Frequent Miler on the Air - 17 Surprising ways to save on travel | Ep150 | 5-14-22

Episode Date: May 14, 2022

Seeking stackery for savings on flights, hotels, rental cars, parking, hotel food, and more? On this week's show, Greg and Nick talk about surprising ways to save on your upcoming trips. 1:36 What crazy thing did Hyatt do this week? 7:57 Mileage running the numbers: Is it worth spending to keep Air Canada Aeroplan elite status? 13:54 Main Event: 17 Surprising ways to save on travel 14:42 Ways to save on gas: Gift cards at the supermarket, Walmart+, Speedy Rewards, and more https://frequentmiler.com/walmart-members-now-save-10c-per-gallon-at-walmart-exxon-mobil-murphy-gas-stations/ https://frequentmiler.com/getupside-2000-bp-gas-stations-added-now-covers-atlanta-chicago-more/ 21:30 Save on hotels: Greyhound road rewards, best rate guarantees, Capital One Spring, buying points, shopping portal return https://frequentmiler.com/best-rate-guarantee-guide/ 33:08 Save on Hotel food: Kids menu, Uber Eats, discounted gift cards 38:28 Flights: same-day change, companion tickets, Alaska companion ticket https://frequentmiler.com/save-money-or-miles-on-flights/ https://frequentmiler.com/alaska-airlines-companion-fare-guide/ https://frequentmiler.com/travel-companion-tickets/ https://frequentmiler.com/skiplagging/ 53:25 Save on airport parking 56:05 Save on rental cars: rent from a dealership, Autoslash to rent or track, rent a Uhaul https://frequentmiler.com/surviving-the-car-rental-apocalypse-by-stepping-outside-the-box/ https://frequentmiler.com/the-american-express-platinum-hertz-benefit-has-saved-me-over-1000-yr-on-rental-cars/ 1:09:06 Question of the Week: Which airline programs allow holding an award ticket to avoid phantom award space? Join our email list: https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ Music credit: Annie Yoder

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did City do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event. Frequent Liler on the air starts now. Today's main event, surprising ways to save on travel. We're not going to be talking about the regular old, you know, oh, there's a sale on a flight or, you know, the hotel has a deal on, you know, stay five days and get the six night free. We're not going to be talking about those like sort of obvious ways to save on travel, but rather the things that you probably haven't thought of. We've got a whole like collection of those kind of grab bag of ways to save on travel.

So that should be fun to dive into that. First, usually we would have the giant mailbag, but someone amongst the two of us was unprepared today. Oh my goodness. Come rain or sleet or snow or apparently, apparently postman. Yeah, no, no. Yeah. Yeah. I was not delivered. You know, what I'm going to say is that the reason is that your your internet has been going in and out next internet has been going in and out and we we kind of want to get through this pretty quickly while his internet seems pretty rock solid right now so that's my excuse it's all right that's a good excuse that's a good excuse because they have been working on it and t-mobile keeps telling me we're working on it we don't have an

estimated time for completion but it seems that the people who they have been working on it and T-Mobile keeps telling me, we're working on it. We don't have an estimated time for completion, but it seems that the people who work on it, work on it during a more specific time of day, I'm starting to narrow it down. So I'm hoping that we're going to be okay here, but you're right. We should move. Yes. Yes. So let's talk about what, uh, what crazy thing did Hyatt do this week? Hyatt. I got Hyatt. So they recently bought this collection of all-inclusive hotels. And rather than lumping them into their existing brands, Hyatt already had a ton of brands, more than most hotel chains do. And rather than lumping them into the existing ones- No, that'd be easy. That'd be too easy. Right. That would be easy.

And instead of just adding one new brand, they added a bunch of new brands and put all these hotels in different brands. And so that's sort of crazy, but, but realizing that this is kind of overwhelming, what Hyatt has done now is created brand collections. Oh, great. So now, yeah, if you weren't confused enough, there's now collections of brands and those collections have names. So this is kind of fun. You have the timeless collection. You have the boundless collection. You have the independent collection.

And I'm going to go on, but first I want to mention that one of the brands inside the independent collection is called the unbound collection. Not boundless. Not, no, right. Because the unbound collection is not a brand collection. Right. It's just collected within the- Within the independent collection and not within the boundless collection which I guess makes sense because it would be very confusing as if it's not confusing enough

for the unbound collection to be under the boundless collection you don't know the difference between boundless and unbound Greg come on I don't I mean come on boundless is independent. No, wait, I take that back.

Unbound is independent. Come on. All right. Keep going. So now what else is there? Okay. So there's also an inclusive collection, which is very inclusive because it includes a collection called the AMR collection.

Glad it includes it, but it doesn't include the unbound. The inclusive collection is not unbound nor boundless. Right, right, right. Okay. Give me a moment to collect my thoughts on the collections. What? What? Yeah. It's good to know that there is an inclusive collection that doesn't include a lot of other collections. So what does the inclusive collection include? I don't know other than the AMR collection. I know what it doesn't include. I mean, I don't know other than the AMR collection, but I know what it doesn't include. I know the inclusive collection doesn't include, doesn't include timeless stuff or boundless or unbound or independent. So, so it's dependent, bounded, timely stuff. I assume inclusive collection are the, are most, but not all of the hotels that are all inclusive.

But, you know, I haven't actually even looked. Why wouldn't you call it the all inclusive collection? It makes it sound like the other ones aren't including something, right? Well, this is the inclusive collection, but those other ones, they're not so inclusive. Right. I mean, it makes it sound like they're, yeah, they're not going to allow certain people or whatever. Yeah.

I don't know. It's fun. It's crazy, you know, but that's what they did. So many brands. So many brands. It's a whole branding thing. Marriott and Hyatt are getting a little crazy, I think, with all the various brands. I mean, I guess you want to appeal to a wide range of consumers and I get that, but like

who in their right mind can remember all of these? I don't even think somebody at Hyatt can remember where all this stuff goes, right? No way. No way. Forget about a consumer. Who would recognize any of this? Yeah. I mean, maybe they'll start using these collection names instead of the brand names more and more, and then they'll be down to what, four brand names if they do that. But for the short term anyway, it's kind of good news for those who want to collect free night certificates from Hyatt

because Hyatt has that thing where they, the brand explorer, where every time you stay at five different brands than you've ever stayed at before, you get a free night certificate and that's good for category one through four. And so there's many more opportunities here. And just, uh, just so you know, I had this question when I first started like paying attention to the brand explorer, it's not limited to five brands within a calendar year or anything like that. It's over sort of your lifetime of staying at Hyatt. So, um, it's actually very easy to earn these over time. And so more opportunities to get free nights. It is. And I'm at nine brands right now. So I need a 10th brand for my second certificate. So I'm looking forward to picking up one at some

point. I don't know whether it'll be timeless or boundless or unbound or who knows what it'll be, but it'll be something. I have a question though. And I have this question because I haven't looked up the answer yet. So I don't know if you're going to know the answer, but it popped into my mind this morning because I was looking at hotels. You see, I used to not even bother pulling up Hyatt when I was looking at really obscure locations because Hyatt didn't have anything in obscure locations. But this morning I was looking at the Canary Islands. And so I was wondering, well, is there anything on Hyatt? When I pulled it up, there were some brands I've never heard of. There were a whole bunch of one brand I've never heard of, which is probably under one of these many collections. And there was one that was Dreams, which Dreams, I believe,

is one of these all-inclusive properties under the AMR. But I didn't see it on the list of places that you can book with Hyatt points. So is Hyatt slowly folding them all in? Are they only folding in some of the Dreams? What's going on? I believe they're slowly folding all of them in. And the recent big tranche of hotels that were added were mostly around the Americas. And I think they're going to be expanding out from there. But I've only sort of vaguely paid attention to all this. Not 100% sure with what I just said, but I think so. I was in the same boat. See, I was counting on you, Greg, to hopefully have that. But that's what I figured, probably slowly, because it says to check the hotel website for availability. And I thought, well, all right, I'll have to send an email to somebody and say, hey, when are these other ones going to be in there?

Because I'm curious. Yeah. You know, Stephen's listening from a few days from our recording and he's going, come on guys. All right. So, so crazy thing. Hi, lots and lots of brands. Excuse me. My throat is still recovering here. So, all right. So that was what crazy thing. Let's talk about mattress running the numbers. What do we have up this week for mattress running the numbers? Right. This week we have sort of more like mileage running. So we're talking about how to earning status on an airline. And in this case, it's about keeping status rather than earning it. So it's going to apply to fewer people. But Air Canada is out with this deal

where if you have or get the Chase Air Canada credit card, and if you currently have Air Canada elite status, which you might have, they did a generous status match not that long ago. If you did that, and so you have Air Canada elite status, you can keep that status through next year, through 2023, just by earning 30,000 points on the credit card. And now what's, and it has to be by like November 30th, if I remember right. Now, what's really cool about this is that they're very explicit that category bonus points do count. So for example, the card earns 3X at grocery stores and dining and Air Canada, I think, if I remember right.

But just think about grocery stores, for example. That means just $10,000 spend at grocery stores and boom, you've got it. I'm not sure. So it's earning, the current signup offer includes earning 10 points per dollar up to 52,000 points on a couple of categories. I think dining is one of them. And I'm not sure whether those points will all count, but at least three points per dollar of that should count.

Yeah, I mean, if they do, great. If they do do amazing, but even if they don't, yeah. I mean, $10,000 in groceries by you said November 30th. Yes. They've got like six months to spend 10,000 on groceries, which I mean, in six months time, I'm sure a lot of people will spend somewhere close to that to begin with just naturally. And then, you know, if you buy any gift cards at all at the grocery store for other things, that shouldn't be probably out of reach for somebody who wants to keep Air Canada elite status without stepping foot on a plane or doing anything particularly complex. Right, right. So I'm in the situation, I've got high level elite status through the end of this year. And I'd love to keep it longer. My problem is right now,

I won't dip under 524 until after November. So if Chase applies their usual 524 rule to the application, to the credit card application, I can't then sign up for the card because as you know, they usually exclude people who have signed up for five or more cards with any bank in the past 24 months. They usually exclude them from approvals. But you're a blogger. You must have some inside contact, right? You must have a fast track to just get it approved. Not even close. It's more the other way around. If they knew who I was, they would just deny me automatically. But here's the one sort of faint hope is that there have been a number of reported incidents recently where people who are over 524 have been approved for some co-branded carts. Now, all of the examples I could find were not Air Canada.

They were Southwest cards and United cards. But it's theoretically possible. I went ahead and applied just in case. We'll see what happens. And of course, I'll report on the blog if I'm successful. And we'll see from there. But I'm hoping so because I would love to be able to keep the status another year. Yeah, that would be great. It's a terrific promo. So if you got

Air Canada Elite status, easy, easy, easy way to keep it there. And a card that is not a bad card to have, right? I mean, the airplane card, we said from the beginning, we were surprised. I didn't expect to be interested in an airline credit card anytime soon. But I thought, it's a good card. And I think that if you're under 524, it's worth considering. It's I mean, obviously, I prefer transferable currencies. But if you value getting Air Canada elite status at all, it's a card worth considering, right? Because I mean, you get 15k spend, you end up having some level of elite status, right? That's right. That's right. You get like their bottom tier status the first year automatically and then you can keep it with

just 15k spend and then there's ways of um with i think it was 50k spend you could bump up whatever status level you reach to in the next level so yeah there's definite plays there and and yeah and i think that's key is that if you're interested in Air Canada Elite status, then there's a lot of benefits there. It's a decent card even if you're not for some things like because it does earn 3X for grocery and dining. And you could even use, I think it's up to 50,000 miles a year to pay yourself back for travel, like any travel expenses you put on the card. So at 1.25 cents a point. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's, that's very similar to having a Chase Sapphire preferred, except you don't have to book through Chase. You could book your travel anywhere and pay yourself back. So, yeah, I mean, so that's, so if you're earning three X at the

grocery store and then just paying yourself back for travel that's a return of what 3.75 percent on groceries up to the 50 000 points anyway that's not bad right i mean you can do better but um it's not bad i mean it's it's better than most i guess i should put it that way instead of making it sound like yeah yeah it's it's not easy to do better but i was gonna say yeah that's that's that's what i was thinking i I was about to, which ones? But then I thought, okay, well, you know what? That's another discussion for another day. So, all right. Do that one if you can, I think.

So that's Mattress Running the Numbers. So I think that brings us right into the main event. Main event time. All right. Surprising ways to save on travel. We had kind of talked before the recording about having a headline that's something like 12 surprising ways to save on travel, but we don't know how many we're going to come up with. We got a few written down, but who knows what else is going to come out.

Live show, so to speak. Well, recorded for you, but we record it live. Is there any other way to record it? Recorded live in front of nobody. So we will count afterwards. And so the headline you read when you clicked through to this probably told you how many, we just don't know yet. Right, right, right. Okay. What's expensive right now? I mean, the first thing that comes to my mind is gas, right? Gas is great. Yeah. I mean, inflation has been high and it's been especially high with travel, especially within the US. And it's hit everyone. Travelers are not at the gas station, right? I mean, gas prices are way up. And so, yeah. What are some ways to save

on gas that are not the obvious ways? So why don't you start? Well, so I think that if you are one of those people who might buy some gift cards, you might want to buy them at a supermarket because you could usually buy gas gift cards at your local supermarket. And if your local supermarket participates in some sort of a fuel point program, then you can probably stack a few different things here. So you buy your gas station gift cards at the grocery store using a card that earns a good category bonus at grocery like your aeroplane card, like aeroplane card. So you're getting your three X by yourself. I don't know, a BP gift card or an Exxon gift card, whatever your preferred gas station brand is, and then earn fuel points in the grocery store's fuel points program. And so actually,

an example that comes to mind is if you have a Kroger nearby, and perhaps Shell participates in their fuel rewards program, then you could buy some Shell gift cards, perhaps at Kroger, earn 4x on an Amex gold card or 3x on the Aeroplan card. And then also when they run their 4x promos, earn four fuel points per dollar spent. So if you bought $250 worth of gift cards at once, you'd get yourself a dollar off per gallon. You'd earn either 3,000 Aeroplan points or about 4,000 Amex membership rewards points, and then use those gift cards when you go fill up at Shell. So it seems like a good stack. Yeah, yeah.

And it seems like grocery stores are running those fuel point promos just all the time. You know, just watch the circulars or, you know, the blogs. You'll see those kind of deals all the time. And if you live in, I mean, one of a few select areas or travel through them, I know that there are some places, a lot of places will limit you to $1 of fuel points at a time when you fill up. But I think in Virginia, like Richmond, Virginia area,

you could still fill up. The last couple of times I've stopped there, I've used all the fuel points I had, a couple of dollars off a gallon and been able to enjoy a nice discount on gas. Yeah. Yeah. And some places you can basically get your gas for free if you have enough fuel points. Right. Yeah. Which would make it hard then to use those gas gift cards you bought because you're not paying all of them, but some gas stations charge more when you pay with credit than when you pay with cash or with gift card. So you can save them that way too and still be earning your credit card rewards because you bought it at the grocery store. Okay. So the other kind of surprising way to save on gas is by signing up for a Walmart Plus subscription. So, you know, if you have a personal Amex Platinum card, or actually is it?

Yeah, I think it's just a personal one. You can actually get Walmart Plus monthly subscription for free because they'll rebate the monthly fee. But even if you don't get it for free, then regardless of how you get it, you can save up to 10 cents per gallon at Exxon, Mobile, and Walmart and Murphy gas stations. So a lot of places out there since they recently expanded to Exxon and Mobile. Now the terms say up to 10 cents per gallon. So I haven't had personal experience with how often do you really save the full 10 cents per gallon, but still it's something to definitely consider. And it's worth adding to this that we're talking about things like this that are perhaps less obvious. I'm sure that there are at least a

dozen people out there saying, wait a second, I fill up at Costco and I use my Costco credit card to earn 4%. And yes, there are other ways that are, I think, a little bit more obvious like that. But this is an option if, for example, like me, if you live somewhere where there's no Costco, but there is Walmart and you may have Walmart Plus and there are plenty of Exxon Mobils, then this may be a way to save a little bit. I'm going to add on to this one also that Speedway Speedy Rewards can also be worth looking into and checking on, keeping an eye on, because that's a fuel rewards program at the gas station

that awards fuel rewards points, and they often have promos similar to grocery stores where you can buy gift cards, third-party gift cards in Speedway and earn Speedway points. And sometimes you can earn a lot of Speedway points on buying third-party gift cards. So it's worth signing up for that program and then checking in the app for deals now and then, keeping an eye on. We'll write about them sometimes, or Stephen will write about them

at gcgalore.com sometimes. For a while, Speedway was hot because they were awarding fuel points even on Visa gift card purchases. And so you go in and buy some Visa gift cards and earn a bunch of free gas. And that stopped, I think, but it's also worth keeping an eye out in case that comes back again. So that's another one that's similar in regards to just taking advantage of a fuel reward promo or program, rather, to buy gift cards and save on gas. Right. And, of course, when you're doing that, use a credit card that bonuses gas stations. But be careful. Some credit cards bonus pay at the pump gas and not gas stations in general.

But cards like the Wyndham earner business card, eight points per dollar gas stations. So that's a great option. If you have the city premier, you get three X at gas stations. So there are some good options out there for getting bonuses at gas stations. And we should mention, too, that there's this whole Gas Buddy app and some other stackery that goes on with gas savings that Stephen's written about. So I'll link to a post about some more ways to save on gas in the show notes here, because Stephen spends a lot more time focusing on saving on gas

because he drives far more than either Greg or I with his five-year or 10-year or long 50-state road trip, however long it is now, I'm not sure. But yeah, so I'll link to a little bit more on that. So I'm liking this word stackery that I just heard come out of your mouth. Tell me more about that. It's the, you know, the stackage of things. So stacking A and B and C, like we talked about a second ago, the stackery that goes into, you know, the gas station gift cards at the grocery store and the fuel points and the bonus categories.

We like stacking that stuff up, right? Yes, we love stacking deals. And I love that new official word in the Merriam-Webster plus dictionary. Stackery. Okay. Very stackery. Okay. So let's talk about hotels. I mean, gosh, last time I looked at booking hotels in Florida,

the rates were just unbelievable. I mean, I was seeing prices like $600, $700 a night at, not at fancy hotels, but at, you know, cheap brands and they were not cheap during that time. Right. So we're seeing that not everywhere. Like, so there's still a lot of places sort of non vacation places where hotels aren't necessarily through the roof, but there's a lot of places where it's just absolutely insane right now. So, um, yeah. So, so what are some ways to save on hotels that you wouldn't have thought of? Well, one that I wouldn't have thought of until we discussed it before this was the Greyhound Road Rewards. And so that's one that actually, I think I'm going to have to leave up

to you to leave up to you to talk a little bit more about because you wrote about it. I took a look at it a couple of years back, but I haven't actually looked at it again since. So what do you remember of Greyhound Road Rewards? Yeah, I haven't looked at it recently. And I tried to jump on before our recording,

but apparently it's been so long that I guess my password has expired or something. So I couldn't quite do it. But basically, in the past, and I believe this is true still, all you have to do is join Greyhound's frequent sufferer program. And it's free to join. It's called Road Rewards. And once you join and log into it, there's an option to book hotels. And when you go through there, it pops up sometimes fantastic rates for certain hotels. Now, what you want to

look for is where it actually has a big sign on the result that says 30% off or whatever. And then of course, compare it, use a tool like Kayak or Google Hotels to compare prices to make sure it's really good. But in the past, I found really, really significant discounts that way. Oh, that's a good one. That makes me think of something that we didn't talk about beforehand, and that's best rate guarantees, which is something we've written about before, but I think it's worth a highlight here because it's something that I forget about from time to time. And I'm sure other people do too, that most major chains have the best rate guarantee where they say, if you book directly with us, we'll beat the price you find elsewhere. Now there's a lot of, I don't know, finer details to that. Oftentimes they

aren't going to beat something like Greyhound road rewards that you have to log into in order to be able to book. So it'll have to be something publicly available for them to match it. And then often there'll be some rules in terms of it needs to have a room description that matches and a cancellation policy that matches. But the bottom line is quite a few chains have pretty good best rate guarantees where you might not only get the better price matched, but often, or in some cases anyway, get the best price beaten. There are a number of chains that will beat the best price you've found by 5% or 10% or 20%. So you can end up saving

quite a bit with a best rate guarantee. So it's worth shopping around. If you see a hotel and you think, okay, well, let's see if I can find a better price than you do. It's worth checking into the best rate guarantee. Absolutely. That's a good one. That's a good one. Another one I'm just going to mention briefly, I think it's very similar to the Greyhound deal is Capital One Spring. You sign up for that. You don't have to even have a Capital One card to sign up, if I remember right. And they have that same kind of thing of like hotel deals that are, it's kind of similar to, I forget the name of it, but you know that hotel search engine where it won't tell you what the hotel is, but it'll give you a

big discount. Like Hotwire, are you talking about? Hotwire, yeah. Both of these are similar to that, but these tell you which hotel it is. So you can really comparison shop. So I really like that. But from my experience, it looks like the savings are similar to Hotwire. Very good. All right. Excellent. So those are a couple of options for saving on hotels.

And another one that we had thought about was buying points because sometimes you can buy points on sale and save quite a bit. I mean, you look at IHG, for instance, and they're frequently selling their points at half a cent a point. And I've seen more and more situations now where you can get definitely better than half a cent per point, even without any stackery, so to speak. But if you also have the IHG Premier, Premier Business card or the Traveler card, and you get the fourth night free on awards days, then you might do really well by buying points and then using them to book the hotel rather than paying the cash rate. You'd actually save money by buying the hotel's points and using them to book the hotel.

Right. There's situations where even when the points aren't on sale, you can do really well. And some things to look for with Hyatt, Hilton, or Wyndham, all three of those programs do not charge resort fees on awards days. And sometimes those resort fees can be ridiculous. So for example, I was looking at Hyatt's Miraval recently, and when I looked at the cash rate and compared it to the rate after all the taxes and fees, including the sort of resort fees are added on, the final rate was close to double. It was close to double. It wasn't like just 10%. It was just unbelievable. And so, you know, in that example,

if you bought Hyatt points at the most expensive they ever charged them, and I don't know how much that is, let's just say three cents per point, you would still save almost 50% off the rec rate of a stay at Nurovol. And that's just kind of ridiculous, but that's an extreme example. But let's look at IHG. It's a good one. Yeah. Go ahead. example, but let's look at IHG. So what I was going to say is even IHG and Marriott, which don't

waive resort fees on points days, what they do do is when resort fees are based on a percentage of the hotel cost, as opposed to a fixed rate, you don't pay a resort fee in those cases. And so I've been a couple of places like that. And in those examples, yeah, you can do really well buying the points. Ideally you get them on sale, but again, even if you don't, you could potentially save a lot of money compared to the cash rate. And especially when you add on the taxes and fees that are involved in that. And then, of course, as Nick mentioned before, take advantage of things like Marriott. It's not really fifth night free, but the- A night out of five.

Pay four, stay five. They removed the lowest award price night. And IHG, again, if you have the right credit cards, you could get fourth night free on those. Hilton, fifth night free for everybody. So all those things can add up to make buying points if you need them a really good deal. Yeah. And by the same token, buying Wyndham points might make sense for those interested in vacation rentals. We've talked a lot about Vacasa and Wyndham has put their points on sale for a penny each often. And even when they're not on sale, they still may end up being a really good deal for vacation rentals. Because again,

I mean, even if they charge you two cents per point, I can't remember what the regular price is there either. But then you're talking about paying about $300 for 15,000 points, which could get you a one bedroom vacation rental and perhaps save you at least a hundred dollars probably over what the cost would be if you were to add in all the taxes and cleaning fees on your one bedroom vacation rental. But of course, if you're able to buy the points on sale for one cent each, buying a vacation rental for about $150 a night could be a really good deal. So that's another one to keep in mind for those. Yeah. And just like what I was talking about, about the resort fees and things, when you book with Wyndham points for a cost of

vacation rentals, you're not paying those cleaning fees or other taxes and fees. And so, you know, when you book a short stay, the cash rates are ridiculous because they put the, those big cleaning fees, you know, are, are, are a fixed rate basically. And, and so if you stay two nights, a $300 cleaning fee is huge, right? $150 extra per night. Whereas you don't incur that when you're paying with points. And so the savings get bigger and bigger, the shorter your stay is because of that. For sure. One other thing I want to mention in hotels, and this borderlines on the, is this obvious that we shouldn't include this, but I'm going to include it and I'll tell you why. And that's clicking through a shopping portal before you book when you want to book directly.

And the reason I mentioned this is because every time we write about shopping portal deals for hotels, I always find that there's a few readers who are surprised to find out that you can still get elite benefits and elite credit after clicking through the portal. So I want to highlight that quickly for the people that aren't familiar with the fact that if you click through Rakuten or TopCashback and you go to IHG and book IHG, you're going to click through the portal and earn portal rewards, but you're going to book directly with the program. So you'll earn your elite credit and you'll earn your hotel points different than booking through like if you book through Expedia, where you book through Priceline or something like that, then typically you're not going to get elite credit or elite benefits. You're going to be giving that up. Whereas if

you click through top cash back on a day when we say, hey, there's 10% back at IHG and you book your $100 stay at IHG, you're going to get your 10 bucks back from TopCashBack. Plus you're going to earn your IHG points. Plus you'll get whatever benefits. So it's always worth, if you're going to book a cash rate, it's always worth at the very least looking for a shopping portal you can click through. That is a great point. So go to cashbackmonitor.com and search for the brand or chain that you're interested in. So I'm saying that specifically because sometimes you'll find what you want by looking for searching for IHG or Intercontinental Hotels Group. You got to try different terms, but sometimes you might find it by looking for Holiday Inn.

They might be specifically named. So try it in different ways to find what the best rates are. You might find one at one portal, another at another portal. And so you'll have to compare across to see what the best rate is. Yeah. But that's one to save you some money anyway. And typically that pays out after your stay. So if you book a stay today for six months from now, you're not going to get the cash back until you finish your stay. But I have done that months in advance and gotten the portal rewards. So you will eventually get them. Right. And it's good to mention too, that you'll get the rewards that were in effect at the time that you click through, or at least you should. Of course, there's always some issues with shopping portals, but if you click through when there's a special promotion, 15% back,

that's great. Theoretically, it's locked in for your stay. So that's a great way to save. And I also, I guess I should have mentioned on that, and that's not only for advanced purchase rates, right? It's pay at the hotel rates. So you don't have to book an advanced purchase day. That's another point of confusion I find often. You don't have to book an advanced purchase day. You could book a stay where you pay at the hotel. That's fine.

You're not going to get the rewards until after your stay anyway. Exactly. Yes. Yes. Very good point. Okay. All right. So that was hotels a little bit, but on the hotel topic, once you get there, you got to

eat and food ain't cheap. So what can we do to save on hotel food? Yeah. Yeah. So one thing I've done in the past is sometimes some hotels offer a really good kids menu with stuff that I've wanted. And so while I'm not brave enough to order things like kids filet mignon meal at the hotel restaurant, I found that if we all wanted these kids meals, ordering room service, I mean, yes,

there's that extra fee for room service, but it doesn't look weird. You know, I think they don't know that there's not kids in the room. So you get these like, you know, 10 or $12 meals that are, they're smaller than a big, you know, American meal. But if you're not starving, it can be a great way to save a lot. Ordering off the kids menu. Look at that. Greg, the frequent miler ordering off the kids menu. So you only have to deal with the scornful stare of the person who brings it to the room. That's it. Right. And they're gone in a couple of seconds. They're gone. They get their tip. They're right. Right. They're on their way. Right. They're looking to see if there's any kids

in the room. That's that's not a bad hack. And actually, you know, there are some hotel chains, especially overseas, not as much within the United States, but that will offer kids eat free. And so, you know, we were at the St. Regis Bora Bora a couple of years ago and, and kids eat free there. And the staff was terrific about that and reminding us and letting us know. And I remember one day we were on the beach and somebody came up and said, you know, can we get you something for the baby? You know, maybe some, some chicken fingers or this or that. And we were like, no, well, yeah, some chicken fingers. That sounds great.

You weren't like, uh, how about a lobster Thermidor? Well, you know, we didn't push to see how far we could, we could put, but you know, of course he ate a chicken finger one and we weren't going to let the rest of them go to waste. That would be wasteful. It's not one not or something. Right. So, yeah, no.

So the kids menu, kids, stuff like that can certainly be. Right. Right. In your example, I mean, you have to borrow someone's baby in order to. Well, you do need you do need the child. In my example, it's true. But I have kids to order off the kids menu for me for at least the next few years. So, all right.

So, kid's menu. Another option for saving money would be food delivery apps, right? I mean, gosh, there's so much stackery to be had there, right? Oh, absolutely. If you're like, well, I'm going to order room service or order through Uber Eats or one of those things, I bet you anything it's going to be cheaper to order through Uber Eats. But all of those programs, they have deals where they'll advertise $10 off a meal at $25. You just have to look for what the local deals are. There's a lot of different ways to stack savings with those things. I don't think we want to get into all the details unless you have one on the top of your head that you think is worth sharing right now.

No, I know. If anything, there are, of course, apps like the Flues app where you can save perhaps on buying gift cards for Uber Eats or other similar services. So sometimes getting discounted gift cards can be good. And of course, all your various credit cards that have credits for Uber Eats can be useful because they can stack together. If you have more than one platinum card in your household, or you got a platinum card and a gold card, you can load those to the same account. And so for example, in my household, we've got my platinum card and my wife's platinum cards and her mother's platinum

card. And they're all in the same account. So every month, all that money is in one spot and that's useful for being able to pull it together. So, right. And so that can be a lot cheaper and also better. You could potentially be getting better quality food than what's at your hotel. So I think that's a great way to go and something that probably a lot of people

just don't think about. Cause you think about ordering when you're at home, I think these kinds of food delivery, but you can usually deliver to a hotel as well. Oh yeah. Yeah. We do it all the time to hotels. So that's typically how I use it since I can't get over eights at home is when I'm at a hotel and I find it to be convenient. Another thing that I just briefly talked about with Greg was discounted hotel gift cards. So when Marriott runs their 20% off gift cards now and then, or there's an Amex offer, you might buy a gift card. Or what I've been doing is I have an old Capital One account with this weird ability to redeem for Marriott gift cards at a really good

rate, 1.4 cents per point, which is not common. Not many people have it. If you've got an old Capital One card, it's worth checking. But what I do is I redeem that for a Marriott card, and then I use that to pay for my room service. So that's like getting essentially, if you get your gift cards at 20% off, getting 20% off the room service prices, which in some cases can be more reasonable at that point where you're like, oh, you know what? If I'm paying 20% less than the cash rate for this, maybe it's not so terrible. Yeah. Yeah. So one way to save is to be Nick and use that capital one deal. Or have an Amex offer and grab your gift card, you know, and even if you're going to use your points for an award stay, you're not going to pay for your stay. It's still worth buying the

gift card to save on the food you're going to buy when you're there. That's right. Absolutely. All right. So, okay. So we were saving at hotels and we're saving on gas but what if we have to what if we want to fly to where we want to go good luck flight prices are through the roof um obviously we're so we're not going to talk about just booking award flights because that's obvious and we're talking about surprising ways here um So, let me start this time. So, one kind of surprising, I think it's surprising to people, way of saving on flights is to plan on doing a same day change. So, a lot of airlines will charge far less for a flight that's at like 5.30 in the morning or a red-eye flight that leaves at 9 p.m, and then wait until it depends on the airline what the rules are. But often it's 24 hours before the flight to call the airline and same day change to the flight you actually want.

Either for free or for a fixed fee. And so if it's free, it's usually because you have elite status, but it just depends on the airline, what they charge. Some will let you stand by for free without confirming for free. So that's another thing, another option. There's all kinds of issues with doing this, right? So you have to be ready to take that 5 a.m. flight, right? I mean, exactly.

That's the thing. Don't do this unless you're ready for the consequences if it doesn't work out. But if you need to have a lot of seats available in the flight that you want to go to. So if you're looking to book and you see that the flight you want to book is already mostly sold out, don't do this. It's not going to work then. It's not going to work out. And, you know, ideally you do this when there are a lot of flights with the same airline that same day that you'd be willing to do because that would up your chances. But yeah, ultimately you have to be willing if things don't work out to fly the one that you, you booked. Yeah. But I mean, I think that it's, it's a valuable technique and one that

I hadn't used because I hadn't had airline elite status until this past year. And I, I did almost this exact thing Greg's talking about. I booked the cheap flight that was, I don't know, $400 in business class going across the country. So it was, you know, obviously in an undesirable time and blah, blah, blah. And then day of, I switched to a flight that the day I booked would have cost more than a thousand dollars. That was a better itinerary, better equipment, flatbed seat. And I did it for free because I was able to do it with Delta elite status. So, so I think that's valuable. Now, a question I have that hopefully you can answer since you've got a lot of experience as a Delta elite member, at least is how does that work when you've got multiple people on your reservation? So, you know, if

you've got people that don't have elite status, are you able to same day change everybody for free or just you? I actually don't know off the top of my head. I mean, most, most of the Delta elite benefits are based on you and one companion. And if you book more than one, you might be out of luck, but I'm not sure. I know that's true for getting on the upgrade list. I don't know about the same day change. So same day change possible there

along the same lines with the same day change, by the way. I think maybe we should mention Southwest that Southwest very frequently in the last year or two has opened up windows of time where you're able to switch your flight without paying the difference in fare to anything within like a couple of weeks of when you originally booked. Now, this isn't something you can necessarily plan on. But since Southwest flights

are so easily cancelable, particularly with points, I have booked lots of speculative stuff where I've said, okay, well, I'm going to book this really cheap flight and then I'm going to wait and see. And maybe if they open up the schedule and they say, okay, you know what? We're going to allow changes during this two week period. You can change to anything you want. Then I can change to the stuff I really want. So it's not even a same day change. Sometimes you're able to do that within a couple of weeks with Southwest. Yeah, that's a fantastic one. And that's obviously much more reasonable for more people to do as long as you have the Southwest points Yeah, that's a fantastic one. And that's obviously much more reasonable for

more people to do as long as you have the Southwest points because those are fully refundable. Whereas a cash booking, you get back credit that has to be used within a year. So I wouldn't do that with cash unless you fly Southwest enough that you'd know you'd use that credit if excuse me, that you'd use that credit if you end up canceling. Good point. Good point. Well, speaking of Southwest, I think we should probably talk about companion tickets as a way to save on money. You know, of course, you know, about the Southwest companion pass where if you earn enough points in a year, you get a companion who flies for free with you,

whether you buy your ticket with cash or points or whatever else that I think maybe falls under the more obvious methods for companion tickets. What do you got for companion tickets, Greg? Yeah. I mean, I mean, I definitely think Southwest makes sense to talk about there because that's probably the best one you could, you could get. And I'm not going to talk about Air Canada credit card ability to get a free companion once you spend something like a million dollars. I'm not going to do that one. I mean, but if you get the card, Greg, you kind of have to go after it. You've got to spend a million.

No. So the other one, it might with a sign up offer of a it's not a free companion, but it's like ninety nine dollars or something like that, plus taxes and fees. So it's around one hundred and twenty five dollars to add a companion to an economy ticket. And unlike some other companion tickets, they don't have many limitations. You could book a really surprising itinerary and add your companion to it. Maybe you could expand on what I'm saying about the surprising itinerary. Yeah, because you can add this companion. And first of all, I wish to mention it only works for coach tickets initially anyway, because you can add this companion. And first of all, I should mention it only works for coach tickets initially anyway. But you can, if you have elite status, you can potentially book one that you're able to apply one of your upgrades to. So you can book it in economy and then use one of your upgrades if you've got an upgrade instrument.

But anyway, the reason that this is surprising is because you can book really complicated itineraries with this that don't look like a simple one-way or simple round trip. Basically, Alaska requires that you go one way west, one way east, but it doesn't really have to be connected. So for example, you could book a round trip, so to speak, that flies from Newark to San Francisco to Maui right now. And then you could return eight months from now going from Cabo San Lucas to Chicago to Boston, let's say. I mean, I'm just making that up. That's not actually a route that they fly. But anyway, as long as you're flying west once and east once, you can book basically two trips

that aren't even necessarily connected. And the reason that might be useful is because you can also have a stopover in there somewhere. basically two trips that aren't even necessarily connected. And the reason that might be useful is because you can also have a stopover in there somewhere. So you can plan out a stop on that and make it creative. We've got a whole post about that. So I'll link to that in the notes, but essentially you can get yourself kind of two trips in one with a creative booking there. And both of you earn miles on the flight and Alaska still awards miles based on distance flown. So you can earn a boatload of miles with the right itinerary at a really reasonable price.

So that's one that I like if you're into booking anything with some complexity and taking a couple of trips. Right. And yeah. And even if you're not into, you know, doing that complicated stuff, I mean, you could just straight up save a bunch of money. You know, imagine a couple with two children and you're looking to fly to Hawaii, let's say, and it's extremely expensive. You basically for the price of, you know, signing up for each of you getting one of these Alaska cards, if you don't already have them. Um, and then, then your kids fly for $99 and change. So that's, that's easily two, two passengers and that kind of a situation. So, yeah, I mean, that's, I think that's a really, really good one that doesn't get a

lot of attention these days, but it probably should now, especially with domestic airfares being as high as they are. Exactly, exactly. Now, I think tell me if I'm wrong. I think it's limited to Alaska's own flights and you can't even with their partnership with American. I don't think you can use it on American. I don't think so either. You only ever used to be able to do it on Alaska and Virgin America for a while there. But yeah, I don't think you can use them on American, but I haven't tried to use one in a long time. So I just don't live in an Alaska hub, so I don't get to use it. So it's worth double checking that. But my point is like Alaska has a very limited route network,

especially in the central and eastern US. Most of their flights are on the West Coast. So if you're over there, you could easily make good use of it. If you're on the East Coast, if you're at an airport that Alaska serves at all, then at least you can probably get a flight out to the West Coast and beyond. But it does limit your options. Another thing I should mention about this actually quickly is that they do require now that you pay with your Alaska credit card. But I believe my understanding from people talking about it in the past is that I believe it still works.

If you've got your wallet loaded with money, whether that's gift card money or other credit that you can still use your Alaska wallet funds. And the reason I bring that up is because if you've got a Costco nearby, they have frequently been selling $500 Alaska gift cards for $450. And so in that kind of a situation, you might save yourself $50 or $100 or whatever it might be by buying those gift cards at Costco and loading them to your Alaska wallet first before you go ahead and book. Yeah, no, that's great. One more I'm going to mention is there are some American Airlines credit cards that if you spend 20K or 30K, excuse me, within a calendar year, you get a similar type of companion ticket. And in that case, you would fly American. So the route network is going to be much better for a lot of us for that.

Oh, you know, we should add one more here too. And that's just following price changes, because in the past, this has always been a Southwest thing, but now it's basically an everybody thing. You should just keep checking your flights, your paid flights, keep checking them as you get, you know, as time passes every now and then set yourself a reminder on your phone to just pull up a search and take a look because as the prices change, you can rebook and get a credit back for the difference in price. I wrote a post last fall about, I think I rebooked the same United flight four times in five days. And it went from like $300 and change down to like 130 or something over the course of that few days. So I just kept rebooking and getting credit back.

Yeah. Google flights, search for your flight on Google flights. And then there's a little checkbox to say, alert me if the price goes down, just do that at the minimum. And then when you see it go down, boom. With award searches, with award bookings, you can do the same thing, but not, I mean, sorry, you can do the same thing of rebooking when the award price goes down and get extra miles back, but Google Flights isn't really going to help you there. You do have to recheck it over and over.

Yep. Okay. All right. So those are some ways to save on flights, I think. Well, yeah, I've got one more. This one's for advanced users only. And it's been alternatively called hidden city ticketing or, oh, shoot. What's the other one? Skip lagging. It came to mind and I meant to add this and forgot. Yeah, good. Yeah. Skip lagging. So the idea is, and I think everybody's heard of this, but the idea is that sometimes it's cheaper. Let's say you want to fly from Newark to Chicago. It might be cheaper to fly to book Newark to Minneapolis through Chicago. And so the idea of skip lagging or hidden city ticketing is to book that one, that one way flight and just get off in Chicago and be on your way and just let the, uh, that last segment expire. All kinds of downsides to this, or I should say risks to this. Um, maybe just post a link

neck rather than us go into it, But don't do this unless you know what you're doing. But the savings can be really significant. They sure can. And you can use tools like Google Maps to look at airfares. And this is maybe a good point, too, that's worth mentioning separately. I'll develop that in a second. But you could use Google Flights, for instance, to search from Newark to the United States and just take a look at what the prices are to various places and then start seeing, okay, well, where do the flights connect for here or there and to look for that kind of thing. There's other ways you can use IT. Yeah. And that SkipLagging website will let you find these deals as well. So that's a good place

to look as well. Yeah. Which by the same token with Google Flights, Greg wrote a great post a few years ago about how to find great deals on business class with Google Flights. And this is worth mentioning because when I said this, searching a region like Newark to the United States, Europe came to mind because that's obviously a popular place to visit. So you could search from your city to Europe in general and see what the prices are to all of Europe. And then you could set search parameters and say, okay, well, I want business class and I want it to be less than $2,000 round trip and see what, if anything comes up or whatever your price point may be. So that can be a really good tool for saving because maybe you'll find

that you could fly into Paris instead of flying into wherever other city, insert other city and take a train or take a cheap intra-European flight. And so it's worth checking something like Google flights for stuff like that. Exactly. Exactly. And if your plans aren't concrete, you might find, oh, it'd be interesting to go there too, wherever there is and give that a try. But, but absolutely flights with in Europe tend to be really cheap and there's great ways to book really cheap awards within Europe. So there, there's a good ways to get around once you, once you get there at all. So that's a great tip as well. Okay. All right. So I think then that brings us to airport parking. Yeah. So that can be a big expense, you know, at Detroit airport where I fly out of. If you stay in, if you park in the deck where the Delta terminal is, I think they charge now

long-term parking something like $2626 a day. So thank you. Yeah. So the obvious way to save is to, is to do off airport parking. Um, and there's plenty of them. And with like a AAA discount, you're talking about maybe about $11 a day, something like that these days. Um, but there's, there's some other ways to, to save even more. And even more. And so one that comes to my mind is that, and this is especially relevant if you need to stay by the airport or you want to stay by the airport the night before your flight, there are off-airport hotels that offer park and fly rates. And often those, those park and fly rates are not that much more than the, uh, the rate for a night. And so, you know, you can, you can book like, let's say an eight night, um, parking, um, one night stay with eight nights of parking. Um, let's say you

pay $30 more or even $80 more than that's $10 a night, but you know, $40 more would come to a $5 a night for parking. And so that's, that's a example of one way to use that kind of, that type of deal. Yeah. That's a great idea. The other thing that I do frequently, because I live far enough from the airport that it's, well, I should say my local airport's very cheap to park at. So I have a totally different situation than Greg for domestic trips. But for international, I often fly out of New York City and similar situation where it's quite expensive to park anywhere, really.

So I mean, I've done Groupon to find parking and things like that before. But something I've done more often is just rent a one-way car and drop it off at the airport. Pick it up at a neighborhood location and drop it off at the airport. It's often cheaper than the cost of parking. So it depends. Obviously, one-way fees can be a lot. If you have access to rental car codes, if you've got somebody who works at a place that has a good rental car code in your family that you're able to access, that could certainly be worthwhile because a lot of times those negotiated corporate or educational codes will remove the one-way fee. So you won't even pay the one-way fee necessarily with some rental car companies anyway. So then it can be quite cheap. I've often booked a one-way

for 30 or 40 bucks one way to drive to New York City and not have to worry about parking. So that's a great way to segue into our last topic, which is what are some surprising ways to save on car rentals? Which I just said $30 or $40. And you're like, not this year, you haven't paid $30 or $40 for a rental car. And that's true. So yeah, I mean, wow, they have gotten really expensive. I started looking at trips and I was like, the rental car is going to be the most expensive part of every trip I take for the foreseeable future. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. Rental car prices are through the roof. I mean, I think there's multiple reasons for that.

You know, if you remember during the pandemic, a lot of rental car companies sold off their fleet. And then when travel came back, they were suddenly short on cars. And so the scarcity certainly drove up prices, but of course, everything's going up. And so it's just, yeah, it's just insane right now. So what are some ways that you might not have thought of to save on car rentals? Well, I wrote a while back about how not all, not even most, but a decent chunk of car dealerships offer car rentals. And so that's something you might not have thought of that you could actually potentially rent a Toyota from the Toyota dealership or a Nissan from the Nissan dealership. And it makes sense. I mean, they want to get you in the car and have you

enjoying the car and liking it and coming back to buy one. So it's a pretty, and they obviously have a lot of inventory lying around. So it's a, I don't know, it's a smart way to potentially save a bunch. And the thing that I found about the dealerships that offer rentals is they very frequently have just set rental prices. It's not dynamic. Like with most rental companies where you search one day or the next day and the prices can be totally different. Most car dealerships just set a $30 a day or $40 a day or whatever it might be for the particular vehicle type you're looking at. And it's that price all the time, whether you book in high demand or low demand or whatever else. And a lot of people won't think of that. Some dealerships, I found, even would pick you up at the airport because they were close enough to airports.

They'd even pick you up at the airport. So they know that they're getting travelers interested, but why not? I mean, it's certainly in their benefit and in your benefit too, potentially. And something that people aren't finding when they search on Expedia. So you're competing with a smaller group of people to find those rentals.

Yeah, I think that's a great one. I love that trick, that hack. Another one, we've known about this so long. It doesn't feel like a surprising option, but I think a lot of people don't know about this, which is a website called auto slash. And I absolutely love that, that site because it works in two different ways. One, you could, you could go to auto slash from the get-go and tell it where you want the rental car and put in the parameters and so on. And instead of giving results immediately on the screen, it'll email you results in a few minutes. The other way you can use it is just find the best deal you can and book it. And then through auto slash, you tell it what you signed up for

and it'll look for better rates for you. And I'll keep looking and email you over time when it finds better rates for that booking. And I found huge, huge savings at times, not always, but at times by going through that. Yeah. And so that second piece that Greg's talking about, the tracking is valuable because then you continuously get those email updates. So I like that very much about auto slash, but even the regular search tool, like Greg was talking about initially there, the ability to

search, you can check the various discounts you're eligible for. You can say, I have a Costco membership and a Sam's Club membership and a BJ's Wholesale membership. And I'm a member of Air Canada Aeroplan and AARP and this and that. And it'll search all of those various discounts for you. So you do still get access to all of those other things. It's just, you don't have to search in quite so many places. So I have certainly saved a lot of money over the years. A lot of money. Yeah. Because sometimes when you do that, it comes up with these deals that I don't even know how they got them, you know, somehow they found a code or something that made the, made it cheap. And, and, uh, it's great that you don't have to do the work. And so they, they, they've got your back there and, and I will often book through,

through their link, which gives them like a, um, they get, they have an affiliate relationship, I think with Priceline. And so you book sort of indirectly through Priceline and I'll book, I'll book through them rather than going through a portal first to Priceline because, well, two things, one, it can be really hard to recreate the price that they found. I mean, it's possible sometimes, but more importantly, I feel like they're doing a good service. So in that case, I would rather them get the money and keep offering the service than me get 5% back or less from a portal. So that's how I've been using it. And let me say too, even though the bookings go through Priceline, there's usually an option to pay later. So it's just like booking directly with National or Hertz.

From that point of view, you're paying when you bring the rental back kind of thing. And you can put in your National or Hertz or whatever loyalty number in there. So you're getting all the perks and everything if you have status with them. So it's not like the normal buying from Priceline and prepaying. It's not at all like that. No, yeah. And like you said, I mean, I often look at that and I say the two or three or 5% that I could earn through a portal isn't worth all that much to me.

It's worth much more to me to continue to have auto slash. So I'm happy to book through them and have them collect whatever that, you know, two or three or 4% is. This episode is sponsored by auto slash. We are not going to pay anything. No, no. It's been a fantastic service. It saved me a lot of money over the years.

So I want to see them, you know, I want to see the light stay on there. So I'm happy with keeping that one around. So all right, that's a good one. Now, speaking of being able to book directly, if you're booking directly instead of using something like auto slash, or particularly if you need to hold a car for a little bit more than 24 hours, then an option that comes to mind is using your Amex Platinum card code thing. I always get confused with these like CDC, CDP, this code, blah, blah, blah. Use the Amex Platinum thingy, whatever it is. You got to add your Amex Platinum card to your Hertz profile.

And essentially the short version of the story is when you book through the Amex Platinum discounty thing, you get a four-hour grace period. So you can keep the car for up to four hours beyond the 24-hour period, whenever that ends and your rental, whether you're renting for one day or 10 days or whatever, for four hours beyond whatever the end point would be. And that's come in really handy for me on a number of occasions before where I've been like, oh, I can't have it back. I'm picking up at noon one day. I can't have it back by noon, but I could be there at two or three o'clock or something. And it can save you from paying for an entire extra day. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And Tim wrote a nice post about that,

about how he's gotten huge savings in my case. So through my wife's affiliation with University of Michigan. We have like special rental deal as employees and you can use it for personal travel as well. And I almost always find that that is so much cheaper that the four hour grace period isn't nearly enough to make it worth using that, that, uh, that deal. But that said, um, you know, obviously in many cases, it's, it's a great savings. So I just personally haven't had a chance where it's, where it's worked out yet. Yeah. I had one actually just earlier this year, I bought a car, wrote about buying a car and we bought it in Columbus, Ohio. And so we had to drive out to Columbus to get it. And then we could have driven one of our cars and driven both of them back. But then my wife and I would have to drive separately on the way back. And it was like a 10 hour ride.

So instead we did a one way rental and drove to Columbus. And I didn't, I don't think I ended up booking the Hertz Platinum card rental, but it was competitive. I was going back and forth between that and some other things thinking, well, I'm going to pick it up in the morning here and I got to drive all the way out there and I got to get the new van and return this a lot of moving parts there. Maybe it's worth just a couple of dollars more because it wasn't very much more to book with the platinum card discount in that case. Certainly wasn't the cost of a full extra day. And so there's situations like that that might come up and be useful. So

that's a good one. Another one, if you're going to be creative and you can't find a rental car, let's say you've looked, you know, auto slash doesn't have anything. Priceline doesn't have anything. You tried Turo, which is like the Airbnb of rental cars and Turo didn't have anything. Something you might not have thought of, but we also wrote about in a car rental post last year is booking a U-Haul. Now you may feel a little bit self-conscious about rolling up to your Four Seasons or your, you know, Park Hyatt and a U-Haul, but hey, you can probably park it there just like anything else. And the reason that I bring this up is because particularly for in-town moves, if you are going to return to the same place,

then you can book usually a cargo van or a pickup truck that seems at least a little bit more like a normal vehicle. It still says U-Haul on the sides of it, but you can have at least two passengers in there and have a car that you could probably still park easily enough. And those are like 20 bucks a day plus whatever the little taxes are, which aren't very much. So usually the cargo van and the pickup truck are a good option because again, standard price. So it's going to be 20 bucks a day, basically all the time. It doesn't fluctuate with demand if they have one available. And that's the big if with a U-Haul is whether they're going to have it available, whether or not it's going to be there when you show up to get it, which is a problem you can run into with rental car

companies too, but that's a possibility. Right. And a variation on that is when you want to go one way and the car rental places, their one-way drop-off rates are through the roof, which does happen, you might be willing to drive a UL truck from one place to the other. And you might find that that's actually significantly cheaper than the car rental. It's not gonna be as comfortable as a car driving in a truck.

It probably won't work if you're more than two people. And you're probably gonna pay a lot more on gas. So watch out for that as well if you're going far. But that's another kind of funny way to do it if you're really stuck needing that one way. Right. And when we mention U-Haul there, we should probably also mention, don't forget, there are a lot of other similar services. Budget has a truck rental division and Rider. And I've booked through some of those services too, because when I bought and sold, I often would have to pick stuff up. And we bought some big items where I had to rent U-Haul trucks or similar. And I have rented from some of those other ones also, because sometimes they're cheaper and there's portals you

can click through and coupon codes. So it's worth looking for some stackery and not just taking whatever the price is at face value, because just like with car rentals, there are ways to save on those too. So worth checking out what your options are. Maybe a last case resort here is probably not your preferred way to do it, but it could be an option if you can't get anything else. Yeah. I did that once, not because I wanted a rental car, but, um, I needed to move a big thing to the dump. And, um, so yeah, I ended up renting, I think it was a rider, uh, truck and, and it was a big like panel van, like, like a, you know, a kidnapper van, basically, you know? And so, um, yeah, it cost me about $20 all in by the time,

by the time I was all said and done, you know, and, and it, it, I, I think they were charging by the hour, but I only needed it for an hour. So, uh, it was, uh, it turned out to be a good deal and, um, no, I didn't kidnap anyone unless you can. Yeah. Unless you consider the thing I brought to the dump, but I probably consider the thing I brought to the dump. I probably didn't want to go to the dump, but I had to go. So the gotchas to watch out for on this are, A, they aren't always unlimited mileage. The local ones usually, I think, are when you're in the cargo van, I think, is normal. Maybe it's not normally unlimited mileage.

I can't remember. It's been a while since I've rented one of those now. But certainly the one-way rentals usually are not unlimited mileage. There's a certain allowance that you're going to pay by the mile. So that's something to keep in mind. And then B, a lot of credit cards won't cover the insurance for U-Hauls. So they're going to cover, like for example, you got to chase Sapphire Reserve or Ritz card. Those will cover rental car insurance when you're renting from a regular rental car company, but they don't, I don't think, cover U-Hauls and they may not. I'm sure they don't. That's a great point. Cover you from a dealership. So that's something to keep in mind.

Yep. Great. All right. I think that wraps up our surprising ways to save on travel. So I think that's going to bring us to the question of the week. Yeah. All right. No post-ros today. No post-ros. We're going to skip right over the post-ros question of the week. This week comes from YouTube. So there was a YouTube comment. We talked about what was the practical sweet spot awards last week. And I thought there was a great question that came in from NS said, gentlemen, which flight

award programs allowed a call to hold before transferring to avoid phantom award space? Because on the show last week, you may remember, we talked about how there was a reader who had written in because he was looking for award space on Air India via Singapore, thought he was going to be able to book it, saw it there, transferred points. And then of course it was phantom space. And so he stuck with all these points. And so the question here is, okay, well to avoid that, some programs will let you call and hold the award space before you transfer the points. So which programs allow that, Craig? You know, I love that question because it's a better answer to last week's dilemma than what we, what we mentioned in that, like, if you can call and put it on hold that, you know, if there's,

if it's successfully held, then, then it's almost certainly not phantom award space. And, and that would be great. So what I'm excited about here is when I read that question, I didn't know the answer, but surely because Nick is asking it here, he's prepared with the answer. So I'm looking forward to hearing what that is. Oh, I thought it was really, but well, I, I, I'm sorry to disappoint. I didn't necessarily look it up, but I figured that between the two of us, we could probably think of a bunch. So American Airlines allows award holds. That's not going to do you much good in terms of transferring, unless you're going to transfer from what, uh, built, right? Built has American. So if you're going to transfer built points, I guess that could be useful for

American. Uh, so you can call and put a hold, usually five day hold with American. So give you a few days anyway, to get your stuff figured out whether or not you want to book it. Now I did once have a partner hold that they released. I don't know if it was just glitchy, but it didn't end up getting held. So a little bit of risk there, but probably minimal. So American allows holds. Let's see who else allows award holds, Greg. So you've done it with Turkish, right? Turkish. Turkish allows award holds. Thank you. So I was like, I know I've done a few of these. Turkish allows award holds and they give you a hold that varies. I think it's like standard is 72 hours. But if you're booking within a certain window, they'll only give you a 24 hour hold.

If somebody tells you, though, that it's only 24 or 48 hours and you're booking far in advance, I think they're just wrong. And you just are probably going to have a 72 hour hold because I've had some situations where they told me a shorter amount of time and it seemed the hold lasted longer. So, uh, so Turkish is one though, that's a good one. Cause you do want to get the itinerary on hold before you transfer the points because it's such a pain to book those. So you definitely want to get Turkish on hold before you transfer any points, uh, because they'll give you enough time to hold it. So, uh, so that's a good one. What else, Greg, what came to mind while I was talking there? I, I do not, I cannot think of any off the top of my head. I just don't know. I, you know, I don't know.

Does Singapore allow it? I have no idea. No, no, they don't. So yeah, there are, I know there are others. And I hear, I was counting on you to come up with a couple other ones. So I'm gonna have to write a post about which, which programs allow award booking holds,

because I know there are some others that'll allow you to put an award on hold. And that is a great answer. Like you said, a better answer than the one we came up with is book through a program that allows you to put an award on hold for a few days. Now, I know some programs will allow you to put a price on hold for a ticket. But in terms of the award bookings, those are the ones that immediately come to mind anyway.

Yeah, Yeah. What a great option if they allow it, you know, because as we've talked about before, when transferring points from a transferable points currency to an airline program or to anything, it's one way you can't, you can't get those points back into the transferable points program. So they're stuck in that program. And it's really bad when they're stuck in a program where the points expire, no matter what you do, if you don't end up actually booking an award with the points that you transferred. So a great alternative is to secure the award first, then transfer and complete the booking then. Okay. I was going to say Air France. And

then I was like, do they really, they do, they do 48 to 72 hours. So that's, I thought I put one on hold with Air France once before when we booked to Tahiti. I thought I'd put that on hold before I transferred the points. And I apparently did. Well, that's a great one. Very relevant to lots of people. I think they have some very good award prices and you can use their miles to book not just Air France and KLM, but also Virgin Atlantic and Delta and, you know, any SkyTeam program, as well as a few miscellaneous other partners that they have. So, yeah, that's a great one. There you go. I'm looking forward to reading your post.

We'll write more about that when I get those all exactly put together. Okay. So I think, my friends, that brings us to the end of this week's show. If you enjoyed what you've been listening to and you'd like to get our email or posts in your email inbox each day or each week, you want to go to frequent miler.com slash subscribe. Again, that's frequent miler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. You can follow us on all the various social media. We're on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook. We have our frequent miler insiders, Facebook group that you'll want to join in order to be able to discuss this stuff with other people and ask your questions

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