Frequent Miler on the Air - Advanced Award Booking Techniques | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep279 | 11-1-24

Episode Date: November 1, 2024

If you learn a few advanced tricks, you can book awards for less miles than you'd think, and for better products or flights than you might think as well. (01:07) - About our Coffee Break: Earn miles while saving and paying for college | Coffee Break Ep31 | 10-28-24 | Podcast See episode 31 of Coffee Break "Earn miles while saving and paying for college" here. (01:36) - Giftcards dot com added fee - it still seems to be earning GCdotcom rewards, but might not last (02:14) - One reader says as of 2024, you can rollover 529s into Roth IRAs. Learn more about our ongoing challenge at https://millionmilemadness.com (05:44) - Quick recap SAS Eurobonus allows points pooling (Read more about SAS points pooling here.) (06:52) - Stephen is all booked! Read Stephen's Million Mile Madness journal here. (08:35) - Read Nick's Million Mile Madness journal here. (11:36) - Greg: "Speed and Style" Read Greg's Million Mile Madness journal here. (17:05) - Marriott Homes & Villas promo: Stay 2+ nights & spend $1k+ to earn 30K bonus points Read more about the Marriott Homes & Villas promo here. (18:24) - Choice enhances program in 2025 Read about Choice Privileges improvements coming in 2025 here. (20:19) - Virgin Atlantic's dynamic award pricing is live Read more about Virgin Atlantic's dynamic award pricing here. (23:03) - United increasing elite requirements for 2025 (24:41) - DOT Refund Rule (26:56) - JetBlue's excellent status match Find our episode about JetBlue's status match here. (27:39) - Last minute bookings/changes (29:53) - Same day changes (32:09) - What is Skiplagging? (35:37) - Mix cabins for lower prices (39:25) - Start to End Distance based pricing (43:37) - Weird pricing (45:50) - Distance based award tricks... (51:59) - Avoid sucky programs (1:01:33) - How can I time an Amex Platinum consumer card downgrade to gold card in order to get maximum credits from each, and what happens if I upgrade again later... would I get the benefits again?

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, advanced award booking techniques. We're going to tell you about some of the tricks that we use to book awards that go beyond the just find award availability, but to where you can get awards cheaper or sometimes just better awards for low prices.

Yeah, I mean, I'm excited about this. These are some of the things that we do all the time or at least think about or check or try. And so hopefully you'll find some help in a couple of these tidbits along the way. But before we get into all that, I want to remind you that you can always find the timestamps in the show notes. So don't forget to expand the show notes if you want to jump ahead to something or come back to it later. And wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to like this podcast video wherever you're, like I said, watching or listening. Leave us a review, leave us some stars, that sort of thing. We always appreciate that.

All right, let's drag out this week's Giant Mailbag. All right. Today's Giant Mail comes from Lauren. But first, a little background. This is in response to a Coffee Break episode that we did called Earn Miles while saving and paying for college in there we talked about how you can buy gift of college gift cards with a credit card to earn rewards and then use those to pay for college in various ways and one of the tricks that we mentioned during that show i should i should say is no longer working that during show, we said that temporarily giftcards.com was selling the Gift of College gift cards with no fee. But shortly after we recorded, but even before publication of the show, I think they started adding a fee, which we expected to

happen. We just didn't know it'd be so quick they were on it they were on it pretty pretty quickly there or or at least after our readers started buying this right right um okay anyway back back to lauren lauren wrote uh well she wrote a bunch of things i'm i'm extracting a few things she wrote she says as of 2024 you can roll roll over 529s into Roth IRAs. And as an aside, so the way you pay for college with Gift of College gift cards is to deposit them to 529, or one of the ways is to deposit them to 529 savings accounts, which are then in turn used to pay for college. But what Lauren's explaining is you can also indirectly use this approach for your long-term retirement savings, not just college, because you can rollover 529s into Roth IRAs. Here are the rules, she says.

Holding periods. You need to have owned the 529 for at least 15 years before you can execute a rollover. So this is a long-term play, but so is most retirement savings, so that's fair. Annual limits. Your rollover can't exceed the annual Roth contribution limit, which in 2023 is $6,500. And ownership. The beneficiary of the 529 plan must also be the owner of the Roth IRA. And there's a few other things that she, more details that she pointed out. But anyway, I thought that was a neat tip that came from Lauren, because I know a lot of people don't have college to save for or to pay

for or student loans to pay for. And so if you don't have any of those, maybe you do want to save for retirement. And so that's an option. Yeah, yeah, it is. So that'd be a way of potentially in the future funding your IRA and indirectly having done it via credit card long ago if you were buying the gift card. So I think I find this interesting. Actually, I find this more interesting even for if you do have young kids like I do, because I look at this and I say, first of all, I could create essentially a Roth IRA for them. It's obviously not going to be a Roth IRA now, but once they turn 18, 19 and they have earned income, enough earned income to roll over amounts

into their IRA, they'll be able to fund their IRA with more than they probably would have been able to with their first teenage jobs. So they'll be able to afford to put the full contribution perhaps in, which they probably wouldn't have done otherwise, I would assume, with whatever jobs they have at that age. So I think that's pretty interesting in terms of a way of creating Roth IRA funds in the long term. I think it's kind of a, I don't know, I'm not a financial advisor or a personal finance person, but it's interesting because the 529 plans have different investment choices than you would have if you had a traditional sort of just regular investment account. That's why I said I kind of split between the two because in New York State, the Vanguard funds in there are sort of target date funds, which generally have less volatility but also less return than if you were to invest differently.

Of course, you never know what's going to happen. But that's why I split. And so we put some just in a regular investment account and some in 529s so that we can pick investments that we want that hopefully will grow more long-term, but also have a relatively safe return through the 529. So I think it's just a matter of how much risk you're willing to take on on that. But yeah, I thought this was really fascinating because I could see that being a great way to help my kids start a Roth IRA, whether they go to college or not. That makes it a little bit more interesting to me. So I appreciate that, Lauren. That was a great tip. Okay. So let's talk about the Million Mile Madness Challenge update. So we've got the Million Mile Madness

Challenge coming up very soon. So as we record this, we're probably I don't know when everybody's leaving for sure, but probably about a week or so a little bit more away, a little bit less, maybe by the time this publishes. So if you want to check out all of the updates about this, don't forget, you can go to million mile madness.com. You don't have to monkey around and click around a whole bunch to find it. Just type in million mile madness.com. And that'll take you to the correct page on frequent miler that has all of the updates. So again, if you're not familiar, what we're doing is Greg and Steven and I are each taking up the SAS Euro bonus millionaire promotion, which is that if you fly 15 qualifying

SkyTeam carriers by the end of the year, you earn a million miles. So we're each in the process of planning out a huge trip to fly those 15 SkyTeam carriers with the most speed, affordability, and style that we can. That's our SAS, our S-A-S. And so we're going to be doing that and be judged. And you can check out more at millionmilemadness.com. But we got a few updates to share, right? Yeah. Yeah. Let's start with Stephen. As of the time we're recording this, he has reported that he has his whole trip booked, at least all the flights booked, which is the hardest part of this whole thing. And he talked about where he's at with aiming for being best in terms of speed, affordability, and style. And he says that he's still aiming to be most competitive specifically with speed and

affordability. So he's not really competing or says he's not competing on style. We'll see what happens. And with regards to speed, he said, I'm feeling cautiously optimistic about that. The itinerary I've pieced together is almost as fast as I could make it. I found this interesting because, well, you'll see in a minute that both Nick and I both think we're competitive in that way, too. And then he goes on to say, for affordability, I'm mildly confident about this, but I have a feeling Nick might beat me on this. I found that interesting because, you know, affordability is the area where I think most people thought Stephen would have the upper hand. He's known to book $20 flights that are a 12 hours long economy with no recline or whatever, because he's always finding the best deals. And he lives in hotels full time and has for years here. So he's great at finding

the right hotel deals, too. Yeah, I found that very curious that he was less confident than I expected him to be on the affordability scale. But as far as I'm concerned, I've got to say that I think, well, I've said this already. I'm going to say it again. I think I'm going to beat Greg on speed. I think I'm pretty confident I'm going to lose to Steven on speed as long as all of his flights go as planned, because that is a big thing. A few minutes ago when you said something like him having the flights booked, which is the most difficult part, I thought to myself, well, it's the most difficult

part so far, but once you miss a flight or if like it's canceled that's true like it way more difficult yeah so so yeah it's the most difficult part so far but uh anyway so with with terms in terms of speed like i said i think i'll probably get greg by a day i think maybe two uh probably just one i i don't think i'm gonna get steven if everything goes according to plan because i think he was willing to take a little more risk in terms of short connections than I was. And initially, I thought I'd have like no time to do anything. But I'm actually feeling pretty good now about a couple of the layovers I have where I'm actually going to do some cool stuff, too. So I think I'm going to get some style points because I've got a couple of stops that I'm actually really excited about.

For a while, I thought, oh, this isn't going to be fun at all. I'm just going to fly hub to hub and try and get this thing done as quickly as possible. I'm not going to have any time to see anything. And now I'm pretty excited because I do have a couple of cool layovers built in. But like I said, still pretty quick. Affordability, I don't know. I don't think I'm going to have Steven beaten on affordability. I'm just pretty hopeful that I've got Greg beaten on affordability. And if I can beat Greg on affordability and speed, then I feel at least I've got a fighting chance to compete on style with him and have a chance to take this thing. But at the same time, I'm not sure. I don't know. I'm not sure exactly how that's all going to go. I think that from an affordability standpoint,

maybe I made a couple of mistakes or just both mistakes and intentional decisions that we'll see may come back to haunt me or may work out to give me a lot of extra style points. We'll find out. Oh, interesting. All right. Well, and you've booked as by the time we're recording this, you've booked all your flights, correct? Yeah. Yeah. So I, and my goodness, talk about sleepless nights. I'm sure that Greg has had the same situation night after night. Oh my goodness. Hours upon hours. Nobody will ever understand how difficult this is if you don't actually try to put it together. And if we had three weeks or four weeks, it'd be much easier, but trying to pack it into less than

two weeks is definitely a challenge. So anyway yeah, I've got all the flights booked and I've got some of the hotels booked. And like I said, I've got all the flights booked, and I've got some of the hotels booked. And like I said, I'm actually one thing that I'm particularly excited about is that because we're all flying the same airlines, you would expect that we're all mostly going to end up in pretty similar places. I mean, maybe in Europe, that's less true than in Asia. But you would think that we're all going to end up in the same spots, but I've got one good long layover in a place that I don't think you or Steven is going to fly to. So I'm pretty excited about that one because I think it's going to be cool. Style points incoming.

That's interesting. Okay. So for my update, I am not done booking. I've booked everything, all the European airlines, but I still have to book all the Asian airlines by the time we're recording this. I hope to change that very soon after we finish recording. But for now, that's where I stand. Last weekend, I presented at the Chicago seminars and I talked about this challenge. And I talked about at the time, my focus was on speed and affordability, less on style. And the audience was not happy with that. They want to see me go in style. And you know what? I think it would be much more comfortable going in style as well. So I basically, I didn't throw away the plans I'd come up with up

to that point. And I hadn't booked anything yet, but I didn't throw them away. But what I did is I rethought some key decisions and I realized that some assumptions I had made about what was possible and what wasn't possible change when I'm not competing on affordability anymore. It opens up a lot of new options that just weren't options before. So that's really cool. And the interesting outcome of that is that it made it possible for me to do this, at least the European part that I booked, much, much faster than I previously thought I could. So my current plans have me blazing through Europe. Wow.

Blazing through Europe. I think in his, one of his posts said he would eat his hat if he wasn't faster than me, but I'll eat Nick's fedora. If I'm not, if I don't complete Europe faster than he does, I don't know yet about the Asia portion. Cause I haven't booked it, but so that's where I'm at. I'm actually just like Nick and Steven.

I'm feeling really confident, confident about speed. So we're all feeling confident that we've won the speed portion of this. Yeah, that's tough though, right? Because it's tough to do this fast. Yeah. Oh, it really is. I mean, you've got all these moving parts and I don't want to get into all the details

with the audience here. But anyway, it's really, really complicated, like a three-dimensional puzzle. And Nick said, we only have a couple of weeks to fly this, which makes it hard. But the other thing that made it hard is we only had about a week to book it. Plan it, yeah. Right, right. That to me was almost harder. So anyway, as far as style goes, I have a couple things that I'm really, really excited about, like seriously giddy about. But I have no idea how Kerry and Tim, the judges, are going to think about these things.

Are they going to be excited about it when they see it? Or are they going to be like, you know, it's not swimming with dolphins, so I don't really care. I don't know. i don't i don't really care i i don't know i don't know um so so it's hard to it's hard to be confident about style when you don't know how exactly that's the most subjective judgment call sure and so we don't know how that's gonna be judged yeah well that's exciting though it's interesting so i'm gonna i'm gonna make a prediction right now i'm gonna say i will get to asia before greg does really bold, I will get to Asia before Greg does. Really? Bold, huh? You'll get to Asia before I do, but will you complete the European? I said I would complete the European carriers before you do. You're not answering that one.

Look at us playing a game of semantics. We'll see what happens. Well, I mean, you could be going right to Asia right away and not getting all the European carriers or not getting any of them for all I know at first. So I don't think that's too much of a prediction then. And also, I guess it... Anyway, we'll see what happens when it unveils. We're not going to tell people in advance what we're doing. We're going to unveil things as we go. So make sure you're following on Instagram actually is the best place to follow. Make sure you're following Frequent Mylar on Instagram and you'll keep up with all the

action there. Yeah, we're going to obviously keep the blog updated as well, but it's just much easier to watch the story unfold on Instagram because you can see more picture and video and kind of get a sense for the feeling of being in there. And by the way, I want to remind you that if you want to get involved in this thing, you can. We each have our journal posts. Each one of us has a journal post. And at the end of this thing, after it's all said and done, we're each going to pick the

reader who helped us the most throughout this trip. And that person is going to get 100,000 miles, the person who helped each of us the most. And then the most helpful person of whoever wins this thing out of the three of us is going to get an additional 300 miles and five Hilton Be My Guest certificates that are good for any Hilton brand. So this is a fantastic opportunity. If you want to get involved and help, we do still need more help. Even though flights are pretty much wrapped up at this point, there's a lot more to the trip. And when things go wrong, that's when we're really going to need help. Yeah.

And one small correction. The overall winner gets not 300 miles, but 300,000. 300,000. Did they say 300 miles? Wow. You can tell we're working on limited sleep. All right. Mattress running the numbers. This week's mattress running the numbers. We've got a promotion out from Marriott homes and villas. What is it? And is it worth the mattress run? Yeah. So their new promo is if you stay two

nights at one of their homes and villas properties and spend at least $1,000 on that stay, you'll earn 30,000 bonus points. So pretty large chunk of change there. You have to register by November 7th. You have to register and book by November 7th, but it's good for stays through the end of January. So really quick, is this mattress run worthy, Nick? No, it isn't. Even if you value the Marriott points at one cent per

point to keep the math simple, that's about $300 worth of points and you got to spend a thousand to get it. So no, it's not worth a mattress run if you don't need the stay. If you do need to stay, it's a great rebate on the stay. $300 back on a thousand is a good rebate, particularly if you're able to stack. Sometimes we see Amex offers and if you're able to stack and use an Amex offer also, well, then you might get a good return if you have a stay planned already. But it's not worth going out of your way for this promotion unless you have a stay to book. All right. Awards points and more.

Boy, do we have more today. We've got a whole bunch. So we're going to try to run through each of these pretty quickly. They're not going to get as much attention as usual. So don't forget to check the description for links to more information about those of these that we've written about. So let's talk about choice. Choice privileges announced a bunch of changes, right? Yeah. So they announced changes for 2025. And basically, they have had a 100-day booking

window for award nights, which has been a big frustration with the program, meaning you can't book a stay for more than 100 days in advance, they're going to change that to 50 weeks. So that's 350 days. So that's a great, great change. They're going to have reward saver nights. So some nights where they'll have discounted awards. We can't really get excited about that till we see it in action. The part I'm most scared about, they're going to start allowing you to book premium rooms

with points. And that one scares me because it has been possible at a lot of choice hotels, not all of them, but a lot of them to book almost any room at the property, sometimes any room for the same standard price of the hotel. So you could book a standard room or like the top level presidential suite for the same, let's say 20,000 points at certain choice hotels. But now that they're going to allow you to book premium rooms with points, I expect that that won't be true anymore. So that's too bad. Finally, there's good news in that we asked the choice rep who told us all this information if they were planning on making changes to their award pricing along with this change. And they said, no, there's no expectation of that. So

we were a little worried that there'd be a devaluation on top of this. So that's not to say there won't be, but they're not committing to it. Yeah, I imagine that suites won't be bookable for a small number of points anymore. And that's kind of a bummer. but I'm actually more excited about the booking window because that's always been one of those things that theoretically I think sounds good, but in practice I rarely ever use because I'm usually looking at big trips farther in advance. So I'll be happy that you can book farther in advance now. Yeah, that's a great change. Okay, Virgin Atlantic, dynamic pricing went live this week. What happened? Is it good? Is it bad? So as expected, there Atlantic, dynamic pricing went live this week. What happened? Is it good?

Is it bad? So as expected, there is some horrible pricing out there, but that's not surprising because what they're doing is they're moving to where every seat on their planes can be booked with points. And so you'd expect that there would be seats that weren't available at all before with points that they're going to charge hundreds of thousands of points and it's going to look horrible. The surprise is that there's a lot of flights, at least as we're recording this, with great prices. We're talking about really low, you know, business class awards, international business class awards

in some cases. Even better, the award fees are sometimes really low for Virgin Atlantic. So Virgin Atlantic is known for having crazy high surcharges for their awards. So if you book a business class award to Europe, it used to be you'd be paying $700, $800, $900 in fees on top of that one-way award. But we're seeing some awards now more in the $200, $300 range in fees for those same flights. So that combination is pretty exciting. I would urge some caution there. Nick predicted that we might see some great pricing out of the gate in order to get people excited.

And so if that's the intent here, it's not going to last. So a little caution there. Don't get too excited. But if you see some good things now, you might want to book right away, except you need to know their cancellation fees have increased to $100. They used to be, what, $50, something like that. So it's a little more expensive now to book just in case you're going to take that trip because canceling now is going to cost more.

Yeah, yeah, that's a bummer. That's too bad because the cancellation fee was nice at $50, at $100, especially per person that could get expensive to book a speculative trip. So that's kind of a bummer. But good to see. I mean, we've seen rates like from the East Coast, as good as like 35,000 points one way and about $250 in taxes and fees to fly business class to London. So I mean, that's from the East Coast. That's that's really good. Even with a high surcharges. That's a pretty good deal. So, I mean, overall, mildly exciting, but I'll believe it when I see it longer term. Because like Greg said, I don't know how

long we'll see those great deals. But moral of the story, book them now. Yeah, no, totally. If you have trips that you know you're taking and you see these great deals, snag them now. All right. United is increasing their elite requirements for 2025. If you want to be elite with United, you're gonna have to spend some more. Yeah, it's gonna take about 20% more flying or spend

to get to the same levels of elite status next year. To offset that a tiny bit, I guess, they've increased the ability to earn uh lead pqps they call them uh from credit card spend and so they're they're expensive cards that get you into the united clubs have a better earning rate than before and uh you can earn more PQPs. Still, with all that, the earning rate is still worse than even Deltas or Americans or Alaskan or anyone. So I think that's pretty much mostly all bad news for those seeking united elite status although yeah i guess

the credit card thing helps a little bit if you're a big spender yeah yeah it doesn't hurt a lot but the increase is hurt so yeah bummer there too bad if you're interested in being elite with united all right let's now i'm i'm gonna throw in a prediction here that Delta is going to take a look at what United did and say, 20%? I can beat you on that easily. I'd love to see Delta being competitive. Yeah, right. We haven't seen Delta's 2025 requirements yet, but I'm a little nervous. We will see probably sometime soon.

All right. The Department of Transportation has instituted new refund rules that I think are all good news for consumers, right? As far as I can tell, yeah, it's really good news. They announced the intention of several months back to do this, but now it's the rule that you get automatic refunds if the airline cancels your flight, if there are delayed flights of more than three hours domestically, more than six hours internationally, where you don't end up taking the flight. You're not going to get refund if you wait and take the flight. But if you're like, oh no, that doesn't work for me anymore, you can automatically get a refund for

just not taking that flight. So that's a great change. If you're downgraded to a lower class of service or to a plane that's less accommodating to special needs, the automatic refunds if you don't fly it. Some interesting ones like baggage delays. Now, it has to be a really long delay, like your baggage was lost kind of thing. If you paid to check your bags, you'll get those fees back. Now, that's something that should have been the case all the time, but it's surprising how few airlines did that. So they had to be forced to do that.

Another one that's sort of similar, if you pay for Wi-Fi and it wasn't working, then you'll get your money back. In all these cases, you're not talking about credit with the airline that's going to expire. You're talking about you're getting paid back to the original form of purchase. So if you paid with a credit card, you get it back to your credit card. Or if you paid with credits, then it will go back as credits. Now, they do have the option to pay you back in cash too, but I kind of doubt we'll see much of that. Right. But those are really good changes. I especially like the delayed flights one because if you're sitting in a situation where the flight has been delayed by so much that it's not useful to you anymore and you need to find a different way to get to where you're going it's great to be able to know that you can get your money back you know

like that's that's awesome so i'm particularly happy to see that i think for award travelers that's particularly useful too because if you got a international flight that's gotten delayed by that long or even a domestic one that's more than three hours, you may have enough points to save that a different way with a different airline. But your hesitation in the past would have been, yeah, but then you're giving up all your money. Nice to be able to get that money back. So good changes. Good changes. Yep. And then lastly, we've got JetBlue's excellent status match. We've talked about this before, I think maybe during a coffee break. I can't remember for sure. Previously, their status match was only for elites with American Airlines, Alaska, United, or Delta. But the news here is that they've opened it up now to also elites with

Southwest, not Companion Pass, but A-list elites, Spirit, and Frontier. So now there's a lot more people who can qualify for their status match and check out our show on that status match before to see why we think it's such a good opportunity. Very good. All right. That wraps up the awards points

and more, I think, and brings us to this week's main event. Main event time. Advanced award booking techniques. We've got a whole slew of example techniques that we're going to walk you through. Starting first, last minute bookings or changes. So this one is basically the idea is that sometimes the award you want is not available until a few days before the flight. Some airlines are infamous for

this, like Lufthansa First Class. It's usually impossible to book until about three days before the flight, at least using partner miles. And so, the idea here is simply to be flexible. And maybe what you do if you're planning, if you're planning a whole trip around this is you book a flight that you're happy with. Maybe it's, you know, economy or premium economy or something, but when the first class or business class flight becomes available that you really want, you book that and cancel the other one. So ideally, the first booking is either freely or cheaply cancelable. But even if it costs like $200 to cancel that other award, if you're getting in on a flight of a lifetime type thing, it could very well be worth it.

Yeah. Yeah. Last minute, a lot of things tend to open up. So we're always very flexible and people will ask about our plans and I'll be like, well, right now we're booked and blah, blah, blah. I don't think anybody else understands that. But that's the way it is because you never know. Things might change at the last minute. You might see that much better award and you have to be open and ready to pounce on it. Oh, it's such a powerful, such a powerful trek.

For a while, I had been tracking United's business class flights out of Hawaii, fly back cheaply in business class with certain programs on United if you're willing to do it last minute, literally last minute. Very good. Same day changes. This could be a powerful technique. And I know you've talked before about leveraging your Delta Elite status for this, right? Yeah. So this actually works with cash or or points bookings but you know sometimes the cost for the flight you want whether it's in points or cash is uh way too expensive but sometimes there's a another flight same day that you can you can find you can book with award points or you can book with cash whatever whatever, that's really reasonable. And often

those are like 5 a.m. flights or red-eye late-night flights. And so, the idea with same-day changes is this usually works best if you have elite status with that airline that you're flying. The idea with same-day changes is what you do is you book that cheap flight and then different airlines have different rules about when you can make a change. But the idea is, you know, probably 24 hours before you originally scheduled flight, you can call the airline and ask to same day change your flight to the one that you really wanted. And it's not a hundred% guaranteed, but sometimes it works well. Yeah, yeah. With Southwest, this is one of the reasons why I very frequently book want to get away plus fares because those include free same day changes.

And when you're booking an award, it's usually a small amount more than the want to get away fare. And it gives you the flexibility of being able to make a same day change. Southwest is also interesting in that they don't oversell planes, or at least they say they don't. of gives you the flexibility of being able to make a same day change. Southwest is also interesting in that they don't oversell planes, or at least they say they don't. So you know that however many seats for sale are the number of seats that are left. So if the cheap flight is at 5 a.m., but you really want that 9 a.m. flight, then if a friend of yours books a fully refundable fare on that 9 a.m. and that happens to cancel the day, probably same day change if you've booked a one to get away plus. So yeah, I can.

Yeah, I did this once for my niece and her family because, you know, they didn't want to fly with a baby at, let's say, 5 a.m. or whatever it was. But I didn't want to pay twice as much for the fare. So it worked out. I was able to book them on the flight they wanted and pay the lower amount. So that was great. There you go. All right.

So that same-day changes can be a powerful tool. Skip lagging. What is skip lagging and how can you use this? Skip lagging is where you book a trip that goes past the airport you really want to go to. So, for example, you want to fly to Paris, but you find that it's cheaper to book to Milan or to Lisbon or Madrid or whatever. You name the city, it doesn't matter. These can be hard to find, but it's often the case that award awards with certain programs are cheaper to certain cities without any particular explanation for why. That's one thing. And we'll talk about some examples there.

But the other thing is there's something called married segment logic where awards might not be available. So let's say Detroit to Paris, that award might not be available, but Detroit to Paris to Lyon might be available. That's called married segment logic where the award is based on the beginning to end, not on the individual segments separately. And so, if you really want to fly to Paris, you might have to book to Lyon in that example. Yeah. And this happens, we see this happen with a lot of different programs. But, you know, there are some risks, I suppose. One that people are often worried about is, are you going to get in trouble because the airline is selling you a ticket to Lyon and you're getting off the plane in Paris.

And you know, if you do that once, it's unlikely to be a problem. People miss flights all the time. There's plenty of legitimate reasons why you might have missed that flight to Lyon. You know, if you do it weekly, then yeah, probably the airline won't like that very much. And you might end up getting in trouble. And when I say getting in trouble, they might cancel your flights, take away your points. So I wouldn't make that a regular habit. But if you're going to Europe once this year, then probably the trip to Lyon won't make a difference. But you do need to be careful about checked luggage, because if you check your luggage to Lyon and then something happens with that flight to Paris and they decide they're going to reroute you instead through

Barcelona, then your bags might end up in in Leon and you could have a problem there. So I would only advise the skip lagging without checked luggage, ideally. Yeah. And, you know, and where it gets really complicated, let's say you're flying within the U.S. and doing this and the plane is full and you go to board the plane and they say, nope, you got to gate check that, that bag might end up at the final destination, not at the airport that you're hoping to go to. So it's just something, you want to be boarding first in that situation. True, true. Good point. Yeah. So there are some dangers there to be aware of, but it's certainly a technique that I think we've both used it various times before, because sometimes the difference can be really big. I mean, I wrote a post actually a couple of years ago, maybe a year ago, two ago like 60,000 miles, but Sydney to Los Angeles was like 300,000 miles. And so you get that same Sydney to Los Angeles just by booking onward to

El Paso. So there you go. CB. See that all the time, actually. It's very, very common. CB. Yep. All right. Mixed cabins for lower award prices. Avianca Life Miles has something interesting here, and you've written about this before first class for less right you can fly sometimes in a higher cabin for less miles fewer right so so avianca like life miles has zone-based pricing roughly uh basically that the idea is that the price for an award should be based on what zone you're flying from and to you're flying from north america to you're flying from North America to Europe, it should be a particular price. Mostly, they have exceptions.

But, so let's say you're flying business class, which would usually cost, what, 70,000 miles as we're recording this. You can make that flight cheaper by adding on, by going further, as long as you stay within those zones. So for example, let's say you're flying back from Europe to New York. And so it would cost 70,000 miles in business class. But you change the booking to be from Europe to New York to Hawaii, where New York to Hawaii is in economy. In that case, the price is going to go way, way down. And the reason is that they

kind of average the award price based on distance flown in each cabin. So they're going to take the award price for economy from Europe to Hawaii and weight that like 80%. Let's say that's 80% of the distance. I don't know off the top of my head. That'll be 80% of the price. And then they'll take the award price for Europe to Hawaii in business class, and that'll be 20% of the cost. And that all weights together and you end up with a much cheaper flight overall. Yeah. I mean, you do have to be able to find the connecting onward availability, which can be tough, but this can work out well. And it can work out well sometimes when you really do want to go somewhere. For instance, I find this useful in the other direction going to Europe, because I don't really care if my connection within Europe is in business class or economy class, because

it's basically the same business class within Europe is usually just an economy class seat with the middle seat booked. And if I'm only gonna be on the plane for an hour or two, I don't really care if the middle seat is blocked. So if I can fly that segment, let's say, you know, I fly New York to Brussels to, I don't know, Athens. Let's make that up because that's far. I don't know if Brussels Airlines flies that. But anyway, so I don't care if the Brussels to Athens is an economy class. I care about whether the Newark to Brussels is in business class.

So if I have the option, I'll book that in business and then book the Onward Connection in economy because I know that's going to drop the price. I'm going to pay fewer miles for the award. So I get what I really want, business class across the pond, and pay fewer miles for it. So I think that can be a useful tool, even not just trying to find a way to squeeze the value out of it, but even especially within Europe because there's typically such little difference between business and economy. The other way I could see this maybe being useful is if you were flying from Europe back to the US and you really wanted an economy class award, but you needed extra checked bags, because sometimes you can get just that first segment in business class and then the rest in economy. But I think you'll get the full business class checked luggage

allowance in that case. So if you were moving back to the US from Europe and you had a lot of bags or you go for the, I don't know, Christmas markets or something, and you're coming back with a lot of stuff, then that mixed cabin award could work out well for you too. You might get into a nice lounge too because you have a business class ticket. True. Because you have a business class ticket. True. Okay, moving on to start to end distance-based pricing. So this is rare, but does happen sometimes where you have an award program that prices based on the distance flown,

but they're pricing not based on the distance of all the segments added up, but rather the start to end. So for example, if a program, this isn't a real example, but just to give you an idea, New York and Boston are really close together. So if a program charged, let's say, 5,000 miles for that flight, but you were able to fly New York to Paris to Boston for the 5,000 points, that would be an example. Now, again, that's made up just to show an extreme example, but that's how these programs work is that if you can book it, the pricing is based on the point-to-point. The start point to the end point, that is.

Yes. So here's a specific example that really does work. Virgin Atlantic has a number of partners where you could use Virgin Atlantic points to book those partner airlines. Two of them are KLM and Air France. And Virgin has a special award chart just for those two airlines and just for short haul European flights. And so the long distance flights on Air France and KLM don't apply to this. So flights to the US or to Asia don't apply. around Europe and nearby, like including Northern Africa, do apply to this, where they specifically in the word chart say the distance is measured by the start and end, not the sum of the segments. And so, you can do things like fly, well, pretty much just like what I said. You could fly from one, let's say, Italian city like Venice to Rome

for 4,500 points. Now you're going to be flying through Paris or through Amsterdam to accomplish that, but it's really cheap and really cheap in business class too for what that's worth. Yeah, and less than what it would probably cost for Rome to Paris in that example. I don't know if that specific example is right or not, but in some cases, at least anyway, it'd be less than what Rome to Paris would cost you to fly Rome to Paris to Venice because Rome and Venice are close by. That's the idea anyway, whether or not that specific example is it. That's the type of idea that we're talking about here because the starting point and the ending point are nearby each other. Yeah. So maybe like Athens and Istanbul would be a better example because they're relatively close to each other, but far from Paris or Amsterdam.

Yeah. Yeah. Great point. Very good. Yeah. So I think that's certainly one you could use. Avianca Life Miles has something kind of similar-ish in that within the United States, they have zone-based pricing. And so to give you a for instance, it's based on my own experience. I live near Albany, New York. That's my domestic home airport. And I sometimes fly to Myrtle Beach. And so New York and South Carolina are in zone one. And so that would be 7,500 points each way if I find availability on United. So again, Albany, New York to Myrtle Beach, 7,500 points one way. Now that's true, or it has been in all my searches in the past. Even if I fly Albany to Chicago to Myrtle Beach, it's still 7,500 points because my award is going from Albany to Myrtle Beach. I fly Albany to Chicago to Myrtle Beach, it's still 7,500 points because my award is going from Albany to Myrtle Beach. However, Albany to Chicago would be 10,000 miles one way. So save a little bit there over the cost of just going to Chicago. And obviously, this is sort of like the skip lagging example where if you ultimately wanted to go to Chicago,

you could try a move like that. Of course, if they cancel that flight and then want to put you on something more direct to Myrtle Beach, then you'd be in trouble, I guess. So there are some cautions there. But again, you might be able to fly a little bit out of the way, very similar to the Virgin Atlantic Air France KLM example there. Weird pricing. There's some weird pricing out there. Some airlines just price certain awards differently than others with no rhyme or reason. Avianca LifeMiles has long been famous for this. They used to have tons of great examples of these awards that priced out oddly. And then they changed their award chart a couple of months ago, and a lot of those went

away. But there's still at least one out there that we're aware of. So Avianca LifeMiles charges 70,000 miles in business class one way to Europe from the United States to Europe. But for some reason, London costs only 45,000 miles in business class one way to Europe from the United States to Europe. But for some reason, London costs only 45,000 miles in business class. So if you're able to find availability on United, for instance, you'll pay 45,000 miles one way to get to London, rather than the 70,000 that the rest of Europe costs. And because that exists, I bet that there are probably others out there still with Avianca LifeMiles. They may have just changed or maybe there are more to look at between other regions of the world because we've

often seen odd award pricing from Avianca where there are just some things that don't follow the chart. So you may find something else. You may stumble on some other good finds with Avianca LifeMiles. That is true. I should mention Air France, KLM Flying Blue, and American Airlines are both programs where just sort of randomly picking different endpoints to go to will show you very, I want to go to Europe, but I'm not that particular about where, try a lot of different endpoints and see what the pricing is, because you'd be surprised how much those vary. Yeah. And you may assume, like if you're looking at Air France, you may assume that, oh, there's just no, quote unquote, saver availability on the JFK to Paris segment, because you searched that or you searched JFK to Paris to Madrid first, and it was super expensive. So you may just be like, oh, I guess I got to search a different day. But actually, you may just want to search some other endpoints, because you might be surprised searching a

different endpoint, all of a sudden, there may be that 50,000 point award that you wanted that includes that same JFK to Paris flight. So particularly if you're not particular about which airport you fly to in Europe, that can certainly be, like Greg said, worth poking around and trying different stuff. Distance-based award tricks. What tricks do you have up your sleeve? Yeah. So first, let me explain what distance-based awards are. like British Airways, Avios, Cathay Pacific, Asia Miles, and a lot of others where their award chart is based entirely or almost entirely on how far are you going to fly?

And they base the prices on that. And for those programs, they usually have a top range. So the idea is like you can fly, I'll give Cathay Pacific as an example. You can fly up to some number of miles or the top end of the word chart will say something like if you fly, I don't remember it off the top of my head, but let's say 8,000 miles or more in distance, the price for business class is going to be 110,000 Asia miles. And what's nice about those or more situations where the top end is uncapped as far as how far you can fly, if you want to fly really far, you can really do well. So in Cathay Pacific's example, I looked at flying Chicago to Hong Kong in business class, and that's 110,000 Asia miles, Cathay Pacific Asia

miles. Or you could fly Chicago to Hong Kong to Johannesburg, South Africa, which is way the heck away. So you're almost doubling the whole flight for that same 110,000 Cathay Pacific Asia miles. Yeah, that's pretty incredible that you're able to now could you do a stopover in Hong Kong and see both places? You cannot anymore with that program. They used to allow that. And sadly, they took that away. Yeah, that's a bummer. That's a bummer, but still a great deal. If you want to fly really far, you know, you can leverage that sort of a program in that sort of way. Air Canada Aeroplan also has sort of distance based awards, they have both zone and distance based. So you first have to look at the two zones you're connecting and then the distance. But similarly, if you exceed the maximum distance band for your combination of zones,

then you just keep going as far as you want. And it still costs the same number of points. But actually, another distance-based trick for Air Canada Aeroplan that might be also useful and worth keeping in mind and that I have used is the routing rules for Air Canada Aeroplan allow for a lot of flexibility. So you can really mix and match partners. And I've written before about how you can search for different segments and put them together, and they'll let you fly out of the way. You can fly a really zigzaggy sort of itinerary. The rule, though, is that in total, your total distance flown with whatever segments you pick can't be more than double the distance from your start

point to your end point. And I was running into an issue with that when I booked an award over the summer because I was starting in Paris, doing a stopover in Mauritius, flying through Southeast Asia to get a day in Singapore. And I wanted to ultimately get to Japan. But the distance of all of what I just described was more than double the distance from Paris to Japan. And so that wasn't working out. It wouldn't price that award. So I came up with the idea, I realized, well, United flies to Guam, and Paris to Guam is really far. And so even if I've flown out of my way, if I make my endpoint Guam, then that award that wouldn't work from Paris to Tokyo or Osaka or whatever it was would work if it was

from Paris to Guam for the overall award. So, sometimes flying farther, adding some distance will give you the opportunity for a more out-of-the-way routing with Air Canada Aeroplan. So, that could be another trick. To be really clear, Nick was still able to get to Japan, but as long as the award included the Japan to Guam piece of it, which was brilliant. I mean, that's an amazing way to get around that limitation. So, there's a lot you could do with Cathay Pacific in that way. you should pay attention to, if you have multiple legs, whether it is actually, it might actually be cheaper sometimes to book multiple awards instead of one. So I've seen this with British Airways Avios. I've seen it with Air Canada Aeroplane as well, where there are certain situations where it's a little bit cheaper. Let's say you have to make it simple.

You've got a flight that maybe you're going to Hawaii from Chicago via LA. So you're Chicago to LA to Hawaii. And in some cases, it's cheaper to book Chicago to LA and then LA to Hawaii as separate awards. I had that with Aeroplan where it was London to Chicago to Detroit came in in the 70K band, whereas London to Chicago came in at the 60K band, and Chicago to Detroit was, I think, 7,500 or something like that. So tiny bit cheaper if you book at a separate awards in that case, I didn't think it was worth breaking it up to do it, but, but, um, that's an example, a real life example of where it happens. And if you actually wanted to spend time a day or two in Chicago, in that case,

then, you know, being able to save miles doing it is nice. Get a free stopover. Yeah, exactly. Essentially, count that as a free stopover. You get paid to take a stopover. Save a little bit of miles over booking it all as one. Yeah, I found a number of situations like that recently too, where breaking up the awards into two awards just happened to work out to be cheaper because of distance-based pricing. And this certainly can be the case if you're booking with different programs, if you're booking the two segments of different programs, because maybe there's another program that has better pricing on one of those pieces for the same flight. So that can be useful. All right. So those are some techniques that we use to book,

you know, more advanced techniques to book great awards. But another technique we use is avoiding sucky programs. This is probably my favorite technique overall. And it's the easiest one, I think, for listeners to take home and actually use. Right, right. Or don't use in this case. Exactly. So tell us about Iberia.

Why do you want to avoid that sucky program? And when do you want to avoid that sucky program? Yeah, that's more it. Iberia has some sweet spots, some opportunities that are really good, like flying their own And when do you want to avoid that? sometimes find good pricing for American Airlines flights through Iberia. I've seen business class from the US to Europe on American Airlines through Iberia for far fewer miles than what American is charging, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50, sometimes even more thousand fewer miles. But I would not book that through Iberia because Iberia partner awards for the most part on most of their partners are completely non-refundable. So whereas most programs allow a cancellation for a fee and you can get your points back, Iberia, there's not even a fee you can pay. It's not even like there's a high cancellation fee.

There's just no way to get your Avios back if you book a partner award on American Airlines, for instance. So if you book that 61,000 mile award or whatever it is from New York to Barcelona via Iberia Avios for travel on American Airlines, and you later can't take that trip, you're just out the 61,000 Avios. There is no getting it back. So that stinks. I think that's horrible. And for that reason, I avoid using Iberia Avios to book on partner airlines. I think British Airways, you can get a refund, the IAG Group Airlines, but most of the one world partners, you can't. So I would avoid Iberia unless it's a flight like tomorrow that I know I'm going to take. I just wouldn't book with them because the cancellation policy is horrible. Yeah. And usually when Iberia has good pricing on partners, usually,

not always, you can find that same pricing on British Airways Avios or Qatar Avios. And so you can move your Iberia Avios to one of those programs and then book from there. They both have better cancellation policies than Iberia. Yeah, that's a great point because if you just move them over to British Airways Avios and book that same American Airlines flight, then your cancellation penalty would be just forfeiting the taxes if the taxes were less than $50 or it'd be like a $50 cancellation fee, I think is what they have, right? So pretty easy to get all your Avios back if you just book through British Airways, Avios instead of Iberia, Avios. So I avoid Iberia for anything other than flying Iberia. Yeah. I was just about to quiz you, Nick, about when would you want to book,

if the prices were the same, when would you want to book with Qatar Avios instead of British Airways Avios if you think you might cancel? And you alluded to the answer there, but I'm not sure you... Yeah. So I didn't realize. It took me a second. Yeah, well, because Qatar has a better cancellation fee. Their fee is, what, $25, I think, for cancellation. So it's a better deal in terms of a fee. However, you'll still pay that even if the taxes were only $5.60. So if you're booking a domestic American Airlines award, for instance, where the taxes were $5.60, British Airways won't charge the cancellation fee. They'll just have you forfeit the five dollars and sixty cents whereas qatar would charge you the twenty five dollars so so if you have very low taxes then

you want to book through british airways avios if you have taxes of more than twenty five dollars then book through qatar avios so that you there you go that's the answer alas so all right but that's i mean that's a great example of avoiding the sucky programs there, right? I mean, that's like a little move of the points there and knowledge of the way the programs work can save you a bunch of money. Right, right. All right. But Iberia is not the only sucky program to avoid.

Now you have Turkish listed. Tell us about that. Well, so I love Turkish miles and smiles for their sweet spots, particularly flying United domestically for 10,000 miles each way. But I mean, there's no there's no arguing that Turkish is not an easy program to deal with. If you need to cancel something or change something or even just get a hold of someone to help you book it, it's really a tougher program to use. It's not nearly as easy as some. So when pricing is similar, I'm probably not going to bother booking through Turkish because it's just more of a pain in the butt

and it's not worth the hassle. So if I was looking at a domestic award where Air Canada Aeroplan is charging 12,500 miles or Turkish is charging 10,000 miles, I might err on the side of booking via Aeroplan because I know it's going to be easy. It's going to be simple. The award's there. And if I need to do something with it, I'll be able to get ahold of somebody on the phone that can help. Whereas with Turkish, I know that if I get ahold of somebody on the phone, they're probably not going to be able to help with whatever it is I need. And if I need to cancel, maybe the miles will come back instantly. Maybe it'll take months to get the miles back. You never know. You could be in for some hassle there. And so it's not worth it to me for saving 2,500 miles. Now, if I'm saving 10,000 miles or 15,000 miles per passenger in one

direction, well, then maybe I'm willing to put up with a little bit more hassle for that. If I'm flying to Hawaii, then yeah, I'm still going to book via Turkish for 10,000 miles if I can. But if I'm flying like New York to Chicago, then I'm probably not going to bother with Turkish because there are other options that are similarly priced that include far less hassle. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Last up in our list of sucky programs to avoid, which is not to say there aren't other sucky programs to avoid. It's just we only have in our notes three that came to mind as we were preparing for this show.

But the last one up is Etihad. So you may see, depending on what award search tools you use, you may sometimes see Etihad coming up as having the best award price for, let's say, American Airlines short distance flights as one example, because they partner with American. And so you might be tempted to transfer some points from, you know, let's say Amex membership rewards or wherever to Etihad and book that thing. But you need to know a few things. One, Etihad has awful award cancellation policy. They charge you a fee in terms of how many miles they keep. And it depends how close it is to departure. So if it's pretty far from departure, they'll keep like 25%.

And then as it gets closer, they'll keep 75%. So you just don't want to deal with that because there's other programs you can book with for just a little bit, a few more points. The other thing, we mentioned this on a previous show, some people have had the experience where the, the Etihad shows that award costs, let's say 8,000 miles. So they transfer 8,000 miles in and then they go to actually book it. And then towards the end of the booking process, it says you're short on miles because you actually need 8,165 miles or whatever. So then you've got to transfer more, you know, and that's just, that's just insane. So just avoid, avoid booking that way. Yeah. And I know Greg said that'd be the last one, but I just thought to add one more

and that's avoiding programs with bad or hard mileage expiration policies. And so this is one that we don't necessarily avoid this all the time, but to give a, for instance, you know, if I can book through United or book through ANA, and ANA is only going to save me a few 1000 miles, I'm going to book through United instead in that case, because ANA, first of all, transfers to ANA are not instant. So the miles aren't going to show up instantly, the award might disappear before I get a chance to book it. And then B, they have a hard expiration policy of three years. So after three years, that's it, your miles are, are expired and gone and without any way to get them back, or any practical way to extend them transferring in more doesn't extend them.

And so I'll avoid a program like that, again, if prices are close, I mean, if prices are significantly different, then I may still be willing to put up with that hassle. But I think that the more advanced technique here that we're, of highlighting anyway is that we'll avoid that hassle if the price difference is really small. It's got to be more significant to make it worth the hassle. Another way of saying this, avoid transferring points to those programs. I mean, if you already have points in those programs, then use them as quickly as you can. In fact, I would be willing to pay more points to use my Singapore miles before they expire than let them just expire for no value.

So just as a quick rule, it is hard to figure out which programs have those difficult policies, but if it's an Asian carrier, chances are good it has a bad policy. Cathay Pacific Asian Miles is one good exception to that, where they allow you to extend the miles just by having activity in your account. But a lot of them have hard and fast rules. Yeah. And to, I guess, expand on what I didn't say and kind of left between the lines there is that, you know, obviously if you're going to fly the award, then, you know, great. You don't have to worry really about the hard expiration policy, but the problem is you don't know what might happen. And if you have to cancel the trip, then you're stuck with miles. You know,

certainly obviously during COVID, everybody became much more attuned to the fact that you never know when you might have to cancel something and then be stuck with a bad expiration policy. Right. So, so, all right. Those are a bunch of the tips and techniques that we use. I think that wraps up the main event and brings us to this week's question of the week. This week's question of the week came in via email from Tom. Tom says, I currently have the Amex Platinum Consumer Card, which I'm considering downgrading to a gold card. Many of the benefits reset at the beginning of the calendar year. It seems like I could potentially use all the annual benefits within a few weeks, say by the end of January, and then downgrade the card to access a new round of benefits available to the gold card members. Is there any reason not to do this? For example, would Amex revoke the statement credits?

And so it goes on to give a concrete example of using the airline credits and the fine hotels and resorts credits of the Amex Platinum card in January and then downgrading to the gold card after that. And then as a follow-up says, what happens if I did this and then upgrade back to the Platinum card later on after a few months? Do I get those annual benefits again? Thank you for all the great content and helpful advice. Best, Tom. All right, Craig, walk us through it. All right. So first of all, to the first question, yes, that should work. You should be able to use up your platinum credits in January and downgrade and then take advantage of the gold cards credits like the resi credit and all of that stuff. So I think that's a great strategy. If you upgrade back within the same calendar year, no, I believe Amex will remember that you've already used your airline fee credits and whatnot.

So I don't think you can double dip within one calendar year in that way. Now, one thing to be very, very careful about is if you have a welcome bonus that you earned in the past, in less than 12 months, or if you accepted an offer, like points offer or whatever, to keep the card instead of canceling, then you should wait at least 12 months from when you agreed to whatever that is to upgrade or downgrade your card because Amex may claw back, not the credits you earned in those examples, but they might claw back points you earned from a welcome bonus or a retention bonus if you don't wait the full 12 months before making a change. Yeah, that's a very good cautionary point there. And again, to repeat that last part,

they don't claw back the credits. You may get clawed back on the welcome bonus or the retention bonus if you've accepted that. Yeah, it can be much worse than those credits. Another aside I wanted to kind of mention here is that, Tom, if you haven't ever had the Amex Gold Card, then you probably wouldn't want to do it this way, at least not without first opening the Gold Card. Although, actually, I just said that, and the family rules are going to potentially prevent you from getting the welcome bonus on the Gold Card anyway. So maybe that's less of an issue these days, although I'd probably still take a swing at the gold card and see if you are able to get the welcome bonus before you downgrade to it and then have it or have had it before. Anyway, but yes, that works. And it also works if you were going to cancel. If you're going to cancel the platinum card, then yeah. I mean, anytime I'm on the edge of when the credits are going to reset and I'm thinking about canceling, I wait until after January 1st, for instance, and use those calendar year benefits. That's

certainly, and that's true, not just on this, but any cards that have calendar year benefits like that, I make sure to use those or if they're every six months, that sort of thing to use up all of those before I cancel or change. And is that activity going to make Amex mad? I mean, I don't think so. It never has caused much of an issue. Although then again, is that activity going to make Amex mad? I mean, I don't think so. It never has caused much of an issue. Although then again, is that going to land you in pop-up prison someday? I mean, I guess maybe it could, I doubt it's going to be a problem. If you're doing this one time with your platinum card in January, if you're doing this with like, you know, eight platinum cards, then, you know, maybe it makes a difference, but, but with one, no, probably unlikely to have

much of an issue there. All right. That my, brings us to the end of this week's show. If you've enjoyed this show and you'd like to get more of this stuff in your email inbox each day or each week, you want to go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe. Again, that's frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media, wherever you're watching or listening. Again, don't forget to like or thumbs this up. We always appreciate that too. And if you have a question that you'd like to be considered for a future question of the week or a piece of feedback that

you'd like to be considered for the giant mailbag, you can send that to send it to mailbag at frequent miler.com. Bye everybody.