Frequent Miler on the Air - 5 cool points & miles opportunities expiring soon | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep328 | 10-17-25

Episode Date: October 17, 2025

On today's Frequent Miler on the Air Podcast we'll discuss how to fly with 1 free human companion and 1 pet companion for a full year, or how to fly with a free human companion for two years, or how to get 350,000 points and elite status for 25 years!Giant Mailbag(01:15) - "I wanted to share some insights on the Mesa card based on my experience..."Learn more about the Mesa Homeonwers card here.100K Vacay Challenge(07:36) - Stephen won both judges' vote and the popular vote!(09:05) - Tim posted his full itinerary here: 7 nights in London and Norway for 100,000 points: Mountains, fjords and ferries Card News(10:02) - 5K bonus points for Atmos Summit card waitlisters extended(11:59) - Citi Strata Elite 100K offer now public ($6K spend required)Learn more about the Citi Strata Elite offer here.Bonvoyed(13:02) - Alaska tanks the utility of its “Famous Companion Fare”(16:55) - No notice: Atmos changes award chart for Alaska & Hawaiian flightsRead more about this no-notice change here.Awards, Points, and More(19:15) - Alaska Atmos to improve earn rates on premium cabin partner bookingsLearn more about this here.(25:04) - Rove launches Loyalty Eligible hotel stays; earn both Rove Miles & hotel pointsLearn more about this here.And consider signing up for Rove to get 500 free miles here.(31:53) - United Mile Play offersLearn more about new targeted United Mile Play offers here.And read about Nick's recent experience here.(35:47) - Rakuten: Best Ever 5K Membership Rewards / $50 referral bonus for both sides [Extended to 12/31]Learn more about this here.(37:54) - Rumor: Rakuten:Bilt(39:36) - UseYourCredits: Track coupons, use their handy mapsLearn more about the handy maps here.(42:18) - Find Preferred Hotels bookable with points (New interactive map!)Find the interacitive map here.Main Event: 5 cool points & miles opportunities expiring soon(45:31) - Buy United miles for 1.36 or 1.44 cents each (or keep your Wyndham points from expiring) [Act fast: Oct 21]Learn more about

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyescape.com. On today's show, we'll discuss how to fly with one free human companion and one pet companion for a full year. Or how to fly with a free human companion for two years. Or, if that's not enough for you, how to get 350,000 points and elite status for 24. five years. Frequent Miller on the air starts now. Today's main event, five cool points in miles opportunities expiring soon. On today's show, we have sort of a grab bag of really cool opportunities that you need to jump on. Most of them

before the end of this year is when you need to attend to it, but some of it you need to jump on much quicker than that. Yeah, and you really have to strike while the iron is hot on things like this. and these are some of the kind of fun things. So I'm excited to talk about these. We'll get further into those later in the show and what you need to do to take advantage of them. But for now, don't forget that if you want to jump ahead to that or you want to come back to something later on,

don't forget you can always find the timestamps in the show notes. So just expand the description box there. And wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to give this a thumbs up, a like, leave us some stars, a review, leave your comments and your thoughts about what we're talking about. We love to hear from you. With that out of the way, let's drag out this week's Giant Mill.

All right. This week's giant mail comes from Prince. Prince actually wrote this in quite a while ago, but I finally have an opportunity to share it. Prince wrote, I wanted to share some insights on the Mesa card based on my experience. As an aside, the Mesa card is a card that lets you earn points when paying mortgage. And anyway, I'll get a little more into that in a second. But Prince writes, while the exact calculations will vary for folks, I'm finding that I essentially get about 8.7% back on my $1,000 monthly spend. And again, as an aside, in order to earn points for your mortgage, you have to spend at least $1,000 a month on this Mesa cart. And he goes on right, this is largely due to key expenses that receive the 3x multiplier. Specifically, my

daughter's preschool tuition, which is $850 a month, and lawn mowing services, $150 a month. With this $1,000 in spending, I accumulate 3,000 points. additionally earn around 3,700 points from my mortgage, using the 1.3 cents per point RRV, reasonable redemption value, this works out to roughly 8.7% back on spending that would typically yield about 3.1% with a card like the Blue Business Plus. As an aside, I'm a recent entrant into the Points in Miles game and have learned a ton from watching your videos. Since February, my player two and I have signed up for a whopping 18 cards combined. And keep in mind that this email is kind of old. So he's probably sent it for more since then. We recently booked our

first amazing, mostly points-based 10-day vacation to Maui for five people, needing two rooms per night. I also figured out the most economical way to fly first class on Hawaiian by buying economy flights and using Hawaiian miles to upgrade. That is terrific. Well done to you, Prince, first of all. I mean, to get involved in February and be that far along in just a few months, that's pretty wild. And great points on the Mesa. card. I think if you have a mortgage and you have at least some expenses that fit into the 3x multiplier, it's kind of a no-brainer card, isn't it? It really is. And the more I think about it, the more I think it's actually worth considering, even if you don't have a mortgage. So here's

some reminders about the Mesa card. It has no annual fee. You get 3X on home decor, home improvement so that's things like you know lows and home depot general contractors so that's a wide net cable and streaming services home insurance property taxes maintenance telecom utilities and daycare so a huge number of things are in 3x and it's all centered around things that they expect homeowners are going to be paying a lot for you also get 2x on groceries gas and evie charging And it also has like perks. So for a fee-free card, it has perks like they just introduced one year a free Instacart Plus. It has $120 of statement credits each year, $30 per quarter for Lowe's purchases, which remember you're getting 3X and then you get $30 off your Lose purchases each quarter.

$65 statement credit for your Costco membership. And then there's several other miscellaneous rebates like that. And it earns transferable points. So you have things like you can transfer to Air Canada, to Air India, where you could get some really cheap, united short distance flights, SAS, Euro bonus, and others. Also, you could transfer to a core with a three to two ratio, but because of how valuable a core points are,

that's like getting one and a half cents. per roughly, per Mesa point. So it's a pretty compelling fee-free card even if you don't earn the 1,000 points or even if you don't earn up to 100,000 points a year on your mortgage. Yeah, no, it absolutely is, especially if you do own a home, I think it's particularly valuable because, you know, most people, they're going to spend a lot on a home decor and home improvement probably own a home of some sort. And so, uh, so, but if you do, I mean, you probably do spend in those categories pretty regularly. And I know tons of people are spending a lot of money on

daycare. So you're right. I mean, I think it really is a very interesting card. You know, you, uh, I think another point that you kind of made indirectly is that those three X categories are not common three X categories. You know, they're not things that you're going to find on any other card on the market for the most part. Utilities is a one exception or maybe telecom, but like nobody, Nobody bonuses daycare and property taxes and home insurance. I mean, those are things that you'll only get on this card. The general contractors, you know, raises an eyebrow, but I don't know very many general contractors that take a credit card

without charging you more for it. Now, it might still be worth it, though. I mean, if they charge a 3% fee to take your card, you're kind of buying points at one cent per point, it may be worth it to you depending on how you're going to use the points. So you've got to consider that too. But yeah, interesting. I think it's a good point that that really,

is a good card. The problem, I think, is that it usually doesn't have an introductory bonus, right? That's right. And unfortunately, as we're recording this, there was a 50,000 point bonus that ended just recently. So, yeah, if you're looking for a welcome offer, I'd wait around a bit to see if a deal like that comes back. But for now, I'm just thinking that in terms of people who are looking for, you know, I know a lot of people who just want no fee cards. And as Nick said, if you own a home, you probably have a lot of these expenses that'll earn 3x. So, and even just getting free things like Costco membership and stuff. I mean, it can be worth just for that. So that's true. I mean, $30 per quarter at Lowe's, even if you don't find anything

you want at Lowe's, Lowe sells a wide variety of plastic things on a rack somewhere that might, you know, fit your needs better. So you could probably find a way to use that even if you didn't have a home. You're right. Right. Right. All right. So that, that's that. Let's talk about a 100K Vacay Challenge update, the final update for the 100K Vacay Challenge. It's now in the books. It's over and done with. So who won? Yep. So the judges, we calculated all the points for each contestant. And it was really, really close. But Stephen won by a hair over Nick. You may remember that, unfortunately, Tim had to drop out very early due to a family emergency.

But Stephen won the judge's vote. And then we opened up a poll for our audience to get the audience winner. And Stephen won that too. quite handily. So congratulations to Stephen. He hasn't won a challenge till now. And so I know that he's really excited to have won one. He threw down the gauntlet when he first wrote like a post about the 100K of AK saying he was in it to win it this time and really thought he could do it. And he did. So great congratulations to him. I also want to mention Tim, even though he couldn't do his full trip that he had planned, he wrote out a day by day what had been planned.

And so look for his journal post, which is titled Seven Nights in London and Norway for 100,000 points, mountains, fjords, and ferries. He planned an incredible trip through Norway, and it just looked fantastic. Yeah, it did. It looked great. It looked great. And there are lots of good tips in there in terms of places to stay and how to make that more affordable. Interesting because those are two destinations that are typically very expensive. So being able to make that happen for $100,000, $9,000 certainly might be of interest to folks who want to visit those parts of the world. Yeah, yeah. I think anyone who looks at his itinerary will say, well, almost anyone will say, yeah, that's a trip I would be interested in doing.

Right, right. yeah yeah for sure for sure so check that out too congratulations to stephen though well deserved well earned and uh and glad that that he was crowned champion so well done all right let's talk about card news we got some card news up first up the 5k bonus points for atmus summit card waitlisters has been extended so if you signed up for the atmus summit wait list which was i don't know almost like a year ago right it was late 2025 i think when you signed up for the wait list for Or 2024, you mean late? Or 2024, I mean, yes, yes, yes, I sure do.

I believe it was by the end of 2024, maybe you had to sign up. And then you'd get an additional 5,000 points on top of the welcome offer on the Atmos Summit card. And that was scheduled to expire, but I guess they've extended it. Do you know when it's extended until? I don't know off the time. No, it's not really clear. But people who put their names on the wait list and who hadn't signed up yet got

email saying this offer has been extended. So I'm not sure when it's valid through, but, you know, it seems to me that they're hoping for more people to sign up. And it's a, you know, it's a pretty darn compelling card, I think. And so I think that's great that people who didn't quite jump in in the first 14 days or whatever it was that it was originally offered for still have a chance to get that extra 5K. And, you know, today's, today's main event is going to be about miles and points opportunities to take advantage of while you can. And I've got to say, this is when I regret not taking advantage of. I didn't get on the wait list when they offered it. And why not?

It didn't cost me anything. It could have taken two seconds to sign up and get an extra 5,000 miles. So, so definitely, you know, when you see that kind of opportunity, strike will the iron is hot. Get it on it on because you might regret not doing it later on. Yeah, seriously. I can't believe you didn't sign up. I know. I know. It's silly. Very silly. I mean, not to have signed up. Although now I'm waiting because I'm almost under 524. So I'm waiting until later in the year to give it another shot on that.

I see. I see. All right. Next up in card news, the Strata Elite. So City's Strata Elite card, they had the 100K offer when it first came out was only available either in branch or sometimes you could get a city bank. or to email you an application for the 100K offer. Otherwise, it was only 80K point offer for online applicants. Now, the 100K offer is public, but it requires $6,000 spend in three months instead of 4K, which was the original offer. So I would guess, but I don't know this for sure, that you could still get the 100K after 4K spend

if you go in branch, but again, I don't know that for sure. All right. That's interesting and good to know. And we've talked about how the first year value of that card is pretty incredible when you consider all of the coupon credits, too, that you could use this year and next year. It's certainly worth considering that sooner rather than later in order to be able to take advantage of those benefits this year also. Yep. All right. Let's move on to our Bonvoid section.

All right. So first up in Bonvoid, Alaska has tanked the utility of its, quote, famous companion fair, which has had. has been famous because it's been an awesome thing. Now, I want to be clear, we're not talking about the kind of companion voucher things you can earn with spend on the summit card, but rather on the what is it, the assent card. Is that what it's called? Assent and business card. Right. Right. So these are the old Alaska cards essentially, or now they're under new names. And so historically, either if you signed up a long time ago, you might get one of those companion vouchers every year, companion certificates every year or you'd have to spend $6,000 in order to earn one depending on when you

opened your card. And so they allow a companion to travel with you for $99 plus taxes. And it has been valid on any North American economy class fair, I think, on Alaska. But now it's expanded to Hawaiian as well. So you can fly on Hawaiian also. Both people earn status points and redeemable points. So it was really awesome. Even though it always said, it was for one way or round trip, it was way more flexible than that. Yeah. So to be clear, it's still pretty awesome. In fact, I mean, the fact that you could fly to Hawaii from mainland and at a companion for $99 plus taxes is still really awesome. But what's not awesome is that there were all kinds of great tricks you could do with

multi-city routings with these tickets before. And now, they've, they've limited it to just round trip or one way. It has to be just that. And, and, um, that's pretty common with, actually, the fact that you allow one way is uncommon, but the, you know, requiring round trip is really common with companion fares, uh, with these companion certificates that are issued by different credit card issuers. Um, so that's sort of just matching the industry in a way. Um, but that's a real bummer for those who are taking advantage of, many unique things you could do before but the other part of this is it hurts some people even more which is that they no longer allow you to use your wallet funds uh to be applied to the

companion fair at all you must pay the entire cost of both tickets um with your alaska credit card to to make this work and and so you know for those who have um you know canceled uh alaska flights and earned, you know, a lot of Alaska funds, wallet funds, that kind of stinks that you can't use those funds on these. So I don't understand. I understand why they would enforce the round trip requirement, but why they would not let you use your funds, your wallet funds do this. It doesn't make sense. Well, I think the reason why is because they want to make sure you keep the Alaska card open in order to be able to use it, that you don't just close your Alask a card and then then use the companion certificate.

I think that's the reason why. And obviously they want the spend going on the Alaska card. However, the bummer of it is exactly what Greg said. But also, like, let's just say you legitimately made a companion fair booking and you paid for it with your Alaska card. And then plans changed and you had to cancel. Well, now you can't use, you got a credit with Alaska, but you can't use it to rebook on a different, you know, trip.

And that to me is the part that I think really stinks, that somebody who just was trying to use this, quote unquote, the right way, right? And that's somebody who is trying to stretch and expand the rules a little bit to take advantage of other ways to get Alaska wallet funds, but just rather somebody who was using it the way it was intended gets hurt by this change. So that stinks. It does. It does.

But that's not all that Alaska is in our Bonvoid section for. No, they've made some changes to the award chart for Alaska and Hawaiian flights. Yeah. What really gets me here is that it was, they've made these changes with no notes. so just one day people woke up and and what happened was the word charts for flying Alaska and Hawaiian themselves as opposed to partners had changed and what they did is they they kind of merge them into a more really a simplified structure that's just based on distance like like their other award charts already were so it makes sense I think what

they did. The reason I put them in the Bonvoid section is for doing that without any notice. That's very un-alaska. Like, normally they give us some notice for things like that. The good news is the lowest economy awards dropped to 4,500 points. And this can make, they used to have, for flying Hawaiian, a minimum of, I think it was like 12,500 points, something like that. And so this makes like flying around Hawaiian islands a good deal with points, whereas before it was almost always a bad deal. And so that's, I think that's really nice. The, on the not so nice side, they added a new distance band of 3,5001 miles or more. So that makes long distance flights more expensive with points. They, they also, they removed.

rows that were specific to flying to and from Hawaii, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. So that's where there may have been particular sweet spots or bad deals from those sections, but now it's all just distance space. So they simplified it. Yeah, I think the worst part is just like you said, no notice, because that's not a precedent. I want Alaska to be setting. I don't want them to make no notice changes to their other award charts. So that's the part that concerns me the most. I don't want them to feel comfortable doing that. So hopefully we won't do any more of that Alaska and just made a little simplification here and got that out of our system. All right. Let's talk about awards, points, and more. So Alaska is still hanging in here. And to be talked about today,

Alaska Atmos is going to improve the earn rates on premium cabin partner bookings, which is really good news to hear. Yeah. When they changed things a while ago, they, they, changed their award charts and everything. They also drastically cut down how many points you'd earn on a partner booking unless you book through Alaska's website. And what they're doing now is changing that a bit. They're not going back to the original. Originally, they had different earning rates per partner, and they're not going back to that, and that makes sense. But what they're, what they're moving to is, is better earn rates if you credit a flight you've booked elsewhere, um, to Alaska or to the Atmos program. Um, so what's happening is, oh, we don't know

exactly when this is starting. They say that these changes will begin, and I quote, when choice earn launches later in 2026, when choice earn launches. So, so what that has to do. I thought that was coming like in like I thought that was like a January 2026 change I thought so too um so you you can you can interpret this different ways right so when choice earn earn launches later in 2026 could mean January 1st or you could read it as launches later in 2026 which means it's not January 1st and sometime later so I don't know what it really means but the good news is like if you're booking a domestic business or first class flight, the earning rate will go up from what currently 125% to 150%. Bigger news is if you're booking, these are for paid flights,

international business class or international first class, those will go up to 250% bonus on your points earned. From currently they're at 125% and 150%. This sort of may impact me personally. So my wife has been planning a business trip to Australia. It got pushed back to late February. And when I looked at it, it was originally going to be in November. When I looked at where she should credit her flight, she was going to fly Qantas. So booking through Alaska's website would have cost almost twice as much as booking through Qantas or many other avenues. Um, so that wasn't an option. Um, booking through Qantas and crediting to Alaska, uh, the earning rate was really bad compared to other options. And so at the time, it looked like my best option for

her would be to have her status match from her Delta diamond to American Airlines high level elite status credit to American Airlines because then she would get, I don't remember exactly, something like 12 or 13 points per dollar. So then it would be based on the dollar spent and she would get a lot more miles. Now, if this happens before her flight, I'll have to rethink that strategy and see which way offers the better, the best earnings. Oh, yeah, very interesting there. Yeah. Yeah, I think that the takeaway here is that Alaska's PR team needs better proofreading on the release or maybe they intentionally wanted it to be vague.

Maybe they're not sure when it's going to launch. They're just like, sometime later, and it's going to be in 2026. We don't know. Yeah, so that's, that's, well, do you remember, do you remember when partner, mixed partner awards were supposed to launch later in 2024? I think it was. I sure do. I sure do.

I sure do, because I was looking at some awards yesterday. I was like, man, I wish I could do more mixed partner stuff. So, although I, you do see some mixed partner awards via Alaska now, just not all. of them. Yeah, yeah, there's a couple here and there. But I think, you know, in that case, later in 2024 meant later than 2024. Right. That is exactly. It was just a mistake in wording there. So yeah. Anyway, we'll see. That'll launch at some point. And when it does, that'll be better news for people who book those paid international business in first flights, which, by the way, remember that you might be booking through a credit card portal. You know,

Maybe you've got points, credit card points, and you find a good fare, good points boost, maybe, something of that sort. And there may be situations where it will be worth using your points to book a paid fare and credit to Alaska. So that's the good news. That's why that 250% is particularly valuable. Even if you say, oh, I don't usually book paid business in first class flights, it might make it make more sense in some situations. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of booking through a portal, for another paid flight my wife had,

She was flying Delta, but we found that Virgin Atlantic had a better fare for the same flight, and we found that Capital One's offers. That's where you have to log in your Capital One account and have a credit card, offered, I can't remember. It was like 6 or 7X, so she got those points plus 4X for paying with a Sapphire Reserve card and a better fare. overall. So yeah, anyway, portals can be really valuable. There you go. All right, speaking of portals being valuable, let's talk about Roeve. So Rove Miles has launched loyalty eligible hotel stays. So you can book hotel stays and earn both Rove Miles and hotel points at the same time. That sounds pretty wild. Yeah. So Rov Miles is a sort of platform where you can earn transferable points. It's not tied to a specific

credit card at all. So it's its own little rewards program where you could earn points from booking hotels, booking airfare, or shopping through their portal. And you could use points a few ways through Roeve or you could transfer them to transfer partners, which is what I would want to do with Roeve points. And so now, one downside of booking hotels through shopping portal, through third-party booking sites like Rove is usually you don't qualify for the hotel's own rewards program. Like if you're booking a Marriott stay usually won't earn Bonvoy points. You won't maybe get any elite benefits for your stay when you book through these like third-party portal things. However, what Roe-Miles is doing is they're making these,

direct bookings available and it's very clear on their website that that's what you're booking is where you will get a points earning stay when you book through them and you'll earn five points per dollar five rove miles per dollar on top of whatever you're earning with the hotel program and on top of whatever you earn with your credit card for paying for the hotel stay and through October 31st they're doubling that 5x to 10x, so you're in 10 points per dollar. So this is all very similar. Billet has been coming out with a similar thing where you could book direct and earn hotel points, but Bill, I think, earns two points per dollar for those booking.

So Roeves is more than doubling that. And so what do you think? That seems like a pretty good deal. I mean, it seems like a great deal. I was disappointed at this lunch a couple of days later than when I needed it. because I was booking a Marriott property over the weekend where I would have loved to have earned an additional five or ten points per dollar on my paid booking and also earned my Marriott points and everything. So, yeah, I think this is a really good opportunity, especially with the 10x through October 31st,

earning 10x transferable miles and earning your hotel points. I mean, that's fantastic. If you have paid stays to book, then I think it certainly makes sense, especially because, you know, you're booking direct rates, so probably in most cases they're going to be flexible. where you could cancel later on if plans change. So totally worth it. You know, the comparison to built is obviously,

it's an obvious comparison, really. However, the difference, of course, is that Roves transfer partners aren't as strong as builds. Sure.

On the flip side, they're strong enough that I would take 10 of those over two build points. So, so, you know, you'll have to take a look

and make your own decisions. But I think that this is really good news. And I think it's, I think we're going to see more of this. I built obviously was, I think, sort of leading the way in this new distribution channel method of booking things, the NDC platform, booking things sort of direct with hotels and offering the chance to earn transferable miles,

but Rova is making it obvious they won't be the only ones doing this. And hopefully, that will add some pressure on entities like Capital One, for instance, and all of the other major credit card portals to offer ways to do this too. So because obviously it's possible, I'm guessing that they're just earning less commission. than the traditional travel agencies were. And that makes sense if they could tap directly into the booking engines and earn something that's good enough for them to be able to offer the rewards and the hotel's happy with it.

I think everybody can be a winner here. So hopefully we'll see more of this. But in the meantime, I think it's certainly worth signing up for Roeve. And I think if you sign up right now, still you get 500 free miles for signing up. So you might as well check out our post about Roeve Miles. Yeah. Yeah. Or if you don't want to check out the post, go to Freigomiler.com, forward slash go, forward slash

Rove Miles to get your 500 free miles just for signing up. A couple of downsides booking through them. Right now, they don't have member rates for all the hotel chains yet. I think they have Hyatt in there, but I don't think they have it for others necessarily. Also, another issue is that you won't see all possible rates available. So, for example, last night I looked up a Hilton stay, and the only rate it offered me was the non-refundable rate. And I didn't want that. So that's unfortunate. So there are some downsides.

You are going to want to still, you know, compare prices through other avenues. Also, keep in mind, sometimes you can get really great deals through shopping portals where you click through to the hotel itself. So that's different from booking through like Expedia or whatever. This is where you go to like the Rackenden portal, for example, or the Capital One Shopping portal. And you click through to Hilton. Capital One shopping in particular sometimes offers as much as 30% back at Hilton. And, you know, Rackin and you'll see deals sometimes IHD for as much as like 12X, things like that.

And so those can be better deals. Plus, you could use any rate that shows up on that hotel site. You don't have to, you know, be limited to what Rove Miles would give you. Yeah, although rates like AAA rates may or may not earn rewards. So there's there's times when that won't work, but then you're probably not able to book the AAA rate through Roe either. So whether or not that matters will be situational. But Capital One shopping is worth a second shout out probably because they brought back

a lot of gift card, popular gift card redemption options this week. So it's been really varying in terms of what they offer and it had become sort of a desert for a while. But they brought back a bunch of good ones and they launched Marriott recently. So now you can redeem Capital One Shopping rewards for a Marriott gift card. And this week I've seen things added like Lowe's and REI and Dick Sporting Goods and Macy's. And there's a ton of different options there that weren't there before. So it's worth taking a look if you've earned Capital One Shopping rewards and you got kind of like discouraged by the fact that there were so few redemption options for a while, they

seem to have opened the floodgates this week. And whether that lasts or not remains to be seen. Yep. All right. Next up, United Mile Play offers. So United periodically has these targeted offers that sort of gamify earning bonus points. And all you do is you click, you put in your member number and it tells you what offer, if any, you have. I wanted to talk about it here. because we had a particularly good one that a reader reported. But in my case, like, my offer was book and take a trip in a premium seat one time and earn 5,000 bonus miles. So that's pretty good.

My wife has to take a trip two times, but in any cabin to earn 4,500 bonus miles. What about you, Nick? Did you get any? Yeah, mine was to book a trip two times and get 11,000 bonus miles. So more than double what? and what Greg's player two got. And by the way, sometimes they vary in terms of how much you have to spend. I know mine had to be $225 each.

I don't know what yours were, but it's worth looking at that because that does matter. But neither of those are as good as what a reader reported. Yeah, a reader reported that she got book and take a trip in a premium seat two times during 27,000 miles. Wow. That's a terrific offer. It's an excellent offer. I mean, it says in a premium seat. So I don't know, would it work if you just book an economy class fare, but pay for a premium

seat? I don't know. Can you do that? Maybe you can. I'm not sure. Or do you have to book like premium economy? I'm not sure. But either way, 27,000 miles, that's a great return probably on two trips.

So can't complain about that. I also want to remind people who have the Sapphire Reserve card from Chase that, you know, they switch to that whole points boost thing where you get up to two, where your points worth up to two cents per point when flights you're trying to book are boosted. And United is the one airline I found that was almost always boosted for all of their flights. And when you book first class or business class, the boost is 2x. So you get two cents per point for those. So it could be a good way to use your chase points to earn a lot of United miles if you get a deal like that. For sure, for sure. And I mentioned before the spending requirement. And so there's

there's a post that we'll link in the show notes that I wrote several years ago. So two things I want to mention. First of all, we mentioned each of these offers, or no, not all of them. Yours didn't. Most of these offers that we just mentioned required booking a trip two times. Keep in mind that one ways will count separately. So for instance, one time I needed two trips, but I had one one single round trip planned. Well, I just booked my round trip as two one ways instead to get two trips out of it. So that's tip number one. Tip number one. Tip number two, too is that I mentioned the minimum spend for mine, and minimum spend for yours may be different. And what I ran into in that specific situation several years back was that my one-way trips were

a little too cheap. Like when I went to United.com and I searched, they didn't cost enough to meet the minimum spending threshold. However, when you go to United.com, you just run a search, it's going to show you the basic economy price and usually like one economy class fare and one premium economy and one first. But really, there's a whole bunch of different fare buckets. available on any particular given flight. And so I found a different fare bucket that cost $1 more than the minimum that I needed to spend. And so it was the same economy class flight and I overpaid for it by, I don't know, $20 or something like that versus what I could have paid for it. However, I earned 20-something thousand miles. So it was worth the additional

$20 each way or whatever it was. So check out that post for how to use the advanced tools and how to use ITA Matrix to find other fare buckets because you can see there's lots of other fair buckets for sale to find what it is you're looking for. Yeah. Yeah. Great tip. All right. Racketon is up next here. Racketon has extended its best ever. 5,000 membership rewards points referral bonus. So both sides get 5,000 points. You're a first someone to sign up for Rackettin. They get $5,000 or $50 and you get $5,000 or $50 after they spend, I don't know, a little bit in the first few months, not even that much you have to spend. I can't remember. remember off the top of my head. Do you remember how much you have to spend in order to earn the

bonus? It's not much. Uh, $50 maybe. I think, yeah, and then you get your 50 back. I, that's, that's what I thought. So it's something of that sort, but it's a great deal because of course, Rakuten, you can choose to earn cash back and earn that as 50 bucks or you can earn AMX membership rewards points. That's why we say 5,000 points or 50 bucks. I earn membership rewards points. So I get 5,000 points in that kind of a situation, which is a good deal because I find those to be worth more than $50. And of course, we recently reported that a reader on Reddit noticed that it looks like maybe built will become an option for crediting your Racketon rewards to build instead

of Amex, if you prefer that. We don't know more about that. That's just somebody got a screenshot and then posted it on Reddit. I think it was probably not meant to go out yet. Who knows whether it's actually going to happen or when. But if it does, that could make this even more valuable. So, I mean, especially with holiday shopping, you want to hop on this, right? Yeah, yeah.

And don't forget, you know, this is for both sides. So if you refer other people, you also get 5,000 membership rewards points or or $50. And so if you're, you know, player two or player three or player four in your household or your friends, relatives that are going to be doing shopping, why not tell them about this opportunity and share your referral code with them? It's a, because it's a great deal for them, and then, of course, a great deal for you, too. So, yeah, I mean, you know, this was great when it was only $30. It was greater when it was $40 and now it's $50.

So they keep wrecking and keeps ratcheting it up. You know, the built thing, it was not, it seems very likely that it's happening because it wasn't that someone doctored a screenshot because what they did is they, the person on Reddit posted a link to like a help page that showed this and other people were able to follow that link and see that Bill was an option until they took that down. And so, you know, like Doctor of Credit has a screenshot that they took of that screen. So it wasn't doctored. It seems like it's really happening. The reason we find that really exciting is because Built has some really interesting

transfer partners. They are the, I think, the only program that transfers one-to-one to Alaska's Atmos program. They're the only one that transfers one-to-one to Japan Airlines, which Nick has written a lot about how valuable that program can be. They transfer one-to-one to Hyatt, which competes directly with Chase's ultimate rewards. So a lot of good stuff there, if or when that happens. So I'm excited about that possibility. Yeah, and Biltz recently added Atiahad is a new transfer partner. So that's another option with your Bilt points. I mean, there's a built gives you quite a range of different options. Of course, Hyatt is a partner of Bilt and United. And so they've got a whole bunch of different partners that would be very useful for a lot of people. Not that

Amex does. And Amex does too. But if I had to choose between getting Rackett or getting Amex points or built points to Rackaton, if built becomes an option, it will be a no brain. for me to switch to belt, I think. Yeah, totally. All right. Next up, there's an app called Use Your Credits, which the purpose of the app is to let you track your coupons. If you have, you know, Amex Platinum cards or Sapphire Reserve, Citadel Elite, all those

things have these different like coupons that are use them or lose them. And when we say coupons, we mean they're like rebates, usually, or credits of some sort where you get some value every quarter or every six months or every year or every month. And it's really hard to keep track of all that stuff. Nick has made a great spreadsheet for tracking that. Here's an app for doing that instead. But that's not really what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is they have these two maps that you can get to,

even if you don't sign up for user credits at all. You don't have to put in your name or email or anything. You can just go right to the website and see the maps. One is to see the Chase Saffir Reserve exclusive tables. So if you have the Saffir Reserve card, you get a certain amount back. What is it? I forget the amount. $150.

$150 for six months. At exclusive tables, which is so exclusive that there's very few of them in most cities. There are some cities or there are quite a few. And so this lets you find those tables. But even better, the Resimap. So, you know, the platinum cards now offer, what is that, $100 per quarter back on resi at resi restaurants. And the resi map makes it easy to see where all the resi restaurants are in your area or an area you may be traveling to even better. It shows you, it lets you limit to the ones that sell e-gift cards directly.

And so, you know, let's say you live somewhere where there is no resi-gift cards. There are no resi restaurants, but you're going to be traveling in the future to a place. You know, maybe you want to buy their gift cards in advance and then use them when you get there. Yes, absolutely. That's a great tip. You know, my biggest frustration with the resi credits has been that it is a pain to find which ones are nearby. I'm, you know, I've traveled a bunch and you have to like Google and find the city and, I don't know, switch the city somehow in the drop down. I always have a hard time figuring out.

I just want to look at a map and see which restaurants are nearby. buy. So this is really helpful to do that. So certainly worth checking out. Use your credits for that. By the way, Greg mentioned the $100 per quarter on platinum cards. He meant, of course, consumer platinum cards get the $100 per quarter for the Resi credit. But yes, you'd certainly want to make sure you use that in the Sapphire Reserve exclusive tables. Again, I'm much more of a visual person, so I like being able to see the maps. That's great. Speaking of maps, you have a good map out for finding preferred hotels. Yeah, yeah. So, so, uh, You may remember that preferred hotels, there are multiple ways to book them.

You could book them with I prefer points, which is preferred hotels' own rewards points, or you could book them with choice points. Which of the preferred hotels are bookable with choice points or I prefer points? I mean, not all preferred hotels are bookable with either of those. And there's not a one-to-one correspondence between the ones that are bookable with choice and bookable with I prefer. In fact, surprisingly, there are more that are bookable with choice points than are bookable with I-prefer points. If you have a city bank card with an annual fee that earns city thank you rewards points, then you could transfer one to two to choice or one to four to preferred hotels. And so these are great opportunities to get great value using your city points to book preferred hotels, but how in the world you know, which site to go to, you have to go to one site for choice, a different site where I prefer, how you're going to find, where you're going to use your points, and then if it's available in both places, which one is the better deal can be really hard.

So a while ago I had created a table that merges all that information together and lets you filter by all. kinds of things. Now what I've done is I've updated that table and added an interactive map. It's like a Google map that shows all these properties. I use icons to show like here are ones that are likely to offer a great value for your points. And then if you click on it, it'll tell you how many points it costs with choice or with I prefer and whether to transfer your city points to, which one to transfer your city points to. All that information's there. And I definitely check it out because, I don't know, I find it just really fun to play

with, like to zoom around the world and see where there's, like, good value we had and then click. And then, I don't know if Greg can see the reflection of my eyes because that's exactly what I'm doing as he talks here. Scrolling around, scrolling in, scrolling out, clicking on hotels. No, this is really helpful because I actually have been less enamored with preferred hotels than everybody else because every time I go to search for one, They're not in the places where I'm planning trips at the time. This is so useful because it helps me visually see, okay, if I plan a trip to A or B, will preferred hotels be something that's anywhere nearby?

And not only in the city that I was thinking of, but maybe there are situations where I'm saying, okay, well, I'm going to go to Europe. I want to go somewhere in France, but I don't know where yet. Well, I can look and see. Are there places in France that are on there? There aren't very many, in fact, for preferred hotels in France, but there are some that are okay. And you scroll around and see that. so thank you for creating that's a great resource yeah you're welcome all right i love i love it myself i have so much fun with it yeah yeah very good all right i think that brings us finally believe it or not

those are not the short-term opportunities we're talking about today that brings us to today's main event it's main event time five cool points and miles opportunities expiring soon all right first up there's an opportunity to buy United Miles for as little as 1.36 cents each, but you have to stack three different promotions to make that happen. So you have to act fast. This one is the shortest term of all of them because one part of the promotion requires it being complete by October 21st, so really soon. Here's how it all works. And by the way, even if you're not a buyer of United Miles, if you have a lot of Wyndham points, the other good thing about this opportunity is there's a chance to retain your winda point value, even if it's all your points are about to

expire or will expire soon. And I'll talk about that a minute. Okay. So the first promo, United is offering a 25% transfer bonus from hotel programs to United. So normally, hotel programs offer really poor transfer rates to transfer hotel points to United Miles. It's often like 10 to 1 or 5 to 1 kind of thing. And a 25% transfer bonus makes that a little bit better. By itself, I would still say, don't even worry about it. But this is an important piece to the overall story. So, and this is where, this is one, you have to register.

and it's available through October 31st. You also need to know those bonus miles, those 25% bonus miles won't happen until later. Those will be credited to your account on or before January 31st of 2026. Sort of like Atmos is later in 2026. All right, so that's the first promo. The next one clearly intended to capitalize on that

is Wyndham is offering 100% transfer bonus from Wyndham to Unite. And so, and that's instant. So, meaning as soon as you get your points from Wyndham into United, those points are doubled. Standard transfers from Wyndham to United are five to one. But with this deal alone, it brings it five to two. But when you combine with that 25% transfer bonus that United is offering, the whole thing becomes a two to one. So your two Wyndham points become one united mile by stacking these opportunities together.

This is where if you have a bunch of windom points that are going to expire, because windom points have a hard expiry of like four years, there's nothing much you could do about that, this is an opportunity to kind of retain the value. So our reasonable redemption value for windom points is 0.7. United is 1.3. So if you convert your windom, your two, every two windom points to one United mile, you're just, you're just losing a tiny bit of sort of reasonable redemption value. It's going from 0.7 to 0.65, basically. Now, it's a totally different thing. Now you have United Miles instead of Wyndham points, but at least you've retained value

in some way. United Miles don't expire. Plus, there's a trick with United. like let's say it's your player two doing this and you you want the united miles there's a trick where you could create a a family pool and then cancel the pool and and keep all the miles for yourself and um that's a little too involved to get into here but there's a way basically you move the united miles to someone else for free okay so that's two that's not it that's only two we're not done okay and but we're done if if all you wanted to do is convert your windham points to united

miles and we're done. The third one. And that's, I think that's a valuable thing to mention, because if you've been earning your Wyndham points at a good clip, and the Windham earner business card earns eight points per dollar, gas stations, for instance, and five on utilities, if you're able to convert those over two to one to United, I mean, that's not, then you're earning essentially four United Miles per dollar in those categories. And so I'm sitting on a bunch of windom points. And I use them here and there, but I probably have more Wyndham points than I really need. So I'm looking at this saying, turn to some of those wind and points in the United Miles. Maybe not such a bad idea. Yeah. Yeah. And do this, I had my wife transfer as many as

she could. And I transferred a whole bunch myself because I have more than I think I'm going to use before they expire. Well, yeah, they're pretty easy to replace. Right. I mean, at eight points per dollar, yeah, I'm constantly replacing more and more windham points. So I can afford to give up some of the past ones because it's not going to require that much spend for me to be replaced. them. Yeah, here's the thing. Do this as soon as possible, as soon as you're listening to this, because Wyndham does not promise to move those points to United quickly. The website, when you go to move them, it says it'll take like six to eight weeks. Now, that's not true in practice, but if it was, they would land after October 31st, after that United promo is done, and you

wouldn't get that 25% bonus. So do it quickly. So far, transfers have only been taking two to four days, that kind of range. But definitely don't wait until the end of the month. Right, right. But I think if you do it by the, I don't know, I would guess by the 22nd or so, 23rd, you'd probably be safe. I'd start to get nervous after that. But anyway, so yeah. And then, all right, the final piece of the puzzle, if you're interested in buying United Miles cheaply,

there's an opportunity right now through October 21st. So that's the nearest deadline of all of these to buy Wyndham points for as low as 0.68 cents each. So Wyndham's offering either a 90% or an 80% bonus when you buy points right now. And so that comes to 0.68 or 0.72 cents each. With the deals who described above, you can convert those Wyndham points to United Miles.

at a 2 to 1 ratio. So that ends up with you're buying United Miles for either 1.36 or 1.44 cents each. And so that's great. I mean, I wouldn't do that without a plan for United Miles, but I don't think United has ever had a sale that was that lower that I can remember for their points. Right.

And we sometimes see other Star Alliance carriers offer points in that range, like Avianca Life Miles sometimes sells their points in that range. And every now, on that Air Canada Aeroplane does. And so whether or not you want to buy United Miles at that price, when you do have opportunities to buy Star Alliance miles in other ways, I don't know.

But I certainly could see situations where you might say, oh, I'm 20,000 miles short of this really valuable award. Maybe it's worth buying some wind and points to do this. So I think that's worth a look if you're close to a valuable award and you just need some more United Miles. Yeah. But do remember that that 25% bonus piece, of it isn't going to come to later right well that's true so if you if you've a short-term need that

wouldn't wouldn't help you right in that regard good point anyway uh really interesting uh triple stack available um yeah we don't often get those triple stacks yeah that's cool all right southwest is our next short-term well i don't even know if this is necessarily yeah this one's not short-term at all yeah this is just a cool opportunity then this is a cool opportunity that as far as we know is going to stick around for the foreseeable future, you can still get two free checked bags. So you can still get free check bags. And this was a tip that was offered up by Max Miles points on Instagram, right? Yeah, yeah.

So I came across this video and I was like, wow, that's a cool trick. As you know, Southwest, who had long promise to keep free check bags for everyone, has moved away from that. And so now you need either elite status or Southwest credit card. to get a free check bag. However, if you book through getaways by Southwest, which is their vacation package site, you still get, you get two free check bags per person, free changes and flexible cancellations,

just by booking through that platform. I did a couple of price comparisons where I just looked at what if I was booking, this was like real world examples where I was looking at real trips, What if I booked directly through Southwest, what would the price be versus through getaways where I added a rental car on top of it? And I found that the combination through getaways with the rental car to be significantly

cheaper in the couple examples I looked at than booking just the flights directly through Southwest. And of course, that doesn't even factor in the fact that the people I'd be booking for don't have a Southwest credit card or elite status. So they would have to pay for check bags. They have a kid that they would be checking bags. So it becomes a good deal. But it's, this is all not without a catch. Yeah, there's a few catches. First of all, you do have to book round trips. So if somebody likes booking one ways, that won't work for you. But perhaps more important for a lot of people is that you can't use rapid rewards points on Southwest Getaways booking. So if you got a whole

bunch of points. I'm not going to do you any good here. You also cannot use the companion pass. So if you book a Southwest getaways package for just yourself, you can't add a companion on that, which is one of the rare situations where you can't add a companion, right? I mean, most bookings through Southwest, you can add your companion if you're a companion pass holder. This is an exception to that. So that's probably news for a lot of people, but you can't do that. And also, the points that you weren't on getaways bookings are not companion pass qualifying. So if you're booking through Southwest getaways, you're not going to progress at all towards the Southwest companion pass. Now, that might not matter to you. I mean,

if you don't have a Southwest credit card and you're not chasing a companion pass, you don't have a companion pass, well, then by all means, the getaways bookings probably make a lot of sense for you, particularly if you find what Greg did and that you're able to find cheaper prices. And even if you do have a companion pass, depending on the difference in price, maybe it's worth booking through Southwest getaways, but it's not necessarily a no-brainer. And those, I think those drawbacks are things that would not be obvious to most people. That's right. So it's worth knowing those things. All right. Okay. Next up, though, we do have a short-term opportunity. Frontier is offering a companion pass of its own for one year. Sort of. So what they're doing is they're offering

a way to get platinum status for one year. A fast track to platinum status and and Frontier Platinum status includes a free companion on all your flights. So here's a deal. The Frontier Platinum Status Fast Track is where you pay $99 to enter the fast track. You don't get status right away. You have to earn 12,500 elite points. And then once you've done that, you get status either through 2026 or for one year. The website has it written both ways. So I'm not really sure. I guess my guess is it probably is through the end of 2026.

I mean, maybe you get it for 12 months because you have to register for this by December 31st, and you have 90 days to earn the 12,500 status points, right? So if you registered at the end and you didn't earn your 12,500 until March of 26, I think they're offering you a year of status hopefully right right so what happens though if you complete this before December 31st do you get and you just get 2026 you get 12 months or do you get all the way through 2026 yeah that's a good question we don't know for sure we don't know for sure yeah um anyway yeah so you have to register by the end of the year um you have 90 days to earn your your your those 12 500 elite status points and um yeah and then um let's talk about

platinum status. Is platinum status worth getting, Nick? I mean, it might be. It certainly might be. You get a free carry-on bag and a free check bag for everyone on the same booking. I mean, that is a big savings. I mean, frontier a lot of times, the majority of your costs, like other low-cost carriers, will be those additional pieces. So you're going to save potentially quite a bit there, a free preferred seat at booking, free premium seat at check-in based on availability. Again, for everyone on the same booking, which is in contrast to the way that, like, spirit offers elite status benefits. If you had gold status of spirit, it's only the status holder that gets benefits like those. So this is pretty cool that other people get it.

So free premium seat at booking for you again, free upgrades to upfront plus 12 hours before departure. So I guess up front plus must be their sort of competitor to the big front seat. I haven't actually flown frontier in a while. So I don't know exactly what that looks like, but I would assume it's got some extra leg room. A pet fee waiver, which if you travel with a pet, That alone might make it worth spending the $99 on this and earning the points. And then the free companion. And this is kind of cool because the free companion can be anyone. You don't have to, unlike Southwest, you don't have to set a companion in advance.

There's no need to change the name in the companion. You could bring a different companion every time. The catch, so to speak, is that you do have to add the companion at the time of booking. Whereas with like Southwest, for instance, you can add your companion later on anytime before the flight takes off. As long as there's a seat for sale, Frontier requires that you both. the companion at the time that you're booking the flight. So that's the sort of drawback. Though for most people, it's probably not a big drawback. Right. So not bad. And you can give silver status to someone else. I don't know if that really matters. So I don't know, that sounds

pretty good to me. Yeah. I mean, if you fly frontier even a moderate amount, this all sounds really compelling to me. Now, you might wonder, well, how could I get the 12,500 status points quickly? Probably, obviously, you could get points by flying frontier, but probably, you know, the way a lot of listeners would want to go about it is to sign up for the frontier credit card. That gives you one status point per dollar. Right now, as we're recording this, well, it has a $99 on your fee, and right now it's offering a $50,000-point welcome bonus after $1,000 spend in 90 days. It'll also give you temporary instant gold status after first purchase, and there's a way to keep that longer. You're not going to care about that because you're going for platinum status with this deal. But the good thing is you could also, if you have that gold status and you actually fly frontier during this period where you're trying to earn platinum, you'll earn more points for your flights because you're gold status.

Also, you'll have the benefits of gold status. it'll also give you waived award redemption fees. So in a way that makes the points from the welcome bonus and that you earn from flying more valuable as well. So, you know, I think that's not bad. You have to spend $12,500 to get that platinum status for a full year and all those benefits we talked about. Yeah, I mean, that's certainly not bad.

No, I mean, it's not for me because Frontier doesn't serve my home airport very well. But if you live somewhere where Frontier has a decent, range of service, this seems like a really good opportunity. If you live somewhere with good frontier service and you either travel with a pet or a companion very often anyway, then I think this just adds up very quickly to be worth the $12,500 spend on the card. Of course, you do have a relatively short window to do that because you only get 90 days. And so that might stretch for some folks in terms of how much you can spend in that amount of time. But if you can, I think this could be well worth it. Yeah, no, totally. Of course, if you can spend $12,500 in three months,

then you alternatively should be considering the Southwest Companion Pass because Southwest through October 28th is offering a better offer on the Southwest Performance Business Credit card. And this elevated offer gives you 120,000 points after $10,000 spend in the first three months. So a little bit less in spend, quite a bit more an annual fee. because that card has a $299 annual fee. But the reason this is so relevant here is if you were to get this card before October 28th, and then wait until after your December statement closes in order to do the spend, and then you do the spend after your December statement has cut.

Okay. So after you get the email that the statement is here, blah, blah, blah. Then you spend so that your next statement cuts in January. Then you'll earn the 120,000 points. plus the points from spend. So if you did that full $10,000 spend after your December statement cuts, then you'll end up with 130,000 Southwest points, which is more than enough for the companion pass.

You do need to earn 135,000 points in a single calendar year for the companion pass. But when you're a cardholder, you get a 10,000 point shortcut. So you only have to earn 125. So again, in other words, just the spend from this card and the new card welcome bonus will put you over the edge to earn a companion pass. And again, if you do that, you time that out. So it's after the December statement cuts and you earn all the points in January, you'll end up with a companion pass that's valid for two years, all of 2026 and all of

27. For a while, I'd been nervous about whether that would be the case or whether Southwest would change the requirements for the companion pass. But at this point, it's late enough in the game. I don't think we're likely to see a change in companion pass requirements for next year. So I would feel comfortable. And I have actually recommended this to friends that have opened the card. in order to be able to do this.

So I think that's a really valuable opportunity potentially because you get two years a companion pass. It functions differently with Southwest than it does with Frontier, but they have a much wider network, so it may be more valuable for a lot of people. And then, of course, the card comes with some benefits in terms of seating and boarding and all the rest of that that would be useful for you. All right. Very good.

That's an awesome opportunity. So before we get to the last one, so what we've covered now is a, one year companion passish thing with Frontier where you get both a human companion and a pet companion for free for a year, or you could do Southwest for two years, but only with a human companion. Your pet you're going to have to pay for. So is that the longest period of time we're going to talk about status type things? Not yet. We're not done. So if you thought two years sounded like a lot. How does 25 years sound? That sounds pretty good to me. Yeah, well, we talked a lot over the summer about JetBlue's 25 for 25 promotion, which is still running

through the end of December. And it's worth mentioning there's no registration for this. You just have to do it. And so the gist of the promo for people who were not with us yet over the summer didn't hear about this somehow is that if you fly to 25 JetBlue destinations, 25 different airports served by JetBlue by the end of this year by December 31st and from the time the promo launched, which I think was around June 27th, you'd have to check our post for the exact date on that. So 25 destinations and you'll get a total of 350,000 points and JetBlue Mosaic 1 status for 25 years. And, you know, of course, that relies on JetBlue lasting for the next 25 years, but probably it'll last for at least two, maybe more.

So you could end up with status for several years. So we talked a lot about that over the summer and how I was doing that with my family. And we've heard data points from readers who have completed the 25. I haven't actually completed the 25 yet. We did 20 in the month of August. And so now I have a few more yet coming up here. But we've heard from readers who have hit 25 destinations and their partner booked awards have counted.

Etihad booked JetBlue flights. And I assume Qatar Airways booked JetBlue flights have counted. towards the 25, and now we have an even better path, potentially, because Capital One launched transfer partnership with Japan Airlines. Remember, Built also transfers to Japan Airlines, and Japan Airlines mileage bank has some interesting sweet spots. One of them is its multi-city tool, and that could really come in handy for JetBlue's 25 for 25. So I wrote a post this week about how you can kind of sort of gamify this to hit a whole bunch of airports in a short amount of time. I gave some examples where you could hit, I can't remember if it was four or five over the

course of a few days with 23,000 Japan Airlines miles, which would be less than 24,000 capital one miles transferred over to Japan Airlines mileage bank or 23,000 built points, and you could knock out a bunch of them. And in fact, I showed out a nest trip. So with 38,000, you could hit seven of them over the course of a week and have a couple of extra days where you could probably hit a few more airports if you wanted to and get close to halfway done over the course of a week. And in fact, we heard a data point from a reader in our frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group later the same day that I posted about it, who did book a trip to hit five airports starting in Houston. So not even on the East Coast for 23,000 points. So it's very doable.

It's a little challenging. The search tool is a pain. It took me a long time. So you have to be ready to fight the fight in terms of figuring out what the search tool will allow and what it won't and how it works because it's not totally intuitive. But if you're willing to put in a little bit of effort, this could be, I think, the cheapest way to hit 25 for 25 because you're just going to pay the airport taxes and a really good rate. I mean, I showed five or six thousand capital one points per airport. And on a lot of jet blue flights, I'm seeing like seven seats available through Japan Airlines mileage bank. Not every flight, but a lot of flights. So worth taking a look if you're interested in this that's such a cool find um definitely even if you're not

interested in doing the jet blue thing take a look at nick's post about it because it's um it's just a cool read like how to how to really push your points and miles to the max and so i i find that kind of stuff really fun i do want to point out though that um the reason uh so right now capital one as we're recording this capital one miles transfer almost one to one to japan airlines but only because of a 30% transfer bonus that's going on and that that transfer bonus ends october 22nd so if you're interested in doing this and you're interested in sourcing your japan airlines miles from capital one miles um make sure to do that by um october 22nd or maybe october 21st i'm not sure exactly when it ends somewhere in there So yeah, that's a really good point.

The other thing that I want to mention on this is even, again, if you're not interested in 25 or 25, Greg said it's still worth looking at. I think because even if you just had one trip you wanted to take with JetBlue Miles, it might be worth getting two trips out of the deal if you just play with the multi-city tool a little bit. For the same number of points you might otherwise use on a single round trip on JetBlue, you might be able to sneak a second trip, essentially, within your trip with a little bit of creativity. And if I understand right, the sort of the trick here is that Japan Airlines has these award distance bands. Like so they charge more as you go up into higher bands, but they add up. When you do like multi-city type of itinerary, they're just adding up the distance overall to come up with which band this whole booking comes into. And so if you think about like some bands are quite wide as far as how much. many total miles you could go. So if you're going to go, I'm just going to make things out.

Like, let's say band is like from between 5,000 and 8,000 miles of distance flown. If you could fit in very close to 8,000 miles of distance flown by adding more flights into this itinerary, you're getting a lot more value for the same price, same point price. Yeah. Yeah, that's totally it. And because of the way the multi-city tool works, you can get stops at multiple places. So, you know, and that's where people who really want to get into the weeds might nest a couple of different trips in order to get some quick back and forth, but also stop in some places you want to stop. Because, yeah, I mean, you can stop in multiple cities. So you're really getting multiple separate trips, but because of the way the

distance spans works like work, like Greg said, you could get quite a bit of flying for a really reasonable number of miles. So it's worth taking a look at it. Okay. And then let's see. That brings us, I think, to this week's question of the week. Am I right? It does. All right. So this week's question of the week came in actually just before we started recording. But I thought it fit in with some of what we talked about today, particularly with that Wyndham and United promotion where you talked about maybe buying miles. So Stephen writes in says, hi, I've been watching your videos on YouTube, reading your blogs. I'm new to the hobby and trying to learn. But all the ninja math valuations lose me. If the purpose of the game is to amass points that we can use for great travel, then why isn't that just enough? I'm genuinely asking because I'm not trying to be I'm discouraged. You've taught me a lot. But I'm having a hard time caring about how many tenths of cent per point and blah, blah, blah. So I'm going to skip to the end of that and say, why does it matter? Who cares whether you're getting the 1.36 cents or 1.44 cents or, you know, why does that matter, Craig? Yeah, yeah. You know, I read this question. I sort of stepped back and I

thought, like, can you even play this game well at all if you don't do the math? Like, is math, like a requirement here because the thing is, if you don't understand the math, you're going to be making some really poor decisions. So just as an example, Hilton points tend to be worth less than half a cent each on average. I mean, sometimes you can get better. But if you're looking at opportunity to earn points and you could be earning, you know, you could be earning 10 Hyatt points or or 20 Hilton points. If you don't understand that that Hyatt points are worth about four times as much as Hilton points, you're going to be going for the Hilton points and thinking you've got a great deal, but you're going to end up with less travel value when you do

that and so uh so so i guess we care about that we we want you to get the best deal possible but you know the flip side could be like hey if you're happy uh you know you get points you sign for some credit cards or whatever you get points and you use them it all seems free and you don't care about the math i'm not going to tell you you're wrong doing that um all i'm going to say is you probably could have gotten a lot more travel from your from your points had you had you step back and thought about the math and tried to figure that out? Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. That last thing that Greg said is that the reason the math matters is because you could be

getting far more travel than what you'll get if you don't do the math. And so here's a simple example. Let's say a real world example. I have a high ad I'm going to stay at later this year, category one. It's about $100 a night for the cost. And so let's say that I think I'm going to spend $10,000 on dining over the course of the year. So I could put that $10,000 in dining spend on the World of Hyatt credit card and earn 20,000 points, right? And so my 20,000 points could get me four nights at that 5,000 points a night hotel, right?

So I can get four free nights and say, all right, great, I got four free nights. That's awesome. But if I'd put that same $10,000 spend on a Freedom Unlimited card, for instance, and earned three points per dollar with Chase, then I could have 30,000 points. And the same hotel, I could have six nights instead of only the four nights, right? So two more free nights of travel, and so that might be even better. But now this hotel's about $100 a night. So if I put that $10,000 on a card that earns 3% back, I'd have $300, right?

And so the Robin Hood card earns 3% back. And so that would give me three nights. Well, that's less. It's 3%. So it might sound the same as the Freedom Unlimited. but it's actually only going to buy me three nights at that particular hotel. And if I put that $10,000 spend on an Amex gold card instead, because I say, well, that's four points per dollar. I mean, I have 40,000 points.

But if I book through Amex, I'm only going to get like, I don't know, what is it, six tenths of a cent per point or eight tenths of a cent per point. So then I'd get $3.20 maybe in value out of that, which is only going to get me three nights versus the six that I said I could have gotten with a Freedom Unlimited. And that Freedom Unlimited example requires then moving the points to a Sapphire. referred or Sapphire Reserve. It gets a little more complicated, but the point is you can get far more travel potentially for the same amount of spend. And now, I know there are people out there that are saying, well, yeah, but if you put that $10,000 on your World of Hyatt card, you'd be two-thirds of the way to earning a free night certificate on that card, and you'd earn some elite night credits. And so there's more complexities that come into the math, right? And yeah, okay, you might

not care a ton about all of that, but at a base level, you should probably care about getting six free nights instead of four free nights. And so, you know, that's probably where you should start and saying, okay, well, how do I get the most free travel for my points? And maybe we go a little too far on that from time and time, or at least in a perspective of somebody who gets really kind of unhappy about the math. Maybe you want to say, ah, we care too much about tens of a cent per point. But what I care about is getting as much as I can. And then, you know, when you take a step back from that and say, okay, well, I could earn a welcome bonus that offers cash back and just buy my nights. So should I get that cash back welcome offer? Or should I be going after hotel points

or airline miles or whatever? And so, yeah, I mean, I think you're right, Greg, that I think math is a really important component in this game if you want to get the most you can. If you're happy with just getting, you know what, I can travel four nights a year. And so if I can get my four nights covered and my flights covered, then that's all that really matters to me because I'm not going to travel more than that anyway. Well, then I could certainly see that why am I going to waste the time and mental capacity on figuring out the exact best, as long as I get something that's good enough for my situation. I could see that. That's not me, though. That's not us. And that's why we tend to look into the, oh, how can they eke out every tenth of a cent per point in value and

figure out what the most value is? So we can get more free travel, so to speak. Unfortunately, for Stephen, our answer included a lot of math. A lot of math. I know. I knew I was doing it. I knew I was doing it, but I figured that's, you asked for it, Stephen, you asked for it. I tried to keep it to a minimum in my answer, but I know you did. Even I had a little bit of math in mine. You did, you did. Yeah. But it matters.

I mean, math matters. Math matters. It does. I can't even imagine what our show would be without math. I mean, we wouldn't be able to evaluate opportunities. I mean, like literally, like, how would we know which opportunity is worth pursuing without math? I don't think we could.

You got to run the numbers. Stephen got to run the numbers. Sorry, Stephen. Came to the wrong place if you hate math, but hopefully we can help you love it over time. All right. Well, if you've enjoyed today's episode and you'd like to get more of this stuff in your email inbox each day or each week or you just want to do some more math with us. You go to frequent miler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media. Join our Frequemiler Insiders Facebook group where you can ask and answer questions about this stuff all the time. And wherever you're watching or listening, again, don't forget to give us a like or a thumbs up. If you've got a question that you'd like to be considered for a future

question of the week or a piece of feedback that you'd like to be considered for the giant mailbag, you can send that too. Send it to mailbag at Frequentmiler.com. Bye everybody. have traveled to over 150 countries around the world and all seven continents. Now we're sharing our favorite places, some of our best tips and experiences from all around the world in just 10 minutes on Travelin'10. Join us at Voyescape.com. I'm Pauline Fromer. I've spent most of my life writing, talking, and thinking about travel, not just where to go, but how to go in a way that's meaningful. On the Frommers Travel Show, we explore the trends, people, and ideas, share.

how we see the world. If you care about the why, as much as the where, I hope you'll join me. You can find new episodes weekly at voyescape.com.