Frequent Miler on the Air - 5 rewarding ways to book paid hotel stays | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep331 | 11-6-25

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

In today's episode of the Frequent Miler on the Air podcast, we'll talk about the Bilt card 2.0 that's coming, we'll reveal a trick for finding Air France award availability, and talk about 5 ways to super-stack your hotel bookings.Giant Mailbag(01:08) - Air France Availability on JAL searching tipCard News(06:09) - Bilt card 2.0 (replaces current Bilt card)(08:21) - Citi now allows product changing via online Chat(09:53) - United debit card now live (Read more about the United debit card here)Crazy Thing(14:50) - Insane Capital One Shopping 70% back at TripAdvisor (airport transfers Bora Bora, lights viewing, considered a couple of $900 private boat tours with 70% back!).Read more about this here.Bonvoyed(22:28) - Aeroplan is bringing back points expiration on 11/30/26(23:43) - Problems combining Chase Ultimate Rewards points keep spreadingRead more about this here.Awards, Points, and More(28:28) - Rove Miles adds Lufthansa Miles & More as a transfer partner(30:55) - Choice Privileges revamping rewards program in early 2026Main Event: 5 rewarding ways to book paid hotel stays(33:16) - Credit card portals + coupons(35:05) - Capital One Shopping loop(37:54) - Super Stack(41:11) - Rove Miles(45:17) - The Intercontinental Ambassador Weekend Trick(50:51) - Read more about this here.Question of the Week(51:41) - When you have multiple Fine Hotels + Resorts® credits, can you book more than one room, and how?Subscribe and FollowVisit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media.Music Credit – “Ocean Deep” by Annie Yoder

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyescape.com. On today's show, Built Card 2.0 is coming. We'll discuss a trick for finding Air France award availability and five ways to super stack your hotel bookings. Frequent Milo on the air starts now. Today's main event, five. rewarding ways to book paid hotel stays. So we love using points to book hotel stays, but

sometimes that's not an option, or at least for the place you want to stay. It might not be an option. And so, of course, we seek out ways to maximize our rewards when we are booking paid stays. And that's what we'll talk about in today's main event. Yeah, and there's actually quite a few ways to stack things and save quite a bit to the point where sometimes it just doesn't make as much sense to use miles or points, even if you got the hotel points, it might make more sense to book a cash stay. But we'll discuss more of that later. If you'd like to jump ahead to that or come back to it later on, don't forget, you can always find the timestamps in the show notes. Just expand the show description. And wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget

to like this. Give it a thumbs up. Leave us some feedback. Leave us a comment about your favorite stack. We love to hear from you. All right. Let's drag out this week's giant mailbag. All right. In this week's giant mail bag, we have mail from Brandon. This is a great hack that Brandon figured out, and I'm excited to talk about this, but it requires a little bit of background information. So we did a show about Japan Airlines, their rewards program, and you can currently get their points by transferring from built or from Capital One. And the cool thing is they have some really incredible. award prices, especially on their own partners. And they also have a lot of kind of weird partners. They're a one-world airline, but they partner with a lot of different airlines that are not

one-world airlines. And one of those is Air France. So with that background, and Brandon, the subject heading was Air France availability on Japan Airlines searching tip. I wanted to say thank you for your recent podcast on uses for Japan Airlines Miles. I was able to snag two business class seats from Paris to Houston for only $60,000 miles and $280 each next summer, the same week that the FIFA World Cup is in Houston. A helpful tool I found was that Eddie Had has a similar partnership with Air France, and you can search for Air France availability with Eddie Had miles on sites like Seats. Arrow and Points Yeah to find the same flights that are available to Japan Airlines. Because they are not one-world partners, they have.

have saver-level fares you cannot get on Air France or any of their partners offering you expanded flight options. Okay. So, again, this is probably confusing to a lot of people, but basically the issue is as good as the pricing is for Japan Airlines to book Air France, it's very hard to find that availability when Air France flights are available to book with Japan Airlines miles. The Japan Airlines interface isn't meant to like, you know, just show you. you when it happens to be available. You have to search for specific dates and everything.

So what Brandon figured out is that he looked at another similar partnership with Air France, which is not part of the alliance that Air France is part of, which is they partner with Edihad. And so if you have an easy way of finding where Edihad can book Air France flights, then what he's saying is Japan Airlines ought to also be able to book those Air France flights. And so that's a trick to find that availability. And then you could use your Japan Airlines miles that way. That's a great trick. So a lot of award search tools do search Eddie Hudd, but they don't search Japan Airlines.

And so you can use one of those tools to quickly find availability. So, for example, I just brought up seat-side arrow and could quickly see that Eddie Hott, at least, has maybe 12 days over the course of the year where I could fly from Detroit to Paris using Eddie Hod miles in business class. And so presumably I'd be able to use Japan Airlines miles as well. Yeah, you know, this is a great tip and a great hack, obviously for this. But it's also a piece of general knowledge that applies to other situations. as well. For instance, we've talked before, I think, about how you can sometimes book British Airways flights for far less than surcharges with Cathay Pacific Asia Miles. But none of the award search tools, as great as they are, or I shouldn't say none of, most of the award search

tools don't search Cathay Pacific Asia Miles for award availability. And so you wouldn't know that those flights are available necessarily, though if you apply the same knowledge here and you say, okay, well, if the British Airways flight is available to Alaska and American Airlines, I bet it's probably also available to Cathay Pacific Asia Miles. Now, you should log into Cathay Pacific Asian Miles and double check that and verify it. But that's the type of thing that as you become more, I think, experience with award booking and you start to see those patterns, that really fills in the different pieces. It completes the puzzle because that's exactly how you ought to be looking at it. So it's a great tip from Brandon for everybody out there,

not only for the Air France availability, but in general, to recognize availability across strange partnerships like that that you might not find through award search tools. And that's no knock on award search tools. They are great, and they have changed the game in terms of making it far easier to find award availability. But having a little bit of extra knowledge can be scary. You could find all sorts of different stuff with that. So awesome job.

Well done. And a great tip, I thought. Absolutely. kudos to you. All right, let's talk about card news. We've got some big card news coming at some point. We don't have all the details yet, but the built two point, or the built card 2.0, rather, is coming in February, replacing the current card card. It is. So, Bill has announced that they're going to be transitioning all current built card holders from Wells Fargo to cardless. We already knew that was going to happen. Now we have a specific date. when it will happen which is February 7th of 2026 until then you won't be able to

apply for built cards that's going to be cut off it's already cut off and you you know you'll be able to apply once they launch on on cardless but not until then one interesting tidbit is that with this card which is the one that is the one that is transitioning from the current one to the new one. And I said it that way because they also announced that there's going to be some additional cards coming out. So we don't know more about those yet. But with this card, you will be able to not just earn points paying rent with any landlord, but you'll also be able to earn points paying mortgage with any lender. So that's a nice little tease there. That's about all

we know that. We don't know how many points you're going to earn, what the limits are or anything like that. Or how that's going to function in practice. So, yeah, there's a lot of things to wonder about still, but interesting that now we know it's February. So keep your eyes peeled for that. If you currently have a Wells Fargo built card, you're going to have the opportunity to transition a card list. If you don't, then your Wells Fargo build card is going to become an autograph card. So whether or not you want that to happen, you'll need to think about that. Now, my fear here is that when you do transition to card list, this is going to show up as a

new account for 524 purposes, Greg? We have that question into the built gurus to try to find out, and we will come back with an answer if we get one. Very good. All right. So next up, city is now allowing product changing via online chat. So if you have a city credit card and you would like to product change to a different card, you can now pull up the chat in your online login and request that.

this is great news for those of you who have a player two or even a player one that just hates making phone calls because it's a lot easier to chat online and get this accomplished. So I think this is terrific news. I'm really excited about it personally. I stopped having my wife apply for city cards because when it was time to product change away from a card with an annual fee, she doesn't want to call. It makes it, it's a big problem. And she won't change her name to something that sounds adrogynous.

So, you know, without those two things, what I'm left with are options to do online, you know, chats or something like that. And so now that they can do it, my wife could apply for the, you know, Strat Elite, for example, and a year from now, product change to a fee-free card. And so that's what we're looking to do. So I'm weirdly, you know, very excited about this, what seems like such a little change. Yeah, but it's nice. It's the more stuff you can self-serve, do online, or even it's not quite self-served here. But yeah, it's great. You know, it is, it's very useful to be able to do those things.

There's a lot of little things like that in this game that are convenient when you can do them yourselves. All right. Next up, we've got the United Debit card is now live. And it looks like it could be interesting for certainly for, certainly for, united mileage plus fans i shouldn't say certainly for some united mileage plus fans it'll be interesting you can get a welcome bonus of 10 000 miles after 500 dollars spent in four months so i mean that's nothing wild and crazy but at the same time that could be a one way economy class flight for five hundred dollars and spend on a debit card i mean that's better than a poke in the eye um you'll earn

a half a mile per dollar for most of your spend and an additional 2500 bonus miles each calendar year after you've spent $10,000. So if you spend $10,000, you'll end up with $7,500 miles. It does have a fee of $4 a month, but that's waived if you keep a $2,000, I assume average daily balance in the accounts. You'll need to keep $2,000 locked up there. But your $2,000 is not sitting there without any benefit at all. No, it's not. They actually give you sort of interest on your balance, but interest in the form of United Miles.

And it's based on your average monthly balance. And what it is is the number of miles you earn depends on what range of account holdings you have. So like $2,500 up to just under $5,000 at the end of the year. So if you maintain that for an average of, let's say, $2,500 for 12 months, Then they'll give you 2,500 miles. So basically, at that level, if you have exactly $2,500 in there, you're getting like 1x interest. So you can think of it as like 1% if you count miles as one cent each.

And the interesting thing is the buckets are not all made equal. So they have buckets that go like $5,000 and up, $10,000 and up, 25,000 up and 50,000 and up, and you would think that the amount of earnings you get would increase as you had more savings. But the sweet spot is that $10,000. So if you keep exactly $10,000 in there, you end up with a 15,000 mile bonus. And so it becomes 1.5x, sort of, if you want to think of it that way. So you'll learn 1.5 miles per balance dollar, I guess, is a way to think about it. And if you think about that our reasonable redemption value for United Miles is 1.3 cents per point,

then 1.5 cents per balanced dollar becomes a 1.95% rate of return. So if you're in the market for United Miles and you're okay with that level return, that's, yeah, it's not bad. So I can't say this exciting. You know, to me it's like, yeah, there's no way to get huge, huge numbers of miles from this whole thing. I mean, unless you're spending an outrageous amount with the debit card. But then I think there are better ways to earn a lot of miles. Yeah, I mean, you know, if you had like tax payments. to make, the fees are going to be less with a debit card. But as we talked about recently,

when we discussed, I think maybe the Southwest card, most debit cards have a limit as to how much money you can spend in a single day anyway. So you probably can't make huge tax payments, even if you got a huge tax bill. So, yeah, it seems like it's probably a limited use, but at the same time, if you have a use or a need for a debit card and you want more United Miles, it could be okay. 1.95% is not anywhere near competitive with the best bank accounts out there these days. It's also wildly better than the average bank account. So, you know, if you're if you're maximizing things, you probably are earning 4% or better, I guess, as we record this in an interest. But if you're not and you're just keeping your money in a regular

bank account for the 0.03% or whatever that most banks probably give you, you know, it's better than that. Yeah. I will warn. When you earn miles based on spend, you should, shouldn't get taxed on those at all. But I think that when you earn miles based on your average account balance, that they will send a tax form showing how much you earned. And they'll probably value the miles at about one cent each for that purpose. So just be prepared for just like a interest-bearing checking account. You know, you would get taxed on that interest. I expect that you'll get taxed on the mileage interest happening here. Yep. I would expect the same. Yeah, good point. All right, let's talk about what crazy thing? What crazy thing did Capital One

shopping do this week? So what did they do, Nick? So for the last couple of weeks, Capital One shopping has been offering like one major deal of the day each day. And sometimes it's been really good, like super high payouts. So Stephen wrote a post this week about how they had Trip Advisor for a day this week. And he wrote about how they had TripAdvisor at 65% back on activities or 27.5% back, I think, on hotel bookings. Now, 65% back on activities is very good. I mean, there's a wide range of different activities you can book, sometimes things that cost the same as they would cost elsewhere. Some things are inflated in price, of course. It just depends on the activities that you're booking. But that's a pretty incredible rate of return. Now, oddly,

I didn't get an email that day about the daily deal. And I was miffed about that because I had been getting them almost every day, I think, for the last week or two. And I hadn't gotten it. And he got it in the morning. And so sometimes in the afternoon, when I hadn't received it as of like three or four o'clock in the afternoon, I got on my computer and pulled up the browser where I have the Capital One shopping extension installed. And I went to TripAdvisor and I searched for a couple of activities, clicked around a little bit. Stephen suggested maybe going to the IHG website would make a difference. I don't know why. But I did that too. Why not? So I did that. Clicked round for a little bit. And then wouldn't you know, about three and a half hours later, around

six or seven o'clock at night, I got an email with the offer for 70% back. Not 65, it's 70% back. TripAdvisor. Amazing. Yeah, I mean, that's pretty incredible. I booked, so we were going to go to Bora Bora soon, and I booked the airport transfers from the airport to the hotel. It's much cheaper to book it through the various tour operators you can find on Viador or trip advisor or get your guide or whatever. And it was the same price on all of those third-party booking websites, which is significantly less than what the hotels charge. So I booked those, and they were already a savings. I was going to book those through one of those third parties anyway. So to get 70% back on those was, I mean, just a huge win. And I looked at some things like a $900,

you know, private catamaran tour for hours. And I was like, well, if I get $630 back on that, like, you know, I didn't, I didn't end up booking that. But, but, I, But I looked at some of those things. I booked a couple of things. I booked a Northern Lights tour for later this year. Because a lot of those tours that you can book, those are things that can be canceled up to 24 hours in advance. So I went to town.

It said single use, but I clicked through one time. And then when you go to TripAdvisor and look at activities, each new activity you open opens a new tab in the browser. And the shopping extension continued to show the 70% back on each of them. So I continue trying. I don't know whether it'll track or not. But again, since they can be canceled up to 24 hours in advance,

I should know whether or not they track well before the activities. And if they don't, I don't want to do those activities, I'll just cancel them. But there was no sense of not doing it. So keep your eye out because as we get into the holiday season here, I have a feeling we're going to continue to see these. I had 70% back on Crocs the other day. I've seen a whole bunch in the 45% to 50% back. And if you got a Capital One credit card, it's worth checking the offers within your credit card

login as well because we've seen some 30x, 40x miles. at different retailers, which, again, it's just incredible if you value those things at like one and a half cents a mile, they're terrific returns. So it's worth keeping an eye on what Capital One's doing is you do your holiday shopping. It really is. And just a reminder, I know we've said this a million times on the show, but not everybody has listened to every show. Capital One shopping does not, it's a shopping portal that gives you a pseudo cash back when you click through and you shop or you have the toolbar and you shop and you click to activate the, the, the, the, toolbar rewards. It does not require having a Capital One credit card to sign up for it.

You just sign up, use your email address and create a password to log into it. And if you install the toolbar, when you're clicking around, as Nick was talking about a little bit before, when you click around at different sites, it sees what you're doing and will often email you outrageously good offers. Now, we don't often see 65, 70% back, but you know what, during the holidays every now and then, that's actually not, you know, we've seen some of those last year. Yeah, exactly. We bought some stuff last year that way. Yeah. Yep, yep, yep. So, yeah, you know, even if if you're not a big shopper, it's worth doing that. You sign up for it and do that. Now, I have a question for you, Nick. I often get a good deal for a trip advisor hotels. And by good deal, I mean like maybe 25, 30% range. I can't tell what that is. Because when you go to TripAdvisor and search for hotels,

it links you to other sites to book them usually. I don't know if it ever books within TripAdvisor. You don't know the answer. No, I've never tried it because I've run into that same thing. So I've never tried booking the hotels through TripAdvisor. And truth be told, I mean, I see good enough rates by clicking around at Hotels.com and waiting for a targeted rate or we get good targeted rates at IHG and choice and less so Marriott, but oftentimes Hilton, so that I don't worry about those,

like the trip advisor. I ignore the hotel payouts. So I don't have a good answer for that. But something I do want to touch on that you started to mention is that you can just create a login with an email address with Capital One shopping. And anecdotally, I think that you want to do that. So you have a few different options when you go to Capital One shopping. You can log in with an existing Capital One account.

But based on some anecdotal reports and some tests with this, I think you're better off creating an account with an email address rather than with your existing Capital One credit card login. It seems that there are better targeted offers for people who are not logging into that with their Capital One credit card login. So just use an email address, create a separate Capital One shopping account, even if you're a Capital One card holder to use that and keep that separate. And then make sure you're opted into the emails. Like, if you're not opted into the email, you want to be opted in to the Capital One shopping emails because sometimes there are some amazing rates like this. Now, keep in mind, you can only redeem for gift cards and the gift card selection changes over time. Right now, it's really good, but we've seen times when it's not been really good. So it's hard to know what's going to be good and when or, but right now they've got Marriott in there.

They've got Hotels.com in there. I've got RIEI. There's plenty of, there's plenty of, best buy. There's plenty of stuff. Oh, wow, Atlantis, I just saw. I'm at Atlantis as we record this, and that's an option. If I had known that, I'm going to save some on some of the food here. Anyway, so it's worth looking at anyway.

It's worth looking at, worth installing the extension, giving a shot. Some people have trouble with Capital One shopping. Some people have trouble with things tracking and whatnot. But with some of these offers like this, I just booked things. And if they don't track properly, then I can always cancel them because the prepaid trip advisor activities, you can cancel up to 24 hours in advance on most of them. Same thing is true with a lot of the. Viator once. And in fact, that's what I did. I had already booked. I had already clicked through

Capital One Shopping to book through them using a 30% back offer on my airport transfer. But then I got the 70% one. So I just canceled the original booking and we booked the same thing for 70% back. That's great. That's great. All right. Let's move forward. Let's talk about being Bonvoid today. So Air Canada Aeroplane has bonvoid us first. Yeah. Yeah. So they decided that they're going to bring back points expiration. I guess they paused all points expirations during the pandemic and due to popular demand, it's coming back. It's just what everybody wants, Greg. November 30th of 2026. Hopefully they'll get enough negative press about that that they'll change their minds. I don't. I just hate the whole idea of points expiring. So everybody asked for for the holidays this year. Canada

airplane came through. Right, right. We've got too many points. You don't know what to do with them. Why can't you just expire those? Yeah, right. So, but, but you can still keep them alive with activity, right? So you can still. I believe so. It's not, yeah, it's not like some programs where after three or four years, it's just, you're done. So that, so it's actually not that big of a deal probably. But still, I don't like it. It's not as good as not expiring. So it's definitely But you should be able to transfer in a thousand points from some transfer partner, you know, MX, Chase, et cetera, et cetera, and keep them alive. All right.

But speaking of transferring and whatnot, we got to talk about the problems combining Chase Ultimate Rewards and how they keep spreading to more and more people, it seems. So I, this started out small, but it seems to really be snowballing. One of the superpowers of Chase Ultimate Rewards points is that it's easy to move your points from one of your cards to another one of your cards or to another one of your cards or to another card holder within the same household. So for instance, if you've got a freedom card and you've got a Sapphire Reserve card, if you earn points on your freedom card, it long has been relatively easy to just go into your account, hit combined points and move the points you've earned on your

freedom card to your Sapphire Reserve so you can use them through Chase Travel or you can transfer them to partners and so on. And even if you have separate logins for your business cards or whatnot, it's been easy enough to do that online yourself. You sometimes have to link them up through a phone call to begin with, but once you get your cards linked up, you can move them back and forth. And in my household, we've been doing that for a long time. And we also moved them from one card holder to another. So I would move points from my Freedom Unlimited card to my wife Sapphire Reserve, because we had all that linked up in the online system. And it had all been functioning smoothly for years and years until almost a year ago, I think maybe it was January of this

year, that my wife started having problems combining her points. And it would give her an error message and tell her she had to call in and first that seemed annoying, but it sounded like it was going to get fixed by adding a number for text message verification. However, it never worked. And so since January, like 10 months now, she has not been able to combine points amongst her own cards, even within the same login. She can't move points from her Freedom card to her Saf- well, actually, from Freedom or Sapphire Reserve and the consumer side is working. But between ink cards, She has a login with ink cards, and she can't move them from one ink card to another, from her ink card to her Sapphire Reserve, or from one of her cards to one of my cards.

It just won't work. The system gives her an error every time and says to try again later. So instead, she has to call. Every time she wants to move points around, she's got a call, chase, and an agent can do it over the phone. And it's a simple enough process over the phone, except it adds that annoyance. We talked earlier about how it's nice to be able to do things online. When she has to make a phone call, there's all of the various annoyances that go along. with that when it should just be easy to move points online. Now, initially this started that

some people were reporting it, but we keep hearing from more and more people in our Facebook group saying that they're running into this. So it's not everyone. Let's be clear. There are plenty of, I don't know if you've had any problems with this, Greg, but I know, like some of the people, at least Tim told me he hasn't had any issues with that. And other people probably haven't either, but there's a growing contingent of people that have been running into this. And Chase's phone agents have been totally useless in terms of offering any solutions. long-term solution other than just having to call in every time you want to move. Yeah, this is sad.

You know, it used to be, I thought of Chase's having the best IT for this kind of stuff. Like they used to just be rock solid. And we've seen more and more issues like this with Chase's computer systems. And so that's a shame. I haven't had this problem with my own account. Weirdly, we had this problem with my wife's account just for one time where she got the two factors. thing like it wanted her to do all this two-factor stuff we did it it didn't work um but then i don't know a week two weeks later i don't remember how much longer you know later we tried it and there was no

there were no prompts it just worked straight up so i don't know no idea no idea but it's annoying and if it happens to you unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a great solution although i will say that a couple of readers commented to say that they've run into this problem on the website, but that using the app has worked, even though they've run into that problem on the website. Now, I haven't tried it on the app for my wife, actually. I forgot about it until we were just talking about it now that a couple of readers had commented with that.

So I'm going to have to test that out. But if you run into this problem, try the app and see if you're able to combine there. Maybe that's a workaround. But doing it on desktop, there doesn't seem to be a workaround for that. Yeah. So a friend of mine had her points stolen from Chase. like they cashed out with gift cards or something. And it was a bit of a hassle for her to get Chase to reinstate those points.

And I just wonder if there was a rash of that sort of thing and Chase's IT overcorrected. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. It made it kind of impossible to use your points instead of. Yeah, but for random people, it doesn't, there doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason as to what's cause that. So, yeah, I don't know. You're right. That seems like a reasonable explanation.

But all right. So that's Bonvoid. We need to keep it moving here. Let's talk about awards, points, and more. So there's several big pieces of news here. First up, Rove Miles, adds Lufthansa Miles and Moore as a transfer partner. This is a big get for Rove Miles. It is. We haven't seen Miles and Moore, which is like Lufthansa and Swiss Airs program. We haven't seen them as a transfer partner with anyone that I can think of. Well, it used to be Marriott, but then they left that. So for Rove Miles, which is a newcomer to this transferable points world, to be the first to do it, that's a big win. And I understand there's some nice things you could do with those miles.

Yeah, sometimes they offer incredible mileage deals. And so just looking back through posts we've written this year, there was a business class award sale earlier this year. 10,000 miles in business class between the U.S. and Germany. Now, they do unfortunately pass long surcharges, and Lufthansa is known for their high surcharges. So you're going to pay something along the lines of what British Airways charges and surcharges. So that part stinks, although with only 10,000 miles, that might not be much of a problem for some folks. You might be happy still to pay $6 or $700 in surcharges. And perhaps even more interesting than that, a reader commented in our Facebook group, a couple people have let us know this now. There are some economy class awards

that only cost 88 miles plus the taxes and fees. Wow. That's not a speako, which is the spoken version of a typo, 88 miles and like $216 in taxes, which I don't want to do that for an overnight flight to Europe, but on the way back, that might make it really hard for me to justify a business class award like for a daytime flight 88 miles and 200 bucks can i justify using 50,000 miles and like some amount more than zero dollars in taxes if i could pay 88 miles and 200 bucks would you fly back in economy um probably not it's such a great deal but uh probably not well it's worth keeping your eye on and it gives you another reason to consider rove miles which we'll come back to road miles and talk more about them later on but they have some

Good transfer partners that keep growing, and it's great to see them add one that nobody saw coming. Right. Yeah. No, no, absolutely. Okay. Next up, we have choice privileges, has announced that they're revamping the rewards program in 2026. Not going to go through all the details here, but they're making the rewards program more rewarding, faster, you know, sort of fewer nights required to get to different levels of status and to get different. perks. There's a couple things I wanted to mention, though. One is lasting recognition. So

they're going to make it so points will never expire for those who have elite status. So I like that. I prefer they made it never expire for everybody, but at least there's some benefit. For those of us who use the choice program, not because we're earning points from stays, but we're using the points, you know, transferred from other places and using them to, for redemptions, having a way to keep our points longer without having to like, you know, figure out how to create activity is a really good thing. Even better point sharing. They're saying that free point sharing will be coming, and that's not limited to elite status as far as I know. That won't be until later in 2026. That's great. You know, I personally had a situation where

my mom was going to book a choice hotel in New York City. She bought them points when they were on a really good sale at my advice. And then the hotel was no longer available by the time she did that. So she's been sitting on these points. And now she can just give them away to me or whoever could actually use them, which is great. Yeah, I think that's a really nice change. So I don't know the rest of the changes here make a ton of difference to me yet at this point. But that one, that one certainly would be a nice benefit. And like you said, points not expiring is good. And there will be slightly easier path potentially to elite status since you'll be able to earn elite qualifying credits with the credit card.

So it may be easier to earn elite status whether or not that is whether there's enough benefit to make it worth it. we don't, you know, remains to be seen. Let's put it that way. Remains to be seen. Very much doubt it. Yeah. All right. So that wraps up, I think awards, points and more and moves us into this week's main event. Main event time. Five rewarding ways to book paid hotel stays. So we're not going to talk about every possible great way to to book paid hotel stays, but we're going to, we're going to outline some different ways that we think can be pretty rewarding that goes beyond just paying with the credit card and earning rewards with your credit card. Yeah, but let's start with talking about using a credit card and paying to earn some rewards, but doing it in the most rewarding

way possible here. So you can go through a credit card portal. Most of the credit card portals, most of the major issuers offer a bonus for booking hotels through their portal, and several of them have various hotel coupon credits. So City with the Strata Elite card, you get 12x on travel bookings, on hotel bookings through City's travel portal, and they have the $300 annual travel coupon on the Strata Elite card for a stay of two nights or more. Capital One offers 10x on hotel bookings. And of course, there's a travel credit on the venture card. So you could use that. Venturex. Travel credit. On the venture X rather, yes, thank you. And it's really a travel coupon, a $300 discount that you can use when you're booking through Capital One travel. And then, of course,

Chase has eight X when you're booking through using your Sapphire Reserve. You get eight X on hotel bookings and the Sapphire Reserve has an annual travel credit as well. Or then you've got Amex. You can earn 5X booking hotels through Amex and use your fine hotels and resorts or the hotel collection prepaid hotel credit. So that's one that can certainly be useful as well. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, those are, we're starting with pretty simple concepts. So hopefully that wasn't too complicated because we're going to we're going to get worse. The next one, Next one we have up is calling it the Capital One Shopping Loop. So Capital One Shopping, we talked about earlier in the show,

is something that anyone can sign up for their portal. You don't have to have a Capital One card. And often they have great rates for, often great targeted rates. You'll get an email saying, you know, get 30% back for Hilton or get, you know, 25% back for whatever, Hotels.com or different things like that. And so the loop is this. You can use those target offers to click through, book your hotel stay, and then after you earn those rewards, the rewards come as credit that's available to redeem for gift cards.

You can redeem for Hotels.com, Marriott.com. So there's a few different hotelish options where then you can use those rewards. So go through a portal again to actually book the stay and then use the rewards to pay. And so it's a nice way to sort of have a perpetual reduction in the cost of your hotel stays by cycling through the portal. Yeah, I mean, it's absolutely a great tip, a great way to do it. And, of course, you know, when you're clicking through from Capital One shopping, you're making a direct booking. So you're still obviously, like Greg said, going to earn hotel points and you're going to earn your elite benefits and things like that. But you could also use...

If you're clicking through to Hilton or IHG, you know, but if you're clicking through to Hotels.com or one of those, then it's not the case. Terrific point. Very good point. Yeah. But then also that gives you the opportunity to use various card linked offers to pay for that. You don't have to book an advance purchase rate in order to do this. So, for instance, I stated a Hilton, Garden Inn earlier this year. I had a Capital One shopping offer for 30% back on this day. So I clicked through from Capital One shopping for 30% back at Hilton Garden Inn, booked the hotel stay for a rate that I would pay at the hotel. And then at the hotel, we used a bunch of our, we have business platinum cards that have $50 quarterly credits. I've got the Hilton business card that has a $60 quarterly credit. So we split the charge

over a whole bunch of different credit cards at the hotel and also earned the 30% back from Capital One shopping. And then I redeemed for a Marriott gift card from Capital One Shopping. So on top of earning Hilton points and being able to use those Hilton credits, then I redeem the rewards for Marriott gift card. Now I can click through Capital One Shopping to Marriott, like you said, and use that gift card in order to earn rewards again on that gift card. And then we're for another one in the future.

It's awesome. It's a great way to do it. So Nick has already bled into our third category, which is the Hotel Superstack. The Superstack. That's where you start with a portal. It could be Capital One shopping, but it could be any portal where you have a good offer for clicking through directly to a hotel chain. So directly to Marriott, Hyatt, IHG, Hilton. As I say this, Hyatt is pretty uncommon, but the others we see all the time.

So you click through, so you're getting whatever rewards, the portal's promising, and you're booking the hotel stay. stay. It doesn't have to be a prepaid stay. And so you will then earn hotel points, assuming you're a member of that hotel program. And so you can stack that with whatever hotel promotion is going on, whether it's the kind of snoozer, Hyatt, I mean, Hilton, 2,500 points per stay, or whether it's the more exciting, Hyatt, 3,000 points per night for certain hotels. You can stack with that. You can stack with any elite bonuses if you have elite status with the hotel. You can stack it with credit card multipliers. So maybe you have that hotel's credit card and you can pay with that card and earn 6x, 12x, whatever, that card earns at that hotel chain. So all those can mean a ton

of hotel points. That's in addition. Remember, to whatever the portal is paying. you. But that's not all, right? Because then there's also card-linked offers. Amex offers, Chase offers, things like that. They often have deals where you get, like with Chase, it's often like 10% off your next Hyatt stay or Amex. It's more often a fixed amount, like $50 back when you spend $250 or more at Hilton or Hyatt or whatever. And then there's some other card link offer types that are not connected to the banks, and those are more like things like Simply Miles, or sometimes you can earn additional miles or cash back by linking your card. So that's another level.

And then finally, if your credit card has a rebate for specific hotels like Nick was talking about, there are the business platinum cards, give you $50 back per quarter at Hilton Hotels, you can stack all this with that too yeah so there's a lot of great opportunities there the super stack is well worth it and like i said at the beginning of the show sometimes the ability to super stack makes using points a bad deal even when using points is not a bad deal what i mean there is even when you can get decent value for your points you might be able to earn so much on the on the stay so much of a return on the stay that the option to use points doesn't look as good as it did before you considered everything you could earn. That's why we ended up booking a couple of Hilton Garden

in stays because there were just so much to earn back that it didn't make sense to use points, even though it was a reasonable redemption. It didn't make as much sense as earning all of that stuff. So super stack your way to winning. Speaking of super stacking, Rove Miles now offers the opportunity to do just that. Yeah, they do. So Roe Miles, there's a couple ways of earning Roe Rove's transferable points when you book hotels. When you search for a hotel within the Rove Miles platform, they will often let you book either a rate where they offer some really big multiple, anywhere from 10 to like 50 points per dollar, for booking that hotel.

But when you book that way, if you're staying at like a chain hotel, you're not going to earn points with that hotel. you're not going to get any of those stacks that we just talked about. So it would just be the Rove Miles and whatever your credit card offers you for paying for it through Rove. But now they've added a way to kind of direct book hotels through their platform. And so it works much more like any other portal when you pick a room that way. You do, I believe, pay up front, but the charge comes through,

or it's supposed to come through as if it was billed directly by that hotel. And so you'll earn, you should earn the card-linked offers deals and things like that. You'll earn whatever Rove points. Rove offers you for that booking, which I think, correct me wrong, Nick, I think standard is 5X, but they're running a promo right now, 10x, or something along those lines. I don't know if right now is still the case, but that's roughly what you get looked for anyway. I wouldn't be surprised to see more promos than the future.

And one of the things that makes all this different from the stupid, from the super stack that we mentioned before is things like Hyatt. So Hyatt is so rare to see in a portal where you'd earn extra rewards from a regular portal. But Rov Miles does have Hyatt, and they do have Hyatt hotels that are bookable in this way. So you can earn those extra five or ten points. per dollar on top of what your credit card's giving you, on top of what Hyatt is giving you, in top of whatever promotions are going on, on top of if you pay with a chase card when you have the chase offer for 10% back, you know, all those things theoretically should stack

when booking through Roof. So that's great. Yeah, and I've seen some great opportunities there either way, whether we're talking about what Greg just was with, you know, the elite eligible bookings, but also if you just have an expensive hotel stay to book, I mean, I was looking in New York City recently for a particular night, and New York City hotel prices are all outrageous these days. But I was seeing places that were around $700 a night, which, believe it or not, is kind of average for New York these days. And I wasn't going to spend it. But we're offering 43 miles per dollars. So you were looking at more than 30,000 miles with your $700 booking.

Now, I wouldn't pay the $700 just for the $30,000 miles. But if I valued those 30,000 miles, anything. more than a penny each, that's essentially a rebate of about half the cost of the hotel. So it can really make a difference sometimes even without the loyalty eligible bookings. Certainly, if you're looking at book some sort of independent hotel where there's no program anyway, then take a look at Rove Miles. I've been doing that lately myself for situations where I don't care about elite benefits. One caution, if you're looking for specific room types, they don't necessarily list all the ones that are available at given hotels. And so I found that a bit frustrating when

I was trying to book a few different hotels. On the flip side, sometimes they sort of randomly have a better deal than you find elsewhere. And so if you don't care about the room type and you're willing to book whatever shows up, you know, you might actually save money in addition to earning those extra rewards. So that's great when that happens. Absolutely. All right. And then the last one, here that we're going to talk about. This is maybe my favorite, and you have direct experience with it. So I'm going to let you run with this. The Intercontinental Ambassador Weekend Trek. Yeah, I love this. This is so specific, but we have to talk through this because it's just so much fun. IHG has a elite status called ambassador status that's just for intercontinental hotels.

And it's not your normal kind of elite status where you get it from a certain number of night state or anything like that. You just have to buy it. You have to buy it each year. And currently as we're recording this, the price is $225 or $45,000 to get a year of ambassador status. One of the things you get with ambassador status is a weekend, buy one, get one. So they call it a free weekend night, but basically it's like as long as you're paying for a week. one weekend night, which is Friday, Saturday, Sunday. The second one will be free when available. So you have to, you know, check that it's available. And it's only for intercontinental hotels

and resorts. So you have to be wanting to stay at one of those. But Ambassador's status also gives you a bunch of other things. Again, primarily at IHD Hotel. Some benefits are also at places like six senses. But for the most part, these benefits are for intercontinental hotels. You get a guaranteed room upgrade. So guaranteed one category room upgrade on paid stays. You get guaranteed 4 p.m. late checkout. So that's pretty fabulous because IHG does not otherwise have a way to get guaranteed late checkout with elite status. You get $20 food and beverage credit per stay, even on award stays. A few other minor, minor benefits. Okay, so now, now we're going to get back to the fun.

Stacking it. Inter-Canadetal Ambassador Weekend trick. When you book through a portal, the rewards, at least this has been true in the past, and I think it's still true, the rewards that are paid out by the portal are based on the full weekend rate, not just the one night you paid for. So when you go to book one of these rates, it's a little scary actually because you tell the system you're you're booking the buy one get one basically the free weekend night but the confirmation that comes to you is the full price of the

weekend and you don't see the reduced rate until you go to check out of the hotel and then they charge you just for the one night instead of two um so this can be used in your favor uh so take for example let's say through capital one shopping you get an offer for i H.D. Hotels 25% back. I don't think that's an unlikely offer to get. They often have great deals for IHD hotels. So you click through or you activate that offer. You book one of these weekend bookings. And let's say the total weekend costs $1,000. Now, in reality, most intercontinental hotels are going to be more than $500 a night, but I wanted to use a nice easy round number. simple yeah yes yes so your your weekend booking is $1,000 at checkout though you're only paying

$500 assuming both nights were the same price now that's another thing you could use this you know on nights on weekends where maybe Friday night was like $300 since Saturday night was $700 and then you'd only pay the $300 but we're going to assume here that both nights were $500 so you're only paying $500 at checkout but Capital One shopping is paying paying out based on the that you paid $1,000. And so you get full $250 back in Capital One Rewards, Capital One Shopping Rewards, for that stay. So that's a really nice haul. It is.

And it's a really nice haul. If you're paying $500 on each night, like Greg said, keeping the math simple, then essentially you're getting half that pack. And, you know, if you valued the Capital One shopping rewards at face value, just keep math simple here. You'd be looking at essentially a net cost of $250 for two nights. Now, if you had a situation where that first night was $300, well, that's an even better deal, isn't it? So now, keep in mind that we don't, we don't, you know, we can't guarantee that's going to work. I think, my guess, is that it functions this way because I assume that that second night is somehow getting billed to IHG.

So it is getting paid by somebody. And so I think it's probably tracking at what the full cash dollar figure is. probably IHG corporate gets some sort of a discount or maybe I don't know maybe they pay it and you know it just comes out of the profit so to speak I don't know exactly how it works but that's why I think it probably works and probably will continue to work but don't shoot the messenger if it doesn't track properly or it gets adjusted after the fact know that I mean this is one of those things that it's a nice bonus if it works it worked for Greg in the past it tracked for me and then I had to cancel the stay that I had booked so I never got to see it pay out but but that could be a fun

one. It's, again, highly specific. You need to have an intercontinental. You need to have one you want to stay at. But Greg wrote a post about it. And during a weekend. During a weekend, at least one night has to be a weekend night. Right. So it's got to be either like a Friday, Saturday, Saturday, Sunday, or Sunday, Monday. But Greg wrote about how you get that guaranteed one category upgrade. And so he was trying to book a really swanky suite and booked the room just underneath it in order to try to get upgraded to it. I don't think that part of things worked out for you. But I feel like there's a lot of ways you could play this one. You could book a club access room. get yourself club access and end up with a pretty sweet deal in the right situation.

Yeah, totally. The buy one, get one thing by itself can be, you know, really valuable if you have a stay that you want to do that's during weekend. I'm not sure that you could use it Sunday, Monday. I just wanted to correct that. Maybe, but I think it. Anyway, I'm not sure. Maybe not.

Anyway, yeah, it's a fun one. And so let us know if anyone out there takes advantage of that and does something cool with it. Very good. All right. That brings us to this week's question of the week. Now, this week's question of the week has come in several times recently, and I think it's a really important one for us to address. And it's come in different ways. So I'm going to read it in the way that I have pulled up, but it's essentially a number of people asking this in different ways.

So Jamie writes in our frequentweiler Insider's Facebook group and says, I have five. FHR credits, fine hotels and resorts or the hotel collection credits that I need to use by the end of the year. I have a girls trip plan for next year during which we'll need two rooms. I know I can book two rooms, but I want to use two different cards to utilize two credits. Can I make two separate bookings for the same nights? Now, we've got another variations of this where somebody wants to essentially get more than one room. They want to book a trip and have somebody else come with them. Can you do that and how? Yeah. I mean, just make two. separate bookings for the same night and it shouldn't it shouldn't be a problem now Nick I think

you've actually done this is that right yeah I so let's let's let's back up to let's say you only had one platinum card but you need two rooms because you're traveling with additional family you can do that and both rooms get full FHR benefits you can book up to three rooms in in like as a single platinum if I only had one platinum card right in my name only I can book up to three rooms and they all get the $100 credit and they all get free breakfast and, you know, whatever other FHR benefits of the late checkout, et cetera, that goes for all of them. So that's worth knowing because if you do need more than one room, it's worth knowing you can do that. People get a little confused, I think, because Amex created this rule against back-to-back bookings. So for instance,

if I have two platinum cards, I have a business and a consumer, let's say, I can't book Wednesday with my consumer platinum card and Thursday with my business platinum card and get the $100 credit on both nights per the terms anyway. There are times when that might still work. But yeah, but per the terms, that's excluded. That counts as a single stay and most places these days I think will probably count that as a single stay. And you'll only get the $100 credit once, but you'll get free breakfast and they'll lay checkout and potential upgrade. All the things that you get with an FHR booking. Totally fine. Right. Right. And the reason you would do that back to back thing is because you want to use the credits, the $300 credits that each of those cards have,

and that way you could do that on a, you know, a two-night stay. I've done that several times, and every time they've enforced the rule that you only get one, you know, $100 credit, but that's okay. Like, I wasn't expecting to get it more than once. And so, you know, the fact that you're getting the $300 back per night that you're getting the free breakfast and all those other benefits for p.m. late checkout is terrific. Yeah. So that's, you know, it's a back-to-back. That's how that, you just won't get the $100 credit again if you're booking back-to-back nights. Now, you might say, well, what if I have a

platinum card? My spouse has a platinum card. Can I book Wednesday night and my spouse books Thursday night and can we get all the benefit? Again, you're going to get the free breakfast. I would only count on $100 credit if you're going to keep the same room unless player two is going to check in separately. and you're going to move all your stuff to another room. Maybe you'd get away with that. But otherwise, I would only expect $100 credit because, again, back-to-back stays in the same party are not supposed to get the $100 credit twice. But if you and player two both want to book two rooms on the same night so that there's

a separate room for another family member, yes, then you both get the $100 credit. You can make multiple bookings, and I have multiple platinum cards. So I could book three rooms using three different platinum cards and on the same count. calendar day. And yeah, they'll all get the $100 credit and they'll all get the various benefits. So if you've got a bunch of these and you are planning a group trip, know that yes, if you book multiple rooms for the same night, up to three rooms booked through your account are going to be eligible for all of the FHR benefits. It's just the back-to-back nights where you won't continue to get $100 credits if you're booking the nights consecutively. Yeah, that's great.

All right. Very good. Oh, and by the way, the one last thing I wanted to mention on that is Note that it is a prepaid hotel credit. So you do need to prepay the booking. We had a report recently in our Freakomiler Insiders group from somebody who booked a fine hotels and resorts stay, paying at the hotel, not realizing that they wouldn't get the credit for that. And that's a bummer because I can see how that can happen. You do have to prepay if you're using one of the platinum card, $300 credits that you get each half of the year now. You do need to prepay for that. So you can postpay an FHR booking if you're not using one of those credits.

But if you want to use the credit, and again, I'm talking about the $300 credit you get between January and June and July and December and all the various platinum cards now, then you do need to prepaid. Okay, that brings us to the end of today's episode. If you've enjoyed this and you'd like to get more of this stuff in your email inbox each day or each week, go to frequent myler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. follow us on all the various social media join our frequent myler insiders facebook group where you can ask questions just like that one anytime you'd like and if you have a question 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 us a mailbag at frequent miler dot com by everybody Travel Tales with me, Mike Siegel, is full of funny, inspiring, and wild adventures.

Listen now at voyescape.com. Travel has changed a lot since my father wrote Europe on $5 a day, but our mission hasn't. I'm Pauline Fromer of the Fromer Travel Guides, and on the Fromer's Travel Show, I share practical advice, meaningful stories, and conversations with some of the most trusted names in the industry. If you're looking for ways to travel smarter and bring the world closer, I've got you covered. New episodes weekly at voyescape.com.