Frequent Miler on the Air - 4 Cool things Nick learned at the Toronto Travel Summit | Coffee Break Ep10 | 5-7-24

Episode Date: May 7, 2024

Nick just came back from a weekend in Toronto at the Toronto Travel Summit. In today's Coffee Break episode, he'll share 4 cool things he learned there.   (2:00) - Air France is working on upgrades using miles that sounds like it might be very reasonable. (07:30) - Aeroplan intends to bring back family pooling the same as it was. (09:17) - Aeroplan is actually working on getting partner space back up and running. (12:56) - Hotels could be a good use of Finnair Avios (18:08) - Networking at these things continues to be great! Lots of interested / interesting people & creators with different angles. Visit here 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 – Beach Walk by Unicorn Heads

Here we go. This is not your typical Frequent Miler on the Air episode. This is a standalone segment we're calling Coffee Break. Each Coffee Break segment will cover a single topic related to miles and points. And each Coffee Break is limited to 20 minutes or your money back. Enjoy. Today's coffee break. Four cool things Nick learned at the Toronto Travel Summit. This year, Nick went off on his own without me to the Toronto Travel Summit and did some presentations, but he also got to network with a lot of people, got to go to some presentations, and I'm eager to hear what he learned about. And

I think there's going to be some cool things that he's going to talk about today. Yeah. So I had a great time at the Travel Summit, and I got to say, it was one of the best organized and most well-executed miles and points events that I have ever attended. Hats off to Ricky and the Prince of Travel team, because they really put together a fantastic event. And it was good from a lot of different perspectives, the networking, the speakers, obviously. But one of the things I really enjoyed about it, in particular, beyond those things that I expected to enjoy, was the fact that they pulled in a number of different executives and representatives from different programs to come and talk.

And so there was a panel on Saturday morning where they had executives from Air Canada Aeroplan and Air France Flying Blue and StatusMatch.com. And what I really enjoyed about it was that it wasn't just like a commercial for these programs. It was a good panel discussion with a moderator that asked the kinds of questions that you and I would like to know the answers to. And perhaps surprisingly, although I was not as surprised as some because I know that Aeroplan is pretty good about communication, but perhaps surprisingly to many, they're very candid. Obviously, there were some things they couldn't answer as directly as maybe we would have liked, but they're very candid in general in talking about their programs and answering questions. So I learned a number of cool things,

both from that and other stuff at the conference. So we'll talk about a few of those things. But first up is from Air France. So during that panel, I learned from the representative from Air France that Air France KLM Flying Blue is working on creating upgrades using miles that sounds like it's going to be really interesting. And I say this, I should probably have noted at the outset that what many of us know, but perhaps many listeners don't know is that Air Canada Aeroplan is well known for having an executive team that is like points and miles nerds, people that are really into this stuff and know as much as most of us know, which is not always common in loyalty programs. And it seems like Air France KLM Flying Blue is going in the same direction. And so I was very eager to hear more about this because as they started to explain it,

it sounded pretty good. It sounds essentially like what their intention to do is to give you the opportunity to upgrade using miles for the difference between the cost of the ticket you booked and the cost of the cabin that you're looking to upgrade to. Now, what I mean by that is, for instance, let's say there's a business class award for 50,000 miles one way, and you buy an economy class ticket on that flight for, I don't know, let's say $400, right? Well, they're going to figure out, again, this is theoretical, but that's what it sounds like, whatever the difference is. So the business class award was 50,000 miles. Let's say an economy class award on the same flight was 20,000 miles.

So in order to upgrade, you'll pay the difference, the 30,000 mile difference, which at least in some cases will probably be very attractive if it does work as advertised in that way. Now, this hasn't launched yet, and it's not an official announcement. It was a conversational thing. So who knows what might change between now and whenever it comes out. But I'm going to be keeping my eye on this this fall because there are certainly, at least from the Northeast, some very reasonably priced economy class flights to Europe. And if I could book one of those for essentially about what the cost of taxes and fees would be and save a

decent chunk on a business class award. That could be really attractive to me. So I'm going to take a look at that as it comes out. Hopefully we'll learn more about it this fall is what I took away from it, but we'll see when it comes. That sounds really cool to me. Do you know, you mentioned like cash bookings of coach tickets, but do you know, will it work on points bookings of coach tickets too? Whether you'll be able to upgrade those? Well, that's a good question. No, that didn't come up. So I'm not sure about that. Although I think it's going to be loosely based on what an award would have cost at the time you booked it, I think, but, or maybe it'll be at the time when you're actually looking to book the upgrade. So

I guess it'll probably depend. No, I don't know whether it'll apply at the time when you're actually looking to book the upgrade. So I guess it'll probably depend. No, I don't know whether it'll apply to points booking. So great question we'll have to ask. And any information about availability of upgrade space? Or will it be based on? Presumably it'll be based on what's available on that flight for an award. So if there's an award seat available for X number of miles, presumably that's going to be your measure as to what the business class price is. So, you know, if you keep an eye on it and you find a reasonably priced business class

award on that flight, then you should be able to upgrade or potentially right away, you know, at the beginning. So it sounds like, you know, almost every seat will be available potentially, but of course, as you know, sometimes seats are very reasonably priced and sometimes, you know, it'd be a wild number of miles for a business class award. So it just depends on demand. Really quick. I'm really excited about this because as you might remember, my wife and I are trying to get to 2 million miler status with Delta, which is based on distance flown. And we're both within less than 200,000 miles away. Once we get there, we'll have platinum status for life. And I think if I book these cheap coach tickets on Air France, I guess I'd have to put in my Delta number after upgrading maybe

because I presumably would need my Air France number on there to do the upgrade maybe. But still, it should be possible then to treat it as a revenue ticket, earn elite credits, and some miles. But I wouldn't expect much from that. Yeah, so that'd be great. But overall, yeah, that's really positive. That's exciting. Yeah, it sounds interesting. And like I said, I got the sense that both Air Canada, Aeroplan, and now Air France, KLM, Flying Blue are trying to do things in a way that's appealing to those of us who enjoy award travel. So I get the sense that they get it. We don't want to pay a million miles to upgrade and we want wide availability to upgrade. And it sounds

like that's what they're aiming for. So, you know, we'll see obviously how it gets implemented. Yeah, no, they're really smart. If you've read, View from the Wing has had posts about this, about how these foreign programs, they can't sell as many miles to businesses in their own countries, but they've discovered, some of them have discovered that selling to American companies, thanks to these transferable points, and you could transfer to Air France from all these different things, they make a lot of money. Because basically, when you transfer from Amex or Chase or wherever to Air France Flying Blue, they pay for those miles for you. And so Air France KLM Flying Blue has been busy trying to make their program more attractive to us, which is awesome.

So that we'll do more of those transfers and in some ways pleased with some of the award search tools that are highlighting that their awards are less expensive than their competitors in many ways. So I think that's something that they've found some value in. Of course, I think there's a mixed bag there. Anybody who's followed the lawsuits over some of that stuff, there's some argument on either side. But anyway, I think that they have seen benefit in the sense that people are more familiar with their program. And so it's smart. They're making smart moves. So that was interesting. On the Aeroplan side, I learned that Air Canada Aeroplan intends to bring back family pooling probably this fall, the same as it was. And that's the more important part than the timeline for them. I think that when it comes

back, when family pooling comes back, you may remember Air Canada Aeroplan briefly offered the ability to pull miles with family members so that you could share miles in a pool with a number of family members. I don't even remember what the limit was if there was one in terms of the size of your family. So that makes it useful because if you travel with a family, then you can all earn miles from a paid flight and put them together for a useful award. Makes it useful in my household because my wife doesn't want to have to call Air Canada Aeroplan and book the award, but we've got our miles pooled because I did it during that very brief window. So now all of our miles are pooled. So when she earned a bunch from Bilt, for instance, from a transfer bonus, I was able to call Air Canada Aeroplan and redeem them because they were part of my pool. So anyway, they had shut

that down because of fraud concerns very quickly. And so it's been very slow getting it back up and running. And I got the sense that they had the choice between a fast solution that would completely change the value proposition or a slow solution on the technology side that would enable them to put it back the way that it was, just with better security, essentially. And that's what they've opted for. So eventually when this comes back, I expect it'll be free. It'll be easy to pull with all of your family members. There may be some more identity verification. I wouldn't be shocked that this wasn't said, I don't think, but I wouldn't be shocked if you have to upload like a picture of your ID or something to prove who you are so that they can make sure that people are real. But beyond that, I expect that this will

come back and it'll be very good, much better than let's say United's implementation of family pooling. And I think, uh, I think they're aware of that. So I think that they're looking to make it better. Yeah. That's great. More good news. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And then on the Air Canada airplane side, also, I learned a hot tip this weekend or last weekend at the Travel Summit. And that is, so first of all, I did ask directly whether or not they intend or whether or not they expect to lose any partnerships in the coming year. They've grown, obviously added lots and lots of partnerships. And I was broad about it intentionally to not make it clear that I was asking about one or two specific programs, but rather give them the opportunity to take a broad stance on it and say that maybe they're reevaluating, blah, blah, blah. And that's not the answer I got. The answer I got was that they

definitely do not expect to lose any partnerships, which gives me hope for the future because obviously they are very much aware that people know that Etihad and ANA have not been bookable on the website for a long time. And I get the sense that they're working on fixing that. But hot tip I picked up over the weekend is that ANA flights are bookable via Air Canada Aeroplan. They're just not showing up on the website. So if you find ANA space on United that's available to United, then you can call Air Canada Aeroplan and book that over the phone with a phone rep. So that was really good to know. Apparently when they brought that back, it was initially just the intra-Asia flights, but now it's the Trans-Pacific flights also.

So if you find an ANA business class award that's available between the US and Japan, you can call Air Canada Aeroplan to book that or include it in part of a complicated itinerary over the phone. So that was good news. Bad news is that I don't think that there's going to be necessarily a major improvement to the call center hold time anytime soon. Although I say that, and I did call Air Canada Aeroplan two times in the same day last week and copped through to a person immediately both times. So I don't know if I just got lucky or what, but I got the sense that

generally speaking, they are going to work on making it easier for you to self-service most of your issues on the website rather than making the call center a faster option than it currently is. And of course, by extension, it will become faster as more and more people are able to handle more and more of their stuff on the internet. So hopefully that'll improve over time. But that was all I thought very positive. Yeah. And just to be clear, so ANA awards are bookable over the phone, but not Etihad.

Not Etihad, no. And what did they promise around Etihad coming back or anything, if anything? There was no promise made apart from saying that they're working on it and aware of it. And so from things that were said by Air France, I got the sense. So this is me kind of putting pieces together and not attributing it to somebody specific, but rather me just reading between the lines. I think that Etihad wants more money for their awards. And so for access to award space, specifically, I think more than the 30 days in advance that American Airlines has access, I think they're asking for more money for that.

And so I think, and again, this is just my guess. Nobody from Aeroplan said this specifically. This is just my guess. I think that if, and when they come back, I think they probably will come back and I would bet on it being a different award chart, kind of like Emirates is my bet. I hope I'm wrong. I really hope I'm wrong, but that's where I would put my money. Yeah. I could, I could see that happening. I can understand Eddie Hutt's point. I mean, their, their first class is extraordinary. And so I could see why they'd want more money for that. Although business class, I mean, I think they're comparable to many. So why that wouldn't be bookable, I don't get that. But anyway. Yeah. Maybe they know they can package it. Maybe they know they

can use their first access to their first class space by making somebody pay more for the business class space too. Again, there's a bit of reading between the lines going on there. So none of that is official per se, but that's what I gathered anyway. All right. So I thought all of those were pretty interesting, but that's not it. Those are three things. So fourth thing that I learned that, that this one really came out of left field. I never in a million years saw this one coming, but I met someone who spent a long time at Finnair and I learned that Finnair Obvious has a one particularly decent redemption for hotels or a couple of decent redemptions for hotels, decent options for booking hotels. Now, when I say that, that's surprising because usually using airline miles for hotels

is a really poor value. Usually you get like half a cent per mile or something like that. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Even when it's like, you know, advertised as like specials, you know, it's usually one cent or maybe a tiny bit over a penny, but that's rare. Yeah. You know, and I think that a lot of programs are offering multiple ways to use your miles and points in some ways as a way of mitigating the cost of those expensive awards. When we want to fly on Etihad and business or first class or whatever, Emirates or this or that, those awards obviously cost the programs more than somebody redeeming for a magazine subscription or a hotel. So these other options

are often there just to give people other ways to use their points and feel good about it, but also to even out costs overall when there are people using their miles badly. I guess that makes it easier for us to use our miles well. And so I always expect using miles for hotels to be in that realm of things that are just a poor use of miles that are there to satisfy somebody, but not for me. But I was wrong. I would have been wrong about Finnair Avios anyway, because there are at least a couple of hotel redemptions with Finnair Avios, and I haven't dug into these deeply yet. So don't count on this being the be all and end all most amazing redemption, but it looks pretty darn good. And I was told that it was pretty good,

and it looks that way. So Scandic Hotels, which I'm not at all familiar with, so I haven't done the research yet to know much about Scandic Hotels, but they have two different types of vouchers that you buy from Finnair Avios. So there's one that works at most of the hotels that's 68.21 euros and 2,000 Avios. So you use about $70 in 2,000 Avios to buy, or a couple more than $70, whatever it is, to buy a voucher for most of their hotels. Or they also have a premium voucher for a few specific premium hotels that are higher quality, higher price. And that one's about 107 euros and 2,000 avios.

And so I looked up some examples. And so with the base level certificate, that's 70 something dollars and 2,000 avios, I looked up an example that was 105 euros a night. So that 2000 avios essentially saved you about 40 US dollars. So it's about two cents per point. I mean, that's pretty good. It wasn't again at 105 euros, I wouldn't expect a luxury hotel, but two cents per point is good for avios. So that's, you know, for a hotel redemption, I was like, wow, that's not too bad. And at the premium end, it looked even better actually, because I found a couple that again,

were similarly around two cents per point. Now that was a harder to find availability for though, at least in my first few searches. And I mentioned that you're buying a voucher. And so the way this works is you're buying a voucher for money plus obvious from Finnair and then using that voucher with the hotel program. But they provide a code on the Finnair website for you to search for availability. So you can look for availability before you buy the voucher to make sure that there's availability to use it. That was harder to find in the premium ones, at least on the couple of searches that I did than on the base level ones.

But still, anyway, two cents per point would be pretty good. But there's another one to another brand called Socos Hotels. And I heard that these are nicer hotels. Again, I don't know the brand myself, but I heard these are more premium hotels. And the voucher for those was 8441 euros, about 85 euros, and 5000 obvious. So it's more obvious more euros, but availability looked fantastic in the first couple of searches that I looked at. Tons of hotels available and also multiple room types. Not quite as good as choice privileges. Choice sometimes enables you to book any room for the same number of points. It wasn't quite that good, but there were quite a few different room types and room types that were available for more

people, more than two people that were available. And so my first search, I found a couple that were 210 euros a night. So if you take away the 85 or so that you're paying, you're getting about 125 euros for 5,000 avios. Basically you're getting 125 euros in value for 5,000 avios. That's like 2.7 cents per point. Wow. Wow. That's awesome. So I'm excited about this. So, so as things stand right now, you have to have Finnair Avios to do this, right? Like British Airways Avios or Iberia just won't do it. And as we're recording this, we don't yet have the ability to move Avios from Finnair to those other programs. But Finnair's website claims that later this spring, which time's running out for that, they'll add the ability to do that. So fingers crossed that that really happens. I hear it probably will later this spring. And so we'll

still be spring time. A little inside information that you can't share explicitly. Is that what's happening there? I get the sense that it's going to be relatively soon. So keep your eye on that. So on that note, and the way I said that, obviously, Greg picked up something in my tone. I think a final bonus that if we're going to add one more thing is that the networking at these things is really, really good. You meet lots of interesting people that are at varying levels of the game. But it's interesting because I find all of the speakers say there is something to learn from almost everybody that you meet. Almost everyone you meet knows a lot more about something than you do. And so it's a lot of fun meeting different people. I had a great time meeting lots of

readers and listeners that were there and other content creators. Some of the other speakers were fantastic. I really enjoyed talking to Ben from Ben's Big Deal. You find him on Instagram and he does some great reels there. And I learned some cool tips from him that I hadn't known about. And I enjoyed meeting some of the different kinds of creators that they had there. They had some folks that were heavily Instagram that were interesting. Spencer and Ashley from Canada also travel with TMC, really have enjoyed looking at some of the van life stuff that she has up there. And again, these people all are in the miles and points space, but also have other interests

that are just cool to learn about. And actually that travel with TMC posted a story at the end where a bunch of us were out late one night talking, and it was just a quick picture of everybody cheersing. And the background music she used was a song called Find Your People. And it was about, you know, you got to find the people that are into the same kind of stuff as you. And so if you like this stuff, conferences like that are a great opportunity to find your people, so to speak.

So a lot of fun, definitely an event that I enjoyed. Yeah, that sounds great. So it's so good to hear some updates and some exciting stuff there. So I'm really looking into digging into Air France upgrades and booking hotels with Avios and all of that. So thanks. Yeah, absolutely. Very good.

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