one or two that are up around there. So I picked one where for a three-day weekend, the total cost would be $322. So obviously, this is a lower-end hotel. And you would earn 12,000 miles from that stay, 12,000 rove miles. With the staycation code, you get 2,500 miles more. So that's a total of 14,500 miles. and you know so the so the question is would you spend so mattress run is where you would just buy this with no intention of even staying there in order to earn the miles so would you spend

$322 for 14,500 miles let me let me add a little bit more to it you remember in the beginning we talked about you could get a thousand miles for signing up and you could get a thousand miles for referring someone those things I don't really think of as part of of this mattress rank because you could do those anyway. But maybe we should include the 10% of the earnings as kind of part of it because if someone refers you, they're getting 10%. You add that on top if you have access to those rovima. I don't know.

But, you know, it's kind of a stretch, right? So let's just keep it at just the straight up. You get 14,500 miles for $322. dollars, is it worth it? What do you think, Nick? Well, you know, you're pretty good at math, Greg. So I see you've done the math on this one. And so $322 for 14,500 miles comes out to a cost of 2.2 cents per mile. Now, they do transfer to some decent partners, like Air France, KLM, Flying Blue, for instance, Qatar Airways, Privilege Club. There's a few thin air, so that gives you obvious that you could move to British Airways, but not to Iberia Air Lingus,

right now. We'll get back to that later. So anyway, you've got several useful things. And then that's not an exhaustive list. That's just a couple of them. Is it worth paying 2.2 cents per mile for miles in any of those airline programs? I mean, I'm not a buyer at 2.2 cents per mile. But if you have a specific use in mind, maybe it could be worth it. I wouldn't be mattress running for that. Yeah. No. There's no way. And so, yeah, it's definitely not, I think it's definitely not mattress run worthy. You know, it is a fantastic promo. You know, if you've got a stay that's that's around $500, around $250.

You know, why not get those extra points? In my experience, now this is important, my experience, sometimes the Rove Miles platform has really good prices for hotels. In fact, there was one time, like I booked a Hilton. It was cheaper than even the member rate at that same Hilton through Roeve Miles. But sometimes it's more expensive. And so you have to be careful about that. Okay, follow up question.

Let's say that you had a booking to make that you were already planning on making that's $250. Is it worth spending another $250 to get the additional $2,500 bonus miles? Then you're kind of buying miles at about one cent per mile, right? So if you had a booking to make already that was going to be $250, you could use the promo code staycation and you'd earn $2,500 bonus miles. But if instead, you just book a more. expensive hotel, and you find a $500 hotel for the same dates, is it worth spending that extra $250 and using code back to school to get the $5,000 bonus miles instead? No. So unless I'm, I'm confused by what you said, because when you need $25,000 bonus miles

in order for $250 to equal one cent per mile. Yeah, you would. So you're talking about adding paying $0.10 per mile. And obviously, that's not. not worth it. You know what? Thank you to Greg the Frequent Myler for catching my terrible math on that one. You know, I made that same mistake. On a recent recording we did in another show. So it's contagious apparently. So I started it and my apologies for that. Well, very good. I'm glad we got that sorted out so that neither of us makes a mistake and books an extra expensive hotel for no real good reason. All right. So not a mattress run, but if you got a qualifying stay, go ahead and book it. Don't overspend in order to get a few more bonus miles there.

Let's talk next about being Bonvoid. So even Bonvoid this week, unfortunately, by Alaska Atmos. It took them at most, what, two weeks or so to Bonvoy us with something. I don't know, however many weeks it's been since they launched their new program. And unfortunately, we have found out that on October 1st, they're losing, effectively losing their partnerships with Lott Tom and Singapore Airlines. Now, I've corrected myself and said effectively because if you have paid tickets on those airlines, depending on when you've booked them, you may still earn some miles and there's still going to be some code sharing. But in terms of reciprocal redeeming of miles, starting on October 1st, you're not going to be able to redeem your Alaska miles to

travel on Latam or Singapore. You're not going to be able to use your Singapore miles to redeem for travel on Alaska. So how big of a bummer is that? I mean, for those who were looking forward to booking those awards, I think it's pretty big. Alaska was a great way to book Latam Awards to South America. And Singapore was a pretty good way to book select Alaska economy flights. And so both of those things are no longer be possible as of October 1st. So, you know, for me, I mean, I wasn't looking to book either of those, so it doesn't really affect personally, but obviously, if you were someone who was going to book one of those types of things, that's potentially a big deal. Yeah, same here. So I'm a little bit more bummed

than Greg, probably, because I had a one-way award to South America and Lotton booked for early next year that we were probably going to cancel. I still haven't canceled it yet, but probably going to cancel. And I was hoping to rebook that for some time, maybe late next year. early the following year and now unfortunately that's just not going to be possible. So I'm really bummed because there aren't very many great ways to get South America using miles and points in business class and a lifelat business class of any sort. So that's too bad. But at the same time, I use the vast majority of my Alaska miles for other types of redemptions. So it's not my usual go-to redemption. So for me, it's not a huge difference maker in the overall scheme of things. But I

think it's definitely disappointing. So hopefully we don't see any more of that. Hopefully we see Alaska adding partners before they subtract anymore. Yeah. Well, good news for those who enjoy being Bonvoid. We've got another Bonvoy entry. Avios transfers between British Airways, Iberia and Air Lingus have been suspended. What's going on there? Yeah. So as you may know, Avios is that one rare breed program where you can move your miles from one airline to another. is I sort of hate this because beginners to the game always find the idea of partner awards really confusing. They're like, oh, how do I transfer my, you know, Turkish miles to United to book a United flight? It's like, no, no, no, no. You're going to transfer your points to Turkish and book the

United Flight through Turkish. It gets kind of confusing that you don't actually move the miles from one airline to another. But obvious, of course, is the exception to that role. Obios is obviously the exception to that role where you actually do move the obvious from one airline that uses obvious to another airline that uses obvious. And so there's a whole bunch of them. And you can move them from British airways typically to Aer Lingus or Iberia or Finnair or Qatar or Logan Air. However, right now, you cannot move them from British Airways to Iberia or Aer Lingus, which effectively cuts Siberia and Aer Lingus off from transferring from the other airlines as well, because the only way to get to those is through British Airways, or it also cuts off the ability to move your Iberia

obvious or your Aer Lingus Obios anywhere because it's just stuck. So Headford Points has a great post on this. It sounds like it's a security breach that they've had a lot of accounts hacked and are working on a different solution. Apparently, there's a different technology platform that handles the way or governs the way that they transfer Avios to Finare and Qatar than the program for transferring avios from British Airways to Iberia and Aer Lingus, which has always been kind of buggy anyway. So hopefully they're going to simplify it and just get it all on the same tech platform. But I say hopefully, because how likely do you think it is that Iberia adopts new technology? That's a really good question. I don't know. I would think that Finn Air, since they're

newer, they're newer to Avios might be more, you know, eager to get onto everyone else's platform there. Iberia, yeah, they seem to like it being quirky. I don't know. Yeah. Well, so, I mean, Finare's already on the newer, so the newer platform between British Airways, Fin Air and Qatar and Logan Air is unaffected. So it's Iberian Aeralingis are the two. And Aer Lingus, I don't know. I don't, I don't, I'm not familiar enough with Aer Lingus to have any doubts there. But Iberia's tech is kind of notoriously buggy their website. Yeah. Yeah.

It doesn't work particularly well. So I'm skeptical that they're going to be. get moved on to some sort of a new platform. Yeah, yeah, that's a shame. The good thing is like, I feel like it's rarer and rarer to see good deals available through those programs than through some of the others. And the bad news is that if you have points stuck in Iberia or Aer Lingus and you want to move them to one of the others, then that's really bad news. Gosh, I have to check.

I don't know if I do right. now or not. Well, there was, so I included in our post about it that I noticed in the comments had for points that a reader there had reported that they saw messaging, I think, on the Aberia side suggesting that if it's some sort of an emergency type of a situation, you need to move your obvious to reach out via email to some contact center. And I mean, that might just sort of be the electronic equivalent of the circular file. Or maybe they do have some capability to make transfers happen on a case-by-case basis if you make a case for why you need to move them. I don't know. I'm not sure. Yeah. All right. So that's Bonvoid. Let's talk about awards points and

more. Built is offering a status match to Virgin Voyages. So what's the deal here and is it any good? Yeah. So, you know, built rewards has its own loyalty program where you get different levels of built status based on how many built points you earn or how much you spend on their credit card and things like that. And built silver and gold members now can freely match to Virgin Voyages, blue extras. And that means if you're sailing on a Virgin Voyage, you get access to one cocktail event, and you get one bag of laundry clean for free, and you get one specialty coffee per day that you don't have to pay for. So some nice little perks there.

If you're built platinum, though, you match to Virgin Voyage's Deep Blue Extras, which I think is their top tier status. And from there, you get a $100 bar tab credit, so that would probably pay for a couple drinks, I imagine. And unlimited premium Wi-Fi, which, wow, that can be really valuable on cruises. you get a few more laundry options,

like in addition to the bag, you get some things pressed and whatnot. You get priority boarding, which that could be really good. And two specialty coffees per day. Yeah, so nice if you can match that, seems pretty good. You alluded to the $100 bar credit

not going very far, but actually on cruises, drinks tend to be relatively reasonable. I assume they're paying far less in taxes anywhere since they're serving them in international waters so it actually might go farther than you insinuated however all that said virgin voyages has offered a status match for quite a while from lots of other programs so this built thing is relatively new but they've been offering status matches for a while now so if you've got

cruise line status with another cruise line you can almost certainly match it over to virgin voyages as well and at times have seen them match uh casino statuses and stuff like that too to something useful so it's not like something that's unprecedented, I guess is what I'll say. But if you've got built status and you're going to be taking a Virgin Voyages cruise, might as well match it over and get the benefits that you can. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of status matches, we also have GHA discovery out with a paid status match. This is a hotel program that is the loyalty program of sort of a loose association of boutique-e sort of hotel brands. So I kind of clarify it or or classify it that way because it's a little different than like an SLAH or a Mr.

and Mrs. Smith. Those are kind of collections of very independent hotels. This is sort of an association of small brands. So it's like Kempinski, for instance, which you may have heard of before, or NH collection. There's a number of those types of brands, Anantara, that you may have heard of before that are typically kind of boutique sort of hotel properties, but they are like some branded sort of thing. so it's a little bit different. Anyway, GHA Discovery is offering a status match all the way up to their top tier status, GHA Platinum,

if you are interested in that, but you do have to pay for it. So if you want a match to, rather, I'm sorry, I said their top tier platinum. Platinum is the second top tier. The top tier is titanium, and you can match to either of these. And so it's $100 to match to platinum or $150 to match to titanium, and you get half that back in the form of discovery dollars that you can use. for instance, on your first stay with GHA Discovery. So if you pay 100 for the platinum match, you'll get 50 back in Discovery

dollars, pay 150 for the titanium match, get 75 back in Discovery dollars. The matching is pretty broad here. So GHA platinum matches to a lot of different hotel statuses that you may have. And GHA titanium also matches to a whole bunch of different stuff that you probably already have. In fact, GHA titanium, I think you can get with IHG platinum, which is something you can get just by having the IHG Premier card. A lot of readers and listeners probably have that.

Hilton Diamond matches to GHA platinum. Marriott Platinum matches to GHA Platinum. Of course, Hayek Globalist does as well. And then there were also statuses from cruise lines that could match over. So if you've got status with a cruise line, you can match that. So it's pretty broad. I think the match to GHA titanium was relatively easy. It's not like the world's best hotel status in terms of benefits.

I think it's going to really vary, especially because it's such of a loose association of different brands. I imagine that you may find different, I don't know, different delivery of benefits, whether you stay at a Kempinski or you stay at, I don't know, whatever else, some other brand that is part of this. So I wouldn't necessarily count on being wowed. However, in some cases, if you look up the property you're staying at, you may be in for a nice treat in terms of the benefits. You get a welcome amenity. At top tier, you get 7% back in GHA discovery dollars. Some brands you'll get breakfast, but not all of them. And I don't know which ones you get it at. 11 a.m. check-in based on availability, 4 p.m. check out based on

availability. I don't love that those are based on availability. But, you know, they're there anyway. They give you a good chance for those things. The other reason this might be interesting. And so I don't probably sound super enthusiastic about this. I'm not super enthusiastic, but one reason I think it might be interesting is I've noticed a lot of these GHA discovery brands available via the edit, via that Chase is the Edit, which is their like Fine Hotels and Resorts competitor where you can use your Chase Ultimate Rewards points and a value of two cents per point if you're a Sapphire Reserve card holder and book hotels that come with free breakfast and like $100 credit and that sort of thing. So I've seen

a number of NH collection properties on there. I've seen a number of Viseroi properties on both fine hotels and resorts and chases the edit that's another brand that's that's in the collection of things that are potentially in this and certainly some kempinski's around the world too so so if you're going to be using your points via one of those programs and you want a few extra benefits maybe it's worth paying for this and getting a few extra benefits too and remember that usually when you're booking through the edit or through fine hotels and resorts you qualify for hotel rewards so then you may also get your 7% back in discovery dollars so I think it's worth if you think that there's a really good chance

you're going to stay at one of those brands and otherwise it's probably not something that's going to draw too many people in. Yeah, the irony here is, I think if you're booking through the edit, you're going to be guaranteed free breakfast and other perks that basically overlap with the best case of what you might get

with titanium status. So I actually think that this is probably more interesting to someone who's planning a stay not through the edit. And does their homework to see whether this is one of the brands where titanium sets would give you free breakfast and you wouldn't otherwise get free breakfast and then it would therefore, you know, have some value. I don't know. You're losing enthusiasm quickly, Greg. I'm obviously not very excited about this one.

Yeah, it's probably not the world's most exciting thing unless you've got a stay coming up and you've done your homework, which is part of the fun for a lot of us. So there you have it. There's a link to the post with more information in the show notes, I'm sure. so let's move on to this week's main event main event time 100k vacay resetting the odds due to transfer bonuses so let's talk about the 100k vacay team challenge and what it means to reset the odds due to transfer bonuses we'll get to that in a minute let me first just give an overview for those who haven't been following along from the beginning it's also been a while since on the show we've really talked in depth much about the upcoming fall challenge we're doing. The

100K vacay is it's a competition to see who on the team can book the most amazing 100,000 point vacation. Me and Kerry are the judges. And I'm also, because I couldn't stand the thought of just staying home, I'm also going to be booking my own trip, but not as a competitor, but rather it will be like a benchmark trip and we're going to use it as like a as a guide to see for the other trips who gets more points kind of because their components of their trip are better than greggs or or worse than greggs and that'll help determine how many points each contestant gets and who ultimately is the winner i'm using chase points the challengers tim is using city thank you points uh stephen is using capital one miles and nick has

Amex membership rewards points. And here are the rules. Roundtrip travel is required. You can start anywhere in the world as long as you come back to that point. And the budget is 100,000 transferable points. We already talked about which kind of transfer rule points each person has. Plus $1,000 cash. And all of that has to cover everything. So if you have to pay for a visa for the country, going to if you had to pay for local transportation, food, you know, really anything, that has that budget has to cover it all. And from a judging point of view, the more that is covered by points, the better. So we started off originally having like these very like hard, complicated rules about like you have to book your flight with miles because that's the spirit of the competition.

But then we said, well, what about like short positioning flights where it might not make sense to pay with miles and like all right let's just more generally say the more the more covered with points the better um you must have a minimum of three nights in comfortable lodging and bonus points will be given for longer stays how do we determine comfortable yeah that's up to the judges right so we're going to come sleep in your bed next to you during your trip better be ready for the snoring then no cashing out points um rebates do not change the $1,000 limit on how much you could spend but we are going to be giving points based on affordability. So if somebody gets a lot of rebates,

like they booked a lot of stuff through portals, they earn a lot of miles or points from their stays or from travel, whatever it is, that will all be factored into how affordable was their overall trip, but it doesn't change the budget that you have to work with. And this is key. All transfer bonuses that were active during the trip, travel planning phase are fair game and don't need to be declared in advance so what we mean by that

is we started planning this challenge in may of this year and so any any transfer bonuses that were in effect between may and and when the challenge starts which is later this month or end of this month are fair game and can be used to help to help people out. And so transfer bonuses are when, you know, normally most of these transferable points, when you're transferring to airline miles, for example, they transfer one to one. A thousand transferable points becomes a thousand airline miles. But when there's like a 30% transfer bonus, a thousand points becomes 1,300 miles. and that obviously can make a huge difference in how big of a trip

people can build with the right transfer bonuses. Yeah, for sure. It could make a big difference in how big of a trip, how comfortable of a trip, how many different things you might be able to do or how far you might be able to get. So there's definitely a lot of influence

that those transfer bonuses can have. And I think that this challenge really gives us an opportunity to potentially display just how strong those transfer bonuses can be because they really can juice up the value of your miles and points quite a bit. So we've got our schedule out as well. So if you've been wondering, well, when, when is this all going to happen? Because we've said fall, but we hadn't been specific.

Let's get specific. So we've got the 100K vacay schedule announced from Thursday, September 25th to Tuesday, September 30th is going to be Greg's benchmark trip. So the last week of September essentially will be Greg's benchmark trip where he travels to kind of show us how it's done to set the standard that we need to try to beat. So you're going to want to be following Frequent Myler on Instagram if you're not already because you're going to be wanting to watch Instagram and YouTube to keep up with all the action along the way as Greg travels around and does his thing or travels to his destination. I don't know. Is he going to one place? Is he going to two places? Is he going to fly a whole bunch? Is he going to stay all the, you know, the entire time

in one spot. I don't know. We're going to find out. So you're going to want to, again, follow on Instagram and YouTube. And then, of course, just like in past challenges, we will all be publishing daily updates when we're traveling. So during that first week, you can look to the blog also for daily updates from Greg as to where he is and what he's doing. Yeah. And let me add that I've got a couple surprises in store, especially for those who are big fans of these challenges, is you're going to want to follow along and check that out. It's not going to be a stayed boring benchmark trip, I think. Oh, okay.

All right. Interesting. I look forward to it then. The gauntlet has been thrown. He's got some interesting stuff coming. So you'll want to be checking that out. You want to be following us in order to check it out. Then when his trip concludes, we're going to all get together.

on Wednesday, October 1st, we normally have our Ask Us Anything at 9 p.m. Eastern time on the first Wednesday of every month. On October 1st, that Ask Us Anything is going to be our challenge kickoff and live stream. So that again, 9 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, October 1st, we're going to have a live stream on YouTube where all of us together will review Greg's trip and we'll get a chance, we'll have a chance to kind of interview us and find out what we think and how we're feeling. And we'll, of course, answer audience questions as best we can. Of course, I'm sure that Tim and Stephen and I will be slightly cagey about the details of our own trips in order to surprise you and each other, but we'll certainly be discussing some of the stuff that went into the planning and probably

fielding questions about things we didn't do, didn't choose to do one way or another. I've got to say, there have been so many trips I've put together that I've thought, wow, this is pretty amazing for 100,000 points. And it's been hard to pick what, you know, which of those is the right one in order to be able to try to take this thing home. So maybe we'll discuss some of that. On the first, you'll want to be there at 9 p.m. Eastern. Yeah, yeah. And then over the span of the next, so that Wednesday to the following Wednesday is the contestant travel window.

They can travel anytime they want within that window of time with one very specific caveat. they have to be available on Saturday, October 4th at 6 p.m. Eastern Time for a mid-challenge live check-in that we'll do on YouTube as we always do these live streams. So that's the main requirement beyond the rules of the game that they have to pay attention to within that travel window. So we don't know. Like will people do, they could do as few as three nights on the road or as many as you know, the full week is possible if they could stretch out their points that far. Who knows? Yeah.

So it seems like a fun challenge to undertake. So that will be our travel window, the first to the eighth. And to be clear, like Greg said, we don't know how long each of us is going to be traveling. So it's possible that some of us will already be in progress on the first when we have our live check-in and that others of us may not be leaving yet until the second or the third. it all depends on each contestant but your travel can start as early as October 1st and it has to end at the latest in time for the 9 p.m. Eastern time check-in on Wednesday, October 8th. So travel has to happen between those things. And so that is the next point to bring up that Wednesday,

October 8th at 9 p.m. Eastern, we're going to have our final challenge live stream. So challenge live streams again are going to be October 1st is the kickoff at 9 p.m. Eastern. Saturday, October 4th at 6 p.m. Eastern will be our mid-challenge check-in where everybody has to be somewhere where we're traveling by that point. And then Wednesday, October 8th, everybody has to be back to where they started by 9 p.m. Eastern for the final challenge live stream or have made it back to where they started, whether or not they're still actually standing there is probably irrelevant. But that'll be our final challenge live stream where judges, and the judges this time around, remember our Greg and Kerry will crown the challenge. winner and then we're going to kick off an audience vote part. So explain this to me. I'm a little confused. You're crowning a winner and then there's an audience vote. Tell me about how this is going to work. Yeah. So we'll crown a winner and let's just for the sake of argument say

Stephen wins the challenge. He gets a crown for the year. Then there's this secondary question of like, okay, he beat the other guys. But was his trip really better than Greg's trip? And that's where the audience vote comes in. We're going to put up a poll and let people decide Stephen versus Greg's trip, which was better. And so we'll sort of crown a secondary winner in that way. But whoever wins the main one is, in my mind, the ultimate winner for this year, regardless of what happens in that secondary vote. But the secondary vote is sort of the reader's choice uh audience choice uh pick overall why do i feel like you're saying that because you think your trip is going to be so good that nobody's going to beat you so you're kind of like a all right

be be happy be proud if you beat you know the other two because beating greg the frequent miler doesn't matter it's not important doesn't matter it's it's actually not that at all i it's more that i don't want uh i don't want people to think that there's a chance that uh i can be considered the overall winner here because that's just too unfair, given that I'm a judge of the competition. It just doesn't make sense. We'll see. We'll see what happens and we'll get your input, your reader input when we get to that point. So I'm excited about this. So that's our window for traveling. Going to kick off with Greg's trip the 25th to the 30th of this month of September. And then first to the 8th of October will be Stephen and Tim and I. So we got to talk a little bit

about everybody's best options here and what we think everybody is thinking about at this stage. Yeah, let me talk about. So when we kicked off this challenge, I posted about the challenge, and I put in information about how I thought about who had the upper hand based on the facts we knew at the time. And that was, of course, the facts we knew without knowing what transfer bonuses would be available all summer long. So in that post, I talked about how important hotels are because of the requirement to have three nights in comfortable lodging. That's why we picked Chase alternate awards as the benchmark program because Chase points transfer to Hyatt.

Hyatt has a really competitive award chart. The points are on average worth a lot, which is not true of any other hotel program. that you can transfer points to, where you can transfer points one to one. And so, so anyway, so then I like laid out, okay, given that, given that hotels are important, you know, what do each of the contestants have to work with? And so you start with Tim and Citibank thank you points. He has the best options, again, without transfer bonuses. He can transfer it to leading hotels of the world.

he can transfer it to a core live limitless, he can transfer to Wyndham, he can transfer it to Choice at a 1 to 2 ratio, which sometimes leads to some really great value, and he can transfer to preferred hotels and resorts at an amazing 1 to 4 ratio. And so there's absolutely some fantastic value to be had there. Stephen has considerably less to work with with Capital One in terms of hotels. So he has the same ability to transfer to Accor Live Limitless, which is a 2 to 1 ratio, which is worth around 1.3 cents each with the current value of the euro compared to the dollar. He also has choice, but it's only 1 to 1 ratio, so compared to Tim's 1 to 2, that's kind of useless. And then Wyndham, he has one to one, which is the same as Tim's Wyndham. So Stevens is a subset of Tim's and not even like the best options of Tim's.

Nick, meanwhile, doesn't have Wyndham, which is a pretty good option. But he does have choice one to one, which I already explained why that's not very good. He's got Marriott one to one, and he's got Hilton one to two. And I, it, you could argue whether. Capital One or Amex are the worst options with hotels here, but I kind of asserted that Amex was probably the worst when you're not considering transfer bonuses and everything. So in my original post, I said the odds-on favorite is Tim because he has a plethora of options for hotels and city is known to do regular airline transfer bonuses too.

But I said, I wanted to say, don't count Stephen out. Stephen has lived in hotels and vacation homes for the past eight or so years, and therefore is more experienced booking hotel deals than the rest of us combined. Then I threw in that the advantage Nick here has is that Amex runs transfer bonuses frequently. So we don't really know what the landscape is going to look like for Nick. Well, you know, we don't, but what we could do is take a look at what transfer bonuses we've seen. to see what could potentially work out. And I think, we'll see, but I think I will show that MX is not the weakest of the hotel transfer programs here. I think Stephen has a really

tough hill to climb with Choice and Wyndham being essentially his better options. A Corps doesn't provide particularly good value for Capital One points. So he's got to find some outliers in Choice and Windham. I think actually Stephen's got the toughest road here of the bunch of us. So I would disagree with you on that. But we'll talk more about that as the challenge unfolds also because I think that there are some hidden values on the MX side. Anyway, yeah, yeah. That out of the way, let's talk about the planning phase transfer bonuses because we expected there would probably be tons of them and there have been tons of them. And that could totally change the game in terms of who's got what advantages. Right, right. So we're going to just cover one program at a time and talk about

what transfer bonuses we've actually seen this summer. And so let's just start with Chase. Even though I'm not a competitor, it does factor into the benchmark trip, the ability to use these transfer bonuses. As far as airline transfer bonuses to airline programs, there was a 25% transfer bonus to, from Chase to Air France, K-Lam Flying Blue, a 25% transfer bonus to Virgin Atlantic Flying Club, and a 20% bonus to Air Canada Aeroplane. And in each section, I've counted up how many I think are meaningful, meaning like, are these ones that a contestant would reasonably want to take advantage of? And so I think all three are meaningful because they all potentially could have been used to help out my trip.

For hotels, I had two different transfer bonuses to Marriott. One was 65%, one was 50%, and I had 100% transfer bonus to IHG. Now, I count that up as zero meaningful transfer bonuses for hotels. And the reason is twofold. One is if you look at the reasonable reduction, redemption values of these points, even with these transfer bonuses, you don't get to what a Hyatt point is worth straight up with a one-to-one transfer. The other reason is because I'm setting the benchmark trip, and because we pick chase points as the currency for the benchmark trip,

and because we did that because of transfers to Hyatt, I felt like I have to transfer to Hyatt. It would be ridiculous for me to do a benchmark trip transferring to some other program. I really just set that as a pillar for my trip. So now you know, up front. Because, because, because, because because because. I booked high it. Because there's a wonderful thing. Hyatt does.

Yes. So anyway, so I have a total of three meaningful transfer bonuses, all airlines and zero hotel bonuses that are useful to me for this trip. That makes sense. And to be clear, those are three pretty meaningful. I mean, I know you said those are the three meaningful ones, but pretty meaningful because Air France, KLM Flying Blue, Virgin Atlantic Flying Club, and Air Canada Aeroplane all have some great deal awards and not necessarily tons of them from each one, but more than I expected

to be honest with you, because I have access to all of those transfer partners as well, not all of those transfer bonuses, but all of those partners. So I've spent a good deal of time looking through some of the best uses. of each of those, and it gives you a lot of options, especially with those bumps. So I think Greg's sitting in pretty good shape as far as that goes between a decent high at redemption and a good transfer bonus with those airlines. I could see him putting together a pretty nice trip. Yeah.

And a little foreshadowing here, the transfer bonus to Air Canada Aeroplane 20%. That's the only program that got a transfer bonus during this period. to Air Canada Aero Plan, if our records are correct. So I'm the only one who has any advantage on the aeroplans side, but other people had Flying Blue and Virgin Atlantic. And some didn't. And some didn't. All right, let's talk Citibank.

What did Tim have? So to airlines, he had a 30% transfer bonus to Virgin Atlantic, so that was better than mine. He had a 30% transfer bonus to Qatar privilege. Club Avios. So he could then move those to British Airways or whatever. And he had a 20% transfer bonus to Air France, KLM Flying Blue. So my transfer bonus to Flying Blue was a little bit better than his, but otherwise he has the bigger transfer bonus to Virgin Atlantic, and he has that 30% transfer bonus to Avios, which I didn't have. He also had a ton.

of, of hotel transfer bonuses. So 25% to Wyndham, 50% to Accor, 25% to leading hotels of the world, 25% again to Windham. So that happened again. So three meaningful bonuses right there in the hotel realm. Yeah, but potentially meaningful anyway. You know, I think that there's there's a lot of room there for Tim to do pretty well. I mean, leading hotels of the world is already a decent value even before the transfer bonus. With the transfer bonus, it becomes better yet. So that provides, I think, a really good opportunity for Tim. A core, I think is potentially good, but I think the ceiling on a core being something that you can't get outsized value beyond, you know, it's very specific.

You know, you're going to get X amount and that's it. I wouldn't put my money on Tim using a core, although I think he could have used it well in this because you could book any room type you want. You could be charging massages and things to your room and potentially using the points of good value for that. So I don't, I wouldn't say that Tim couldn't have done really well with a core here, but I bet he probably took advantage of the leading hotels of the world or maybe he'll use preferred hotels. But I don't think it's going to be a 25% transfer bonus to Windham that Tim ultimately uses. And I wouldn't bet on the 50% to Accor, even though I would agree with you, those were three meaningful bonuses. I think out of those, the only one that Tim is

likely to have used is leading hotels of the world. And I'm not 100% convinced that that was the program. We'll see. Yeah. Yeah. And we'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment once we get through the list. Capital One. So for Stephen, the airlines he had a 20% bonus to Qantas 15% to Avianca life miles and a 30% transfer bonus to Virgin Atlantic Flying Club so three meaningful bonuses there and then let me read through the list of hotel transfer bonuses okay all done I think I missed that can you repeat that all done so yeah there was not a single hotel partner transfer bonus for Stephen. So he already was working with a very weak slate of hotel options, and it wasn't helped at all with transfer bonuses. You know, I'll say, no, you're right,

it wasn't really helped at all. The one thing maybe he could have done, but it wouldn't have probably appealed to him, I think, is he could have transferred to Virgin Atlantic Flying Club and then on from Virgin Atlantic Flying Club to IHG. So he could have essentially turned that into a 30% transfer bonus to IHG. However, for all the reasons you've already said, that wouldn't be a compelling use of points. So I hope he didn't do that.

Yeah. Well, you can also do, can you do 1.5 from Virgin to Hilton at a even better rate? So there's something he could have done there as well. But that wouldn't have been as good as starting with Amex points and starting with a 1 to 2 ratio. But that's a good point. That's a nice little hidden one, a hidden trick that we may have exposed for Stephen Pepper there. We'll see because I think there was, there had to have been some struggle on the hotel side. I shouldn't say there was. Stephen hasn't indicated that he's had any struggle at all. He seemed pretty happy from the get-go. But it seems to me like one would have had to have struggled with that. But anyway, he's certainly got access to some good transfer programs. I think, though, that this is kind of exposing a capital one weakness, whereas, I mean, Tim had a ton of trouble. transfer bonuses, you had several good ones. Capital One was pretty limited here. It really was. And even the ones they had 15% Tavianca Life Miles, like, while that's better than no transfer bonus, it's not, it's not that strong. Yeah, yeah, there wasn't, there wasn't a major

transfer bonus to a program that has like a wide set of awards. Like, like, like, so programs like Flying Blue, Air Canada, and Life Miles, too, but, you know, can be used to book lots of different trips all around the world. And so all these guys are at 15% to Life Miles. Virgin Atlantic, like, the usefulness is very particular to certain flights. So, yeah, yeah, there's not a lot going on there. So, you know, if Stephen wins, it's probably not going to be due to the generosity of Capital One's transfer bonuses. You know, I think that if he wins, it's not going to be in large part because the transfer bonus to Virgin Atlantic came so late in the game.

Well, you're absolutely right that it is not as widely useful as others. I think that I have been surprised by the number of good Virgin Atlantic uses that there are out there. However, it came so late in the game that transfer bonus came so late in the game that I'm thinking, Stephen probably had everything planned already and has not been able to take advantage of that one unfortunately but we'll see all right now let's get into american express and and nick um so for airlines american express offered you a 30% transfer bonus to aviosos to all the different aviose partners and a 15% transfer bonus to avianka life miles that's it for airlines wow wow amex i mean i think

i think i speak for all of us when i would i would have crowned emex the king of transfer bonuses in general. If you ask me, who has the most transfer bonuses and the most frequent transfer bonuses? I wouldn't have even thought about it. I just would have said AMX, right? Absolutely. I mean, and that's what I said in my post is that the reason Nick is probably has a much better chance than it looks like is because of transfer bonuses. But at least as far as airlines go, it was a pretty weak offering this summer. It was. Yeah, I'm surprised you don't You don't have Virgin Atlantic or Flying Blue in that mix. You're not the only one.

You're not the only one. And in fact, in fact, a bit of foreshadowing here, if I remember correctly in both September 2024 and September 23, MX launched like 12 transfer bonuses at a time, I think. I think it was each of the last two September. Right, right, right. And that hasn't happened yet if it's going to happen at all. No. Okay.

So that's airlines. hotels, though. You got a targeted up to 25% transfer bonus to Hilton early on. You got a 20% transfer bonus to Marriott. And now a 25% not targeted transfer bonus to Hilton. So really, it's just two different transfer bonuses, 25% to Hilton and 20% to Marriott. So two meaningful, so you had two meaningful airline ones and two meaningful hotel transfer bonuses. So not bad. By the numbers, if we just, if we accept my picks of what meaningful it means, City had six, Amex had four, Capital One and Chase both just had three. Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. So I guess I didn't come in as far behind with Amex points in terms of transfer bonuses as it perhaps felt when we were

reading through it there, because I do have one more than Greg, although Greg didn't need anything on the hotel side. So maybe, you know, arguably that was not as much of a disadvantage as it kind of sounds like. But, uh, but yeah, all right. So what do we think? I mean, what do you think everybody's going to do here? Yeah. All right. So let's, though, dig further. So you started to do this earlier talking about, um, sorry, about Tim's transfer bonuses, maybe not being, even though they were there, maybe not being the best picks. And I agree with that. So let's dig into the numbers. Let's look at Citibank. So for the hotels, his strongest options for getting great value.

So that's what one of the things, his strategy posts, he said he's going to be looking for opportunities to get like fantastic point value. You like stay in very expensive destinations and use points to great value. A lot of those transfer, a lot of those points he has are pretty limited in like you could get good value, but they might not have the, ability to get like way outsized value. And I think the strongest options for him to get way outsized value are the one to four transfer to I prefer and the one to two to choice. There were no transfer bonuses for those. So if that's his strategy, the hotel transfer bonuses didn't help him at all. On the airline side, I think he had some decent options because any, of the three could be useful depending on what he's planning on doing. Take even the just the 20%

flying blue one. He talks about like if he has an overnight flight wanting it to be in live flat business class. If he found a 60, if he decides to fly to Europe, found a 60k award on flying blue, that would then cost him 50,000 city points. That's for one direction. Obviously he would have to spend a lot less to come back. but that's possible to do something like that. So I think even though it looked like he had a really strong set, I think on the hotel side there's not a lot actually going on there for him, but on the airline side, he did well.

Yeah, and you skipped right over the 30% transfer bonus to Virgin Atlantic, but that could also create some really valuable potential redemptions there too. Oh, totally. We've seen Virgin Atlantic business class to Europe from like 29,000 miles one way. right so the surcharges are potentially the problem on that side but nonetheless he certainly has had some opportunity there i think to potentially get some good flights i mean between virgin guitar and flying blue he had a really strong set of airline transfer bonuses that's that's what i was trying to say yeah i i think that's a really strong collection um you know what he's missing is is star alliance so if he was hoping

to do star alliance he doesn't have anything going on there but other than that um yeah really strong Um, on the Amec side, you know, I, I think the, I think Nick's hotel, uh, transfer bonuses are, uh, more exciting than they may appear at first glance. And so I, I just spelled out a couple of, uh, examples here. Suppose he could, with Hilton, find a Hilton somewhere that charges 20,000 points per night. And, uh, and, uh, And gives good value for those 20,000 points. That would be he could stay five nights for 80,000 Hilton points because of the fifth night free benefit that Hilton has. And with a, with the 25% transfer bonus, he could get those 80,000 Hilton points for only 32,000 Amex points. So that would leave him with nearly 70,000 points for flights. So there's a lot of potential there.

something really nice. And I could do almost the exact same math with the Bonvoy thing. So Marriott, like, I've seen nice properties start at much lower. Well, on the Marriott side, like I stayed at a really nice one. And Jakarta, that costs 10,000 points per night. So I know that's rare, but I'm using that as an example. So a 10K per night hotel would be five nights for 40,000 points thanks to the fifth night free. With the transfer bonus, that would cost neck 34,000 amex points. And so, you know, again, he's got nearly 70,000 left to work on flights. And then he's got the, you know, 30% transfer bonus to avios or 15% to Life Miles, you know, which could make those, that nearly 70,000 points go further. Life Miles has a lot

of hidden little, you know, sweet spots, even with the evaluation. they've had. I'll tell you when I was looking up flights, I was sorry I didn't have Life Miles to work with because there were a couple times where I came up with things. I was like, oh, that price is really good. And so I could see Nick doing something really nice with that combination. Yeah, there are some really, really good values with Life Miles. And I think that one thing we haven't mentioned about a transfer bonus to Life Miles yet is that I believe by the rules, we're allowing the 10% discount that you get as a Life Miles Plus subscriber. I think we're going to account for the cost of that is what we had decided,

if I remember correctly. But so for the $20 a month that it costs, you get 10% off on those also. So when you kind of stack the 15% transfer bonus to Life Miles with the 10% discount for subscribing to Life Miles Plus, then it really becomes, like you said, an interesting program with some really good values out there. And we often think about that for flying Star Alliance carriers, but be surprised at what a good value you can sometimes get flying on Avianca also. So there's quite a few different opportunities there. And Avios, of course, has lots of different good uses. I've got to say, I think the most surprising

thing here is that when I looked back at the transfer bonus page, we have not seen a transfer bonus to Virgin Atlantic specifically since December of 2024 from MX. It has been the better part of a year. And that's when we used to see all the times. I'm surprised we haven't seen that. Equally surprised that we haven't seen a transfer bonus to Air France KLM Flying Blue because those tend to also come around oftentimes more than once in a single year. And then we've occasionally seen transfer bonuses to Cathay Pacific and Air Canada Aeroplane. And I am really miffed that there has not been more on that side. Now, on the Hilton side, I've got to say

I was very happy to see the untargeted version because I was not targeted the first time around. And so that was a bit of a thorn in my side. And now that the untargeted version has come out, that that frees things up a little bit. Nice. And it's nice that you waited till now to start your planning too. So you're able to work with that assumption right from the get-go. Well, you know, in your example about Marriott is, uh, is another good one because while it feels incredibly rare that there are very cheap Marriott properties, it just depends on where you look, you know, in certain parts of the world, there's tons of cheap Marriott properties.

Right. Right. The, the trick is that we're going to be looking not only is a, you know, did you fit in within the budget, but also did you get good value for it. So, you know, uh, it has to be the ideal, right, for this game is that it's cheap on points, but fairly expensive in cash. And that's where may be harder to find that particular combination.

But it's there. It exists. Okay. So, yeah, so that was city and Amex. Capital One, you know, as we said, there were no hotel transfer bonuses for Stephen. I think that a Wyndham transfer bonus would have been really helpful for him if it had happened because I feel like Windham is the only hotel program he has where he has a really good shot of getting way outsized value.

And Tim got the transfer bonus to Windham, which he's probably not going to use, but maybe you will. I don't know. But my guess is that Stephen found some outrageously good deal with one of Windham's weird partners like cottages.com or one of those kind of things where they have like these fixed 15,000 point awards. He could have gotten 10% off those awards because he has a Wyndham earner card, but in order to get it as a discount rather than a rebate, he has to actually call Wyndham to book the award instead of booking it online. That's just how Wyndham works. So whether

he was willing to call and get 10% off, I don't know, but my guess, as he did, if he booked with Wyndham. So anyway, that's, uh, yeah, that's that. Of course, if you book Couchardist.com, he probably had a call anyway. So that's probably, uh, a given. Right, right, right. And I think there's a non-zero chance that he did something like that. So I'll be curious to see because I feel like Stephen is really good at finding the gems

in those types of situations. So I'll be curious to see which gems he has found for that. All right. So that's the hotel side. How about on the airline side? I mean, he had that transfer bonus to Qantas. That's great, right? You know, Qantas, it has a few sweet spots here and there, but not much.

And I don't think that transfer bonus is going to really push it over the edge to make it like an exciting option. And so I expect that he was looking hard at the 15% life miles and probably even more at the 30% transfer bonus to Virgin Atlantic. Virgin Atlantic, as Nick mentioned earlier, it has some amazing sweet spots, especially now if you avoid business class where, so they're adding these huge surcharges onto business class, but if you're willing to fly economy or premium economy, you could probably still find really, really great deals. And so he might have found some awesome deals with that. And if he took advantage of that, 30% bonus, that would free him up to have a lot more

points for his stay. Yep, yep. So hopefully he can figure something out there, although I don't know. We're going to find out. We're going to see what he does. So I think that business class is far less important to Stephen than it might be to the rest of us. So I don't know that I expect him to splurge on fancy flying as much as I do expect him to find some really interesting lodging options. And I think that that's going to make it challenging for us to compete with him, because I could see him finding lodging either A, in a really interesting place that's a great value, or B, that's just individually a really interesting lodging option. And I think that that's much tougher when you're kind of handcuffed by chain properties. Like, you know, in my case, there are only so many interesting Hilton or Marriots out there, whereas, you know, if you're looking at cottages.com and Vacasa, there's potentially. tons and tons of really unique places that you could go. So I'm curious to see what happens with

that if I'm right that he does kind of wow us with his lodging choice. Yeah. Yeah. You know, along those lines, it was it was a little frustrating for me because I would have loved to have been competing to find like the most original kind of property find where you could get the best deal with Wyndham points or with I prefer points, something like that. But with with Hyatt, even though they have that whole Mr. and Mrs. Smith collection, so they have like incredible, you know, library of hotels that could be booked with points. It's very, very hard to get outsized value with points with those Mr. and Mrs. Smith properties. And so I was really, in a way, stuck with Hyatt's own properties to look for something good. And I mean, I

think I found something very good, but at the same time, it's not, it doesn't have as much opportunity to be something like this great fine that, that, that, that would change how people look at, you know, the points for that program. Yeah, yeah. That's, I think it's a great way to put it because, you know, if you, you might find the most amazing high at regency in a really incredible location, but it's still going to be a higher regency. So it's going to, and it's going to be, I've been on the award chart. So I could see where you would feel that way, although, I think there are so many really good low category Hyatt's and they're constantly opening new ones that I haven't even looked to see what's been open lately. So I think you have a litany of options there.

So I'm curious to see which of those. And then, of course, when you consider the fact that Hyatt allows you to book sweets with points and premium sweets, and there's just so many ways that you can kind of play that to make that, I think, an extra luxurious option that I'm not going to cry too many tears for you, Greg the Frequent Myler. What about on the airline side? Yeah, I mean, I had a decent collection between Flying Blue aeroplane and Virgin Atlantic transfer bonuses on all three. The aeroplane is the one that no one else had. And so, you know, that one's pretty exciting.

And because it is a very strong program and can get you really anywhere in the world because not only do they have the whole Star Alliance to work with, but also just a huge number of... individual partners that can be added on to any particular award. So I think that's a pretty big strength for my trip. Yeah, I agree with you. They do have a unique array of partners that enables you to get to places that none of the rest of us could get to.

I mean, just recently we talked in the podcast about how they added that partnership with Air Inuit. And it goes all sorts of places in northern Canada that none of us could get to with miles and points. Of course, I don't know that Hyatt has built a Hyatt Regency or the Category 2 Park Hyatt in any of those destinations either. But I have faith that you have found a way for those two things to cross potentially. So exciting.

I think you got plenty of good options. I think those actually arguably, I don't know. Convinced me, I'm wrong. Those are probably the best of the Chase Airline transfer partners in many ways. And you got transfer bonuses to them to like the best options that you had. I mean, I was disappointed that I did. have avios to play with as a transfer bonus that's that's the main missing thing um but uh but if i mean if i were to pick shoot if i was to pick just two it probably would been aeroplane and and flying

blue as the two that you know if if i know you know not knowing ahead of time what i was going to book right yeah those those have a lot of potential uh to different parts of the world um yeah yeah so so i I feel good about my airline ones, and, you know, and I've already said it's Hyatt without a transfer bonus for me anyway, so that doesn't matter. Okay. So, so originally, in my original post about all this, I said, Tim was the odds on favorite, but I concluded with this. I said about neck. I can almost guarantee that he's going to make some 100K vacay magic happen in a way that no one can predict, and I said, despite the odds, I'm betting that Nick will take home the crown. So I bet on Nick, but I didn't give him the benefit. I said, Tim is the odds on favorite.

Does all of this with the transfer bonuses change? Who is the odds on favorite? Well, that's a question for you, Greg, the Freakumiler, right? I mean, because that was you that made that prediction. So what do you think? How do these transfer bonuses influence you? Do you think that you would stick with that prediction now or does your prediction change? All right. I have an answer in my mind, but I guess I want to hear from you first, Nick. What do you think? Do you think that the transfer bonuses have changed my prediction? Well, all right. So let's work through this. Let's work through this logically. Tim had, I think without a doubt, the best combination of transfer bonuses. I think it's impossible to argue anything else really. But I don't think those transfer bonuses are probably going to

make a huge difference on the hotel side for him because even if he is leading hotels of the world, it's probably not going to make a huge difference over what he would have done otherwise. So I don't necessarily think that that is the thing that's going to cause him to look stronger or weaker. I think so his hotel is pretty much unaffected by the transfer bonuses. And his airline options were roughly similar to everybody else's airline transfer bonus options. So I think he's sitting in about the same situation as before, perhaps a bit better because he did have some useful airline transfer bonuses. So maybe that makes him a little bit stronger. Stephen, I feel like, boy, like, it's tough. He picked Capital One and he wanted Capital One. It was tough from the beginning,

and I don't think that these transfer bonuses have changed his, my prediction anyway, for how difficult of a road that he had. So I think that that didn't make a change there. And I think I was pretty obviously weakened in the sense that there were much, many fewer transfer bonuses than what we probably would have expected from Amex. So I'm going to say that, you know what, I'm going to say that because of the lack of transfer bonuses from Amex, you're going to change your prediction and say Tim is going to be the winner. All right. So first talking about the odds before I predict who wins. I still think Tim is the odds-on favorite based on what he has to work with. But I think that the existence of some decent, not exciting, but decent transfer bonuses that Nick has on the hotel

side brings him up much closer than before. You know, because he already had, Nick already had a slight advantage, I think, on the airline side. And so the lack of great transfer bonuses on the airline side doesn't make me move Nick down much, but having some transfer bonus on the hotel side helps fill a weakness he had. And both Hilton and Marriott have such a huge footprint that there's a lot more for Nick to work with than Tim. Like, if you look at I prefer or choice where there's good value to be had, both of those situations are very limited footprint. So Tim will hopefully find something amazing, but then he has to get there as well. I think Nick can pick a part of the world that he can get to for good value and then find a Hilton or Marriott to meet his needs there, for example.

So a long way of saying, I think they're odds on. They're very close to on par. So this has not changed my prediction that that Neck will ultimately take home the crown. We'll see. I think it's really interesting because I've found myself starting to try to predict what I think other people are going to do. And I don't want to make predictions on the show because I don't want to predict something and end up being right. And then they lose the element of surprise. But I have in mind what I think Tim is likely to do and what I think Stephen is.

likely to do. I really don't know where you're going to go and what you're going to do, Greg. So I'm curious to see what that's going to be because there's like there's such a huge map there of different options. I think Stephen's options make it such that it's a little bit easier for me to predict what he's got. And I didn't read Tim's post about what he intended to do. I was looking to be as surprised as possible. But now that you've mentioned that Tim said he's looking for, you know, particularly outside its value, I have what I think. Tim is likely to be doing in mind now, too. And so that, I don't know, that might change things from maybe I need to, like,

you know, adapt and adjust and change up what I'm going to do to stay competitive. I think that one nice thing of flying by the seat of our points was that it taught me that you can kind of plan late in the game and still work things out well. So, so, you know, we'll see what happens. I'm excited. I've got to say, I've been getting very excited. I've poured a lot of time into this. recently especially. I have not gotten a lot of sleep in recent days. But I have poured a lot of time

into this. And I almost wish I could do it more than once. The other thing that I found myself wishing is that we had not locked each person into a specific currency, but rather set 100,000 points in general and let everybody use all of the currencies. I think it might have been interesting to see who mixed and matched and which types of points got used and which didn't. But all that out of the way, I think it's going to be competitive. No matter how this shakes out, I think it's going to be competitive because Stephen wants to win. And we're talking about it as though he has a hard road, but I'm not counting him out because I think that he's got the grit and the determination and I think he wants it. And so I imagine he's going to come up with something really surprising

and I can't wait to see what it is. So that's going to be fun. And Tim is naturally, and Tim and I are both naturally competitive people. So I think we both want to not only best each other, but try to build something that's going to beat out, Greg. So I'm excited to see where everybody ends up, where everybody goes and what new things and places and sweet spots were all collectively able to showcase. I'm also very much looking forward to the post about the things that I'm not doing because I feel like I've stumbled on a number of things that I've been like, oh, wow, that's awesome. But it's not going to work out for this particular instance. I feel like I could build a whole other trip that I'm not going to actually do that would still look

pretty good. I think those are some pretty good posts in the future. I'm looking forward to reading them. I think so. All right. That brings us to this week's question of the week. I think that wraps up our main event and brings us to this week's question of the week. So this week's question of the week came in via comment on the blog and I'm going to kind

of combine comment on the blog with something that came up earlier in today's show as well to ask for your thoughts on this. So what came in in the blog is we announced, of course, that we mentioned earlier that Alaska is losing Latam and Singapore Airlines as partners. And so a reader commented to say something along the lines of, well, are we going to see a change in frequent miler's reasonable redemption value for Alaska mileage plan miles since they've lost these two partners? And in a response to that, somebody else pointed out the fact that Chase has now changed. changed up the way points boosts works from the way the Sapphire Reserve used to offer a floor value of one and a half cents per point in all redemptions. Of course, they've gotten rid of that. So newer card holders and then post October 26th, well, I don't know, it gets complicated.

We've done a coffee break recently on this. But the short version of the story is long term that one and a half cent floor is gone. And we didn't change our reasonable redemption value for Chase points when Chase effectively pulled out the rug on that. So my question for you, Greg, the Frequemiler is, should we be adjusting our reasonable redemption values for Alaska and Chase based on the things they've lost? Should we not? What are your thoughts? Yeah. So the Alaska one is an easier one to answer because we don't look at particular sweet spot awards and whether they're available or not in order to come up with our reasonable redemption values of airlines. miles. We instead, we use points path, makes its data available to us, which is used to search

over millions of routes all the time, and it compares cash rates to points rates. And we use that data to determine just what's the average value of, in this case, Alaska at most points. And And so if that has a negative effect on the point value, then the next time we update, the RRV will get changed accordingly. I do not think there's any chance in the world that it will change it because the vast majority of searches don't involve Latam in the search results. And so the fact that that won't be part of it should have a negligible effect on the bigger average, okay, long way of saying that. The Chase 1.5 thing is a more interesting question

because the reason we have Chase, the reasonable redemption value at 1.5 is that for years, if you had this effort reserve card, you could redeem your point, your chase points for 1.5 cents each when you book through Chase travel. When you book any, travel through chase travel. So we said, well, we think it's reasonable for people to use their points for that much value or more because if you're not, if you could get better value by transferring your points to an airline partner or hotel program and booking that way, great, but we also think it's reasonable to use it at that 1.5.

So that was a perfect, you know, point at which to say, okay, 1.5. is what chase points are for the reasonable redemption value. And then we assigned reasonable redemption values for other transferable points based on relative to chase. Oh, we think Amex is a little bit better, built it a little bit better, city a little bit worse, or whatever. And that's how we came up with those reasonable redemption values. Now, that whole point value flag in the sand kind of thing is gone.

And so the irony is that, so Chase's points, you can argue that the points are worth less now because you can't guarantee at least 1.5. On the other hand, now that that 1.5 is gone, you could argue, well, you should really base it on what we think is a reasonable use of the points. And maybe now we would say, well, a reasonable use is to transfer them to, you know, Hyatt or, or an, you know, airline program when you could get 1.8 cents value or better. Who knows what would make sense? So the irony is that, like, even though a lot of people see it as a devaluation, if we were to change up the logical way we do the reasonable redemption value for Chase, I could see us moving the value up rather than down. And so it's, as things stand right now, I don't think that's the right answer. I think that 1.5 is still a reasonable value to,

to get for your transferable points and so I think we'll keep it there for now and just we'll see how things go over time and there's no science there's no perfect answer to this what an RV should be for any program and it's even harder for transferable points and so we're going to keep it as is right now because we can and we don't have a better alternative well it is really complicated excuse me And Alaska, I knew it was an easy answer, and that those few situations where a lot of time award or a Singapore award came up must have a negligible effect on the overall searches for Alaska miles. So I knew that that was an easy answer. But I did think, like you said, it was an interesting question about Chase.

And again, like Greg said, I could see why some people see that as a devaluation. It is. It makes Chase points harder to use in the sense that, you know, we've said on the show before. that we used to recommend that the Sapphire Reserve was a great card for ease of use. For somebody who doesn't want to dive into the complexities of learning award travel, they were earning good category bonuses and then able to use those points at one and a half cents per point to book travel. And that's no longer the case. So now it's more similar to Amex and Capital One in city in that you need to learn how to use the transfer partners to get reasonable value out of those points.

And so that's a change, and it sounds like a devaluation, but on the flip side, if we look at the RRV of airline miles, I am not actually looking at our reasonable redemption value page right now, but I think most of our airline miles, RRVs are around 1.2 or 1.3 cents or so, right? And so a transferable point that can cherry pick the best of those various airline miles or hotel programs reasonably has to be worth a little bit more because you can hunt and find the best redemption in any given spot. So it still, in my mind, has to be more than the 1.2 or 1.3 because you have the freedom to not be locked into the six reasonable uses of Virgin Atlantic points, so to speak. So I think it's actually still a pretty fair valuation at one and a half

sense, but it's a fair point to challenge us on and say, is that where it should be? And moving forward, you know, that'll certainly be something we think about and something you should think about too when you're thinking about how you redeem your points and your miles. Now it is a world where you do need to be looking at transferring your chase points similar to other programs. So if you were somebody who was just booking your travel through chase, yeah, this is a devaluation for you. And it's then I would say, I would argue, time to learn how to use the transfer partners. That brings us to the end of this week's episode. If you've enjoyed this stuff and you'd like to get more of it 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 all the various social media. Join our Frequent Myler Insiders Facebook group where you can ask questions like this all the time and wherever you're watching or listening. Don't forget to give us a like, leave us a thumbs up, leave us a review. We appreciate hearing your thoughts. If you have one of those thoughts that you'd like to share for a giant mailbag or a question that you'd like to be considered for a question of the week, you can send it to. Send it to mailbag at Frequentmyler.com. Bye everybody. Hi, I'm David Brody, co-host of the Travel in Ten podcast. Together, myself and my co-host, Tim Johnson, have traveled to over 150 countries around the world and all seven continents.

Now, we're sharing our favorite places, some of our best tips and experiences from all around the world in just 10 minutes on Travelin'10. Join us at Voyescape.com. I'm Pauline Fromer. I've spent most of my life writing, talking, and thinking about travel. Not just where to go, but how to go in a way that's meaningful. On the Frommers Travel Show, we explore the trends, people, and ideas shaping how we see the world. If you care about the why, as much as the where, I hope you'll join me. You can find new episodes weekly at voyescape.com.