Frequent Miler on the Air - Aeroplan Encourages Gaming: Ready Player 1?

Episode Date: December 4, 2021

Air Canada's Aeroplan rewards program has unveiled a new credit card for the U.S. market. And, surprise... the card seems custom built for "gaming"! Ready to play? 0:01:00 Mailbag Double header Mea Culpa: Wyndham 10K, JetBlue pooling 00:05:00 Mattress Running the Numbers: Swagbucks 0:09:20 Main Event: Aeroplan encourages gaming. Ready player 1? 0:56:13 Post Roast: Nick is sad that Greg picked Richard Branson over him 0:57:23 Question of the week: Why earn cash back instead of transferable points?

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, Aeroplan Encourages Gaming. Ready, player one?

That was supposed to have a question mark at the end. I don't know if you heard it. I heard it. No, I definitely heard the question mark there. Yes. Are you ready? Yes. I should have said it in sort of a computer voice, you know.

Ready Player One? Close, close. You have to keep working on your computer voice. Is it an impersonation if you're trying to sound like a computer? That's a great. In Computer Nation or something? I don't know. In Robon... Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. So anyway, we're going to talk more about the Aeroplan card.

And that was a great title. So nicely done on that. But first... It's giant mailbag time, but I'm using my prerogative to not read any giant mail. Okay. Instead, we have today a mea culpa double header. By mea culpa, Greg really means a nicka culpa. At least one of these was not head. At least one is a nicka culpa.

That's right. We're going to start with the both-a-culpa, though. Okay, all right. Which is, I think it was both of us, which was Matt just running the numbers last week. We talked about Wyndham had three different promos going on at once. And we said that the 10K promo for doing two nights could be done twice so that you could get a total of 20,000 points with a total of four nights in stays. And yeah, no.

Whoops. So that whole deal is a bit less valuable than we thought. I mean, I think you could still do most of the deal with just two nights. It was just that extra 7,500 points that required the four nights. And so we thought the other things would double as well, but they don't. So not a bad, it's still probably a good deal if you just do two nights, but yeah, don't, don't do four. Uh, so I can get the extra 10. So that's what I was thinking was the neck of Culpa because I reviewed the Wyndham stuff. So

if it's not, now I'm sweating, now I'm in trouble because I don't even know what else I did wrong. All right. So you're ready for the real neck of Culpa. So when, when we were talking about some of the positives. I'm on vacation, guys. All right. I'm going to leave the rest of the show to Craig. There you go. And Nick is calling in from vacation.

So you got to give him some slack here. But he wasn't doing that last week when he said that. We were talking about spirit offering point pooling and talking about how that was a good feature that Spirit offered. And Nick specifically pointed out some airlines that don't offer pooling, including, he said, JetBlue. But JetBlue does offer point pooling. Well, who would have known that?

I even remember when you said it, I thought, wait, I thought, I thought they do. And, but I, I wasn't sure enough to say anything about it, which, which is actually a huge may have come up on my part because I've done it. I've point pooled in my household. Whoops. I did not. I did not know that that you could so you did no status just anybody can point pull it's just free to point points yeah yeah way back because i did know that i did know that big ridiculous promo having to do with um virgin america you remember that airline that doesn't exist anymore i i do and and there was some kind of match with JetBlue where depending on how many Virgin America points you have, you could fly one round trip. So anyway, everybody in my family did that one round trip on JetBlue.

So all three of us got lots of JetBlue points. I combined them all into one account so they'd be easier to use. Makes sense. And forgot to call you last week. Since they allow that, that makes sense. This is me doing that now. Whoops, whoops. You know, I should have known that too

because there was some stacking credit card shenanigans a couple of years ago that we wrote about and then it stopped working, of course. And I think that part of that, if I recall, was the ability to put the points together now that I think about it. But I didn't think about that until right now. So my apologies there. It's easy to forget the details.

No question. No question. Well, so good, good. I like sweeping that right under the carpet. So let's move on right on to mattress running the numbers. And this week, it's sort of like rewards running the numbers, right? I mean, we've got a promotion out to rack up some rewards.

Yeah, yeah. Or maybe it's manufacturer spending the numbers or something like that, right? Right. We've got a nice little bite-sized manufactured spending opportunity, basically, that's free. And Swagbucks lets you buy $20 at a time worth of Swagbucks with a credit card,

no fee, and you can cash out Swagbucks for full value through PayPal. So it really is like buying money for free and getting credit card rewards. Apparently, the reports are that if you want to do more than one of these a day, you've got to wait about an hour between. Maybe the limit's around $40 a day, but reports vary on what exactly it is. So is it worth doing? Well, I mean, so that should be probably at least $40 a day per person as a minimum figure, right? So, I mean, Steven ran the numbers in the post and said, if they run it the entire month of December, because they recently ran it for a month. So if they do it for a whole month again, and you were able to do it for the entire month of December, you'd be looking at $1,240 worth of

spend per person, right? So that's for one player. If you do two players in the household, that's almost $2,500 in spending. You get one day where you're able to buy three for some reason, then you're at $2,500 in spend between two people. I mean, is that worth it? You know, it's definitely worth it for all the people who say, I don't know how to meet minimum spend. You know, I have a hard time with it, blah, blah, blah, or I don't spend enough. Then it probably, though my question on that, well, you know what? I'm going to hold my question for a minute to say that Stephen also points out, by the way, that there are sometimes some like challenges with swag bucks where earning a certain number of swag bucks in a day will get you a little bit more of a bonus.

So it may even be worth buying more than the free limit. There's some ways to buy point packages. And so you should see the post, see the post link in the show description. But anyway, is it worth it? Yeah. I mean, it's easy to spend. It's couch MS. I mean, you're turning credit card into PayPal. It's pretty simple. But is there a risk in this, Greg? I mean, if you've got an Amex card that you're working on, the welcome bonus, or maybe you did the plus four referral and you're earning a bunch of membership rewards points per dollar. Is this safe?

I think so. These are small numbers. I'd be very, very, very surprised if Amex or any of the issuers are going to turn their eyes towards this one. There is a play here that makes this, I think, more interesting if it works. I haven't tried it personally, but a few readers wrote in saying they are using this as a way to liquidate the Visa gift cards. Visa or MasterCard gift cards are buying at Staples or OfficeMax when there's those fee-free

promos or OfficeMax has those $15 back promos, things like that. So you're buying those gift cards usually at face value and earning, hopefully, if you have an in-cash card, you're earning 5.5 extra rewards when you're buying them. And then here's a way to liquidate them for free. That seems like a, that seems like where it's really worth it. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great idea. And actually I bought, I'm sure some readers probably also did virtual visa gift cards from giftcards.com over the Cyber Monday, Black Friday weekend, because those were profitable, slightly profitable with the discount that they had on them. And they made like 20 bucks on $750 worth, plus your portal rewards. So, so I've got, I placed a couple of those orders. So I got a bunch of virtual visas that I was going to have to use for something. And this would be a great

way to get rid of those. So yeah. Thank you. Thank you for that readers. Exactly. A bit of a hassle. I mean, you're gonna have to set a reminder to do it daily. Right. But you know, it does seem like it's worth it. So go for it why not awesome awesome there you go so pick up some free easy points all right then that brings us to i think this week thanks yeah we're skipping the crazy thing we don't have a crazy thing maybe the crazy thing is the main event i think the main event is a crazy thing i agree with that and we'll talk more about why so welcome to the main event vote the main event so today's main event i'm gonna remind you the the title.

Aeroplan Encourages Gaming. Ready, player one? I really thought you were going to try for a better voice that time. There you go. That was better. Try it one more time. Ready, player one. Okay, there we go.

There you see? He's improving, guys. He's improving. Pretty soon, you're going to have him on those voiceovers. You're going to hear him on the commercial. You tried. You do want to. No, you know what?

How can I follow that act? That's a tough act to follow. It was too good. It was too something. Yes. Too something. All right. So ready player one. Oh, it's getting better. It's getting better. There you go. Yeah. Well, so this aeroplane card, I got to say it is the crazy thing because just a couple of days ago, I was talking with somebody about the rumored AeroPlan card and I said, you know, I can't imagine what they could possibly do to make me interested in an airline credit card right now. Like in an era where there's 100,000 point offers on transferable currencies all the time, Amex is just showering us with points.

I was like, this is like a total snoozer. I don't care what they do. It can't possibly be interesting. And boom, I was wrong. It is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So let's get a couple of things out of the way first. This is a chase, new chase credit card. So unfortunately those who are over 524, they've signed up for more than five or more cards in the past 24 months that show up on their credit report, probably won't get approved for this. The other thing to note, I think just to get it out of the way, we're not really,

our discussion here isn't really about the welcome bonus, but let's just get it out of the way. It has a weird structure. They say it's up to a hundred thousand point value, but what you get are two 50K certificates that can be applied to award tickets so if an award costs let's say 70 000 points you would pay the certificate plus 20 000 of your points to to purchase the award um you can't combine two of these certificates in one award, but you could book two separate one-ways or if you have two separate passengers, book them separately and use both of your certificates. So it's kind of awkward compared to getting points. The one good thing, when I first saw it, I was like, oh my God, this is terrible because I assumed it had a one-year deadline for using it the way hotel certs do usually. But it doesn't. It doesn't expire as long as you keep your credit card open. So it's not as bad as I thought,

but at the same time, I'd rather have points. Right. Of course. Of course. Anybody would rather have points, man. But I think that the way they thought this through is really indicative of how much thought has gone into the card because they obviously knew that we were all going to pan these certificates if they expired in a year. There was no accident in the fact that they decided to make these valid as long as you keep the card. It gives you a reason to keep the card if you don't use it in the first year. And it avoids every blogger in the blogosphere saying, oh, this stinks because it's certificates. So it was a brilliant little piece of innovation

that I think is just a glimmer of the thought that they put into this and how they've really kind of tailored it to fit what people like us would like or intrigue us. So let's get into some intriguing things. And first, let me say, so Nick and I attended a virtual presentation the other day and the people in charge who were speaking, they know the loyalty game, right? Like the senior VP who talked, he said, I was just on a mileage run and blah blah blah blah like he he's into this game and and it shows in the structure of the card in a way that that kind of my it boggles my mind because i'm surprised chase went along with it like very i feel like chase doesn't know what they're getting into like the aeroplan people on the they do you know they know clearly what's going on

right chase is probably like oh yeah that sounds sounds good. Okay. So here's the thing. The simple thing that's not as sort of mind boggling, but it's certainly a big piece of this is that they're bonusing grocery spend at 3X uncapped. So I didn't spell this out in my post about Aeroplane, but we all know that it's easy to do things, do manufactured spending at grocery stores. It's easy to buy Visa gift cards, for example. Whether or not it's easy to liquidate them, that's a regional issue. But a lot of people who are big into manufactured spending can spend a lot of grocery stores without trouble. So earning 3x there is a big deal. It also earns 3x for restaurants and for Air Canada purchases, 1x everywhere else, which is a bit of a bummer. They kick in a few extra

points. If you spend exactly $2,000 in a month, you get an extra 500 points. If you spend exactly 4,000 or 6,000, get an extra 1,000 or 1,500 points. So it's up to 1,500 points maximum per month that you can get through that bonus structure. So there's like little gaming going on in that level. Meaning, if know, if you spend exactly, let's say, $2,000 a month, you're going to average earning 3.25 points per dollar at grocery stores and dining rather than three. So that's kind of nice. So that's little gaming. Where it gets bigger is with all the other incentives they have for spending. They put in just an almost mind-boggling number of thresholds for big spend. No, no, not almost.

A mind-boggling number of thresholds. Subtract almost, yeah. Right. Editor, take that out. Thank you. Full stop, mind-boggling. Wait, I'm editing the show this week. No, don't bother. If you thought Greg was crazy for spending a quarter of a million dollars a year on his Delta Diamond status, Air Canada is like, hold my beer. That's right. Wait till you hear what

Air Canada wants you to do. All right. Should we just step through these one at a time? Yeah, I guess so. Very, very briefly there. The earning structure, the points, not bad. Not great, not bad. Keep in mind the fact that lots of currency is transferred to Aeroplan. If you have the Amex Gold card, you can already earn four points per dollar at the grocery store, though that's capped at $25,000 spend per year. And, you know, it costs 250 bucks a year to have the card. So, you know, whether or not that makes more sense for you, question mark there, but three is not bad. It's better than what you're going to get in any other chase card for sure. It's for earning era plan miles. And when you look at the threshold there, like Greg said, well, let's use swag boxes. And for instance,

it's not always around, but let's imagine for a moment that that was a perpetual option to liquidate those gift cards that you bought. So if you spent $2,000 a month, you could liquidate theoretically with two players, that $2,000 via swag box, if they allowed you to buy whatever the $40 a day, right? So you spent that 2000 a month, you're going to come out with what 6,500 points every month. Cause you'll get 6,000 from the spend and then the 500 point bonus. So over 12 months, you're talking about more than enough miles, probably to fly one person in business class to Europe. You would end up with the status that we're going to talk about in a little bit from spend. Cause you'd spend enough

to get a level of elite status. I mean, that's kind of interesting already. It's not a bad deal. So, all right. And the card is only $95 a year. So it's not, you know, it's not an expensive card. It's going against what we thought was Chase's direction. When we talked about Chase a few weeks ago about how Chase seems to be targeting the middle ground of more than 95, but less than, you know, 400. But no, this is, this is going more of the usual way. Right. And it throws in a lot of things that most $95 cards don't. So, okay.

Let's talk about the different spend thresholds. So you automatically, your first sort of up to two years, get the lowest level of Aeroplan elite status automatically when you first sign up. It's called 25K status. And you get it for the rest of the calendar year you sign up, plus all of the next one. They made an exception for this year, 2021, because they're introducing the card so late in the year. They didn't want people to say, oh, I better're introducing the card so late in the year, they didn't want people to say, oh, I better wait until January to sign up. So if you sign up before January, you still

get it through the end of 2023, that 15K or 25K status. Beyond 2023, you can keep that status by spending just $15,000 a year on the card. So pretty low threshold to keep some elite status with Air Canada. Then where it gets more interesting and gamey is if you spend $50,000 in a calendar year, you get a status boost. And what that means is at the end of the year in which you spent at least $50,000 on the card, whatever level of status you would achieve for the next year, they're going to bump that up by one. So if all you had done was spend on the card, you hadn't flown Air Canada or done anything else to get elite status, then you'll have already earned 25K status for the year because

of the 15K spend. So it'll bump you up to 35K status, which that alone, I just have to say that there's not that many benefits at either of those levels. So I wouldn't get super excited about that. Where it gets exciting is if you combine that with other ways of getting elite status. So if you're looking at, you know, if you've managed to get 35K status some other way, getting bumped up to 50K status is a significant bump because that gets you to Star Alliance gold status, which means you get access when flying any Star Alliance carrier,

get access to Star Alliance lounges, for example, including United lounges. So you could be using this spend and a combination of other tricks to get that 50K status with Air Canada, even if you only fly like domestically on United, for example, and get to, you know, get to go into their lounges and also get some other like minor benefits of that, of Star Alliance Gold. And of course, Air Canada itself has some nicer perks if you're flying them, you can use your E upgrades and other things. So that's kind of interesting for somebody who flies a fair amount. You know, if you fly enough that you would earn status, some level of status, then I mean, that could be really interesting.

And I think that that's indicative of the kind of play that Air Canada is making here. You know, they recognize they don't have home field advantage in the United States, but they get a lot of people in the United States to fly a Star Alliance carrier and that would benefit from visiting United lounges. So, you know, it's a,

I think it's a brilliant way to give you an incentive to get the card, to credit your flights to Air Canada and to spend $50,000 on the car. I mean, it's smart, smart stuff, guys. It is. It's really smart.

And even by mentioning mileage running in the presentation, they're kind of telling us as bloggers, it was a virtual room full of bloggers, including a live room full of some of them. And they're basically saying, we're good with that. We are encouraging our aeroplane customers to fly for the sake of status. They're fine with that. So the point is that if you can mileage run your way to 75K status, for example, and spend 50K on this card, you could get their top tier. It's called super elite. I almost feel stupid saying it. It sounds so dumb, but Super Elite. Super Elite.

Yeah, I mean, for all of the ways that Air Canada's team clearly gets it, naming conventions, they can use a little work on it, guys. Super Elite. Like, it's 25K, 35K, 55K. It's all, come on, get a little creative guys super elite you know i i don't know i i like their i like their their their k their number and the k uh as the as the names

because it tells you everything you need what you need to know yeah okay all right fair enough fair enough in the title the super elite i could do without but but i'll take that over like i'll take that yeah explorist and discoverist. What am I talking about here? I'll lay off you guys. Well done, Eric. Well done. All right. But that's really interesting because super elite status does have some good benefits, right?

I mean, and you requalify for fewer miles in future years. That's right. That's true. And, you know, it also has it's the only level where you get free award changes and cancellations, which I find another mind boggling situation, given that every other major North American carrier has made those things free to all members, come on Air Canada, that's one area where you need to catch up. But as things stand right now to get free changes, you need to get to that super elite status, which is unfortunate. But 50,000 to spend to bump up one of those levels is really reasonable, right? When you look at having to spend 250,000 on Delta cards in order to get to Delta diamond status versus this, you can get some other level and spend 50 grand on the card.

That's not. Oh my God. Imagine if Delta offered this, like, you know, I would totally be like getting platinum status sort of net sort of naturally, and then bump up with 50,000 spent to diamond. Yeah. That'd be a no brainer to do that. And I think that's going to be true for, for your Canada loyalists for sure, maybe for Star Alliance loyalists. I think that's something everyone's going to have to figure out for themselves how valuable that is

to them to be worth doing. One of the things I'm going to mention about their, their using their miles is that they're, they're kind of more flexible than most airlines are in that they, um, they not only are a star Alliance partner, so you can use their miles to fly any star Alliance carrier, but you can also use their miles to fly their partners, including some very desirable ones. Like you'd fly Etihad first, you'd fly now Oman Air business or first. Well, also economy with all these, obviously, but I'm just pointing out some very attractive options and even better, you can mix and match. So you can use your Air Canada miles to fly, you know, Turkish to get to, to, uh, Europe and, and then go onward to wherever on, let's say Etihad. And, you know, you can just, uh, you can mix and match and it's all based on a single

sort of zone slash distance-based combination award chart, which, um, which encourages first-class travel. So when I've compared, for example, to United's award prices at business class, it depends where you're going, but it's not always actually even as good of pricing as United. It just depends what you're doing, but it's often similar, but it blows away United's prices at first class. And so it really encourages long haul first class travel, which that's part of the game, right? I mean, so you're playing this, that's what you're playing for, right? I mean, it's a legitimate option for that kind of travel. And they also make it easy. Like you can actually book these things online,

which is not something that you can necessarily do with, with a number of other carriers. And they make it clear that that's important to them. That's something that they value and something that they want people to know and recognize and understand and be able to use. And that stands in contrast to a lot of programs that make it complicated or difficult to redeem your miles. Air Canada is trying to make it really, really easy to redeem your miles. And they have tons of, I was surprised actually, I hadn't even thought about how many partners they have beyond Star Alliance. And during the presentation this week, I think they said what, 45, 46 partners, something like that. I mean, that's insane. You've got lots and lots of airline partners. So the thing about spending

like the 15K to keep the 25 K elite status or spending $50,000 to bump up a level is that there's not that much opportunity cost in doing it, you know, because you get three acts of the grocery store. So, I mean, whatever it is you spend on groceries naturally is probably a significant chunk and then whatever you spend on dining. So, you know, if you're able to, and then if you're able to manufacture a little bit of spend there too, 50,000 is not an unreasonable amount of spend to do over the course of the year. And you're earning miles that are A, in decent quantity, if you're earning them at 3X, if you earn all of those at 3X, you're earning 150,000 miles.

And then there are miles that are pretty darn useful. Air Canada allows a stopover on a one-way for 5,000 additional miles. And so when you're talking about how they have great prices for long haul international first class, not only do they have that, but then you can also add a stop and really turn it into two trips for just 5,000 miles more. So there's really some interesting stuff going on there. But that's not the only spending base. No, it's not. Let's take a detour and talk a little bit about something called priority rewards, which I have to admit, I only vaguely know.

So we may have to queue up a mea culpa for next week when I say something wrong. That's our way of saying that, you know, do your own research here. Please do. So already before the card came out, when you hit each level of elite status through the normal way, which means you're actually spending enough on Air Canada flights to get the qualifying dollars that are required for 25K, then 35K, then 50K and so on. As you reach each tier, you get a priority reward, which is basically, if I understand it right, it's basically a coupon to get half off a Air Canada award. Like, I don't think you could use it for partners, but actually, yeah, I'm not even sure about that.

I thought you could, but I could be wrong. I can't remember about that part of it, but'm not even sure. I thought you could. Maybe you could. I can't remember about that part of it. But here's the thing. No, actually, yeah. Yeah, who knows? Everybody listening to this probably knows, but not at the time of recording this. The thing is, when you get that priority reward when you're a 25K or 35K member, it's really, really low value because it only works for domestic economy awards. And then each level above 35K, they expand a little bit what it's good for up to the

max. When you're super elite, they are good for half-off business class international travel and that's where it could be worth a lot. And so with that background- Preston Pyshko And let me just mention very quickly that the Frequent Miler fact-checking team took a look into Greg's claim that it can only be used down here in Canada. And we have fact-checked him to say that that is completely false. That it says your voucher can be applied easily when booking flight rewards on any airline at aircanada.com or the Air Canada app. So you can use them on partners.

So that's awesome. Good, good, good, good. Yes, that is awesome. The thing that the credit card adds, so that's what priority rewards are and what they were before the credit card came out. What the credit card adds is when you hit $100,000 spend or $250,000 spend or $500,000 or $750,000 spend in a calendar year. What? You have incentives for half a million and three quarters of a million dollars spent. Yes, they do. You will get another priority reward. Now, the sad thing about that is those priority rewards are tied to your status at the time you earn them. 25K elite or 35K elite, when you hit $100,000 spend, for example, you can only use these for domestic economy awards. So you're not going to be saving a lot of miles for using one of these things. And that's true even at $750,000 spend, you still get that, I'm going to call it a crappy

priority reward. But if you're super elite at the time you hit those thresholds, then it gets interesting because like I said, can be used for international business class and becomes something that is at least tangibly valuable, materially valuable, let's say. Preston Pyshko, Yeah, absolutely. I mean let's say. Yeah, absolutely. Hold on. Go ahead. Very valuable. Let's throw a very on there.

Because you're talking about when you can use an international business class on partners, then I would assume, and maybe I'm wrong about this, we should probably ask about this, but I assume that also means if you have a stopover on the trip, that's okay, I would think if it's a one-way. I would think so. So you should be able to get half off the super long haul international business class award that includes multiple partners and flies halfway around the world with a stopover. I mean, that actually could be an incredibly valuable deal that would turn that into a great award. It can, but let's say you book a 200,000. Imagine your reward costs 200,000 miles.

Okay. They call them points now, I guess. So you're spending 100,000. So you've saved 100,000 points. You spent 100,000 in order to save 100,000. So you got 2X on all your spend. You can almost think of it as adding an extra 1X on your spend, which is probably worth doing. But when you start looking at the next threshold, 250K, that's 150K extra spend and you're saving less than 1X.

Then you go up to the next one, it's 250K for each of the next thresholds to save 100K. So it gets the return on your investment, so to speak, gets lower and lower as you go up. And you're probably unlikely to be booking a 200,000 point award, right? So you're probably even looking at less value than that. So that's a great point. That's a lot of spend for that. And I haven't looked into when do these things expire?

You know, how long are they good for? I would guess it's only good for your elite year coming up, you know, the rest of the calendar year and all of the next probably, but I don't know that for sure. So that's not all folks. That's not all. That's if you thought 750,000 spend for some, you know, coupons was not, you know, it was crazy. Air Canada's got more coming.

Right. Those are just like little carrot pellets on the way. Just to make sure you want to keep going. A million dollars of space. A million. That's right. The million. They sort of said, we need to put these little, you know, M&Ms or what were those things?

Reese's. Reese's Pieces. Reese's Pieces. Reese's Pieces. You got to dribble these little Reese's Pieces in front of you every 250,000 miles on this track towards a million. I do like me some Reese's Pieces. I'm not going to lie. That'll keep Nick going. Got my interest there, Canada.

You knew the way to my heart. I love it. Okay. So, yeah. So, you get those little Reese's Pieces, but at the end of a million dollars spend, you're getting a whole candy store full of anything you want. Basically you got your golden ticket. Willy Wonka is there. That's the, that's the analogy.

I should have cued that. Oh man. Yeah. Let me start this whole show. That's your golden ticket. A million, what you get, so once you hit a million dollar spend for the rest of that calendar year and all of the next- You become Willy Wonka. You get to nominate a companion who basically flies for free with you on all your award tickets for all of that time. And so I'm saying basically because the way it's structured is you pay for both people, you pay for two people, but they refund after you

fly, they refund one person's award cost. And so you could book millions of miles worth of flights during that period and get back basically half of it because you're getting back your companions. And, um, it, it, it's sort of like South, it works a lot like Southwest companion ticket in that, you know, for the rest of the calendar year, once you qualify and all the next, you get to add a companion for free, you know, it works just like that, except it's worldwide and it works for partners. So you could be booking Etihad first class and all that kind of stuff. And it works for those things too. So I think, and I wrote in my post, I think this is the most amazing companion ticket ever, at least that I can recall,

but it requires a million dollars. A million dollars a million dollars how is chase with that i mean come on you know because chase doesn't give out limits that are that high i mean obviously you can get a chase card with a high limit but even if you've got a pretty high chase limit you're gonna have to cycle right i mean you'd have because you would need like a100,000 limit on your card more or less. I mean, you're 75, whatever. I didn't do the math. But a very, very ridiculous limit that you would need to max out. So probably most people would have to cycle their limits multiple times to have any help.

You'd have to pay your credit card back mid-cycle, probably repeatedly to have enough of a credit limit in order to make that happen. You'd have to do things that would likely make Chase's fraud team- Chase you down. Look at your account and see it as a risk for bust out and potentially shut you down. So there's a huge conflict here. And that's why I said in the beginning, I feel like Aeroplan has one agenda and Chase just didn't realize what was going on when they got on board this train. No kidding.

Because I mean, the thing that I look at that and I say it's crazy is that if this was a business card or they were offering this perk on a business card, okay. Because they expect businesses to spend a lot of money. So a million dollars on a business card may not be A, a problem with Chase or B, something unexpected and out of the realm of ordinary. But a million dollars on a personal card, if you're not using it for business purposes, I mean, come on, who's spending a million bucks on their Air Canada card? Because I can't imagine the Kim Kardashians of the world getting the Chase Aeroplan card. You know what I'm saying?

I can't imagine the person who's spending a million dollars on personal stuff that's either A, not running a business and hence probably wanting a business card or B, manufactured spending. I mean, I think you have a great point because if you're if you're naturally spending a million dollars on a personal card you're probably spending half of that on your private jet and things like that and if you have your private jet you're not gonna be worrying about getting half off of awards i would think i would think not there was that story about the foo fighters a while back i think was that the band i think it was the foo fighters who had spent on the same Amex card since the very beginning of the band and then used all their Amex points to book buses and hotels or something like that for a tour.

Yeah. So I guess the Foo Fighters are the target market. There you go. Maybe they'll get the Aeroplan card. Yeah, but they'll get better value from their Maz value. I mean, the other thing is, so you spend this million. So now you've got at least a million, well, you've got over a million arrow plan points now in the bank. Do you really need the discount at that point? Anyway, it's just called the chase arrow plan Foo Fighters card. It's super interesting. It's super geared towards gamers, people who like to play this game, who like to manufacture spend, who like to get the best award deals.

It's all in there, wrapped up in a bow, waiting for us all to get shut down by Chase. So that begs the question then, is it worth it? Because I mean, I'm sure that we have some listeners, probably not very many, but I'm sure that we have some listeners who have the capacity to spend that much over the course of a year in terms of manufactured spending. And so is it worth doing that? Because I mean, there's the risk here, if you were doing that is obviously that Chase is going to close all of your accounts. And once they do, typically, I mean, that's what a lifetime ban, right? I mean, you don't really hear very many stories of people getting back in with Chase after that happens.

So is it worth the risk to even go after that? I mean, no. It's interesting. So, I mean, maybe it depends. I definitely can imagine there's people out there who are like, what the heck? I'm going to go for it. And if it works out, I mean, if you did all your spend at 3x and you spend it all down somehow at half off, basically, then it's almost like you earn six X for all that spend and it's fantastic. And you could basically let, you know, live the next year on a first-class airplanes and first-class lounges and just live it up for a whole year. That would be an interesting experiment for somebody to do. Somebody else. Yeah. I'm not planning to do that. So let's get, let's, let's,

let's start, let's, let's start low though. Like, like suppose you, I think there's a number of different ways to play the Air Canada card game. So that, that before talking about spending a million dollars, let's start low end. Let's say all you want, you like some of the features of the card. You, you just want that minimum elite status. You're good with the 25 K status. You just want a card gives you free check bags. It gives you, because of the status, you get some E upgrades and stuff.

Pretty good card. I think for 95 bucks. You just have to spend $15,000 a year to keep your status. And you don't even have to spend in the first year. You could start the second year spending in order to make sure that the third year you have that status. If you want to bump up your earnings a little bit, make sure your spend is all in 2K increments. So you get those extra 500 point bonuses. That's not going to amount to enough to really care, but I think that's a pretty solid choice. Like if you were interested in Air Canada status. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you're interested in Air Canada and why not? Why not have the bottom tier of status? If you're going to be doing anything with Air Canada, it's a pretty

low spend threshold. And like I said, the opportunity cost is not really much there because it probably isn't very difficult for most people to do most of that 15K spend just on stuff they'd buy at the grocery store ordinarily, whether groceries or maybe the occasional gift card for other merchants and that kind of thing. I mean, it'd probably be relatively easy to do. Right. Exactly. Exactly., then if you want to bump it up a little bit, um, you can, well, it's, I guess it's quite a bit of a bump up, but, but if you target spending 50,000 per year, um, I think that the game there is to, is to basically spend $4,000, try to spend exactly $4,000 per month to get those extra bonuses on one month of the year you spend six thousand and you you end up with like fifty thousand dollars spend and um that way you keep your 35k status instead of 25k but it also opens up the game in other ways so for example if you

get the opportunity for a status match at the end, near, let's say mid-year. So I'm not talking about the one that just happened, but let's just say next year, there's an opportunity for a status match. So you get matched Air Canada's, let's say 50K status from another airline and that you meet the challenge. And so your status is good for the next year. If during that first year you spend the 50,000, then your match status should actually get bumped up to 75K. So there's games like that you could play. I think, so if you have a friend who's super elite, they can gift you status. And I think you can then bump up that status by one level.

They won't gift you super elite. They gift you, I forget, 50K or something like that. But you can then bump it up to 75K. So there's games like that that I think that can be played. And in fact, in the presentation we went to, they were very clear that all these things overlap. They're not trying to exclude those kind of things. And they said they're looking forward to seeing what people, you know, figure out.

So, and I believe it. So like, they're not, it's not just marketing. I believe it. You know, I've, I've long read one mile at a time, right. Things about how the team in charge of the new aeroplane is like young and mileage nerdy. And, you know, like they're into this stuff. And I finally saw it with my own two eyes and And I was like, okay, yeah, these guys really, they definitely are in this world

and they're targeting. And it's smart, it makes sense because the people most likely to be interested in Air Canada apart from Canadians and people who just love Canada is this crowd, right? I mean, the people that are earning points and transferring their aeroplane right now. And so appealing to those people was, I think, the right move for them. There's a big market for

them. So yeah, I love the fact that they're not trying to exclude any of that, that there are definitely games to be played there and game on, and then they're happy with that. They want us to be happy. Preston Pyshko, MD, PhD Yeah. As an aside, in case you're wondering, you can't status boost your status boost. They designed it in such a way that logically it just can't be done. You can't one year spend your way to 35K status through the status boost and then boost that up to 50K status and so on. It just doesn't work the way they designed it. And they intentionally designed it that way. And that was smart of them because obviously people would do that.

So, so yeah. So, so I think both of those levels make a lot of sense for for a lot of people and it's, it's, it's super gameable. And then if you get to the 50 K, then I don't know, maybe the additional 50 K incremental spend, if you, if you have capacity to do it for the first coupon is maybe not horrible 50K incremental spend, if you have capacity to do it for the first coupon, is maybe not horrible. Although if you only have the 25K or 35K status, then it's probably not worth it. If you are flying some and earning a higher level or you match to something, blah, blah, then maybe. I agree. I agree. I think you'd look at what type of coupon you would get if you hit the 100K. And so if you've been doing these games to get up to 75K status or better yet to super elite status, then it's worth a lot more. So as long as you know you would use it for good value, yeah, it definitely could be worth spending that extra 50K.

I think it's a very rare person where it makes sense to go beyond that personally. Yeah, agreed. Yeah, probably wouldn't. But I think the fact that we're even talking about spending $50,000 every year on an airline credit card just goes to show that they did well with this, that they definitely designed something interesting because I fully expected this to be a total snoozer. Never in a million years. If you told me three months ago that we were going to talk about the Aeroplan credit card as a main event topic right now, I would have laughed at you. I would have been like, there's no way. I mean, I can't like the obvious cards have had a hundred

thousand point bonuses forever. How many times you heard us talk about those? Like almost not at all because it's just not interesting. You know, even though it's a hundred thousand points, it's not, the cards aren't particularly interesting. The side perks aren't particularly interesting for most people, you know, for a rare person, maybe the big spend bonus on that makes sense, but they're not generally widely applicable or interesting. This is very different. So, you know, I think that, that, that makes it notable. Now, would I go out and get the airplane card? I don't know. I mean, I'm not sure if I'm going to be interested in getting it or not, but I find it intriguing and I could certainly imagine the person I would recommend it to. And maybe I will, which again, not at all what I would have expected to be saying.

I definitely didn't have in mind an airplane card with all of the current big offers out there that wouldn't have been on my radar. And now it suddenly is. So kudos again. Well done. Yeah. I'm kind of in the same position. I wouldn't normally get it. I find it intriguing, but I probably won't get it unless circumstance makes it such that it becomes more interesting. And I happen to have that circumstance in a way, potentially, if this works out. In the presentation we went to, they did a game where they said, here's some hints. And if you could guess which new partner we're adding, we're going to give you 75K status. And so I put in my guess of Omen Air and it turned out it was right. Now I haven't

heard anything back from them. They never said, oh, you got it right. So we'll see what happens. But if I get 75k status, maybe next year I should, or maybe, well, I don't know. If it only lasts until end of next year, then I can't really take advantage of this well you'd have to get the card and spend 50k this month this month yeah that's not gonna happen um but you know imagine a scenario like that where it was good for the next year then it you know it i would be tempted to get the card spend my way to super elite elite status because why not yeah again smart on their part to, to make that possible because then that, you know, that becomes something interesting to talk about. So they, they definitely, I think have done a good job of generating buzz with this card. Uh, and right.

You know, it was just an interesting presentation. Well done. One other thing that we have to mention is pay yourself back. Oh, right. Right. How do we not talk about this? Yeah. They're saying early, early next year, they're going to introduce pay yourself back, which is the same feature they have Oh, right, right. How do we not talk about this? Yeah. And basically what you'll be able to do is purchase travel, any type of travel with a card, pay yourself back and get 1.25 cents per point value, which is pretty interesting because, you know, at 3X, you're getting 3X earnings for grocery and dining. You're getting a good cash rebate when you cash out your points that way. So it's very interesting. And it's kind of funny that they actually actively point out that travel includes with any airline, right? So, you know, you could pay for travel on Delta or United, whatever, and pay yourself back. Now it is capped. 50,000 points per year that you can redeem that way. So $625 in value per year. But A, interesting that this is expanding to other cards.

So that tells me that it's not going away. It's sticking around. And the fact that they've expanded it to a co-brand card, like, whoa, I'm surprised. So that's good news probably for all of us. And the fact that it is such a broadly pay yourself back for travel rather than pay yourself back for like, you know, Airbnb and whatever the other category is right now. I can't even remember away, away travel or, you know, bags or whatever like that is right now. Right. So it's not like that. This is any kind of travel, any airline, any hotel, vacation rental, taxi, Uber, blah, blah, blah, which I think was really, really smart. So that A is exciting from the perspective of if you like pay yourself back,

that's good news for all of us. B though, I think a brilliant innovation on this airline card to make that card your go-to travel card, because now not only can you cover your flight, you can cover most of your trip with the miles earned on that card because now not only can you cover your flight, you can cover most of your trip with that, with the miles earned on that card, you know, maybe not your dining, but everything else, your Uber from to, and from the airport, your, you know, connector flight or positioning flight or a hotel or both. Great idea, Air Canada. Well done. And it was probably, I can imagine that was partly Chase's doing, but great for Air Canada to hop on that. Because initially when I saw it, I was like, I thought to myself when I saw it on the list, so we got a press release just a few

minutes before the event. When I saw that in there, I was like, oh, that must've been Chase's doing pushing this pay yourself back. And I wrote down the question, how does Air Canada feel about the ability to use their points to book a flight on a competitor. And when they talked about it, they were very clear that that's awesome with them. That's great with them. And it makes sense. It's, you know, that they would want you to feel like this is your go-to travel card. Yeah, it absolutely makes sense. The other thing that, that makes me kind of excited is, is because they picked this travel category. So when Chase first introduced Pay Yourself Back, it was like grocery and dining, I think, if I remember. And by the way, I think they still

have dining on the Sapphire Reserve, but not on the Sapphire Preferred. And that made sense during the pandemic, people weren't traveling. So it made sense to have these sort of stay at home categories. But I always thought the long game, long game, like if the Sapphire reserve got travel as a pay yourself back category, that would be awesome because it would, it's already the best card to use for, for buying travel because of it's better than almost anyone else travel protections. And so if you also got not only earning 3X, but the ability to redeem your points at full value towards any travel,

that would be kind of an amazing thing. And it sort of makes me hopeful, I guess, is the best way to say it. The fact that they've introduced travel as a pay yourself back category with one card makes me hopeful that it'll show up on the Sapphire Reserve and maybe make the Sapphire Reserve more relevant again. It's sort of lost some relevance, especially with Capital One's VentureX card coming.

Yeah, I agree. I mean, how long can Chase allow the Aeroplan card to be the best pay-yourself-back card? Yeah. I don't know. That, to me, I think was indicative of hopefully good things to come. So, uh, so that is good news. And it's an interesting feature that makes again, that spend at grocery stores at three X, not a bad value proposition, you know, or, or dining wherever it might be, because you're looking at what 3.75 points per dollar

or cents per dollar. I mean, that's a decent 3.75%. So good news there. Good news all over the place. My question is, is this it for AmeriCanada? Because in Canada, they've got what, like three different credit cards, I think. So they have some higher level ones. And they kind of hinted a number of times that how long this has been in development and that they're still working on stuff. There's more partnerships to come. They announced one new partner with Oman Air, but they were clear that there are a couple more coming in the near future. So I wouldn't be surprised to see a premium or ultra premium card or a business card down the line. So I think there's potential for a lot more interesting to come. Yeah. They explicitly said something like, right now we're only releasing

one card, but they made it pretty clear that their intention long-term is to release at least one more, if not multiple others. And one thing I would love for them to address if and when they release another card is one thing I don't like about this current card is that there's no way to spend your way to Star Alliance gold status without adding in other tricks, right? Because you need to get to that 50K tier. It only lets you spend your way to 35K tier. I'd like to see that fixed and I would become a lot more interested in the card. And I think that the fix on that is, I mean, logically an ultra premium card, right? I mean, that allows you to do that. I think that's likely, you know, hopefully,

hopefully fingers crossed on that. Right. So they could, right. I mean, they could do it with, with almost exact same structure, right? Like an Altar Premium could give you 35K status instead of 25K. And then you have your boost at 50K spend to get you up to 50K. And boom, you're there. This is the rare instance where I feel like they're probably thinking exactly what we're thinking. They probably are. Yeah. So, I mean, good news there, hopefully, to come from Aeroplan in the future.

But good news already with this new card. I think it works out pretty well. It's very interesting. And it's fun. It's fun. How often do we find an airline credit card? It's fun. Yeah.

I mean, maybe they're useful. But yeah, I mean, I've attended a couple of these types of things before. And this was the most fun presentation to watch from Aeroplan. Because I feel like they did a very good job. I of dreading like the presentation going oh yeah it's like another one of these things where they are pretending this is all exciting there's gonna be all this you know oh we want to develop or offer lots of value to card members and blah blah blah and like you know like not everybody everybody wants to do that with their card of course they're gonna say it's gonna be a good deal for card members. This time around, it was very interesting.

So it gives me a lot of hope. It was. No end of surprises in that presentation. So that was super cool. Very good. All right. So then I think that brings us very quickly to the post-roast. So I have a very short post-roast here.

So this week, Greg wrote about his top 10 award redemptions of all time. And so we got to get a brief glance at the best experiences Greg has had redeeming his miles and points. And number two on that list was a trip that he took with yours truly that we just took recently to the Maldives. So, I mean, I was very proud to see that. I mean, that beat out things like that gorgeous view of the Andes mountains in Santiago and the Andes Papagayo. But it didn't beat out the guy who choked and flipped you off, Greg. How did I play second fiddle to the guy who choked you?

What could I say? You know, Richard Branson also included scuba diving, lemurs, all-inclusive food yeah you know yeah lots and lots of fun on necker island um so i'm sorry if you feel you know it cost you 1.2 million no it was a good redemption it was good redemption okay all right that was my post-rust out of the way number two and i don't have one okay that's fine good so we're gonna go to the question off scout question of the week then so we had a question of the week sent in via email. I'm going to pull it back up here. Oh, I just moved it.

There we go. So the question of the week was a little long and I didn't truncate it down. So I'm going to try and do that as I read it. So question this time says, maybe you can address it on the podcast. Both of you have recently written articles about sometimes choosing to earn cash back over miles, be it either by using Bank of America card or the X1 card. I was surprised to read this because even if a cash back card is used only for non-bonus category spend like the 2.62% on the Bank of America premium rewards via Platinum Honors,

there are other points cards like the Amex Blue Business Plus that would provide a greater value at 2X based on your reasonable redemption values. That makes me feel that either you're not practicing what you preach, I'm missing something, or you have special reasons for your choice of a cash redemption of apparently lower value. I'd love it if you could fill us in. For instance, why choose 3x or 4x on the X1 on dining spend when the redemption value could be higher according to your chart, your reasonable redemption values using a card that earns 2 to four X. What do you think? Yeah, I saw this question. I love it. I think it's great. I've been intending to actually write a post to, to answer it, but I'll give, I'll give my, my brief answer here, which is that

you're absolutely right. That based on our reasonable redemption values, you're better off with a two X card that earns transferable points because you can redeem for far more value than even like 3% cash back. So why do we do it? Well, because once you have a lot, a lot of transferable points, the incremental value of getting more goes down. And I don't have any magical way of saying how much does it go down, but the idea is this, that if you have more transferable points than you're ever going to use, then getting more of those, the extra ones are worth nothing or they're at most worth what you could cash them out for. And so, you know, at least in many cases, I'm at that level where I might not have so many, like more than I'll ever use, replenish those points through other ways like signup bonuses, referrals,

especially with Amex. I mean, they've been just throwing points at us through bonuses and referrals. And so earning through spend, it's not going to get me anything more. I'm not going to fly more business or first class flights with those points than I would if I didn't anything more. I'm not going to fly more business or first-class flights with those points than I would if I didn't earn more. So in those cases, I much prefer to just earn cash back because cash can be used for anything. And it's important to remember that the reasonable redemption values are what you can reasonably expect when redeeming. It's not meant to be a cash value. And that's come up before in the past. It's been a while since we talked about it last, but that's not meant to be a cash value

because it's not. It's what you can redeem the points for, but that's not the same thing as money. You know, like the Freedom Unlimited, for instance, that earns one and a half points per dollar, our reasonable redemption value for Chase points makes it sort of appear like that card earns 2.25% back, but not really. You can get 2.25 cents in value, but it's not the same as the cash out value. So the cash out value would only be 1.5% on that card for the ordinary. Right. And another way to look at it too is that you're inadvertently buying points or miles when you're using a credit card that earns points rather than earning cash back. So for example, if your choices are to earn two X transferable points or 3% cash back, you're basically,

you're giving up that cash back. And so you're buying your points at what is it? One and a half cents each. Right. Basically. So the math works out that way that, and that's fine. If you are sure you're going to redeem them for more than one and a half cents each, but if you think it's likely you're not going to redeem them for more than, or if it's likely you're going to redeem them for less than that, which is the point I'm at because I have so many of these points, uh, then, uh, well,

and, and even, you know, so there's a couple of other things that I think of too. So one is I'm not necessarily at that number of miles where I feel like I'll never use them, but I have enough that I feel like I'm not likely to use more than I have in the foreseeable future,

like in the next year or two years. And even at that point, I'm like, okay, well, like Greg said, the incremental value of collecting more of something that I just don't have that much travel planned right now. So the incremental value of collecting more of that is low. Then aside from that, on the other side too, there's the fact that if you do do a lot of spending, if you do a lot of manufacturer spending and that sort of thing, there's only so much you're going to do on any individual card or issuer. And so having other cards to use in those unbonused situations can make some sense to be able to spread around your spend a little bit and to be able to then get a good return on that. And then finally, there are things I spend money on when I travel. And so there are some things that I spend money on

and I would rather spend the rewards that I've earned from a credit card, but I don't want to do that at poor value. If I got to pay for a hotel room, for instance, a cash night at a hotel, I don't want to cash out ultimate rewards points at one cent each in order to be able to book it with my money.

And I don't want to cash out, you know, Amex points at half a cent each for a gift card or whatever it might be. Rather, I'd rather just take cash back I earned on the Bank of America card and put it in my bank account, use whatever card it is that I want to pay at the hotel itself and use the cash back that I earned from the credit card to kind of pay myself back. And when you get to that point of X number of miles, like more miles than I'm going to use in the next year or two, it's not only the difference of earning the 2.62% back versus the two miles, but the fact that the 2.62% back, when I cash that money out and I put it in an investment or whatever kind of a savings vehicle it is that I'm going to use is going to grow some while those points don't. So there's that consideration too, that it's just how many points do I want sitting around it, not appreciating in value. So those are all things to think about. So I think Greg will probably write about all of that stuff. I probably will. Or I'll forget about

it because I'm an other guy. You could. I thought it was a great question. It's not at all a problem. All right, my friends, that brings us to the end for this week. If you enjoyed what we've been talking about and you want to get that post that Greg hopefully remembers to write in your inbox, you want to go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe. Again, that's frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. You can follow us on social media. We're on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and all those places. Find our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group. If you do, by the way, if you click to join that, make sure you answer

the questions that come with it because we get a lot of people that join but don't answer the questions and that kind of goes into the spam filter. So make sure you answer the, it's like, where do you want to go? And do you agree to the rules? That kind of thing. Really simple questions. You don't have to do any difficult math, but you have to answer those in order to get in. Anyway, all that out of the way, wherever you're listening to this, make sure you hit subscribe, enable notifications, give us a like, a thumbs up, a comment. All of those things help out the channel. We appreciate it. And we will see you guys again next week. All right. Wait for it. Wait for it. Game over. That wasn't very good, was it? Over. Insert coin to begin.

Insert coin to play again. All right. See you next week, everybody. Bye.