Frequent Miler on the Air - A good deed is its own reward (but we can do better) | Ep229 | 11-18-23

Episode Date: November 18, 2023

Maximize your charitable giving by earning a great return while doing good in the world. From ways to give without causing your favorite charity to incur processing fees to ways to earn thousands of points for your donation, this week we talk about how to do your charitable deeds (better). 00:00 Intro 01:13 Giant Mailbag 03:32 Giant Mailbag #2: United Quest card details 07:22 Card Talk: Capital One Venture X Rewards Credit Card & Capital One Venture X Business Credit Card https://frequentmiler.com/venturex/ https://frequentmiler.com/VentureXBiz/#Goto 18:35 What crazy thing . . . did Marriott do this week? https://frequentmiler.com/apartments-four-points-express-more-details-about-these-2-new-marriott-brands/ 23:27 Award Talk 23:28 Alaska Mileage Plan March 2024 changes https://frequentmiler.com/huge-alaska-announces-unified-award-charts/ https://frequentmiler.com/new-alaska-award-chart-winners-losers-and-sweet-spots/ https://frequentmiler.com/alaska-us-anything-we-discuss-the-new-alaska-award-chart-video/ 37:06 Do you want to collect Alaska miles now? 39:06 Award Talk: Use JetBlue points to book Qatar flights https://frequentmiler.com/book-qatar-flights-with-jetblue-trueblue-points/ 42:15 Award Talk: Marriott free night certificate inside info https://frequentmiler.com/marriott-rules-for-extending-free-nights/ 46:55 Main Event: A good deed is its own reward, but we can do better. 47:15 How do you find charities that do good? (search tools) 48:20 GiveWell 50:03 PayPay Giving Fund 52:15 Kiva Microloans https://frequentmiler.com/why-i-love-kiva-for-earning-rewards-and-doing-good/ 55:29 How do you earn rewards on charitable gifts? 55:47 Ways to earn miles for donating through airline programs, etc 56:48 Credit Card Rewards 46:49 US Bank cards that earn 2x on charitable donations....meh 58:13 Bank of America 2.62% cash back 58:48 Credit Card Big Spend Bonuses https://frequentmiler.com/best-big-spend-bonuses/ 1:00:25 Buying Visa or Mastercard gift cards and using them to donate 1:03:17 Earn a new card welcome bonus https://frequentmiler.com/best-credit-card-sign-up-offers/ 1:06:25 Donating miles and points 1:08:20 Earn Air France elite credit 1:09:38 Question of the Week: Is it worth it to travel to Australia for just a week? Music credit: Annie Yoder

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did City do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event. Frequent Liler on the air starts now. Today's main event, a good deed is its own reward, but we can do better. We're going to talk about charitable giving and how you can

earn some good rewards when you're doing good. Tis the season to open the heart and open the wallet. So we'll talk about how to get rewarded for that beyond just the emotional satisfaction and rewardingness that inherently exists in giving. So we'll talk about that today. But first, don't forget to like this. If you like the episode, don't forget to give it a like to leave a comment, share it with a friend. We always appreciate that. And don't forget, we keep the timestamps in the show notes. So if you ever want to skip ahead to a specific segment or piece or you want to go back and revisit something, you can check the show notes. You'll find those if you're watching on YouTube. You might have to

expand the description of the video to find them. And if you're in a podcast platform, you should see it right there in the notes. So you can always skip around to what it is you'd like. So let's skip right ahead now to the giant mailbag. Greg, drag it out. Dragging it out, rummaging around through the giant mailbag. Let's see what we've got here. First one. We've got two today uh first one comes from uh someone named nicholas reyes uh via some guy some guy named nicholas some guy who knows that yeah a personal conversation uh online with me uh and nick said to me this was about last week's show he said we referred to the excursionist perk that's the united excursionist perk as the united explorers perk repeatedly he says i take full blame for that because i said it first and

we just continue to roll with it oh my goodness wow that that nicholas reyes guy he's gotta go uh yeah wow wow i mean what a what a mea culpa there i when i was listening to the show to to add the time stamps so people could skip around i heard myself say explorers perk and i was like oh my goodness come on the excursionist perk and then you repeated it and i was like oh no here we go and i kept listening and i said oh my goodness we just rolled with that the whole time so yeah that was uh you know we're both pretty familiar i, with the excursionist perk. I mean, we've both written about it a few times before. And, you know, Hyatt Explorist, Hyatt has a partnership with American Airlines. So I apologize, United.

I know that Hyatt is not a close partner of yours, but somehow we mixed up Explorist and Excursionist. And so, yeah, it's the excursionist perk for future reference. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in our defense, those words are really similar. They basically mean the same thing. Which is to say that they're both meaningless, made up words. Yeah. Yeah.

But they both, you know, mean something like travel-ish and they both start with X and end with S. I mean, they're the same word. Close enough. It's all the same. All the same. At least up till now, not a single listener, to my knowledge, has called us out on that.

So I think maybe people didn't even notice. So what are we doing? Why are we doing this giant mail? Why would we tell people we were wrong? Editor, erase this segment. We'll go on to a Delta segment please all right um no let me let me drag out another piece of of uh giant mail uh this one comes from jonathan regarding last week we talked about the 250 united quest card and we talked about how the 250 dollars uh cost of the card is made up for if you're a regular United flyer because the card gives you $125 in United credit. So when you pay for United flights, you get $125 back.

And two times a year, you could get 5,000 point rebates for award tickets. And so Jonathan just wrote in with his personal experience and he had sort of good news and bad news about those two benefits. The good news is that he found that he was getting that $125 credit even when he used his card to pay award taxes and fees. That's excellent. his card to pay award taxes and fees so that's here's why that's yeah yeah here's why that's great news is even people who never fly united can then get that rebate because you could use your united miles to book awards uh that aren't necessarily flying united or they are whatever um and you'll get that that money back um a single flight like uh award flight from london uh especially business class will will uh people easily more than enough in fees to to trigger that full germany like almost anywhere in europe these days has taxes of around 100 bucks or germany is anything 125 france. So, yeah, you could totally use this in one shot.

Right, right, right, right. And remember, United Awards are free to cancel. So as long as you have the United Miles to book these, there's no risk in getting that $125 back by booking a speculative award flight. That's the good news. The sort of bad news is that the 5000 point rebates for booking United Awards, he found that they only happen when you book for the credit card holder themselves. So if you book like, yes, if you book, you know, an award for yourself and separately an award for your wife, let's say, you'll only get the one 5,000 points back. Interesting. Yeah. So it's kind of funny. So the one part was like great news for even people who don't fly United often. And the second one is more like, okay, I really need to fly United often to get both of those 5,000 point rebates.

Question. I didn't actually read Jonathan's full message message on this you did and put this in so uh so i have to double check are we sure that it's only for reward bookings made for the cardholder or multiple or is it just one per booking like if i book for me and my wife together i'll only get one five thousand mile rebate i can understand one per booking maybe, but if I book a separately, I still won't get the 5,000 unless I'm on the reservation. You know, I'm not sure he said, and that's a really good point because I think they're pretty clear that you

only get one 5,000 point rebate per booking. So maybe, yeah, it's a really good point. Maybe Jonathan was wrong about that, or maybe I read his email wrong. I don't have it in front of me. Not positive. Just figured it was the question that came to mind as I read that, because I thought, wow, do they really have it set up so that you have to be on the PNR?

I mean, I don't know. Obviously, easily possible for them to do just seemed surprising to me. But hey, maybe that's the case. So good, good feedback either way. And the fact that award taxes trigger the $125 credit, that's great news. And that makes me wonder about the $25 credit on the IHG cards, the $25 United. But that's a travel bank credit, right? So that wouldn't work. That's right. Never mind. Don't listen to that Nicholas Reyes guy. He thinks it's the Explorers perk.

All right, let's move forward. Let's talk about this week's card talk. What do we have up for card talk this week? All right. Today, we've. Let's talk about this week's card talk. What do we have up for card talk this week? All right. Today, we've got the Capital One Venture X. There's both a personal version of it and a business version, and they're nearly identical. We'll point out where they vary, but both of them have an annual fee, $395, no foreign exchange fees, and free authorized user cards so so there you go to start with

both cards earn basically two I shouldn't say basically they earn two capital one miles per dollar spent in general overall each mile that you earn can be redeemed for one cent towards travel, but you're better off or you can get better value by transferring those miles to airline or hotel programs and booking valuable awards. Both of them have the ability to earn more than 2x for certain things. So you can earn 10X for hotels and rental cars booked through Capital One Travel. And you can earn 5X for flights booked through Capital One Travel. So yeah, so that's pretty good earning. And then here's probably the best thing for people who are not liking that $395 annual fee is that you get $300 off of travel bookings made through Capital One Travel each year. So as long as you book travel through Capital One Travel, you're getting basically $300 of your annual fee back in a way. You also get 10,000 bonus miles every anniversary.

So when you renew your card, 10,000 bonus miles. So that combination of $300 off travel plus 10,000 bonus miles every anniversary. So when you renew your card, 10,000 bonus miles. So that combination of $300 off travel plus 10,000 bonus miles pretty much makes up for the annual fee or better depending on how you value those miles. It also gives you, like any ultra premium card, it gives you a global entry or TSA pre-check credit. And it gives you lounge access. So it gives you access to Capital One lounges when you're flying through. There's not very many airports yet that have Capital One lounges, but there's a few and they're very highly regarded. And it gives you priority pass membership with unlimited guests. Here's where the business and consumer cards differ the most. The business card version of Priority Pass gives you access to Priority Pass restaurants

and experiences. So experiences are things like minute suites or there's massages at certain places. The personal one does not. You only get into lounges. That's it with that version of Priority Pass. And then they both also give you access to Plaza Premium lounges. They both give you cell phone insurance and access to Premier Collection hotels, which is kind of like Capital One's version of fine hotels and resorts where you get to book, you know, kind of luxury like hotels and you get extra benefits like early check-in, late checkout, some property credits to use and free breakfast, things like that. Yeah. The slightly interesting thing about Premier Collection is that they seem to have

a different collection of hotels. Like, whereas a lot of the luxury booking programs all have the same hotels. If you go to Virtuoso or Amex, find hotels and resorts or other platforms, you'll probably find similar hotels in a lot of cases, which makes sense. They're good luxury hotels for the most part. But the Premier Collection has somehow made an effort to include different hotels, hotels that you often won't find on other platforms. So that's either a plus or a minus, depending on you look at it but it you know it is something different so yeah differentiator from other cards so yeah i mean i when i look at these cards i like both of them

quite a bit and in fact so i want to go back to when you talked about how they earned 2x everywhere and those can be transferable males and so you can get tons of value out of them capital one's got great transfer partners really i mean i think that they have a solid, solid set that I personally love membership rewards. I know everybody likes Chase for Hyatt, Chase Ultimate Rewards for Hyatt. But I think for flights, MX Ultimate Rewards is tough to, or MX Ultimate Rewards, MX Membership Rewards is tough to beat for their transfer partners. But Capital One comes pretty close. They've got a really, really good set of transfer partners. So I think that that's a big plus, and you get a lot of value in that 10,000 miles every year that you get, you could use to huge value. I mean, I booked my family round trip to Hawaii this year for 15,000 each because I use

Turkish miles and smiles to fly from Newark to Honolulu round trip for 15k per person. So you can get a lot of value out of those 10,000 bonus miles, depending on how many hoops you're willing to jump through with a partner like Turkish. But that can be a great benefit on its own. However, what I wanted to jump back to quickly is how you talked about how you can redeem miles for one cent each towards travel purchases. And you kind of said not that you'd want to. And while I generally totally agree with that, the one situation where I think about it sometimes is like my chase points, I could book travel one and a half cents each, but I don't really want to book hotels that way because I want to get elite benefits and elite credits. So I could book

flights that way, but I'm hesitant to do that because I need most of my chase ultimate rewards points to transfer to Hyatt. So when it comes to travel purchases where I'm not booking an award, I've actually found myself booking on the Capital One card lately to use the miles as a rebate. And it pains me a little bit to only get one cent per mile. And of course, I can use my cash back cards and use cash back to get a slightly better value. But if I put it on the Capital One card, I get the flexibility of 90 days to decide, okay, do I want to use cash or do I just want to erase this with the points? So I actually, even though it's not the very best, I have cashback cards, but sometimes every now and then it's tough to take the cash out of the bank, even though

it's logical and pay for travel that way. So I've actually used the purchase eraser feature on travel a few times lately. I have to admit that maybe not the best value ever, but I'll take it because Capital One miles are pretty easy to replenish at 2X everywhere. So yeah. Yeah. And let me also add another aspect in the point earning. So earning 10X for hotels and car rentals booked through Capital One travel. In the past, I haven't liked that. But you know what? Now that Hotels.com has tanked their rewards program. So they used to be like where I would go if I was going to book an independent hotel because the rewards program was pretty good. But the rewards program isn't good anymore and so earning 10x booking hotels you know as long as i can get i as i can still get um you know the same price i would get elsewhere i think that's great um now uh the sapphire reserve card has the same benefit so then it's just do you prefer earning ultimate rewards points with Chase or Capital One

Miles with Capital One? So I think that's actually a pretty darn good benefit. That is actually, and it's a good point. And I'm glad you made it because it makes me think of a relevant tip to toss in because I recently wrote about searching for, actually it was for Premier Collection Hotels, but the same tip is going to apply here when you use capital one's hotel search feature if you put in a city and a date it gives results pretty quickly be patient give it a minute because it gives results but it continues to populate more and so initially it'll show like 20 or 30 hotels but if you give it like a minute 90 seconds two minutes you may end up with 100, 150 hotels. It just keeps adding more to it.

So you may have to wait. It's kind of annoying. I hate how they do it. Instead of just giving you like paginated results some way or something, it's like it's just silly. It refreshes slowly and adds more hotels. So that's just a tip. And in fact, it's one that I mentioned because just last night I was looking to book an independent hotel and I was looking at hotels. So that's just a tip. And in fact, it's one that I mentioned because just last night, I was looking to book an independent hotel and I was looking at hotels.com and I was like,

oh, I can book this through Capital One instead and get 10X. Maybe I should do that. And so I went to Capital One Travel and I looked and I didn't find the same property. And I was like, oh, okay, it's not listed on here. And thinking about it right now as we speak, I probably just didn't wait long enough. So I didn't book it yet. I'm going to go back and check again. I probably just hadn't refreshed yet. I know that and still didn't have the patience to think to wait. So I wanted to mention that for readers that don't use that platform very often, that the hotel booking search, you really have to wait. I just used also the $300 annual travel credit on flights. So I found that that can be an easy way

to use up the travel credit. So. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, overall, my review is that I think these are excellent cards, you know, that anyone who travels semi-regularly can basically get the value of the annual feedback each year and get all these perks, like the lounge access and, you know and better earnings for hotels booked through the portal and all that kind of stuff. Sort of for free if you want to. And you're earning 2x everywhere of valuable points. And so that's excellent. You don't need to, you know, like Citi lets you do that with their double cash or 2x everywhere.

But then you've got to pair it with another card in order to make those points transferable. In this case, it's all in one. Just have the one card. You can get good value from Capital One Miles that way. So I give it a thumbs up. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that it's a great solution for a wide range of people. You know, I think people like you and I have a lot of credit cards. So we often have something that gives a good category bonus

on a lot of different types of purchases. Or we have cards like the Double Cash or like the Blue Business Plus that can also be good for everywhere else purchases or Bank of America premium rewards, et cetera. But I frequently see questions from people who say, you know, I have the Sapphire Preferred and I put everything on it.

And now I'm thinking about adding a second card and I'm like, oh my goodness, you're putting everything on it at 1X. Like just get a VentureX or a VentureX business. And if that's going to be you, if you're going to get a card and you're going to put a ton of purchases on it at 1X, don't do that. Either get a 2% cash back card or better yet, get a card like this where you're earning valuable transferable points still, but also a good return to erase travel purchases if you want. And it's a good long-term value. At $395, it sounds like it's expensive. But if you're, like you said, if you're able to use the travel credit every year, which has not been difficult for me, and use miles to good value, it's like a better than, I don't know. I mean, I find it like a net win

keeping one of these cards around. And in fact, we've thought about getting another one for the household because it is a slight net win. And then we always have a card on us. Of course you can add free authorized users. So that's, you know, that makes that relatively easy to my authorized user card got compromised and I haven't replaced it yet. And I was like, you know what, maybe I'll just get my own, uh, venture X businessX business or something and then not have to worry about that. So anyway, good car you go. Good car. Yeah.

All right. We like those. Let's talk about crazy thing next. So what crazy thing did Marriott do this week? Welcome back, Marriott. So Marriott has introduced two new brands to their portfolio because they don't have enough brands? They don't have enough brands. They needed a couple more. They need more choice, right? Come on. They didn't have enough choice with the 29 brands or whatever that they had. I needed at least 31.

Yeah, yeah. You know, when they took over Starwood Preferred Gas, that exploded the number of brands that were in marriott's portfolio and you would think that they would be looking to make sense of them and consolidate trim it back a little bit right like put a couple together like autograph collection luxury collection tribute portfolio i have no idea what the difference is it's just awesome together you know make it wow no no idea what the difference is. No idea whether I'd get breakfast or not with elite status at any given one of them. But we do know with these two new brands, Marriott Apartments, you won't get breakfast. Thanks for clarifying that for us, Marriott, right off the bat. And Four Points Express by Sheridan is the other new brand.

And that one, actually, if you have platinum status or better, you will get free breakfast, believe it or not. So, yay. It's Express. It'll kick you out the door nice and early, probably, or something, right? I mean, like, what does that even mean, 4 Points Express? I think it means you shouldn't expect much of anything for your stay, is my guess. And Marriott is going to go right ahead and make that true right don't don't complain when your free breakfast is a stale bagel let me put it that way um the the other crazy thing is that they've added another

brand the four points express where you only earn one elite night for every two nights that you stay in these hotels. So that's just weird. That's just dumb. So the Four Points Express is not the express train to elite status. Let's be clear. If you're looking for the express path to elite status, you do not want Four Points Express in your life. Stay away. Right, right right right uh you know and the apartments

look like they could be interesting depending on how they're priced because they they look like they'll be nice basically apartments so it's somewhere between you know if you don't need to rent uh an actual apartment for many months but need something shorter term but longer than a typical hotel stay this might be a really good choice because they have full kitchens and I think they have laundry as well. Yeah. I mean, it does look pretty nice. So, and you also are going to be able to redeem rewards there too. Right. So I don't, we don't yet know if it's going to be awards similar to regular hotels or not. Right. But, but supposedly you're gonna be able to redeem rewards. So that's nice. That's good. And you will earn one elite knight for every night of your stay in the apartment. So that actually surprised me.

I would have more expected that to be that half elite knight the way the other one was because I think a typical stay, you're going to be looking at a long, long stay. So people are going to easily, who make use of apartments, are easily going to earn high-level elite status, I think. You know, my guess is that this is all a money thing, right? Because the brands that offer one elite night for every two nights stay just tend to be really cheap brands. And so I assume it's just not enough money coming back to Marriott for them to justify the elite night. So that's my guess anyway. So the apartments will probably be priced such that that's fine. Just like the Marriott homes and villas, you get one elite night for every night stayed.

Right. So I guess that makes sense. What I wonder is like, what happens when you end up with half an elite night? Like you stay one night or you stay like three nights or something. It's just like, are they going to round up at some some point you end up with 49 and a half elite nights are you going to be short of status and need another night you know like it's just dumb right yeah yeah i'm sure the uh you know programmers behind the the website and app are really thrilled with this must love that must love that yeah well and, and then just imagine the

customer service calls again when somebody calls and they're like, but like count the nights. I look, I've spent 60 nights in Marriott hotels or whatever, 50 nights, whatever it is. And how do I not have enough elite night credit? Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. You have 49 and a half. That's not good enough for platinum status. days at the four points express only gave you half a night each like what what do you mean half a night i was there all night long it's not you know an hourly rental come on get out of here it's crazy so uh yeah marianne thanks for you know joining us for what crazy thing it just uh i i wish you'd just make one elite night per night everywhere and or condense these brands too many brands too many

brands all right award talk we got a lot of stuff going on with award talk this week so let's talk about award talk first up alaska mileage plan has redone things or shifted things or introduced an entirely new award chart system for 2024 right they? They sure have. So starting in March 2024, all the old award charts are out the window and replaced with new ones. And in the old days, meaning today as we record this, most awards are based on individual award charts. So you have a different one for like different partners of Alaska. But now everybody except Alaska itself will be on the same set of award charts. So like if you're flying partners, it'll all be based on one set of award charts. Eventually, you'll be able to mix and match partners on a single award, which you cannot do today. So that'll be a big improvement. Um, the Alaska has today some really awesome sweet spot awards. Those are gonna be gone. So if you're hoping to, you know, if you're hoping to fly to, uh, Southeast Asia or, or Australia in business class or first class really really cheaply think again no more of that no more of that but um but the new awards are uh are not nearly as bad as many

of us feared um so you know some of the fear came from when they introduced new partners in the last few years, they introduced new award charts for those partners and they were terrible, like just just awful. And so this is actually compared to other programs, a competitive award chart. And in some ways, it's very good. So let me talk through some of the some of the parts of it. So economy awards. Oh, no. First, let me back up. This is a new, these are distance-based award charts.

So the further you fly, the more you'll pay. But they copied right out of the Air Canada Aeroplan playbook, which is to say that instead of just having one distance-based award chart that tells you how much you'd have to pay based on distance flown, they have a whole bunch of them. And some of them line up so well with Air Canada's that it's hard to even believe that they didn't actually start with Air Canada's award chart and then adjust from there. I mean, I've seen like business class awards that cost exactly the same in both programs. However, their economy awards are cheaper. So they have very cheap economy awards on their new award charts. So I think you'll find when

flying economy that Alaska's new award charts are going to be very, very good. They also have cheap premium economy. So that's nice to have that sort of as an official thing. A lot of programs don't let you book awards on premium economy at all. And so having that option is going to be excellent. And business class, like I said before, it's competitive with other programs. You're not going to find a lot of like, wow, that's an amazing price. But you're also not going to find a lot of surprisingly awful prices. There's some. But not a lot of them. Not a lot of them.

Just don't compare to the previous award chart and you won't be hurt too badly. That's right. Compare to Air Canada instead. to the previous award chart and you won't be hurt too badly that's right that's right compare compare to to air canada instead even though they're they're you know totally separate alliances and everything um that if you compare to air canada things look good um they're keeping the the free stopovers that they have today so even on one-way awards you could get a free stopover. On a round trip, you could get a free stopover in both directions. So that's excellent. They're keeping the free changes and cancellations that you have today for awards. They are fixing or clarifying what the starting at award pricing means on their award charts. So we've complained about this. I don't know if

we've complained about it on the show, but we've certainly complained about this in print that Alaska's award charts, their prices say they're starting at. So in the new award charts, the smallest distance flights start at 4,500 points. But we've complained about that because that means nothing. If you're just going to tell me what the least could be, but not what it actually is going to be, what good is an award chart at all? Well, they've clarified that. So now if the partner that you're flying actually has saver level award space available, that starting at price is the price, full stop. So the reason that they have starting at listed there at all is because the next point, which is that in some cases, they have access to more partner award space

than what's available as saver level. So usually partners only have access to their partner saver level awards. In this case, Alaska sometimes has access to more award space. And in those cases, those awards are going to cost more. You know, that's so interesting. I've been working on a post about this for a while about how award booking has changed so much, like the weird state of award booking. And I haven't like gotten far enough yet into it.

I keep like starting and stopping on this, but it's weird because it used to be that an award that was available to one partner was available to partners, right? So you could book it with any partner miles. And that's increasingly not the case anymore. That it's become much more obscured in terms of which partners are going to have access to which seats.

And so that makes, I feel like award travel more complicated, even though they're trying to simplify. I think legitimately award programs are trying to simplify this and say, okay, well, this is the saver price, but you can redeem your miles anytime you want at this other price. I think that they're trying to make it easier for people, but it makes it more complicated when you're trying to explain it to somebody about how to get good value out of a program. So I have mixed feelings about the expanded partner availability. I can see why it's a benefit. I can also see that it complexifies things a little across the board, not just with Alaska,

but it's not an Alaska problem uniquely, just an observation of mine. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, totally. Things are changing. When I started in this hobby in around 2011, things were kind of clear cut once you understood what saver awards were. If you found a saver award on one airline, you knew you could book it with any of their partners and just go to whichever had the best award pricing for that flight. It just doesn't seem to work like that anymore. It's not quite like that anymore. Yeah, that's too bad.

But I will agree with you, though. The whole starting at thing immediately put me off until I understood that it was going to be that's the price if it's a quote unquote saver seat. So the nice thing there is if you're looking at a flight from New York to London and both American Airlines and British Airways have availability and economy class, then the starting at price is it. You're not going to get one price on American and a different price on British Airways unless it's non-saver availability. So I think that that is a great clarification because before, the reason to be clear why we complained about this whole starting at thing is that like Greg said, if it just says what it starts at, then they could charge whatever they want and they could devalue in sort of a hidden way because they don't have to tell you that

they're increasing the price on something. They could just slowly ratchet it up and say, oh, well, it's starting at 4,500 miles. It doesn't say that it's going to be 4,500 miles. It'll be 6,000 a day and 7,000 tomorrow and 8,000 next week. And they could have all these different prices, but they're not doing that. They were clear that they're not going to do it that way. It's going to be whatever that starting price is, is the safer reward. And so that should apply across partners, which is nice. Yep. Yep. And the last piece of news here is that they have promised to quarterly partner award sales. And my prediction, this is just totally out of left field and no evidence whatsoever, but that the early partner award sales, once these new charts go into effect,

I think will be on the partners where they've devalued the program the most to try to make up for it, give people a chance to book those, those partners at a reasonable rate before, um, you know, uh, before they get too mad about what happened. Um, so yeah, so that's Alaska. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a net win in most ways. It's a net win. I didn't like it because I like those, uh, the sweet spots that exist. And I feel like that's a niche for Alaska. But I think for the average person, this is a big win. It makes it a lot easier to understand and explain.

I also think you made the point that it seems like they kind of copied off the Aeroplan award chart. And I feel like Alaska Mileage Plan was long the darling of award travel bloggers. I feel like for a lot of years, they were touted as like one of the best, if not the best award programs, because they obviously have distance based earning on flights. And then they had these really good routing rules and the free stopovers and good award charts, sweet spots. But then they kind of fell out of favor as they had all of these no notice devaluations and changes to partnerships. In addition to partners with crazy award prices and a lack of trust to a certain extent. And so people have been writing about others. And

Air Canada Aeroplan is one that I think a lot of bloggers have gotten excited about. So I think it's interesting that they're doing something that kind of makes them more relevant in that space again. So kudos to them for that. I'm not thrilled with the changes personally, but overall, I think it's a net win. So that's the last comment. Okay. Yeah. Go ahead. I'm going to say one more thing. So some people have pointed out, or at least from their perspective, that things have gotten worse for West Coast flyers. And to some extent, I think that's probably true because, well, there's probably several ways in which it's true. But one way in which it's true is that some of Alaska's sweet spot awards were sort of mostly accessible from the West Coast and going to Asia or to Australia, for example. And so since those are gone and since Alaska is based in Seattle

and has a good route network on the West coast. They also were able to get, um, feeder flights as part of the same award to, let's say they had to leave out of San Francisco or something. They could, they could book that all as one award. Whereas those of us out on the East coast area, um, didn't, couldn't really do that. And so we'd have to book separate awards or flights to get to San Francisco and then use the Alaska award from there. And so those sweet spots were a little bit less sweet for those of us not on the West Coast. And so I think things have gotten sort of better for the rest of us and not as good for the people there maybe. And I just think that's interesting from the point of view of, we talked about, I think last week about how

often loyalty programs are worse for their own home turf and better for awards that are for flying from elsewhere to elsewhere. And that seems to be a little bit true in this case. Yeah, yeah, that's that's a good observation. Yeah. Yeah. And I personally, I wasn't super excited about this, because I feel like they didn't create any new sweet spots that I didn't already have pretty easy access to with other kinds of miles. So that's why I wasn't particularly excited about it, because I have plenty of miles and other programs. And I'm like, are they going to be the best bet in any of these cases? Or like, you know, words to Europe, for instance, Tim pointed out, got cheaper in some cases from the East Coast. And I was like,

well, okay, but there's so many good sweet spots from the East Coast to Europe that I don't really need another good way to book flights to Europe necessarily. So I was not that excited about that now. I'm sure somebody's going to tell me why I'm wrong about that. But I wasn't thrilled. However, I think another key point is that this will be good for economy class flyers. And a lot of people want to fly economy. And I like to see the premium economy award chart because it's oftentimes easier to find availability in premium economy than in business class. So if you're looking to fly in a little bit more luxury, and especially with multiple passengers, I think that's going to be really good news. So while I wasn't initially excited, and I mourn the sweet spots that are going to be lost, I think overall, there's a lot

of good news to be had, even though it's not necessarily that I'm like, oh, wow, I can't wait to book X or Y. I think overall, it makes it better. And it also makes me trust the miles more. I was hesitant. I was like, do you really want to collect Alaska miles at this point? Because we've got no idea what awards are going to cost. They keep introducing these new weird award charts and having these stealth evaluations. So I was very lukewarm at best on collecting more Alaska miles. This makes me more confident of the unified award chart.

So I feel like that. makes me more confident the unified award chart so yeah yeah the flip side of all that is that um because alaska is not a transfer partner from any of the transferable points currencies um you know it used to be there was there was good reason to try to earn their points through like their credit cards but now uh you know i i'm happy that the points I already have are still going to be valuable, but I'm not going to go out of my way to earn a lot of more. I mean, I'll be happy when I earn them because I can always transfer to British Airways or many other programs to book the same flights with a transferable currency system because you're right, there's very little reason to collect those specifically over others, these over transferable points where you'll have multiple options. So great point. But if you fly Alaska a lot for work, or you fly a lot of paid premium cabin flights on some of their partners, like you fly paid

British Airways business or first class flights, which sometimes you can find pretty good deals on, then you can earn tons of miles, tons of Alaska miles. And if you're doing some of that, well, great, your miles are still going to be relatively valuable here. But you're right, I guess their credit cards, ironically, become slightly less appealing because they don't have those sweet spots that you can't access otherwise. Interesting point. All right, but that's not it for award talk. We got other award talk. So let's talk about JetBlue points. JetBlue points became more valuable all of a sudden. Yeah, they did. Boy, we're going to be talking award talk till like 2024, it seems like. Yeah. So JetBlue, you know, last week we learned that you could use Qatar's points to book JetBlue flights. And now we've learned that we can now use JetBlue points to book Qatar flights.

And so the pricing is okay. I mean, it's kind of zone-based. So that's a good thing, meaning you'll pay like a fixed amount, like 70,000 points. Am I remembering this right, Nick? Yep, you are. 70,000 to book like Cutter Q Suites from the US to Doha. Exactly. And then if you fly beyond that, it's going to be more sort of distance-y based. We don't really have it all worked out.

They didn't announce something. So it's just a matter of searching and finding stuff. AwardWallet did a pretty good job of putting together, JT at AwardWallet did a good job of putting together some of the mileage rates essentially for different places. So yeah, it's not like similar to what we were saying about Alaska a few minutes ago. It's not going to be like, oh, I need to go get JetBlue points to book these flights because they're not going to be a better option. They're going to be an equal at best option to other options. But what I like about this is if you already have a bunch of JetBlue points because you earn them through the shopping

portal or you had credit cards in the past or you've booked paid flights on JetBlue and earned points, well, then this gives you a way to get outsized value, whereas JetBlue points were always capped at whatever they were worth towards JetBlue flights, like 1.3 cents or so, more or less, I think. That was it. You weren't going to get more than that. And now you can get more than that if you're going to use them to book a nice, fancy QSuite flight. So I think that's great news for anybody who's got a lot of JetBlue points. Again, not going to be something you're going to run out and look to use. But if I had the choice between using American Airlines miles or a few more JetBlue points to book the same flight, I might consider paying a few more JetBlue points, whatever that might be, because I know I'm not going to get similar value out of those JetBlue points for a JetBlue flight. So I think that's- Yeah, yeah. And before people complain about that, there are cases where you could get like around 2 cents per point value

with your JetBlue points because it has to do with several complicated things about how JetBlue figures out how many points are required for a JetBlue flight. But regardless of that, you're not going to be getting- It's a fixed value, whatever it is. You're not going to be getting like a $8,000 flight for 70,000 points.

Right. That's the type of thing you're going to be getting with Cutter, using your points in Cutter. Exactly. Yeah. So I think that's great news, especially also for people who are into JetBlue Elite status and are spending a lot on those credit cards. Now there's another way to use those all those points you're collecting. So that's really good.

Yep. Excellent. All right. And finally, Marriott rules for extending free night award certificates. You got some great information and updated the post this week. Right. I mean, we got some hot, hot tips. We really did. So a actual Marriott representative, someone who works in the loyalty care department, emailed us with all kinds of information, even a screenshot of what the reps see. They asked us not to share the screenshot itself, but could share the the contents of it and uh so we we learned about you know let's say you have a free night certificate that's gonna expire can you get it extended for another year and uh we previously had written all about it based just based on our own personal and our readers experiences that were reported

in and and it turned out we had most of it right and the the basic the basic idea was that people would call and be told by reps no it can't be done it's impossible and then call again and maybe be told that again but then maybe on the third try the the rep would just do it with no problem at all and and what we learned from from this email is basically why that's happening, or at least some of the reasons why. And so just at a very high level, one thing we learned that's really important is that not all call center reps have the ability. Some of them, they just don't have a button on the screen that would let them

extend a free night. But anyone who's in the loyalty care department does have that ability and supervisors have that ability. So that's the first step is just getting someone on the phone who has the ability. The second is that the story you tell as to why you weren't able to use your free night actually does matter. The reps have been told to extend them only when they're extenuating circumstances. And so my post lists examples of extenuating circumstances. But the basic idea is that you have to have a good story about why you weren't able to use it. And we also learned that other stuff matters. The reps are told to consider these questions. Does the member still have the credit card where they earned the free night from? Presumably, if they don't, the rep shouldn't necessarily extend it. Does the member use that card on a regular basis? Apparently, that's a good thing if you're active with using the card. And does the member stay regularly at Marriott hotels?

These are all things that could make a difference, but you're not guaranteed because these are just things that are in a memo that reps may or may not have read closely. But the most important thing I think is the finding that when we've said to call and call again and again, like it's, we weren't wrong about that. There's actually, we weren't wrong and there's actually a reason behind it. And that has to do with who can actually do it. Yeah. And the moral of the story is when, when a rep tells you, oh, no, sorry, we can't do that with Amex certificates anymore, only Chase certificates. Or when they say, oh, yeah, no, we stopped doing that on October 23rd or something. You know, don't don't buy this story. Don't argue with them, because if the button's not there on the screen, it's not there. Like, don't get upset and don't argue and don't

say, oh, so-and-so just did it last week or this or that. Just say, okay, thank you. Hang up and call again. Because there isn't a direct number to the loyalty care representatives. They're just randomly people that happen to answer and have a slightly different job title, apparently. So you just need to keep calling until you happen to get somebody who can do it. So don't waste your time and your breath and your energy arguing with someone who doesn't have an ability to do it. Either ask to speak your time and your breath and your energy arguing with someone who doesn't have an ability to do it. Either ask to speak to a supervisor, which who knows whether you actually get a supervisor on the phone or not, right? So I'd probably just hang up the call again, honestly, and know that eventually I'm going to get connected to somebody who can do it. So it is just a thing.

So yeah, and be ready to explain why you want to have it extended. And so, you know, that's another good piece of information to be able to explain why you weren't able to use it and, you know, would like to have it extended. So if at first you don't succeed, try, try again. That's a tip we've given people lots of times. And it turns out it's true. I thought this was absolute gold that we got this information. It really was. I'm so thankful to that person to reach out to us with all that good information.

It's fantastic. Awesome stuff. All right. We actually did finish award talk before 2024. So let's get into this week's main event. Main event time. A good deed is its own reward, but we can do better. I'm kind of proud of that title.

I like that. I like it. I like it. It was well done. Good wordsmithing there. All right. So we have a number of categories of things to talk about here, but first, this really has nothing to do with earning rewards, but how do you find charities that do good? I'm just going to touch on this really quickly. I'm not an expert on this, but I've been looking into this recently and just want to mention a few helpful things. For one, there are websites that help that rate charities in various ways. And so if you want to make sure you're giving to a charity that, you know, where most of the funds that you give actually are used to do some good as opposed to, you know, for overhead or whatever, then these tools can be really helpful. So I'm just

going to list them. I don't have any, you know, I'm not reviewing these tools. These are just what I've come across. There's one called Char charity navigator that's really well known there's charity watch which i think used to be called charity watch dog but it's now called charity watch uh guide star and great non-profits those are the four that i'm aware of um then here's another interesting thing i came across there There's something called GiveWell, and there's probably other things that do this as well, but GiveWell is a charity that gives money to other charities. So what they do, it's a fund. So think of it sort of like a stock market fund where they hold a whole bunch of stocks. And there are some people that decide which ones to hold based on being smart about that. In this case, what they're theoretically smart about is which giving opportunities, so which charitable giving opportunities will have the highest impact.

So they do a whole lot of research apparently. And so whatever you give to GiveWell, then in turn, will kind of automatically go to whatever charities have the most impact with that money. And that changes from time to time. And you can also use GiveWell within categories. So if there's categories of types of charitable contributions you want to give, Give can, GiveWell has multiple funds that you can pick from. And I'll also say that I looked up GiveWell on Charity Navigator and they got a great rating, 99% score.

So that's really terrific. That's interesting. Fascinating stuff. I mean, there's some good stuff to dig into there. If you are looking to share the wealth and give back, I think that those are interesting tools and I wouldn't have known about all of them. So I'm glad to hear about them and be able to check them out myself. So hopefully that helps some other people. It guides them, especially folks that perhaps aren't terribly familiar with those types of tools. Yeah. Yeah. Now let me talk about paypal giving fund have you heard about this one

nick no i don't know this one i mean i've probably seen it in an email but i i probably didn't read it closely enough so tell me more about it all right so this is really interesting paypal has this thing called paypal giving fund and and what they do is they uh list a whole bunch of charities. And if you give to those charities through the PayPal Giving Fund, so your money is actually going first to the PayPal Giving Fund, then being distributed, all of it, to the charity you picked,

PayPal's covering the credit card transaction fees. So you can use your credit card. The charity gets 100% of it. And so you're sort of doing maximal good while still earning your credit card rewards. So I really love that. Not all charities are on there, but they have a website, you know, public website for charities to apply to be on there. And in fact, I went to one local one that I support and ask them, please join this. I want to make sure that when I give to you with a credit card that you'll get 100% of it and not have to pay the transaction fees. And so they're looking into

that and hopefully we'll get on there soon. And I'll mention GiveWell, that charity fund I mentioned earlier is already on the PayPal Giving Fund. So you can give money that way too. It's sort of going through multiple levels before it gets to the charity, but 100% should go to those charities. So that's fantastic. Yeah, that's very interesting because of course the credit card transaction fees aren't free. And so if you are giving to a charity, even though you're not seeing a fee on your end when you're sending the money, obviously the organization that you're donating to is paying a credit card transaction fee in most cases, but not with this. So that's great. I mean, and for those people who just don't like PayPal, then, hey, like stick them with the transaction fees for your charitable giving. I think it's good that they have this. And so, yeah, that's cool. Yeah. Yeah. And now here's another category of giving in a way where you could use your credit card. So Kiva microloans, these are people around the world who have applied for a microloan, a small loan in order to keep their business afloat or to get maybe materials that they need for their business or all kinds of different things. Basically, you're helping out. It's mostly

helping out people in usually impoverished countries that really need some funds in order to make a living. And they do most of the time pay back those loans and when you make loans through kiva when those loans are paid back you get 100 of your money back you don't earn interest of any type and there's no guarantee that you'll get all your money back but eventually you can get your money back it's not not immediate like the paypal giving funds pay PayPal covers the credit card transaction fees that go through Kiva. So PayPal was a big backer of Kiva when it started. And so you can make these loans with your credit card and nobody is being sort of harmed by you earning rewards other than PayPal themselves. And a couple of things to know is

even if you get 100% of your money back, this is nowhere near free, especially as interest rates are higher because your money's not in the bank earning interest during that time. So if your money comes back a year later, you've lost a year of interest on that money. Also, unlike charitable giving, you cannot take any kind of tax deduction for the Kiva microloans, even if you... My understanding is even if they don't pay back. So those are some downsides, but I believe it's doing really good stuff. Preston Pyshko, MD, MPH, And you visited the Kiva headquarters before, right? So you've met some of the people involved with us and feel pretty strongly that they're trying to do good in the world. Absolutely. It's a great organization with just very, very passionate young adults who are,

you know, really believe they can make the world better and are doing something significant to actually, in my opinion, make the world better. I also did a real deep dive because microloans have been controversial at times. There have been articles that have come out saying that they're not doing good and everything. And so I did a deep dive into a bunch of research on it. And while there's no factual, this is definitely the case conclusion, it seems like the overwhelming evidence is they actually are doing good in general. And I believe that especially, like you said, having met the people that are doing this

work and just putting in all their effort into making sure that what they're doing is doing good. I love it. Very good. All right. So you got some different ways to determine places to give or how to go about giving. Now, how do you earn rewards on that money? If you're going to be giving a bunch of money, it would be nice to be able to earn some rewards back. So how can you earn rewards?

Yeah. So every now and then there are different opportunities to get to earn miles or some kind of points or whatever by giving to a charity. Right now, for example, Stand Up For Cancer is offering 10 American Airlines points per dollar that you give to stand up for cancer. Charity Watch gives this organization an A. So, you know, for what that's worth, that sounds pretty good. You do not earn American Airlines loyalty points, so it won't help you towards elite status, but you can get a lot of miles back from donating there. So that's pretty good.

Now, that kind of that category of things where you see opportunities to earn miles for giving a charity that changes all the time. So I would just, you know, do some Googling when you're ready to do that and see what's available at the time you're doing it. And we've occasionally seen them increase that, right? So we've occasionally seen opportunities where they've offered even more. So like you said, it changes all the time. So keep an eye on your email for opportunities like that. Yeah. Yeah. Now where we have a lot to talk about is with credit card rewards. So US Bank, they have a few cards that earn 2X for charitable contributions, but you could get 2X everywhere with a bunch of cards. So, meh.

Yeah. Use whatever card you want. If you're not earning at least 2X on your charitable donations, then the U.S. bank card is not the answer to all of your problems. We need to get you the right card to earn or to be using for your everywhere else purchases. Right, right, right. So you could do better because there are a bunch of cards that earn 2X everywhere and they earn transferable points. So Citi Double Cash earns two thank you points per dollar spent. The American Express Blue Business Plus card earns two membership rewards points per dollar spent,

up to $50,000 per calendar year. And then it goes down to one X. And the Capital One Venture, the Capital One Venture X, the Capital One Venture X for business. Yeah. So all of those are miles. Oh, yeah. I forgot Spark Miles. Yeah.

Yeah. So Capital One actually has quite a big lineup of two X everywhere options. So yeah, there's a lot going on there. So those are all good options. Or you can also get a lot of cash back. about Bank of America, how it has this sort of elite banking program where if you have at least $100,000 in savings with Bank of America and or Merrill Edge and or Merrill Lynch, you can get up to 2.62% cash back on all your spend. And so that's, you know, if you have that, if you're in that situation, that's a good way to use one of those cards to donate to charities. Or credit card big spend bonuses. I'm not even going to go very far into this category because there are so many credit cards that offer some kind of perk once you meet a spending threshold. And just to give an example, there are a couple of Hilton cards where once you spend $15,000 in a calendar year,

you get a free night that's good at any hotel, any Hilton hotel worldwide when a standard room is available. The consumer Hyatt card has the same thing. And you know, there's just a lot of different types of big spend bonuses as well. Sometimes you earn elite credits. So depending on how you value those things and what cards you have, you can look at that yourself. Quick plug. If you go to our best offers page near the top, you'll find a link in there somewhere that says best big spend bonuses, right? There's a best category bonuses page, but we have a best big spend bonuses page where you can go to the page and look at all the various cards and see which ones have the best big spend bonuses that fit your needs, right? Because it depends on what you value. Do you value the companion certificate on an American Airlines card? Do you value earning JetBlue mosaic status? And depending on how much money

you're giving, those things certainly could be considerations for you. So go to our best big spend bonuses page. And if you can't find it on the website, we'll just look in the show notes because like, you know, is always the case. We'll put the link to that in the show notes. So check that out for best big spend bonuses that those can come in handy if you're going to be making a sizable donation. Yep. Yep. And now here's an even better category or even better in that there are bigger rewards available than what we've talked about so far. Buying Visa or MasterCard gift cards when they're on sale and earning a category bonus when you're doing so. What am I talking about here, Nick? You know. Well, you know, office supply stores frequently run fee-free gift card sales. In fact, as we record this, I think there's one going at Staples this week and there was one going

at Staples last week and I don't know about next week yet, but there's frequently these sales where you can buy gift cards with no activation fee. So it frequently happens at Staples and OfficeMax or Office Depot. And of course, there are a few cards on the market that earn five points per dollar or 5% cash back at office supply stores. So if you have a chasing cash card, for instance, you can earn 5X on the first $25,000 per year spent at office supply stores and Staples will usually allow you to buy up to eight gift cards per customer per day at the fee-free activation or rather with the fee-free activation promotion. So you could easily walk into a Staples and buy $1,600 worth of gift cards and walk out with $1,600 that you

can then give to a charity if you're able to use a card online and you'll have earned yourself 8,000 Chase Ultimate Rewards points, which obviously can be quite valuable as a return. So if you were to do that with your charitable giving, that's one way you could do it. Not the only option though, giftcards.com also, especially around this time of year, frequently offers discounts on their virtual visas and virtual master cards. I think we've seen virtual visa recently had a sale 5% on the $100 cards, but we've seen better. So we've seen the opportunity to get, I think, like $75 off on $1,500 or so, something like that, where it'll come out to be slightly better than fee-free, in fact. And you can go through a shopping portal in many cases.

I just got an offer from Capital One Shopping for 12% back at giftcards.com. So I placed a big gift card order with my 12% back. So stack that right on top of the fact that there was a sale on the Visa gift cards, for instance, and that becomes a great return. So that's another option. And again, we talk about the virtual visas and virtual MasterCard there, because those are the ones that frequently offer the sale and because they're easy to use online and come through relatively instantly. So they can be a good option. You don't have to worry about paying any shipping fees. So you can use your gift cards from your virtual gift cards from giftcards.com or your physical ones from an office supply store,

or maybe you've got a card that gets a good bonus at US supermarkets. And so you buy a couple of $500 cards at a US supermarket and earn enough rewards to offset the fees on those. And then use your gift cards to contribute to charity or to microloans, all of the things that we've been talking about. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a great way to go. But I think the best way to go, if you're planning on doing big charitable giving, is to sign up for new cards with the great big welcome bonuses. You mentioned, Nick mentioned earlier, our best offers page that lists the best credit card offers that are available. You could be talking about earning 150,000 points. It

depends on the card and the offer, but all of these big offers, most of the big offers require a pretty big amount of spend in order to earn the points. And so if you're going to be contributing a lot of money to a charity or through microloans anyway, why not earn a big welcome bonus for your effort? And that's really going to be the most rewarding way as far as getting points back for your dollar spent to donate and to contribute to Kiva Loans. Yeah, yeah.

This is actually one that I just did recently because we were making a contribution to a scholarship, a memorial scholarship fund for a family member that passed away. And so we were making a donation and my wife's parents were making a donation. And I said, well, if we're going to donate this, maybe we can turn this into a rewarding situation, too. And in fact, another family member mentioned it to me first and said, oh, well, I thought about this and I got a new card because I realized that he had a new bonus. And so they, it was even,

I was pleasantly surprised that a family member thought of that even before I had mentioned it. So anyway, we were able to do that and earn the most, we did most of the spend for a new business gold card. There's been a targeted 150K offer out. We gotk on it anyway and did most of the spend with a couple of charitable gifts there so that was uh you know that was a nice return on spend there that worked out well and in fact in that case i think i don't know if there was a way to have contributed without a card i think that was the only option for contributing or at least the only one that we saw so maybe there's a way to send a check. I don't know, but who has a check these days? So, you know, so we were using a card for that either way. So it was great to earn a nice return and rewards on that also. Yeah. And of course you can combine these

techniques. So for example, you could sign up for a brand new Chase Inc cash card that has a 90,000 point offer as we're recording this and then go to staples and buy these are master gift cards whichever ones were you know are on sale that week and and uh then use those cards to donate to charity so that that combination is incredibly rewarding and don't forget i'm going to mention we didn't have this in the list but i'm going to mention don't forget if you have uh you know check with your employer because some employers offer matching. And so like in the past, when we've done a donation to something, we, you know, we've talked about that in our family and decided, oh, okay, well, we're all going to give through this person, this person's employer network because they got a match.

And so we can double the impact. And so, so that, that's something else to consider. Do you have that available? Yeah. Hey, that's a great point. Okay. Now, another category of things that you can do is use your miles to contribute to charity. Whatever kind of miles you have, the airline or hotel probably has a webpage saying, here's how you can contribute your points.

And so you could do your own research to see whether those are valuable charities or not. As a big picture thing, I don't usually like to donate my points and miles that way for a couple reasons. One, there's no tax incentive for doing so. You can't claim it on your taxes. But two, I don't necessarily trust that charities are using these points in efficient ways. So points that might be worth one and a half cents each to me because I know how to use them well are probably just being cashed out for a fraction of a cent each by these charities. So in most cases, that's definitely not true everywhere, but that's my general hesitation. That said, there are situations where I think it's the right thing to do. One, let's say you have your miles are about to expire due to inactivity. You can often just donate, you know, 500 miles or whatever, and that creates activity that will keep your account active. So that's one. Another is I think a lot of people have small number of miles in accounts where they don't think they'll ever earn more.

A lot of times you might be just like, oh, well, they're going to expire and I don't care because I'm never going to use them anyway. Well, why not donate them before they expire? I think that that'd be a great way to use them. And even if they don't expire, if you just know you're never going to use them, you know, I think giving them, donating them is a great, great option. And I came across a really interesting option too, is with,, is with Air France KLM Flying Blue. They advertise that you can earn XP for miles donations. XP is experience points, which give you, you need to earn a certain number of experience points

to earn elite status with Air France and KLM. So for every 2,000 miles you donate, you get a one experience point with Flying Blue. So if you're big into donations and you have a lot of Flying Blue points that you want to give away and you're interested in elite status. So if you're if you have that sort of unusual combination, there you go. You can earn your elite status by by being giving. There you go. That's an interesting one. I've never heard of that before. So that was news to me. All right. Well, that ties that up, I think. So we got a bunch of different ways that you can donate and make that donating more rewarding and perhaps then consider donating more because, you know, you'll get X amount back in rewards. So so, you know, whether you're giving in this season or another, that's, I think, a good, good roundup of the different things to consider.

So that brings us to the question of the week. This week's question of the week is one that came in from Mike via email. So Mike said, a few months back, I was lucky enough to snag a Delta SkyMiles flash sale to Sydney, Australia, from my home airport of Grand Rapids, Michigan, for spring break. The flight's for 64,000 miles plus taxes, which is an amazing deal. That was roundtrip. My wife and I, along with our two children aged 13 and 18, are planning on going. We'd love to travel. However, is traveling this distance, like all the way to Australia for what amounts to about nine days crazy. We've never been to Australia and this would be the furthest that we've ever flown. So they've got nine days during

spring break. They got a good deal at 64,000 miles round trip. But is that really enough time to consider going all that way, Greg? Yeah. Mike, I think you'd be crazy not to do it. So the reason I love this question, or one of the reasons I love this question, it mimics so closely to something that happened to me about 15 or 16 years ago. The three of us in my family, so my wife and our, I think it was nine-year-old son at the time, found great airfare deals to Sydney, Australia. So it's the same destination, flying from Michigan, just like Mike. Are you sure you're not Mike? Are you just trying to slide this one in here, Mike?

In our case, we only had a week. So we didn't have nine luxurious days. We only had a week. And it was probably a terrible trip, right? You regret it still? Yeah. That meant only six days in Australia. And so we spent the whole six days in the Sydney, in a hotel in Sydney. Didn't leave the room. We didn't leave the room. No, we did things in the Sydney area. We did a day tour of the Blue Mountains, which was fantastic. We just did. There's so many fun things to do in that area.

And it broke us out of a hole we were in where we, before we were like oh we can't go anywhere as far away as like california unless we've got two weeks we could spend and and you know what we went all the way to australia for a week and had a fantastic time um we've stopped worrying about are we going to be able to see all of Australia in the limited time we have there? No, we aren't going to be able to see all of Australia because there's no way to do it in that, you know, well, in that amount of time, we don't have to, because if we like Australia from this trip, we'll go back some other week that we have available and, and do it that way. So I, a fantastic trip. All three of us loved

it. I would have been, you know, knowing what I know now, if we decided not to do it because it was only one week, I'd be really disappointed in myself. So go, Mike, go. Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. You know, the nice thing about playing this game is that we play with these points that don't have, in many cases, a cash value and that we have the ability to generate more of. And so, you know, Greg's point about if you don't like it, then you don't have to go back. And if you do, then go ahead. Or if you just decide you want to see a different part of Australia, you'll be able to earn the miles to do that again someday. So I think it really eliminates the idea of a once in a lifetime trip, which is weird that I think that that's a good thing. But it is because there are very few places where I feel like I'll never get again. You know, I feel like if I want to, I can go back. So if I'm only there for two days or three days or whatever it might be, OK, I'll see if I like it.

And if I decide that it's a place I want to go back to again in the future, or if I feel like I just didn't give it enough justice, I always can make that happen again. So I enjoy that. I love that about this hobby, that it does make it possible and reasonable to consider using your miles for something that isn't the perfect, what you thought was the perfect situation. You can test things out like this. So yeah, I would totally go for a week. Absolutely, Mike. I wouldn't hesitate. Yeah. Yeah. And you know what you said about it doesn't have to be that once in a lifetime trip. You're so right. And I was trying to articulate that, that a big problem with this idea of a once in a lifetime trip is everything has to be perfect. You have to go to

every single thing that someone said, don't miss this, don't miss that. And it becomes a huge barrier because, oh, well now we have to have three weeks free, four weeks free, whatever, because, oh, you're all the way over there. You might as well go to New Zealand too. That's the trap you get in when you think of these things as once in a lifetime. Stop thinking of it as once in a lifetime. Think of it as like, this is the thing we're going to do this spring break. We might do something similar next spring break. And when you start thinking of it that way, I think you're going to just be so much freer to enjoy whatever great opportunities come your way. You know, the next award sale that you stumble upon might be to somewhere else.

Great. Do it and enjoy that trip, too. Yeah, I think, you know, it's easy to get trapped in that if you're used to spending money on travel, like if you're used to booking paid tickets in general. And so you're like, well, if I'm going to spend I don't know what it is for an economy class round trip to Australia, probably $1,000, $2,000, right? I'm going to spend $2,000 a person, then I got to see everything, right? So if we're going to put $8,000 into it, I think it can be very easy where you'd be like, oh, well, I'm not spending eight. I'm going to spend the same amount that I'm going to spend on food and entertainment wherever we go. Essentially, it was similar anyway. Obviously, there's somewhat differences in how much things cost in different places. But generally speaking, I'm going to spend what I can afford on food and entertainment wherever we go.

And so if I'm able to use these miles that I can essentially keep finding ways to earn more of, whether it's donating in ways that we talked about today or some other way, then it feels less. There's so much less pressure. I think that's what eliminates the pressure is the fact that it doesn't feel like cash. So I don't feel the same pressure that I can't do it again in the future. You'll have another opportunity to get to Australia someday if you keep collecting more points. So So yeah, definitely. I think we agree. Go, go, go, go, go, Mike, don't even hesitate. Just go and have a great time. I mean, my goodness, Australia is a fantastic destination. I've been a few times, which if you asked me 10 years ago, if I thought

I would ever get to Australia, I might have said I hope so someday. You know, and if you asked me 10 years ago, if I thought I would ever get to Australia, I might have said, I hope so someday. You know, and if you ask me, do I think I'll go multiple times? I don't like, no, probably not. And so far, you know, it's expensive, blah, blah. And yet here I am. I've been there. I don't even know, four or five times. I couldn't tell you off the top of my head, but a few times. And I have another flight booked for next year, though. We've changed plans. I'm not going to do that anymore. But that's the thing. You do keep earning these miles. You can make that happen if you want to.

Obviously, you need the time and the money to do whatever it is you want to do when you get there. But time is not a constraint that I worry about terribly. So you should go, Mike, and go back someday. There you go. All right. Unfortunately, we're out of time for today, though. We've gone way over. So whoever has been mowing the lawn today, I guess, you know, or we're working out. You're welcome. I gave you some extra time to get

that stuff done. But but we're out of time for today. So if you've enjoyed today's episode, you'd like to get more in your email inbox each day or each week. You want to go to frequent miler dot com slash subscribe again. That's frequent miler dot com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media, join our frequent miler insiders Facebook group, where you can ask questions and interact with lots of other people who are enthusiastic about this stuff every day. And if you have a piece of feedback that you'd like to be considered for a giant mailbag or a future question of the week, you can send that to send it to mailbag at frequent miler.com. Bye everybody.