Frequent Miler on the Air - Alaska Airline's Exciting Mileage Plan Enhancements | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep277 | 10-18-24

Episode Date: October 18, 2024

Alaska Airlines is making some big changes in 2025! We'll talk about why we think these changes are exciting...(and will share an exciting announcement of our own!)  (01:20) - Greg was recently curious about if the Hawaiian Miles personal card would be getting elevated offers and one reader says the answer is yes! Check your emails for higher offers! Listen to our episode about the Hawaiian / Alaska merger here: https://frequentmiler.com/podcast-alaska-hawaiian-airlines-wedding-planning-frequent-miler-on-the-air-ep269-8-23-24/ (03:25) - Fly 15 SkyTeam airlines (and credit to SAS or redeem SAS miles) by end of year and get 1 MILLION MILES... you all had ideas for us related to this challenge... (05:29) - Greg's post "Catching up on 2 weeks of big miles & points news" (Read the post here: https://frequentmiler.com/catching-up-on-2-weeks-of-big-miles-points-news) (07:04) - For the first time ever, the FM team will do 2nd challenge within 1 year...and we want you to participate! Read more about our newest challenge here: https://frequentmiler.com/start-your-engines-for-frequent-miler-million-mile-madness/ (19:47) - Alaska / Hawaiian transfers live (22:28) - Spirit Airlines adds free WiFi and ditches award fees for Free Spirit members. (23:56) - Virgin Atlantic to go to dynamic award pricing - companion and upgrade vouchers may become more usable (28:33) - Choice Privileges max award pricing for Preferred Hotels reduced from 118k to 87k. Only 9 out of 310 are currently priced 80K or higher. Meanwhile, 68 properties are priced 30K or lower. (30:43) - Bilt adds Accor Live Limitless and TAP Air Portugal as transfer partners. (36:18) - Marriott & Aeroplan launch reciprocal status match opportunity. (42:42) - Huge mostly positive changes to Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan coming 2025... Read more about the changes to Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan here: https://frequentmiler.com/alaska-mileage-plan-updates-earn-status-with-award-flights-credit-cards-shopping-portal-spend-more-other-changes/ (43:03) - Earning Elite Status with Alaska Airlines (53:59) - Mileage Plan Milestones (1:04:46) - Other changes (1:13:11) - Some more negative changes (1:15:14) - Summary of our assessments (1:17:46) - Someone wrote in asking if the Alaska changes change our mind about whether it makes sense to earn Alaska miles when paying rent through Bilt

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 Miler on the air starts now. Today's main event, Alaska's exciting mileage plan enhancements. On today's show, we're going to be talking not just about Alaska's announcement about all these big changes they're making for 2025, but also we have an exciting announcement of our own. So stay tuned for that shortly in the show. Very interesting. Yeah. Yeah, I'm excited. For once, enhancements actually means enhancements. And so we're going to talk about

what some of those real enhancements, usually they use the word enhancement in a marketing email. And I'm like, oh, don't enhance it. Don't simplify it. I don't want those things. But this is one of those times where I think maybe some readers will feel differently. All right. But we'll talk about that in a few minutes.

And if you'd like to skip ahead or come back to a segment, remember, you can always find the timestamps in the show notes. So just expand the description of the show and remember, you can always find the timestamps in the show notes. So just expand the description of the show and you'll be able to find those timestamps to jump to the segment of the show that you want to jump to. And wherever you're listening to this or watching this, don't forget to like it. Give us a thumbs up. Leave some feedback. Leave a review for the show.

We appreciate all of those things. All right, Greg, drag out this week's giant mailbag. All right. Today's giant mail. We've got a lot of mail here. First up is Spencer. Spencer wrote in, Greg was recently curious about whether the Hawaiian Miles personal card would be getting elevated offers.

This is because of the marriage between Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines. And we discussed that probably eventually the Hawaiian cards would be going away, but maybe they would have elevated offers in the short term. And Spencer says, and the answer is yes. I was just targeted for an 85,000 point bonus on the personal card through email. Even as a Hawaii resident, I don't think the card itself is very good, but the bonus is great considering transferring capabilities to Alaska Mileage Plan. So check your emails for higher offers. Yeah, that's a great tip. I actually heard that from a few people and I looked in our email accounts and we did not have that anywhere, but I've got my eyes peeled

for it in case we do receive one of those, either my wife or I, because I think at 85,000 points that you can essentially immediately transfer to Alaska these days. That's an amazing offer, especially when taken in context with everything else we'll talk about today. And I'm going to say if you're interested in the Hawaiian Airlines card for those bonuses, I think it makes sense to consider it sooner rather than later. I think you want it now. And I think the ability to combine miles on the Hawaiian side is something, again, you want now. So go after those things sooner rather than later. I think if there's any takeaway from the speed with which everything has moved thus far, it's that everything is going to move faster than we expect it to.

And that's not to say that the Hawaiian Airlines cards are going to go away tomorrow, but I don't know when they are, and I'm not sure that we're going to know before they do. So I would move on those sooner rather than later is all I'm saying. Totally agree. Totally agree. All right. But that's not all of the giant mail. We also have some mail in response to our post about the Skin and Even Airlines or SAS Euro bonus millionaire promotion. They're running a promotion. They just joined SkyTeam. And they're running a promotion where if you fly 15 different SkyTeam airlines

and credit those to SAS or redeem SAS miles for some of them. And if you do all that by the end of this year, you get 1 million miles. 1 million miles. That's a pretty awesome promotion i mean a million miles for 15 airlines that sounds pretty cool it does and it's it's it sounds really cool it's kind of crazy i mean like you know it doesn't make sense for most people to do because like the cost the uh discomfort in trying to uh fly these 15 different airlines um in such a short period of time could be uh hard but so i don't think most people time cost itself i think it's tough i mean you get 15 airlines that are spread across the world right so it's not like they're all in one spot so there's a definite time cost to doing yeah i mean it seems like close to there's a large number of them in asia a large number in europe and then a few

others scattered around um and yeah you have to fly all over the globe to do this pretty much anyway uh some responses to that article uh preacher says you guys absolutely need to do this as one of your competitions. 100% you do. Jules writes, I can't think of a better promotion for at least one member of the FM team to take advantage of. And Mantis says, this would make a great FM challenge. Judge on who is fastest, cheapest, and most creative slash luxurious. That's a really good idea isn't it greg i thought so in fact i wrote a post so i've been on vacation for a little over two weeks and so if you've been listening to these podcasts you've mostly been listening to ones that we pre-recorded before i left for vacation and now i'm. And so I wrote a post saying,

catching up on two weeks of big miles and points news. And in there, I mentioned this SaaS promo. And in there, I said, I love this as a fun challenge. I'm considering doing this. Maybe I'll offer a big prize for the person who comes up with an itinerary that I'll actually buy and fly. And I need to convince Nick to do this with me.

That's what I wrote in that post. Readers were on board with this. Andrew said, of course, Greg the Frequent Miler would see the crazy SaaS promo and have one response. Challenge accepted. And Gio at YQB says, please, please, Nick, do the SAS challenge with Greg. David C says, challenge, challenge, challenge. You only live once and what a story to tell for generations. And finally, Stever says, I think watching you guys do the SAS challenge would be 100% better than any annual challenge you could cook up.

All caps, this is it. This is the time. Well, you know what? I couldn't agree more. In fact, when I saw this, I immediately popped out a message to the rest of the team and I was like, oh my goodness, this is the most frequent Mylar promotion ever. It's like they wrote this for us, right? And the people have spoken, Greg. The people have spoken that we're supposed to do this. So are we doing it or what? We are doing it. Challenge accepted. We are now announcing the new challenge for 2024. Yes, we already had one in 2024. So this is the first time ever we're doing a second one in the same year and we're calling it Million Mile Madness.

Whoa, Million Mile Madness 2024. So for this one, there's going to be three competitors. So this time around, yes, Greg did convince me to do it. Truth be told, he didn't have to twist my arm very hard because as soon as I saw it, I was like, oh, this is too much fun to resist. And a million miles is a nice little carrot to put out there. But certainly the challenge of finding a great way to do it just seemed too exciting to pass up. And luckily, we were also able to twist Stephen Pepper's arm and get him to agree to do it also. So the three of us are going to be competing to earn a million SAS miles each, a million SAS Euro bonus miles each in the sassiest way possible. What do we mean by sassiest?

Yeah, so we stuffed the rules into an acronym, SAS. So the first S is speed. The faster you can complete the challenge and the least time in flight, the better. So that's speed. The A is affordability. Who can book the cheapest flights eligible to earn these miles? And so it's basically about who builds the cheapest overall itinerary for the whole thing. And splendor we were we were reaching for this one but uh you know fast and

cheap is good but fast and cheap and comfortable is even better uh unfortunately comfortable doesn't start with an s so we use the word splendor to to uh wedge that in there well you know it's a comfortable and a cool trip right i, because there's two different ways you do this. You could just spend the entire time on planes, which, I mean, that's one way to complete the challenge and earn your million miles. And the other way would be to plan a trip that also includes some cool stuff. So Splendor, I think, encompasses both comfort and like style here, right? It's like, you know, there's a style. Style would have been a good ask, maybe.

Let's change it. The affordability style. Like, why didn't we come up with the word style? That's so much better. All right. You heard it here first. Style. That's the creative process at work, folks, right there.

So when you see the post, it'll sound like we had that idea all along. But as a podcast listener, you'll know that that happened live before your eyes. Well, pre-recorded before your eyes. Live and pre-recorded. Same deal. So, I mean, we're going to be doing all this traveling. What the heck are Tim and Kerry going to be doing? Yeah. Tim and Kerry will be the judges. They're going to be sitting at home and watching what we're doing and arbitrarily throwing out points. Not arbitrarily, but they will be deciding basically who wins. And they'll be using whatever judgment calls they need to make. And there will be judgment calls to make, certainly regarding style. is going to be interesting because as we'll talk in a minute, people might be using a combination of cash and airline miles to, and maybe other things to like upgrade certificates or whatever,

to piece this whole thing together. And so they're going to have to figure out how to account for all that. Yeah. So I think that's going to be interesting. And so, you know, we've got a whole set of rules, like we can use our own miles and credits and certificates and things like that to help. So, you know, for instance, we might have to connect some dots that don't include a SkyTeam flight, right? I mean, maybe you'll need to get from A to B in order to catch us another SkyTeam flight. And we can use our own miles to book those in-betweeners. And so that'll be on us to do. And that'll be, you know, sort of separate, I suppose. And also, you know, if you've got like a, I don't know, an upgrade certificate,

like Greg, you've got global upgrade certificates, right? I mean, he could upgrade with one of those and fly comfortably, right? Yeah. I mean, you know, that's going to get really interesting because in order to use my Delta upgrade certificates uh so for example i could book a klm flight and use my delta upgrade certificate to upgrade it as long as my delta number is attached but then i'll have to change it before actually flying to credit to sass um i assume that'll work, but I don't know that for sure. So that'll be a little risky. Yeah. So there'll be gambling like that or trying to find ways to fill in those gaps. And then Tim and Kerry are going to have to consider those along with the kind of overall feel of your trip and the affordability of your entire trip. I mean, obviously, if we spend a million miles connecting the dots, plus we buy all these flights,

then that won't be worth it. But if we spend a hundred thousand miles and $1,500 or whatever it might be, I mean, I don't think it will necessarily be possible to do that cheaply, although we're going to find out, right? So anyway, they'll have to take all of that into consideration. Yeah, yeah yeah yeah um so all our travel is going to happen mid-november uh the exact start and end dates are going to vary by a contestant so we each have our own sort of uh constraints about when we can start an end and then the actual start dates will be dependent on you, when we find the flights that, that match what we need. So, so that's sort of TBD, uh, detail wise. And we're, we're not doing anything to try to force

us all to start from the same location as we've sometimes done in the past. Um, you know, Nick is going to start from starting an end from somewhere near New York, right? I'll start an end from near Detroit, which is my home airport. And Steven is going to be in Vegas, if I remember right, during that time. So that will be his start and end point. And the reason I'm saying near is because like, you know, Nick might drive out to Boston or something for his real start.

I could imagine taking an Amtrak to Chicago and starting from there. So there is definitely wiggle room. And truthfully, it doesn't really – you might look at this and say, wow, Nick has such a big advantage because there are super cheap flights to Europe from New York and Boston, which isn't true from the other two starting locations. But Stephen and I could use our own miles to get to New York if that's the case. So it doesn't make a big difference as far as that goes. Right. I totally agree. As the Northeast located

member of the team, I totally agree with that. Anyway, I think it just makes it more realistic. And with the requirement to fly 15 different airlines, you're really going to have to go all over the world no matter what. So the difference in starting in New York versus starting in Detroit or Las Vegas, I think is somewhat minimal because Stephen could get, of course, to the West Coast more easily and potentially get an option to Asia more easily than I could and blah, blah, blah. So we'll see. Anyway, we'll find out how that all works out. But, but, but most important thing here probably is that not only

are we each hoping to earn 1 million miles, but you, the listener, reader, frequent miler, audience member can also win. Yes. Yeah. We're going to be giving out some pretty significant prizes. And I say that without actually knowing what exactly they're going to be. We're working on that. We're working on that. It's coming soon to be determined, but we're planning. We're planning big. We're working on that. We're working on that. It's coming soon to be determined, but we're planning. We're planning big. We're aiming high. Aiming high.

So I believe that once we announce what the prizes are, people will be very excited about the potential there. The way it's going to work is that each of us, Nick, Stephen, and I are going to have our own journal posts where we document as we go trying to figure out what our itinerary is. We document what our constraints are, what upgrades or digs we have, all that kind of stuff. And we're going to look for people in the comments of those posts to help us. And so you might have figured out an entire round the world itinerary and suggest that whole thing,

or you might just know an easy way to hit the, I don't know how many, eight Asian airlines or something like that in one cheap fell swoop. Maybe you just know one great, great hack for getting cheaply to Asia or to Europe or whatever. All of those are fair game. You can suggest those in the comments. And the reason you'd want to suggest them in the comments is once we've each booked our travel, we're each going to pick a person who has helped us the most to design that itinerary. And whoever that is, is a winner, is a finalist.

You will win something. But there's also going to be a grand prize winner from those three people. So whichever person out there helps the winning contestant design their trip. So in other words, we'll each pick that one person that helped us individually the most. And the one of us that wins our contestant that helped us the most in designing our trip is going to win the grand prize. Yeah. So, you know, you could help just one person. You could pick, you know, you want to be on team Nick, Team Steven, whatever. Or you could help all three.

I think we'll be careful not to pick the same person across the three. But yeah, this should be a lot of fun. I hope that people will really get into this and offering up lots of suggestions and trying to win because it'll help us to win and it'll help make the whole thing more exciting. Yeah, I think this could be a lot of fun. I think it's going to be a lot of fun and I look forward to readers getting involved. One of the pieces of feedback we've had on all of our previous challenges is that readers would like to have a way to be more involved and this seemed like a perfect fit. That was the first thing I thought when I saw it, that not only is this awesome and exciting, but this is a great chance to get everybody involved.

So I think that this will be a lot of fun. And if you are into that, if you're the type of person that's like, oh, man, let me get on Google Flights. Let me take a look now. Let's start searching and finding things and filling in the blanks. Well, this is going to be one where you can, you know, kind of do all of that and enjoy it. Even if you're not going to travel and try to make this promotion happen yourself. If you help one of us, you know, with your search skills, then you could end up winning. Hopefully, it'll be hopefully a pretty good prize. Yeah. Yeah.

And so when you're ready to offer up suggestions or you just want to read more, obviously you could go to frequentmiler.com and then you can find our journal posts. Or go to millionmilemadness.com and we'll redirect you basically to the Frequent Miler blog to a page that's all about this challenge and you'll find our journal entries there. There you go. No need to hunt around. Just remember millionmile madness dot com. All right. Great. So that's that's the challenge.

We'll have more about that. There'll be more to come. It's obviously going to happen very quickly. So we're talking about traveling in sort of mid-November. So that's less than a month from now. We'll all be taking off for this. So it's going to happen really fast. So take a look at the blog, take a look at our journal entries and start submitting your

suggestions right away. Yeah. I was about to say, as soon as, as soon as you're done mowing the lawn, you know, right inside and submit your ideas. But at this point of the year, I think, you know, as soon as you're done raking the leaves, right. Raking the leaves. Right.

Right. Oh my goodness. Yes. And we definitely have a leaf raking episode up for you. So we're going to move forward on to what quickly, but I think they're all important things to know about. First up, the Alaska and Hawaiian transfers are live, which means you can now connect up your Alaska mileage plan and your Hawaiian Airlines mileage accounts and freely move those miles back and forth to each other. Yeah, I mean, that's great. That's fantastic to be able to do for a number of reasons.

Obviously, number one, it makes Hawaiian miles way more valuable than they were before because Alaska's got a way more interesting award chart in general. So you can instantly kind of increase the value of your miles, I would say, in terms of partner award booking, for sure, by moving them over to Alaska. So that's great. It's also great because those who have Hawaiian Airlines credit cards are able to pool their miles on the Hawaiian side. So if you've got a few family members with Hawaiian miles, one of you can get the Alaska credit card and you can start to put your miles together to then move them into one Alaska account.

Also a great benefit and a benefit that I don't think is going to last forever. Yeah. Yeah. Also to take that a step further, let's say someone in your family has some Alaska miles. They could move those Alaska miles to their Hawaiian miles, to your Hawaiian miles, to your Alaska account. So there's an indirect way right now to freely move Alaska miles from one person to another. And that will only be available until, well, who knows,

but it's available now. Right. It's available now. Also that Alaska Hawaiian transfer is exciting because it means that for now you can move Amex membership rewards points to Hawaiian and then on to Alaska. Now I bring that up because at the beginning, when the first day this all went live for a while, transfers from Amex to Hawaiian went down. They didn't work for most of that first day. And then eventually they came back. So you can still move your American Airlines, or excuse me, American Express membership rewards points to Hawaiian and then move them on from Hawaiian to Alaska. That's not going to live forever.

Yeah, if you're interested in doing this, it's just like Nick's advice earlier about signing up for the Hawaiian Airlines credit cards. If you're interested in moving your Amex points to Alaska, I'm going back on advice I gave earlier. On another show, I said, maybe wait a bit to see if there's a transfer bonus. I don't feel that way anymore. I feel like if you're interested in it, do it now. We don't know how long it'll last. And if you miss that window, if you have a lot of Amex points and you miss that window, you're going to be kicking yourself. So do it now. Agreed. Agreed. Okay. That's Alaska and Hawaiian. We're going to talk more about Alaska and Hawaiian. So let's move forward to some of the other things that you had to catch up on. Spirit Airlines adds free Wi-Fi. What? Free Wi-Fi? I had to pay for Wi-Fi in

American Airlines last week. I used my Aviator Silver card, so I'll get reimbursed for it. But Spirit added free Wi-Fi. that is not on brand yeah no not on brand at all they've been changing they've been sort of morphing into a quote-unquote normal airline and this is uh this is worth talking about because it goes a little beyond you know i mean yeah delta offers free wi-fi there's a few airlines that do, but it's not common practice, really. I mean, there's lots of airlines that don't. So that's an awesome customer-friendly change. They also got rid of their fees for booking awards close in with their Spirit miles. So that's good too. Yeah. That's even bigger news to me. That's great. It instantly increased the value of

the Spirit, free Spirit points or whatever that we have right now, because I would typically only be booking Spirit closer in. I rarely book cash flights far in advance, I guess. And so normally I'm looking at that last minute because they're the cheapest, but I previously said that it wasn't worth it at that point because of the fees. However, this is a great change for me. So my points will be much more useful. So I like that. Great news out of spirit. Hopefully we'll see more good news to come. What do they do? Yeah, it's advertised as customer friendly because awards are going to be available for every seat on every plane, every Virgin Atlantic plane, not their partners. But the reason they can do that is because they're going to dynamic award pricing, meaning it basically means they're going to roughly tie the price in points to the cost in airfare. I mean, it doesn't necessarily mean that exactly, but that's roughly what tends to happen in these situations. So we're going to see some outrageously high award prices,

most likely. The good news, there's some good news here. I mean, one is that they're not doing that, or at least not yet, to partner awards. And most of the best uses, you could get from certain credit cards and things. Um, they, they sound like they'll become a bit more useful because there will be a way to, they'll be worth a certain number of points. Uh, it, you'll have to dig into the details, but anyway, you can top them off if, if the cost upgrade is more than the number of points, these vouchers are worth. So I think that will make

those more useful. Fun with that all begins October 30th. Yeah. And between now and then, if you find some great uses, I mean, if you find some great uses for flying Virgin with Virgin Atlantic points, those are pretty rare anyway. But if you find them, then you may want to take advantage of the 40% transfer bonus from Chase Ultimate Rewards to Virgin. That's running now through November 30th. So that could certainly make some of those deals even better. And there's a possibility. I mean, they did make it sound like they're going to institute essentially what are new lower saver award flights than what they've had in the past.

And I can't imagine that we're going to see wide availability of those over the long haul. But I could imagine that when they first launch this, there'll be more saver awards than we might expect in order to kind of control the negative press that they're going to get. So if they, you know, spend a week or two having more saver award availability and then quietly kind of sweep that all under the rug and increase prices. It'll be really easy. So I could see there being some decent saver availability right at the beginning. So that 40% transfer bonus from Chase may come in handy. Yeah. I mean, unless you know how you're going to use it and how you're going to spend the points before October 30th, you have time to wait and see what happens with the dynamic pricing before doing this

if you're considering doing it speculatively. I'm hoping, but I don't know where I would get this hope from, that part of this change will be Virgin reducing the amount of fuel surcharges they impose on awards booked on their own flights. Now, there's nothing in the announcement to suggest that will really happen, but since they're changing up a lot of things, maybe it could happen. I don't know. I mean, I like your optimism. I enjoy that. And hopefully we will all be benefiting from the accuracy of your optimism. So yeah, I don't, I don't, it doesn't seem likely, but at the same time, stranger things have happened. So we'll see. The other thing I was going to mention with Virgin,

by the way, the 40% transfer bonus that might be worth it is Virgin Voyages. I think that there are a couple of current options for Virgin Voyages for redeeming your points. And if that's the case, you'll want to check in the Virgin Red app, because I think right now there are some Caribbean sailings that are available for, if I can remember correctly, I think it's like 140,000 points this time around. I can't remember exactly how many it is. Something like 175 now, some of them are two two there's some that are 140 so it varies a little bit with the 40 transfer bonus that could be a pretty good deal like if you get the one that's 140 000 and only only requires 100 000 chase points and that could be a terrific deal

for a virgin voyages cruise for two people considering that includes all the taxes i think and uh and stuff like that so isn't it except Except for the ones out of the Caribbean, I think. Oh, that might be. That might be. Anyway, either way, it still could be a really good deal. Okay. All right. That's not all.

What's next? No. We've got some good news. Some more good news, I should say, since we are sort of alternating between good and bad. This one's actually good. We had mentioned a while back, choice privileges had devalued a couple times recently when you want to use choice points to book preferred hotels.

Preferred hotels is sort of a partner with choice. And earlier this year, at the beginning of this year, the highest price you'd pay in choice points for a preferred hotel was 55,000 points. They changed that to make the max 87,000 points. That was the first evaluation. Then more recently, it hopped all the way up to 118,000 points per night for some preferred hotel properties. Luckily, that was short-lived and they're back down to $87,000. So that's still not great when you're comparing to $55,000, but it's really not

that awful in the scheme of things, especially when you consider that both city thank you points and Wells Fargo points can transfer one to two to choice privileges. So you're looking at 43,000-ish points for city or Wells Fargo points for booking the most expensive of these preferred hotels. I also did some number crunching and found only nine of the 310 preferred hotels that are covered here are currently priced 80,000 points or higher. There are 68 properties that are priced 30,000 or lower.

So it's not nearly as bad of a devaluation anymore as it looked earlier. Yeah, that is pretty good news overall, especially when you consider how few are even at that price level. I didn't realize it was so few that are at that high end price level. I mean, only nine that seems like they're probably a bunch that are reasonably enough priced, especially considering the one to two transfer ratio from a couple of transferable currencies. Speaking of transferable currencies and ratios, let's talk about built built added two new transfer partners. So they added tap air Portugal as a one to one transfer partner. And that's mildly interesting. What I

heard people talk about about this is that tap tends to have more like anytime type awards available at 150,000 or something like that. Some high number that seemed high to me, but a few people mentioned that they tend to have that non-saver level available very often. For business class awards to Europe? For business class, yeah, to Europe. Yes, yes, I am. Yeah. So, I mean, I guess if you're in that kind of situation, that might be exciting. There's not a lot of great sweet spots in the tap award chart as things stand, but hopefully we'll

see a good transfer bonus to tap at some point. Also, I had a chance to ask tap about stopovers because they allow stopovers on paid tickets. And I think they allow stopovers on star Alliance tickets, but not on tap awards on tap metal. So I asked about that. And that's a feature that is probably going to be coming probably not as quickly as I would like, but down the road, hopefully that's coming. And I think they've got some, hopefully, or what they frame as exciting announcements coming in the next few months. So hopefully we'll see something interesting on a tap to come. So that's kind of cool um and then a core the core is the other new transfer partner and the transfer ratio is better than capital one's ratio to a core

because it is three to two so three built points become two accord points and accord points of course have a fixed cash value so it's what one euro cent point. So this is somewhere just under worth two euro cents per point. So anyway, the math works. The math works out to you're getting about one point four or five cents per built point when you do this transfer, a core is a large hotel chain that has hotels all over the world. Not a lot in the United States, but elsewhere in the world, they have a lot. And you can use those points to just pay for your hotel stays as the best use for those points. Yeah, sort of cut from a similar thread as leaders club you can use this use your points toward whatever room type you want so that might appeal to people who want a suite and also i think

anything you charge to your room and because you just essentially use points to erase the folio so so i mean this is a program where you could you know charge your spa treatments to the room and your meals and everything else and use your points to erase the whole thing at a consistent value. And a core frame of that is being a very predictable, consistent value. So you know exactly what you're going to get every time you earn points and use points. It's the same. So that's not been exciting to me in the past, but when I look at it kind of in the context of the leading hotels of the world, you know, options, I find it to be, I mean, interesting for a certain crowd of people and certainly interesting for the footprint because they do have properties in a lot of places where we don't see other US-based chains. So that's kind of cool too. Yeah. Yeah. And I think they have some chains within the chain that are really, really high end. And if we ever see a built to a core

big transfer bonus, I don't know how likely that is, but I would find that very exciting. Let me ask you a pop quiz. Pop quiz, Greg the Frequent Miler. Now, I did mention this recently in team conversations, so you might know the answer. But I bet you didn't before that at least. And maybe you didn't catch it. How many brands does Accor have? I have no idea. How many Accor brands could you name?

Fairmont. Okay. So that's where I think this is kind of interesting because i would have probably guessed at five or six because i could name like fairmont and i think raffles and ibis and uh i wouldn't have known that moven pick is one of them but it is and and so there's maybe there's a few more that i would novotel, Sofitel, Swiss Hotel. So maybe I would have guessed at six or eight. There's 55. So they have a wide range of brands. And so that's kind of, I think that's interesting because there's a similarly wide range of brands is what we find in other programs. Now,

I hate the fact that Marriott's got 30 different brands. So I'm not sure that 55 brands excites me as much in day-to-day use as it sounds. But I think what it illustrates to me is that they have a much wider reach than what most of us realize. Yeah, no, for sure. And the ability to book all these different... These brands are not ones that they created these are right these are small brands that they bought and like you know like fairmont that had established its own reputation own very positive reputation and now we can use a core points to you know stay at fairmont as a result so the fact that there's so many just tells me we have a lot more choice there. Not choice, privileges choice, but choice.

Okay. All right. So that was a couple of new transfer partner news items here. But speaking of sort of transfer partner and relationship status, let's talk about Marriott and Aeroplan. Yeah, this is pretty interesting. Marriott and Aeroplan have launched a partnership where they have reciprocal status matching. The status matching from Aeroplan to Marriott is not interesting at all. You can get up to Marriott gold status, which is blah. But that's my official, you know, analytic scientific statement on that term for Marriott gold status. You heard it here first folks. But if you have Marriott titanium status or higher titanium is, is the 75 night level for Marriott, then you can get automatic aeroplane 25 K elite status, which is aeroplan's bottom tier elite status just by linking your accounts together and the cool thing is not only do you get like sort of the standard things that bottom tier airline status gives you like free check bags and you know maybe uh priority boarding and whatever you also get two lounge visit certificates.

And you get, well, as a select benefit. So you get to choose a few things. And that's one of the things you could choose. Another thing you get is 20 e-upgrade certificates and the ability to choose up to five more. And this is just for matching your Marriott account to this. Matching it over, yeah. Yeah. And I haven't done this yet,

but I've been told that these e-upgrades, a really good way to use them is to book. They can be used to upgrade awards as long as they're on Air Canada itself. And so the idea is you book what are called latitude economy awards. So they cost a bit more than a regular economy award but not a lot more and then you use these e-certificates to upgrade to business class and so that's what i'm hoping

to do with my certificates if i have a chance to do that um yeah yeah so i've heard that that's good that can be a good value using the certificates for that you know that's a good deal uh so actually i'm excited about this for a few reasons. Number one, it's free and easy if you've got titanium status. And I don't, but I'm suddenly more interested in titanium status. Now, you might say, but titanium already gets you United Silver. So why would you be more excited about Air Canada 25K? Those e-upgrades are one of the reasons. Another one of the reasons is because I understand and I don't know this for a fact. So Air Canada elites, you feel free to chime in and let me know

in the comments. But I understand that award pricing on Air Canada is better for elites. And so I would like to, you know, I'd be interested in seeing if that's true. Could you get better award pricing on Air Canada flights? Because because oftentimes one of the complaints I hear from people about Air Canada Aeroplan is that they're looking for routings to Europe from the West Coast, for instance, and it seems to be routing them via Canada and a lot of itineraries. And there's a lot of reasons for that because of award availability and whatnot. But sometimes I find awards on Air Canada Metal that are priced better than the standard award pricing on partners. And that's without any status. So with status, I would be really curious to see what pricing ends up like. So I find this to be a pretty cool one. Also, I visited a maple leaf lounge last year

during our or this summer, I think during our challenge, I don't even remember where it was. But I remember it was nice. I was like, wow, this is really nice, actually. So I don't know if I just got lucky and found a nice maple leaf lounge or if several of them are pretty nice, but I'd be pretty cool with a couple of Maple Leaf Lounge passes too. Yeah, for sure. And this is in addition to, you know, Marriott still has its relationship with United, as Nick mentioned briefly, where you get United Silver status if you have Marriott Titanium or higher. I am scared that this new relationship means that the United one might not be long living. But at least as things stand right now, getting Marriott Titanium means getting elite status in two different Star Alliance airlines, which is, I think, pretty darn neat.

It improves, in my mind, the value of Marriott titanium status, and it makes it harder to make the decision whether to reach for that level. If you're already at platinum status, is it worth reaching the extra 25 nights required to get to titanium? And it certainly adds another carrot to the end of that equation. Oh, it definitely does. I'm not going to make it this year just by virtue of how much time there is left and how many nights I'm short. But I would be considering it for next year now because that does kind of interest me. But here's a question for you that maybe we already know the answer to. I'm hoping you do know the answer to it because I don't.

I have a guess, but I don't. So I know one of the benefits of the Aeroplan credit card is that if you spend X amount, what is it, 15K? Or there's an amount that you get a status boost, right? Where you boost up your level of status one beyond whatever you've earned. 50K. Would that boost? 50K, there you go would that boost

this i think so but but their next level is 35k and and you have to get to 50k to get star lines gold star lines gold status so that won't help you okay all right that answers that good i was for the honest i was jumping ahead to why nick cares yes Yes. Yes. I forgot that they have that 35K. That's not Star Alliance gold. I was thinking, oh, this is Star Silver. But yes. Okay. Good point.

All right. So not particularly exciting. Right. Although I should mention, because you brought that up, if I'm remembering right, when you have the credit card, you do get 25K status as long as you spend something like 15,000 a year. That's where my 15 came, yeah. So that might be what you were thinking about. And so that, if you have the card and are spending that amount anyway,

then that lessens, obviously, the excitement of this for you. Potentially, yes. Okay, very good. Because I don't know if the 50K, like if you spend 50K, does it bump up the status you earn from the card? I don think I don't know I'm not sure now so I think it I think probably does but again that would just get you to the 35 the same same same yeah same situation all right all right I think that wraps up all of the the news that you uh needed to catch up on and that brings us to the biggest news the the main event. Main event time. Alaska's exciting mileage plan enhancements.

So we didn't see this coming, but Alaska announced huge and mostly, not all, but mostly positive changes to their mileage plan program, which all of this is coming in 2025. And first up, we're going to talk about how to earn elite status with Alaska Airlines so I'm going to apologize in advance some of this is going to get pretty kind of technical speak around all this stuff but unfortunately I think we have to get into this to make sense of of this announcement really but so with Alaska Mileage Plan, you can earn different levels of elite status, which they call MVP. So each year when you earn, and this isn't changing what I'm about to say. Each year when you earn 20,000 elite qualifying miles, EQMs, you get MVP status.

That's their lowest level of elite status. When you get to 40,000 EQMs, you get MVP gold status. You get at 75,000 EQMs, you get MVP gold 75K. So I like that. I like instead of making up new names, they just added the EQ. It makes it easier to know what we're talking about. And then at MVP, you would get MVP gold a hundred K. All right, Nick, how many, how many EQMs do you need to earn to get MVP gold a hundred K status? Must be 110,000, right? Are you going to tell me 100? 100,000.

100K EQMs. Now, before the announcement, the way you earn EQMs primarily is by crediting actual flights to your Alaska mileage plan account. And these could be flights on Alaska itself or on Alaska's partners. And in general, you earn one EQM, one elite qualifying mile per mile flown. This is in addition to redeemable miles that you earn, which you can earn at different rates than that, but we're talking EQMs. So that's how it has worked. And it'll continue to work that way. But now in this new system, there's going to be new ways to get EQMs. And not only that, so the EQMs will not only get you elite status the same way as before, but it will also earn you milestone awards, much like how American Airlines does it, how Hyatt does it. A number of different programs now are offering these awards that you could get along the way towards

elite status and even beyond as you go past the top tier elite status, you can get more. And I think that's really smart and makes a lot of sense because I know tons of people that will never earn elite status with a program and probably aren't even aware of the benefits of that. Maybe they even could, but they probably just aren't even aware of what the benefits are because they've never had them. They don't know how it works. They've never dived into these programs kind of a thing. But I think with these milestones, you give people a chance to earn something at much lower levels that they're like, oh, this is kind of what else can I get? And so I think it definitely turns on more people to being interested in the program if they can get something earlier on. So I think this is really smart.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. First up, the most exciting new way to earn EQMs is through award flights. Simply booking awards with your mileage plan miles, you will earn one elite qualifying mile per mile flown. So if you book a flight that flies 10,000 miles, you'll earn 10,000 EQMs. Now, some other airlines have done things similar, like Virgin Atlantic. But Virgin Atlantic, you'll only earn those qualifying points when you fly Virgin Atlantic itself as an award. With Alaska, you earn it no matter what airline you book with your miles. So you could book Qatar, you could book Japan Airlines, you could book any one world carrier

or other Alaska partners and earn EQMs. That's absolute insanity. That's incredible because it, I mean, for so many reasons, but obviously the ability to earn elite status when you're redeeming rewards makes me want to redeem Alaska miles left and right, because not only am I going to enjoy the benefits of that flight, but I'm still going to be earning EQMs. That is going to make me much, much more invested in Alaska as an elite program moving forward. Not only as an elite program, just as a focal point, because you've got that double sort of

a reward. So I love it. I also love that it'll make it interesting to mileage run again for people that are kind of close. You know, it makes sense to redeem a really long economy class award potentially, you know, or a business class award, obviously, if you can find it, if you're close to reaching status, and you're like, Oh, I'm to toss an extra trip in here and earn status along the way. So I think it's exciting. I think it's cool.

It'll open up some neat opportunities and, again, a good opportunity to get rewarded for redeeming miles that you want to redeem anyway. And another thing worth saying is that this, to me, and also some of the other things we're about to talk about, but it goes a long way towards making Alaska Mileage Plan a program where it makes sense to earn elite status, even if you don't ever fly Alaska Airlines itself. You know, because you get these things and you can earn like one world status that's valuable in lots of ways. Anyway, so that's one. And that's the biggest one. That to me, if that was the only part of the announcement, I'd be like, wow, mic drop.

That's amazing. Yeah, exactly. You know, I'm so excited about that one thing that's coming. All right. But there's more. Credit card spend. So you will, starting in 2025, earn one EQM per $3 you spend on an Alaska Airlines credit card. It's capped at most 30,000 EQMs you can earn in a year.

So $90,000 spend. So, yeah. What do you think about that one? I mean, if you were already spending, so if you're spending 6,000 anyway to earn your companion certificate, because people have opened their cards since I think January 18th of 2023, if I'm remembering the date right, need to spend $6,000 each year in order to earn their companion certificates. If you're spending that anyway, there's 2000 EQMs right off the bat that, you know, are just just coming in. And,

and if you're spending more because you like Alaska miles, and there aren't very many ways to get Alaska miles, or at least there won't be if and when they probably cut off transfers from Amex to Hawaiian, then you know, this is a little bit of a pot sweetener. And it's a better deal than spending on for instance, a Delta card. The best Delta card in terms of earn on spend earns what? Like one EQD per $10 spent? And that's if you have the $550 reserve card or whatever the annual fee is, a 600, I don't know how much is the annual fee on the reserve card.

Yeah, I mean, whatever. But you actually can't compare those apples to apples because top tier Delta status through MQDs is way less than top tier Alaska status through EQMs. But it's still better or at least as good earnings with the Alaska card for that from that way. It's not I would say it's not as good as what American Airlines does with loyalty points. So that also you have to do some adjusting to change the to make it apples to apples. So American requires what is it something 200,000 loyalty points for their top tier status, something like that. I think it's around there, yeah. Alaska requires 100,000.

100,000 maybe. alaska eqm then you know with an american airlines card you're getting the equivalent of of uh what two um you're getting the equivalent of of uh half a alaska eqm per per dollar whereas with alaska card you're getting a third of a eqm Right, right. Yeah. So it's they're they're not too far off. And I'll tell you what, I would trade a little bit less in EQM earning and credit card spend if I can get EQM earning on award flights. And they're giving me that. So that's a trade I'll take. It doesn't make me much more likely to use an Alaska card than I already am. And I'm not particularly likely to use an Alaska card right now. So although that said, like I said, I'm much more interested in Alaska miles now than I once was.

So I say that, and maybe my perspective on that will change some as I begin redeeming and using up the Alaska miles that I have. At any rate, you'll have the ability to do it. So it'll be there. I probably still won't spend $90,000 on an Alaska card, but if you do, there you have it. You'll get your $30,000 EQMs and have MVP status and a good head start on MVP gold. Yep. All right. Another category for earning EQMs is with their shopping partners.

All the partners where you can earn Alaska miles. So like their shopping portal, their dining program, their Lyft partnership, you name it, there's probably some kind of flowers deal where you can get Alaska miles. I don't know. But in those situations for every 3000're looking at oneouts, for instance, aren't as good, I'm not going to accept lower payouts. Also, they'd have to at least match Americans payouts for me to be interested, I think. And then obviously, there's all the other portals out there. Don't forget to use something like cashbackmonitor.com to take a look at the portal rates for all the various portals, or at least many of the various portals to compare before you start shopping through their portal and then consider similar stuff to compare different other partner earning opportunities. All right. So that's partner spending. What about rollover EQMs? Is that new? Yeah. Yeah. So we're about to talk about the milestones that you can earn as you earn EQMs.

One of the choices you can pick when you've earned a certain number of EQMs for a given year is you can roll over 10,000 EQMs to next year, basically get a head start on your status for next year. So we'll get into that now because we're about to talk about the milestones. So we just covered, just to sort of sum up, we just covered to choose a milestone benefit, basically one or two, depending on which threshold you hit. Yeah. So the at the first threshold here, I guess the 10,000 EQMs. So if you're in 10,000 EQMs, you can choose one of the following benefits. And so the first step of those would be 750 bonus miles. Next, you could choose to pre-order a complimentary meal for your flight. You could choose a complimentary Wi-Fi pass. You could try MVP status for your trip. That's, I think, kind of a cool one. Or earn double miles with non-air partners. I assume that's going to be a one-time use as well on that. The details aren't out yet.

Someone said that it might be available for a certain number of days. So for all of your earnings with a non-air partner, but we'll see. Or upgrade your next Avis rental. So, I mean, out of this, what's worth it? Well, I think that trying MVP status is very interesting because you're know, you're not, you're what, you're halfway at this point to MVP elite status. And it gives you a chance to actually enjoy a trip with MVP status, even though you're only halfway there. So, you know, I find that really interesting. And, you know, alternatively, if you know you're going to be doing a lot of shopping through the Alaska shopping portal or something, why not do the double miles day where or not double an extra two miles

per dollar spent on the card. And I think that's coming up in November here, we wrote about it. And so there's going to be a day or two days where you get an extra two, two miles per dollar spent on the Alaska card. And so if you know, you're, you're going to be going after that and going through the shopping portal. So you can earn double miles on the non air partners there. I think that that could work out really well. So I'd be interested potentially in that too. All right. But those are your 10,000 EQM benefits. At 30,000 EQMs, you got a whole bunch more different options, 2,500 bonus miles, $25 off a future flight, four Wi-Fi passes, $100 off an Alaska lounge membership, or you could try MVP gold status for a trip, which that, again,

similar to what Greg said with MVP status for a trip, I think this is a great idea. Give people the chance to experience what the benefits of reaching that next tier are going to be. Right, right. Then at 40,000, that's when you get to your gold status. And at 55,000, that's when you get the next milestone benefits. But this time you get to choose two. You get to choose from the following, 5,000 bonus miles, 10,000 miles off, and extras redemption. So extras redemption, that's a new thing where you can use miles to book experiences and stuff. And I don't expect those to be good value. So I'm not that interested in these miles off these, but we'll see. We'll see when the details are released. You can gift MVP. That's the first level, lowest level lead status. You can gift

it for a trip. I find that very interesting. You can also get one complimentary lounge day pass or you can get two upgrade certificates. So remember, you could choose two from this list. And there are several there that are pretty darn interesting. They're certainly valuable. And especially if you like the idea of gifting, you know, giving someone else the ability to get elite status for a trip that that seems pretty cool. So yeah, yeah, yeah, I like that. I think that's pretty cool. I think the upgrade certificates to are potentially interesting. I've I've used MVP guest gold or MVP gold guest upgrades in the past. And I found them to be pretty useful. So that's another good one. And yeah, being able to pick two of those, that's really nice. I like it. I like it. So at 55K, you get that. Then let's see, you'd reach your next level

of elite status at 75K. That'd be your MVP gold status. And then after that, our next milestone comes in at 85,000 EQMs, which again gives you the opportunity to choose two from the following 15,000 bonus miles, 25,000 miles off an extras redemption, two complimentary lounge day passes, two upgrade certificates, gifting MVP gold status for a trip, nominating someone for MVP status. So that'll be for the entire membership year.

Presumably, presumably. That to me is probably one of the sweetest ones because, I mean, giving someone elite status for a whole membership year, assuming that we're interpreting that correctly, that's a huge gift. Yeah, yeah, that's a great gift. Or 10,000 elite qualifying miles rolled over into the next year. So here you're at 85K, you're 10,000 over the threshold for 75K. If you know you're not going to make it all the way to 100, then you could take 10,000 and roll them over to the next year and kind of shorten your path for the next year, which I could imagine being appealing for somebody who just reaches this level and doesn't think that there's a reasonable way for them to get to 100. Yeah. At 100K, that's when you get to that top tier MVP status, MVP 100K status.

Now you can choose one. And I'm going to caveat this. In the older program, the one available through the end of this year, you get to pick 50,000 bonus miles, I think at MVP 75K status. That benefit is going away. It's getting moved to be one of the choice benefits, one of the milestone benefits at 100k now. So 50k bonus miles is one of the things you can choose. That's obviously very valuable. Or you could do 75,000 miles off an extras redemption. You could

get an Alaska lounge membership. You can get complimentary Wi-Fi on every flight. Or you could fly Spirit instead. You could get four upgrade certificates. Or you can nominate someone for MVP Gold status. I think that's also a really great gift, MVP Gold status. So, yeah, I mean, all of these could be pretty good. 50,000 miles, though, I mean, that would be the one that would appeal to me the most as an East Coast based person, since I could book a business class award on a partner to Europe starting at 45,000 miles one way. So more than enough for a business class ticket to Europe. That would be hard for me to ignore. So I'd probably interested in seeing what the extras redemptions are going to be. I was talking with an airline exec about this recently and the idea that there are opportunities for airlines, at least in some cases, to partner with types of experiences you couldn't otherwise have.

I mentioned how I've been surprised that, at least I haven't noticed, many ways during the booking flow to add things like that to my flight. You know, here you have a group of people that obviously have a lot of miles and perhaps like flying business class, for instance, why wouldn't you give them an opportunity to use more miles on some sort of an experience, an elevated experience that they couldn't otherwise get. And so, so maybe we'll see something interesting from, I mean, I feel like Alaska thinks outside the box. So I will hold hope that there could be something like this. And to be clear, it wasn't an Alaska exec that I was having

that conversation with, just something that gave me some thought that I think there's an opportunity there that airlines are missing. Yeah, that's a great point. And you're right. Who would have predicted that a big announcement about enhancement to alaska mileage plan would be have so much positive in it right we would not have predicted that in advance so right right and we've seen like obvious like uh qatar airways obvious offer some really good experiences with points that have been great value and i don't know why they're not putting that in the booking flow oh you're going to new york well look you you've got an opportunity. You can use some miles to go see a game or whatever, because they've had tickets to games and concerts and things like that. It would seem

like something that programs could take better advantage of. So anyway, that's me on my soapbox. It has nothing really to do with this, because 50,000 bonus miles is probably the clear pick, unless you know that there's an extras redemption that'll be worth the 75K. We'll see what happens there. But there are a couple of other milestones too, right? If you earn lots and lots of EQMs. Yeah. So after you pass 100k, there are milestone rewards you can pick at 150, 200, and 250k. Each of those times you can pick two of the following, 15,000 bonus miles, 25,000 off an extras redemption, two complimentary lounge passes,

two upgrade certificates, and 10,000 elite qualifying miles rolled over. There you go. So you got a couple more options to choose those. So there's decent choice benefits, I'd say, right? At each of these levels. Obviously, if you were previous 75k you know mvp gold 75k and you were getting your 50 000 redeemable miles there you're going to be disappointed that makes sense that's fair apart from that i'd say that these are pretty good overall yeah i i find all of those um i don't know

if i'd say exciting but but like i i just contrast to what American Airlines did with the loyalty point rewards at the low levels. Why? I get my two preferred seat coupons at $15,000. Yeah, I think you choose between that or a roll of toilet paper or something like that. I forget what those options are. Something like that, yes. So being able to try MVP status for a trip or earning double miles with non-air partners at just 10,000 EQMs. I mean, I think that they're not nothing. I think that's what stands out. None of these are like a nothing benefit. Many of them are potentially really nice benefits or at least nice enough to make them worth striving for if you were close to one of those thresholds.

Exactly, exactly. But wait, there is more to all of this. There are other changes coming in 2025. First up, they're trying to incentivize people to book flights through Alaska's website. So this is where we're going to get into, well, we'll get in more of the negative later, but let me start with this uh when you book a partner flight um or alaska itself through the alaska website the uh partner bookings will earn you'll earn a hundred percent of the miles flown um if you book an economy flight, this is for earning redeemable miles now, not EQMs, by the way. 150% for premium economy, 250% for business class, and 350% for international first class. So you can earn a ton of Alaska miles by booking your paid flights, even partner paid flights through Alaska's website.

Yeah. So, I mean, on the one hand, that's good if you are somebody who books a lot of paid flights through Alaska's website, the earnings are certainly nice. So if you're somebody who was already booking premium economy or business class, and you would be happy to do it through the Alaska Airlines website, for instance, or obviously first class, then you're going to be earning a lot more miles. So that's nice in the sense that it simplifies and it makes those increased bonuses available across all the various partners. I'm less of a fan because it requires booking through Alaska. And so if I'm going to book a paid business class flight, I am more often looking to book that using points at a value of one and a half cents per point, whether that's using my Chase Ultimate Rewards points or using my MX Membership Rewards points in the business platinum rebate.

So I would be much more apt to book one of those types of flights through a different site and then credit to Alaska. And at least until now and through the end of this year, we've seen some opportunities to earn lots of redeemable miles on those premium cabin flights, even when you've booked them via Chase or British Airways, so long as you get your Alaska mileage plan number attached. And I think that's not going to be the case moving forward. It's only going to be if you're booking those cash flights through Alaska that you're going to earn those big bonuses. That's right. That's right. For the situation Nick just described, or when, for example, British Airways has a big sale themselves and that you have to book through British Airways, you can no longer earn a ton of Alaska miles by crediting that to Alaska going forward during 2025.

So that's going to hurt a lot of a lot in a lot of situations where people have been doing that in the past so i know i know there's going to be a lot of people out there maybe not a lot but there's going to be a vocal segment of people diehards who will be vocal about this is bad this is net negative and and yeah if you've been doing things it is negative in that way um you're gonna have to see whether you can find a way to book those through alaska in order to earn those kind of rates and in some cases like nick was describing if you want to book with your points that's just with points that pay for travel like through chase through mx that's just not going to work the one way it might work i bet is if you're using altitude reserve points

because you'd be booking through alaska right so if you if you to get real-time mobile rewards yes yes that would be a way to do it so that that that will potentially make it interesting because real-time mobile rewards officially only work on u.s based companies so if you're booking a flight on let's say qatar officially it's not supposed to work for real-time mobile rewards. I don't know for sure Qatar specifically whether or not it does, because we have found some foreign airlines do still work. Uh, but it almost certainly would work if you were booking it through the Alaska website and getting charged by Alaska. So, uh, so I mean, that'll be the way

to do it, I guess, moving forward, but it's definitely, it's a huge bummer from that standpoint. I've booked paid British airways business class through Amex or through Chase before and enjoyed those huge earning rates that are going to go away. So it's a bummer. Let's see, what else? What else is... There's some changes to how lead upgrades will work. First of all, million milers will get the highest priority for the complimentary upgrades. And then the order of upgrade after that will be based on how many EQMs the person has earned. And initially, that's going to be based on how many they've earned year to date, something like that. But eventually, it's going to go to a rolling 12 month type of thing

once they can work that out technically. So that would be a big change to the priority of upgrades. Another change is that currently, if you have the lowest level of status, just MVP, then currently your companion is not eligible for complementary upgrades but if you have mvp gold or higher than they are they're going to be changing that to where even

at the lowest level at mvp your one companion is eligible for complementary upgrades as well that's nice it's still probably never going to clear, but at least now it could clear for both of you. No, I don't really know if that's true. I don't fly Alaska enough. You become theoretically clearable. Yeah. Theoretically clearable. All right. Also coming, and this will be a positive whenever it happens, is multi-carrier award flights. So right now, you can only book award flights that include Alaska Airlines plus up to one other partner. So if you want to book, I mentioned Qatar before, then you could book an itinerary that includes both Alaska and Qatar, but you could not book an itinerary that includes, for instance, American Airlines and Qatar. However, that's coming soon, the ability to do that.

So sometime this winter, you'll have the ability to book more than one partner airline on an award ticket, starting with redemptions between the U.S. and Europe. That's interesting. And then expanding worldwide later on. So apparently throughout 2025, that will expand. So it's not going to be like flip a switch and you can all of a sudden book all the multi-carrier awards you want. It's going to be a slower process. Yeah. Apparently it's a technical challenge for them to make this happen. And I'm not really sure why they're starting with Europe, except that maybe most of the most urgent use cases might be for flights to Europe, you know, because especially for, for, you know, what Nick just described, finding a partner that flies to Europe in this case, I guess you

described flying to Doha, but, um, you know, let's say you want to book, I'll use British Airways because they're the most likely, even though they have those high fuel surcharges, but you want to book a British Airways flight, but your, your home airport is not at the, at that airport of departure, your most likely connection in one world is American Airlines. And so you really want to be able to book both that American Airlines connecting flight to, let's say, I don't know, Chicago, and then British Airways on to London. Yep. So I think you're right. I think probably because Americans that travel internationally, I think the most popular destination for Americans abroad is Europe. So

it probably makes sense that they would make that available. And like you said, I think it's all about, in that case, being able to connect American plus a partner because not everybody lives in an Alaska hub. So if you didn't have that opportunity or Alaska doesn't serve all of the international gateways, there's tons of one world partners that fly to airlines that Alaska doesn't. So being able to add American plus that will be a big advantage. So that'll be great when it comes. And whenever that is, I would assume sooner than we expect because they've been very good about that so far. So I'm hopeful that'll be very soon. They said sometime this winter and winter is coming.

So winter is coming. Okay. Finally, well, not really finally, but another thing that's changing is the extras will be coming. We mentioned this earlier. You'll soon have the opportunity to redeem miles for events and experiences but we know nothing about that so more to come about that and now for the bummer stuff let's let's get into some of the bummer stuff nick all right so mvp gold is no longer going to earn the four upgrade

certificates automatically that is a bummer so it'll be choice benefits i i guess instead of automatically getting your upgrades you'll have to pick them over the other things right so there's some opportunity costs there because you you're going to be losing out on other good stuff if you pick those upgrade certificates mvp cold 75k will no longer earn for alaska lounge day passes automatically again you'll have to pick them if you want them as milestone rewards, nor will you get the 50,000 bonus miles, which we mentioned earlier. Earning rates are going to be reduced on Alaska flights with status. So those with Alaska status

right now earn bonus multiples or bonus miles, excuse me, rather unpaid flights. And that's going to continue, but it's going to be fewer miles. You're going to earn smaller bonuses moving forward. So MVPs currently right now in 2024 earn a 50% bonus over mileage flown, but they're only going to be a 25% bonus next year. MVP Gold drops from 100 to 50. MVP Gold 75K drops from 125K to 100. But MVP Gold, MVP Gold, wow, this is really hard to say. MVP Gold 100K stays the same at 150% bonus.

So that's at least good for those with top tier status or who plan to get top tier status. Another bummer. So that things, yep, go ahead. Yeah, another bummer we have listed here, we already discussed that earning rates are reduced for partner flights when you're not booking through alaska airlines itself and finally i don't know how many people this will affect but there you'll get fewer free check bags for mvp status so uh that's that bottom tier status. You'll be reduced to getting just one free check bag per person instead of two starting in 2025.

Yeah. All right. So a few negative changes there. What do you make of all of that overall? Yeah, I mean, you know, I think we've already kind of covered most of our reactions, which is that, you know, yeah, for people who have been earning lots of miles booking through other avenues, this is a bummer. For certain specific elite thresholds, there are some downsides. But, I know, when flying airlines that have hardly anything to do with Alaska Airlines whatsoever, other than they have a partnership either through One World or a separate partnership, that I'm going to be earning qualifying miles towards Alaska status. I find

that just really cool. And I think I could see easily if you fly internationally a number of times a year, having MVP status at the minimal, just without even thinking about it because you've been redeeming Alaska miles. Yeah, yeah, I agree with that. I think it's a big bummer that the MVP, that first threshold, the bonus is being cut in half in terms of the miles you earn from paid flights. I think that makes MVP status perhaps less appealing. However, I think it's a good trade to trade that for the ability to earn EQMs from award flights. That's just amazing. Yeah. Yeah. So obviously, overall, we're pretty psyched. We like the ability to earn milestones as you go along. And the ability to earn EQMs from other ways like credit card spend, partner spending are

good. They're not quite at American Airlines level, in my opinion, but they're way better than nothing. So it gives you additional ways to earn them and not at not terrible rates, I should say. Yeah, for sure. Excellent. All right. Well, we're obviously both

excited about this. I think we see this as overall hugely positive. So obviously, we are now more excited than ever about both Alaska mileage plan. And certainly we both harped on the fact that we liked the idea of earning elite qualifying miles from award tickets. So clearly, we like Alaska miles more than we used to, which leads us to this week's question of the week. So Mark writes in to say he had asked previously on a previous episode, what we thought about using the Alaska credit card to pay rent through built rewards because if you use your Alaska consumer card to pay your rent through built, you earn three miles per dollar on your rent. However, you have to pay the credit card transaction fee on that. So I think it's,

what is the 3% you pay. So you're essentially paying one penny per mile to pay your rent with your Alaska card. So they came back to us and said, well, you know, the conclusion you came to on the podcast was that it was close, but probably not worth doing for most people. Since I asked that question, Mark says, a few things have changed. For one, built limited rent day earnings. I still use my Alaska card for rent, about $3,600 a month in his case, but not for much else. So I'm not earning points as much as I was before. Also, the revamp of Alaska mileage plan means I would be earning about 150,000 miles a year with rent, and I could use those miles for award flights, making it very easy for me to get Alaska status. I was wondering if these changes would impact your conclusion on this. Thanks, Mark.

So Mark wants to know if essentially paying again, because because of the 3% transaction fee, you are essentially paying one penny. And it's even worse than that. You're really paying one and a half, because if you used a built credit card to pay your rent, you would already earn one built point with no credit card transaction fee. And you could transfer that to Alaska. So you're only really earning two extra Alaska miles in exchange for the 3% fee. So really it's like paying one and a half cent per mile. I guess you could look at it in that way and say, okay, well, is it worth paying one and a half cents a mile if you're in a situation where the rent means you'd earn 150,000 miles a

year? Are you more excited about doing that now that we're more excited about Alaska mileage plan and Alaska award tickets? Yeah, I think that's a great question. And I'm glad you clarified the cost per point. I was going to jump in and do that. You were going to correct me. I saw it coming. You worded it off.

You saw that thought bubble and you worded it off. It was right there. Good work reading it. The, you know, one and a half cents per alaska mile was beforehand i wouldn't have been a buyer at that point but i wouldn't have been i wouldn't have have you know worn people off being a buyer at that point if they regularly use al Alaska miles and knew they could get good value from them. Yeah, I think that the announcement of what's changing makes it suddenly like one and a half cents to buy Alaska miles is a really good deal. especially if you consider that if you're interested in Alaska elite status, then you're earning some EQMs from that additional credit card spend. I assume that's how it works. And you are earning more miles, which when you spend them for award tickets, you're going to earn more

EQMs towards elite status. So you're getting so much more than the miles themselves, you know, ultimately. And so I think if you're into Alaska status, I think that's a very reasonable approach to say, I'm going to keep my Alaska miles, you know, topped up through these getting three Alaska miles per dollar. That's my take. What about you? Do you agree? I'm just curious. Well, I'm curious.

So as you covered, there's the additional incentive of the fact that you're going to earn EQMs based on spend, right? So if you spend that much on your rent every month, I don't know, what does that come out to? 30,000, 50,, $50,000-ish is what he was going at, I guess, a year in rent. Then you're looking at earning a decent number of EQMs just from that spend. But let's separate for a second. Let me just ask you this. If you could buy Alaska miles at one and a half cents per mile, if they went on sale tomorrow at one and a half

cents per mile, would you buy them? I would not, but that's easy for me to say because I, I took advantage of that MX 20% transfer bonus to Hawaiian and I signed up for some Hawaiian credit cards. And now, you know, thanks to those things, I'm, I'm standing, sitting at probably one and a half million Alaska miles, something like that. Yeah. And so, you know. All right. Let's pretend you didn't do that.

Let's pretend you didn't do that. And you've got like no Hawaiian or Alaska miles right now. Right. Right. Or not many anyway, not, not enough to, to be in that spot. Would you buy them at one and a half cents per mile? I don't think so. I think I, but I think if I was in a situation where I flew Alaska Airlines a little bit, it wouldn't even have to be a lot, but a little bit so that I

would really benefit from having elite status, then I'd be a lot more interested in their elite status because that's where I'd get like complimentary upgrades and whatnot. And things like Alaska lounge access would mean something to me. And so if I was in that position, I think I would, because there's not a lot of easy ways, you know, other than built. And once Amex no longer can transfer to Hawaiian, which we're assuming is going to happen, we don't know for sure. But once those things happen, there's not going to be easy ways to get Alaska miles. And so I think this represents, it's not a, not necessarily a cheap way, but a decent value, you know, not a bad value way of getting those Alaska miles and earning towards elite status at the same time.

I like that combination. Okay. All right. You know, I, I, you're all, everything Greg said is right. So it, I mean, it's all true that yes, this is even a slightly better deal than it was before. If you're going to be redeeming your Alaska miles, that is. So you have to be in a situation where you know you're going to redeem Alaska miles because if you don't redeem them, then it's not doing any additional good at this point having them. So you have to know you're going to redeem Alaska miles or be reasonably confident you're going to be redeeming Alaska miles and earning EQMs that way also for that to really matter. Or as we said, you're using the credit card a bunch, so you are going to earn a bunch of EQMs that way. I think it makes more sense to earn EQMs from credit card spend this way, probably for most people than putting all of your other purchases on your Alaska card.

For instance, this is like a, probably a lower opportunity cost method overall, I guess, over what your next best card's going to be. It depends on the situation, I guess, and the type of purchase. I am torn though, still in the sense that I still think one and a half cents per mile is expensive, at least for right now. Right now, you can still get both of the Hawaiian cards. And so, you know, you're talking about a hundred and something thousand. I don't know if you get targeted for that 85K offer we mentioned earlier. And I don't remember what the business card offer is right now. Maybe only 50K. But you're talking about at least 130,000 miles.

They're up for grabs right there with those two cards. You could get membership rewards cards right now. Now, we don't know how long membership rewards will transfer to Alaska, but for a while they will. I'm pretty confident you could put together way more than 150,000 miles with a couple of new card bonuses right now. I would be looking to accumulate my Alaska miles that way over paying one and a half cents per mile. I think right now that's I think that's my perspective. For the time being, though, I say that as somebody who's probably going to regret not having more Alaska miles in the not distant future. The other thing is, I think if you're going to be closer to not MVP, MVP doesn't

excite me as much. If you're going to be closer to one of the one world thresholds, like one world Sapphire or one world Emerald, then I think paying the rent with the card, if like those EQMs are going to bump you over the top or a combination of those and the EQMs you're going to earn from redeeming the miles to get you one world status. And the reason I say that is because then you'll be able to get one world lounge access, even when you're flying on an economy class and different partners, blah, blah. I think it's probably more useful at that point and more valuable to me than if you're only going to earn the first threshold of MVP status. So I'm still kind of split. I'm still not wildly excited about it. I think it's a better deal than it was sure i'm still a little

hesitant at one and a half cents per mile even though i know you could do much better redeeming yeah so if you are going to do much better redeeming great then go ahead but i'm hopeful i hope uh tim will will chime in at least at least with a blog post or something maybe our next ask us anything and see how he feels about this. And I'm mentioning Tim because he lives out in Seattle, which is where Alaska's hub is. So he is a lot more stake in this game than we do out on the East Coast-ish. Yeah, great point. I would love to see that post from Tim. So we're gonna have to make him do it.

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