Frequent Miler on the Air - Alaska/Hawaiian Airlines Wedding Planning | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep269 | 8-23-24

Episode Date: August 23, 2024

Late 2023, Alaska Airlines announced that it planned to acquire Hawaiian Airlines and just last week, the DOJ allowed the merger to move ahead. Today, we'll talk about how to prepare for this "wedding" between programs. (01:12) - The value of my Life miles just disappeared into Finn Air Listen to Ask Us Anything Ep69 here. Listen to Frequent Miler on the Air Ep268 "Best Uses for Virgin Points" here. (02:25) - Dell no longer selling many 3rd party items (headphones, etc) (03:59) - Amex Business Platinum card credits for Dell, Adobe, and Indeed are ending 12/31/24 Read more about the Amex Business Platinum card here. (06:48) - Which hotel award search tool is best? Read Greg's post about which hotel award search tool is best here. (10:17) - Radisson Rewards instant status (Read more about Radisson Rewards instant status here) (11:50) - Marriott just sent Greg a $50 promo gift card for continued loyalty Main Event: Alaska/Hawaiian Airlines Wedding Planning (13:24) - Late 2023, Alaska Airlines announced that it planned to acquire Hawaiian Airlines... (15:44) - Backing up... Let's talk about the pre-merger situation with both airlines... (16:29) - Alaska Airlines recently joined oneworld alliance, recently overhauled award charts, and pledged to offer mixed partner awards by late 2024 (17:50) - What we like about Alaska Airlines... (21:29) - Alaska miles are hard to get in huge quantities... (23:12) - Alaska credit cards... Learn more about the Alaska Airlines Visa Signature card here. Learn more about the Alaska Airlines Visa Business card here. (24:41) - Currently, very few great uses for Hawaiian Airlines miles (25:21) - Hawaiian Airlines has wide body jets with lie-flat business class seats, and international destinations: South Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, Cook Islands (26:31) - Getting Hawaiian Airline miles... Learn more about the Hawaiian Airlines World Elite MasterCard by Barclays here. Learn more about the Hawaiian Airlines Business card here. (29:07) - What we know about the merger so far... (30:30) - What we don't know yet... (36:21) - Amex Membership Rewards 20% transfer bonus to Hawaiian through 8/31/24 (46:34) - One reader booked a one way partner flight through Flying Blue, then it was revoked at the Copa counter without notice or explanation. Is this common and what should you do in this kind if situation? Subscribe and Follow

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 and Hawaiian Airlines wedding planning. We've all been invited to the wedding, but we have nothing to wear. We're going to talk about how

to plan for this big wedding. How many miles should you have in your account to get ready for the big event? And you know, I was a DJ in a past life. I DJed a lot of weddings, so I have some experience here. So hopefully I can help you figure this out, Alaska and Hawaiian. I don't know about everybody else. You guys are good luck. Hopefully Greg has more advice for you about what to wear to the wedding. But before we get into all that, I want to remind you that you can always find the timestamps in the show notes. So if you want to jump ahead to that segment or something else in the show, or you want to come back and visit it later on, you can always find those in the show notes. You might have to expand the description box to find that wherever you're watching or listening. Don't forget to like this. Give us

a thumbs up. Leave us a review. Leave us a comment. Let us know what you thought, wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to like this. Give us a thumbs up. Leave us a review. Leave us a comment. Let us know what you thought, what you agreed with, what you disagreed with, what you think differently. We always love to hear from you guys. All that out of the way, let's drag out this week's Giant Mailbag. All right. Today's Giant Mail is tiny. This is in reaction to last week's show and on our Ask Us Anything, we talked about the Avianca Life Miles devaluation and the Qatar

Avios devaluation. And for the latter, we talked a bit about how Finnair Avios somewhat help make that devaluation of Avios less bad because that's another alternative way to use your obvious to good value. And so, uh, James, Oh, seven, seven, eight, five wrote the value of my life. Miles just disappeared into thin air. Well done. Well played. I love it. That was a great, great joke. Nice pun. Well done there. All right. So, you know, it's true. It's somewhat true because Finnair is probably now your best ish bet for booking at least some domestic flights, although LifeMile still is a bet. Just my opinion, I guess. So thank you for sharing that great pun for us. We were short one pun for this week's episode. Let's next talk about what crazy thing, what crazy thing did Dell do this week? Yeah. So Dell, we've been, we've been shopping a lot at Dell about $200 for every six months or so

because of the business platinum card, which has been offering the 200 in dell credit every january through uh june and again july through december and uh but you know it gets uh to where how many dell things do you want to buy um luckily dell has been previously selling lots of third-party stuff so you've been able to get things like Bose headphones and whatnot to make up for the fact that you're pretty full on Dell's own accessories. But the truth be told, I even had like a little box of Google Pixel Buds and my preferred Logitech MX performance mouse kind of a thing., so I had all these, I have a few backups of all of those types of things. And thank goodness I do because Dell is no longer selling most third party items. So there's a few things they're still stocking, but they're getting rid of almost all of the third party stuff. So no more Bose headphones at all. The pixel earbuds are gone. There was one

pixel watch left. I think when I looked the other day. I don't know if that's even still there anymore. So lots of that stuff is going by the wayside. So that's a bummer. Yeah, yeah. Luckily, unluckily, I don't know. It's not going to make that much difference to us after this year, it looks like. Because just a reminder, Nick published in the beginning of this year that Amex has said that the business platinum card credits for Dell and a few other things are ending at the end of this year. So Dell, Adobe, and Indeed credits are expected to be gone.

I assume they're going to replace those with something else. And hopefully it'll be something that does sell third party miscellaneous things where we actually do want to buy them every six months or whatever the periodicity of the new credits will be. Yeah. I think we briefly discussed this a little while ago. Then we were saying that when this news first broke, it was so long ago now that we'd almost forgotten about it. But when the news first broke that these credits were going to be ending December 31st, I think both of us probably figured, well, they must be planning to announce something that's going to replace these sometime soon. So I think probably either one of us would have bet back in January when this was announced that by the middle of the year, they were going to announce whatever

is going to be replacing it next year. And here we are past the middle of the year and there's been no announcement yet. So I don't know what they're going to do, if anything. I mean, of course, there's no guarantee they're going to replace these credits, but the card would be pretty hard to justify without like any useful credits for six hundred and ninety five dollars a year. So there must be something coming. I hope it's good i'll bet anything anything that they are going to replace it with probably more total dollar value credits yeah but but likely less widely useful you know that so i mean the the things like like the adobe and and indeed were already like very very specific use cases dell you know used to

be have so many things available including it used to have tvs and you know there were like lots of things you could buy um so that was widely useful i think we're going to see more very specific you know use use the card for for this this shop or this product and get credits. So we'll see. We'll see. Yep. Yep. Good reminder.

Good reminder. And on that same note, let me just remind you, if you have more than one business platinum card, whether your own or within your household, you can split tender right on the website when you're ordering at Dell across up to three cards, so up to three payment methods. So you could use three business platinum cards and trigger these credits on all three of them if you have three in your

household to use. So keep that in mind. Although that advice is maybe that advice is more applicable than ever now, because basically all you've got left to order is Dell stuff. So I guess in a new computer, maybe that's more important now than it was when you were buying earbuds and mice and things like that. So true. True. Yeah. Yep. All right.

Let's move on to this week's award talk. So for award talk this week, you, I think, republished a post. You must have updated about which hotel award search tool is best. So what's changed? What's best and why? So I not only updated and republished, I completely rewrote it. So I had first published it not that long ago. It was early this year comparing hotel award search tools.

And at the time, there was only one tool that did a credible job of what you'd expect a hotel award search tool to do, which is, I'm calling it trip planning. And that's where you want to just say, I'm going to this city during these dates, show me what hotels are available and show me, you know, the point prices and the cash rates so I can compare and, you know, let me figure out what I want to do. That's what I'm calling, again, trip planning. And at the time, only the tool called Aways with a Z at the end did that. And so obviously that was the recommended tool for that use case. But there's other use cases such as finding the best use for your free night certificates,

like anywhere in the country or anywhere in the world. Another common use is you have your heart set on a particular hotel that's theoretically available with points, but you can't find a word availability. Do the tools help you find when it is available and or alert you when it suddenly becomes available? And so those are the types of things that I'm looking for. And a whole bunch of tools either came on the scene or have updated to where now they do trip planning. Some of the trip planning ones have added features that do other things. So what was interesting is that Aways, which was the only one before, now came in second place for trip planning. Pointia added a very nice trip planning feature to their search tool, which was originally just about flights.

So they came in number one. For almost everything else, I like rooms.aero. That's A-E-R-O at the end, rooms.aero, which is the companion tool that goes with the tool seats.aero, which is a nerdy tool that I love for finding award flights. So they now do hotels pretty darn well. And I've talked before on previous shows about how you could use it to find things like really hard to get small luxury hotels of the world properties available to book through Hilton. Sometimes it can be really hard to find those

awards, especially because sometimes they have things like a minimum three nights stay. Rooms.ero automatically tells you that there's more availability for three nights. And so we'll show you what's available for three night minimums and no other tool does that, or at least none do it well. Yeah. So interesting. Yeah, I, you know, this is something that I think is really useful. A lot of people have wanted it for a long time. And so it's great to see some more players in the game here.

So very useful stuff there. If you're trying to plan your trips. I know that I often get bogged down with having to search multiple different things when I'm not using one of these tools anyway, and searching in a million different apps is such a pain. So having a few for these purposes is great. And that's a fantastic resource to check out. Yeah, that's not it for award talk this week, though. Next up, we've got Radisson Rewards offering instant top tier status. Now, you might have heard me say Radisson rewards there and been like, what? Radisson's part of choice, isn't it? But if you weren't around the game a few years back or don't recall, you may not know that Radisson split into two different things. And so

there was one big Radisson program that covered all of the Radisson properties across the world. But then at some point, they split into Radisson Americas and Radisson rest of the world and choice privileges bought Radisson Americas. So Radisson's within the United States and within Central America, and I assume South America are now part of choice privileges. However, Radisson properties like in Europe and Asia and that sort of thing are part of Radisson rewards still, which still exists. And so you can get top tier elite status with Radisson by just like clicking through a link and filling out some info. Click a link and sign up. Yeah.

Now I need to caution very heavily that I don't know if this will be working by the time this show publishes that when we first published this post about it, the link quickly, not quickly, but not that long after we published that link stopped working, but then someone found another way to do it and we republished it with a new way. But anyway, we'll put in the show notes a link to that post and you could check out whether it's still alive, that feature, because why not sign up? You get things like free breakfast and room upgrades and things if you stay at a Radisson International property. All right. And finally, we've got a

nice surprise. You got a little surprise this week from Marriott, huh? Yeah. So I have a Marriott stay coming up, just a three-night stay. And Marriott sent me an email. It said, thank you for being a valued Marriott Bonvoy Titanium Elite member. We're excited to host you for your upcoming stay. In appreciation of your continued loyalty and help make your upcoming stay special, we're pleased to bride you with a $50 Marriott Bonvoy promotional e-gift card. So $50 just out of the blue. That's great. So it expires just about three weeks after

check-in. So I do need to use it on this trip, but great. I'll plan on doing that and enjoy it. So thank you, Marriott. Nice little surprise and delight there. I've never heard of that from Marriott before, but exciting if they're going to start doing that kind of thing. That'd be great. I'm sure that people would appreciate that and probably would drive spending on property. So it seems like kind of a smart move, particularly with their top tier members, so to speak. Although I suppose titanium isn't necessarily exactly top tier.

Ambassador is sort of top tier, but titanium is the top tier you can get without spending 20,000 or 23,000 or whatever the odd number is nowadays in order to get that status. So yeah, that's nice. It is nice. And I would guess that there must be

an element of randomness to it. I doubt they do it for all titanium going forward. I'm sure they don't. But that's cool that I got picked. All right. That brings us to this week's main event. Main event time.

The Alaskan Hawaiian Airlines wedding planning. Okay. So a little background here. Late last year in 2023, Alaska Airlines announced that its plans to acquire Hawaiian Airlines. And, you know, we all kind of held our breath because, you know, basically, here's what was said. Should the Department of Justice know of any reason that this couple should not be joined, speak now or forever hold your peace. So we all held our breath, waiting to see what is the Department of Justice going to say, if anything. and just last week, the Department of Justice allowed its review

to expire without voicing an objection. So it looks like, you know, wedding planning is full on, despite that fear of the... The wedding is on. Wedding is on. Yeah, that's great news. That's great news for whoever it is that predicted that this merger was going to go through because of course you know we had our frequent miler predictions at the beginning of the year and i don't know if everybody agreed with whether or not this was going to go through so i actually didn't double check to see who who predicted both tim and i predicted that it would that it would go through so our predictions are looking good although uh we're both so far behind

Stephen, who got a bunch of predictions right already, that it's not going to really matter. But anyway, so in light of the Department of Justice's silence, the DOJ's silence, our listeners and blog readers have written in. They want to know. So Mo wrote, the Department of Justice just approved, they didn't really approve, but they failed to object, to the Alaskan takeover of Hawaiian. Do you think it's worth it to speculatively transfer Amex points to Hawaiian in hopes they'll become Alaskan miles? I do use Alaskan miles a lot, but they're hard to come by. That was from Mo. And we will try to answer that later in this show.

And John in Carataro says, back when the merger was announced, FrequentMiler discussed on podcasts whether applying and earning a signup bonus on the Hawaiian Airlines credit card would make sense. Thoughts on this route? And again, we'll get into answering that later in the show. Before we try to answer either of those questions, we need to back up and talk about the two airlines. We're going to talk about the pre-merger situation. We're going to talk about what we know about the merger and what we think may or may not happen with the merger. Then we can get back to say, do those things make sense? Okay. Yeah. And I'm looking forward to the answer because I have paid business class flights coming up on Hawaiian Airlines that I was intending to probably credit to Virgin Atlantic to earn Virgin Atlantic miles because I thought those are more

useful for me than Hawaiian miles. Hawaiian miles aren't usually useful, but now I'm questioning whether I may prefer to credit to Hawaiian. So we're going to have to find out what's going on here so I can make that decision because those plans are coming up pretty imminently. So let's talk about Alaska Airlines first. Alaska Airlines recently joined One World. So they're in the One World Alliance along with American Airlines and British Airways and Qantas and Qatar and all the other major One World players. They recently overhauled their award charts entirely. So now their award charts are sort of distance based. And so it's a little different than it used to be.

There are some sweet spots that have gotten better and some that have disappeared entirely. We'll talk more about that in a second. But the nice-ish news here is that since there was recently that major overhaul, it's pretty unlikely that we'll see a major devaluation anytime soon. I mean, more or less, they've set where they want their award charts to be. And I expect they'll probably stay that way for quite a while. And they supposedly have pledged, they've promised, to offer mixed partner awards by late 2024. We haven't seen it yet, but it's not late 2024 yet. So that'll be interesting because, of course, the way things stand as we're recording this, you can only mix Alaska plus one of their partners, you can't mix two of their partners on

an award, which is frustrating, because one world has so many great partners, and Alaska has relatively few routes within the United States, especially if you're on the East Coast anyway, so that makes it a little more difficult. But when you can mix an American flight with one of their foreign partners, that will be pretty exciting, I think. So, I mean, that sounds pretty good, but that's not all. There's more stuff to like about Alaska as well. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of things to like. And I want to say, for those of you who knew the old program, we're not talking about that now. I know that some people are very upset about things that were lost in the old Lask Airlines program.

But if we just look forward at what the program has now, there's a lot to like. You still have free stopover on one-way awards. So on a round trip, you could have two free stopovers. You still have free changes and cancellations. Now, there is a $12.50 partner award booking fee. I hate that they impose that and you don't get that back if you cancel, but still it's completely free changes. Cheap short distance partner awards within the Americas. We're talking economy as low as 4,500 points and a business class as low as 9,000 points. So this is a special, Alaska miles are the cheapest way to book, for example, like short distance American Airlines flights.

Qatar was a, Qatar Avios was previously like a really good alternative because those points are easier to get. But now that Qatar has devalued those awards, Alaska is clearly the best for these short distance flights. It's so cheap. And even worldwide. So that was specific to the Americas where it starts at 4,500 points. But worldwide, for flights under 1,500 miles, you're talking about economy starting at 7,500 points and business at 15,000. So those are good prices too. You've got business class awards to Europe starting at 45,000 points one way. From most of the U.S., you're looking more at 55,000.

Both of those are great prices. Now, in some places, you're looking at 70,000, which isn't a great price, but it's competitive with most other programs. So that's still good. I love that. So Iceland Air. Iceland Air has what they call first class, but it's really regional first class. So anyway, if you're booking Iceland Air in first class or business class, I mean, it's the same thing. You're getting just a,

like a bigger recliner seat. You're not getting like what we think of as international first or business class. So one cool thing of this program is they price those awards as if they're premium economy rather than business class. And so that's great because they're just not worth as much as international business class. So you're talking about from the US to Reykjavik, 30,000 or 35,000 points, depending on where you're flying from. That's pretty cheap. And then that's for, again, Iceland Air's front of the cabin. You can fly all the way from the US West Coast to New Zealand for 75,000 miles in business class or from the US to Asia in business

class for 85,000 miles. So there's some good, in some cases, great prices, but in most cases, we're talking about solid value, if not amazing value. Well, and the thing is, it's solid value, if not amazing. And then if you're someone who wants to plan a stopover, then the value becomes really good because a lot of other programs don't allow that at all. And so you'd be paying for an additional award. So you're looking at prices that are in most cases fairly comparable to what other programs charge, but you can get more value if you're interested in doing a free stopover. And I love that about Alaska's program. That's one of the most interesting features, I think. So I think that that's worth keeping in mind.

But Alaska miles are hard to get. You can't get a whole ton of them very easily, right? Right. So you could sign up for the Bank of America credit cards. They have both a personal and a business one and get the welcome bonuses. So that's a way of getting Alaska miles. You can charge to paid flight. I mean, you could credit to Alaska your paid flights and earn a lot of miles that way. Some other, if you have elite status and you book premium cabin with certain partners, they give you

so many multiples that you could actually earn a lot of Alaska miles that way. But still, compared to some other programs where you could transfer from transferable points programs and move hundreds of thousands of points that way into the program, this one does not have that because you can't transfer it to Alaska from any of the bank-run transferable points programs. Built is the only one that provides one-to-one transfers to Alaska and built doesn't have a welcome bonus on their cards. So again, uh, it's hard to get huge, huge numbers of Alaska miles. Yeah.

And that, I mean, that's a concern for someone like me because I have a family of four. And so I want to fly four people in business class to New Zealand, for instance, we're talking 300,000 miles. I mean, it's hard to earn 300,000 Alaska miles. So that's the catch, so to speak. It's much easier if you're able to earn a bunch of welcome bonuses on cards that earn transferable points and then put them all into one program. That's not been the case with Alaska. So that's that's the toughest part. But you know, if you can get them, there are those good values. Now speaking of other good things about Alaska, their credit cards, speaking of their credit cards, offer a companion ticket. And if you're a newer cardholder, then you have to spend $6,000 on the card in or over the course of the year in

order to earn your companion ticket. If you have one of the legacy cards from years ago, then you may still get that as an annual benefit. And so the companion ticket, the way that works is it starts at $121 for the companion. So you're paying, you know, whatever the full price is for the first ticket, and then you add your companion for 121 bucks, which can be pretty cool. You can create some really interesting itineraries actually with the companion ticket. So that can be worth playing around with. I wrote a post years ago about kind of like really maximizing that because both members can earn miles based on the distance flown since Alaska still offers miles based on distance flown. So that can be a cool perk. And then what do you get some other tidbits about Alaska?

Yeah. Just, just for people to know, like some miscellaneous other stuff, their primary hub is in Seattle. They currently don't have any, to my knowledge, any wide-body aircraft. They don't have any airplanes that have fly-flat seats in business class, for example. Their international flights are very limited. So they do fly to Canada, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Very few flights to those locations. But, you know, so they're not really an international airline. They're barely. And so that's just some background because Hawaiian Airlines is different in a number of ways. So let's now talk about Hawaiian Airlines.

So first of all, there's very few great uses for Hawaiian miles. Yeah, you could get some decent value booking Hawaiian Airlines itself with miles, but only when they have their like saver awards available, which they don't seem to offer very often. And you can use miles sometimes at good value, to upgrade Hawaiian Airlines flights. But again, finding that and actually using it can be difficult. So when comparing the usefulness of miles, Hawaiian to Alaska, and Alaska obviously has way more valuable uses. However, Hawaiian has wide-body jets, unlike Alaska. They do have lie-flat business-class seats, and so they have some physical assets that are pretty exciting, including international

destinations where they have gates they're allowed to fly to, and they do fly to South Korea, to Japan, to Australia, to New Zealand, to Tahiti and to the Cook Islands. So these are all things that, you know, Alaska doesn't have and would be getting with a merger. And not only does Hawaiian have them, but they've got like a brand new seat on their 787 that looks really nice. Unfortunately, I'm booked in Hawaiian Airlines business class, but I'm not going to be flying on the 787 that looks really nice. Unfortunately, I'm booked in Hawaiian Airlines business class, but I'm not going to be flying on the 787. I had that booked initially, but changed plans around a little bit. So I'm not going to get to fly that new suite, but it looks really nice. So not only do they have life flight business class, but they've been investing in a new product that's

going out on the plane. So that's pretty exciting. And again, some of those destinations are places that, you know, Alaska never could have taken you before. So that's pretty cool. And getting Hawaiian miles is a little bit easier or significantly easier, I guess we would say, particularly because you can transfer from Amex membership rewards points. So you'll pay the excise tax that Amex charges because they charge some extra money on transferring to US based programs. They don't charge that when you're transferring to foreign programs, but US based programs like Hawaiian miles, you pay some small little percentage of the number of miles up to I think a max of $99 or something like that,

if I remember correctly. But you can transfer from Amex membership rewards points. And of course, there are tons of cards to earn Amex membership rewards points. So there's lots of welcome bonuses you get, lots of great category bonuses you could get for spend. So it's much easier to accumulate Hawaiian miles from that perspective. Built, unfortunately, no longer transfers to Hawaiian. That came as a surprise to us this week that they ended that partnership. But there are a couple of credit cards, Hawaiian miles credit cards, Barclays offers, both

consumer and business Hawaiian miles cards. So you can earn welcome bonuses there. And a kind of nice benefit. This is one that someone pointed out to me years ago, and I didn't believe it when they told me it was a friend that didn't know much about miles and points. And she told me this, and I was like, no, I think you're misunderstanding something there. And then silly me, I didn't. I was the one who didn't understand it correctly or hadn't looked into it well enough because

cardholders can send and share or send and receive share miles with other people for free. So if you've got the Hawaiian miles card, you can transfer your miles from you to somebody else for free. And that's pretty cool. So the wording on that is if you have the Hawaiian Airlines MasterCard, if you're a primary card holder, you can send and receive Hawaiian miles from friends and family online. So I haven't done this because I'm not a card holder, but apparently you can do it right on the website. Yeah. Yeah.

So that's really interesting because if you have family members that don't have the card, but you do have the card and they want to send their points to you, apparently that's free even in that direction. So that's really cool. And it's going to play into our discussion about whether it's worth signing up for some Hawaiian Airlines cards now. So to grossly oversimplify what we just said about the two programs, Alaska has an excellent rewards program. Hawaiian Airlines has long haul aircraft with live flat seats and business class and they fly to international destinations. So there's two good things that are coming together, right? Well, the nice thing is that Alaska has the excellent rewards program and that's the awards program that they're going to keep, right? So let's talk about the merger info. Yeah. So here's what we know about the merger, or what we believe. The brands will be kept separate. So Hawaiian Airlines as a brand will still be advertised. You'll still be booking flights on Hawaiian Airlines, but there will only be one loyalty program. They'll be merged into Alaska's mileage plan program. And so when you book flights on Hawaiian Airlines, you're going to be earning

miles and elite credits and whatever within that mileage plan program. I don't know that they'll keep the name mileage plan, but you get the idea that they're going to keep the good programs and jettison the one of questionable value, which is good. Miles, if you have Hawaiian Airlines miles, they'll convert to mileage plan one-to-one. Now, that's not been made publicly official, but it was confirmed to beat of Hawaii by Alaska Airlines. That's what they reported. Also separately, Hawaiian Airlines did report publicly that their miles would not lose value in this transition. So that indicates that a one-to-one transfer, because they'd have some explaining to do if they said that and then it didn't convert one-to-one. So I feel confident about that, that the miles will convert one-to-one. There's a lot

we don't know, the timing of any of this. We don't know when any of that will happen. So even if the merger goes through pretty quickly, that doesn't mean the loyalty program will merge quickly. We don't know what will happen with elite benefits so alaska has some really nice elite benefits that we're wondering are those going to apply to these long-haul international flights that you know previously alaska didn't upgrade people for free on long-haul international because they didn't have any so they don't have any terms and conditions currently that would prevent that that i'm aware of what about those companion companion tickets that come with a credit card? Will we be able to use those? Will we be able to fly Hawaiian to New Zealand or Cook Islands or

wherever and add a companion for free? Seems really unlikely, but we don't know. Will Alaska take over some of these destinations? That is like, will they fly, will they move these wide-body jets to, for example, Seattle, their hub, and fly directly to some of these international locations? Because that would be really nice for those of us on the U.S. mainland, because currently to take advantage of Hawaiians' international destinations, you have to fly first to Hawaii and then onward. So that would eliminate that. What's going to happen with Amex membership rewards transfers to Hawaiian Airlines?

Will that still be a thing? Is that going to go away? Are they going to change it to transfers to Alaska? We don't know. I'm going to stop for a second. Do you have a prediction on that one, Nick? You know, I know I'm kind of perplexed. I don't think that Alaska will become a partner. My guess is that that's not going to happen. I wonder like how separate the brands are going to be,

though. You hinted at something that stuck out at me right away. And that is, I would predict that they're not going to call the program Alaska Mileage Plan in the long run, because they're not going to market two different airlines with a loyalty program that's branded with Alaska. It just wouldn't make sense for somebody flying Hawaiian to be like, wait, I'm running Alaska Mile. So it doesn't make any sense. It'd be confusing for ordinary consumers. So I expect that they're going to change the name of the program. However, if they're still going to market it as two separate airlines, maybe MX will continue to transfer to the Hawaiian, you know, Hawaiian, like as though they're transferring to Hawaiian

and it's going to be Hawaiian obvious, you know, I use obvious because obvious is one of those programs that applies to several different programs that kind of have separate but equal and intertwined stuff. So I don't know, maybe this will stick around. I'm kind of surprised that there is a transfer bonus scheduled during the time when we're all finding out about this stuff, because I would have thought that they would have not run a transfer bonus if they were intending to end that relationship. So I'm confused, I think, officially. Yeah. I'm kind of leaning towards what Nick rambled towards, which is this idea that I'm guessing that what we're going to have... Let me keep calling it mileage plan, but that

branding-wise, you're going to log into Hawaiian Airlines still and see your mileage plan points and miles and elite credits, even though they're going to come from both Alaska and Hawaiian. And if that's true, if they sort of keep that separation, then there's no reason that Amex has to lose the ability to transfer to hawaiian the reason um amex can't transfer to alaska is that uh alaska has a has a or this is a bit of speculation on my part but this is very common in the industry that uh alaska and bank of america have a have a uh you know a an exclusive relationship exclusive thank you uh alaska and hawai Hawaiian have an exclusive partnership, which doesn't allow them to do transfers from other banks. Now, they're allowed to do built because built is not a bank. Built is a rewards program on its own, even independent from the credit card. So that's what I think is happening there. You're right. So I'm guessing that the transfer will continue, but we don't know. I think you're right, specifically because that would be so brilliant on Alaska's part to have bought Hawaiian in order to be able to get

some of the revenue from selling those miles to Amex, right? Because they can tap into that without having to break their relationship with Bank of America. That would be brilliant. I think just calling it a mileage plan, that would be the play of the year. If that was the main reason for this, which sounds ludicrous, but there's so much money in these loyalty programs and there's so much money in getting these banks to buy your points. And so it could have been a major justification for it. Anyway, the last question we have here is what will happen to the Hawaiian Airlines credit cards? And I think a lot of this discussion we just had

is the answer is very similar. I mean, we don't know. It's possible that Barclays could keep that relationship if they, depending on how they brand their rewards program, I think. It's kind of like that because of that exclusive that Bank of America has with Alaska. That's going to kind of drive what happens with the Barclays relationship with Hawaiian. I have to wonder if part of the reason they're keeping the separate brands is

because those bank relationships tend to be for a defined period of years. And so I don't know when they last re-upped their contracts with these various programs, but it might make sense to keep the brands to keep marketing both brands because Hawaiian Airlines has a partnership with Barclays and it's got to either persist or they lose it. So, yeah, I mean, I mean, that's why they're keeping the separate brands around. But yeah, interesting stuff. So, all right. I mean, we speculated a little bit about this. So what do you think? Like, should you jump on the transfer bonus?

Because there's a transfer bonus as we're recording this that's going to end relatively soon. So right now, Amex membership rewards points right now as we record. Transfer to Hawaiian miles one to one, but there's a 20% transfer bonus through August 31st of 2024. So shortly after this publishes, you want to have very much time left to take advantage of this. But there's a 20% transfer bonus. So if you were to transfer over 100,000 Amex membership rewards points, you'd end up with 120,000 Hawaiian miles that we're fairly confident will become 120,000 mileage plan miles at some undefined time in the future. So first up, should we

speculatively transfer to Hawaiian with a 20 percent bonus? Yeah. So this is very interesting because if you're if you don't need the miles right away, I mean, if you if you need them right away, then it better be Hawaiian miles that you need right away if you even think about this, because we have no idea when the merger will happen. And so assuming you don't need them right away, there's another question here, which is like, should you just wait till the next transfer bonus? There seems to be one about once a year, sometimes twice a year. They're usually 20 to 25%. So, you know, if the other pieces fall into place so that these miles will become Alaska miles. And if you highly value the Alaska miles, uh, mileage, uh, program, then, uh, I think it does make sense. And, but, uh, because of all those ifs and buts, I'd say

the only reason, the only situation in which you should even consider it is if you have so many Amex points that even after you do a transfer, you've got plenty for other uses. So if other stuff comes up where transferring to some other program makes sense, you still have plenty for doing that. Yeah. It's really important to reemphasize here exactly what Greg said in it. We have no idea when this will happen. So if your Hawaiian miles do become Alaska miles, or I mean, we're pretty confident they will. But I mean, that could be later this year, that could be middle of next year, it might be 2026. It's really hard to know when that will get integrated. And so that's, that's very much a I have no idea when that's going to happen. And then the other thing is, again, like Greg said, a lot of conjecture here, like both of us kind of coming to the conclusion on the fly here that we think maybe Hawaiian

will stick around. So maybe there'll be a future opportunity. You know, when I say Hawaiian will stick around, maybe Hawaiian will stick around as an Amex transfer partner, but we really don't know. I mean, we're totally making guesses on that. So very hard to say whether they will or whether this transfer bonus will expire. And then all of a sudden on September 1st, maybe Hawaiian goes away as an Amex transfer partner altogether. And we could be totally wrong on that.

So I want to mention that as well. But OK, so if you have tons of MX points, and you're willing to take a gamble and roll the dice here, maybe you could go ahead and take advantage of that transfer bonus. I think an interesting separate question, maybe even more interesting by some by some token, is should we get Hawaiian Airlines credit cards right now? Because you've got both consumer and business Hawaiian miles credit cards. Might those go away? Well, those, those will eventually become Alaska miles, right? Should we be going after those? Yeah. So, so, you know, looking at the current offers as we're recording

this, um, now we're not going to be alerted if these change or, so we don't know what the offers will be when, when, uh, you listen to. But currently, the consumer card, there's a consumer card and a business card. The consumer card offer is 70,000 miles after first purchase. It's got a $99 annual fee. So no matter how you slice it, I mean, that's a cheap way, cheap, easy way to get 70,000 miles. And as we said, we're confident they'll eventually become Alaska miles. So I think that's a great deal. The business card, not as much, 50,000 points after 4k spend is we've seen bigger, better offers on this one. So personally, I'm looking at these things saying, I like the consumer offer. I like the idea of going for it. Are we potentially missing out? Because if these stay around, maybe we're going to see promotional 100K offers or something in that range. But as things stand right now, there aren't a lot of great offers that have no spend requirement except first purchase. This is one. It wasn't super exciting to me before because it was just for Hawaiian miles, but now that it's probably going to eventually become less miles, I'm a buyer, so to speak, at that rate. Well, and I think what comes to my mind is that I should probably consider doing this in two-player mode because if my wife and I both open the consumer cards, then we're talking about 140,000 total miles. And because they have this feature where cardholders

can transfer for free, we could both open them and then my wife could transfer her 70k to me and I'd end with 140k miles that will eventually become Alaska miles. And so that'll combine with my existing Alaska miles balance or, you know, you obviously play that differently depending on who has all the Alaska miles in your household. But I think that makes it even more interesting because you're talking about 140,000 miles that you can put in one account with just two purchases, you know, by two packs of gum. That's really compelling. And people are always like, Oh, is this worth a 524 slot? You know, this is going to slow me down from applying for other cards. Maybe this is one of those cases where I'd say 140,000 miles for two purchases. Yeah, that's probably worth sacrificing whatever you may lose because there's no spending requirement apart from first purchase and paying the $99 annual fee.

I think it's a great deal. Right, right. And, you know, if you're talking about multiple people and there's just one person who you're trying to keep under 524, then you can consider don't have that person sign up for the card, but the others can do so. Because that's what I'm debating in my mind right now. So I'm the only one in my family who's really close to 524. I think I'm at 424 right now, which means that if I sign up for this Wine Airlines card, I'm going to have to wait a while before I can be eligible to sign up for a Chase credit card because of their 524 rule. And I'm leaning towards doing that anyway. But let me just say, first, I'll probably apply for the latest and greatest Chase Inc. offer before I apply for this Hawaiian

Airlines card. But my wife and son are well under 524. They could each sign up for this card, and then we could put all of the points together. I'm also thinking of these two questions about the transfer bonus and the signing up for the cards as I'm thinking of it all holistically, because in my family, my wife actually has the most membership rewards points. And the reason for that is because we both tend to do things that earn lots of membership rewards points. But when I'm spending them, I'm almost always spending them out of my account. And I do most of that travel planning, at least with terms, you know, with respect to flights and award bookings.

So, so for the transfer bonus, it's kind of cool to think we can transfer my wife's Amex membership awards points to her Hawaiian Airlines account. Now I could do it to mine too, because I'm an authorized user. But if I wasn't, we could transfer to her Hawaiian account. She'll also get the credit card. It'll be easy to move those points, theoretically easy, from her Hawaiian Airlines account to mine. And then long-term they become Alaska miles or the equivalent of Alaska miles. So the key point there that Greg is making is that if you're a Hawaiian Airlines cardholder, you're not limited to only moving the points that you've earned from the Hawaiian Airlines card.

Whatever Hawaiian miles you've got, whether you've earned them from flying or you've earned them from transferring from Amex, then you could move those to another cardholder. So he's saying his wife could earn the 70,000 point bonus on the Hawaiian miles card and also transfer 100,000 membership rewards points to Alaska and end up with 120, however many it may be, and then move all of those to Greg for free. So that's I think that's really interesting, too. That's a great way to look at it. So, you know, through that lens, if you're somebody who's got lots of Amex points and and I know there are probably a number of readers out there who do, and this appeals to you, you know, the caveat again is that we have no idea when this is going to happen. It might be years before you have Alaska miles out of this. So it's very, very hard to say Alaska didn't move terribly quickly with creating their

one world award chart. So I'm, I'm not super hopeful that this will happen as fast as anybody wants it to. But if you're willing to gamble and play the game a little bit, and we all you know, gamble and play the game now and then, then I think it's pretty interesting. I mean, because there haven't been many ways to accumulate a lot of Alaska miles, this would create, you know, a nice chunk of miles. So yeah, I'm, I think we'll probably get the Hawaiian cards in my household which is something i that's a sentence i never thought i would say because i never never had that much interest in the hawaiian cards so this certainly changes the game yeah yeah and

you know with the hard hawaiian card i think it gives you like a free check bag so it makes flying hawaiian airlines around hawai around Hawaii more competitive with Southwest. And so there's other benefits, too, not just not just the miles. All right. Well, I think that wraps up this week's main event and brings us to this week's question of the week. All right. This week's question of the week comes in from a reader who wrote us with a problem

that we're probably not going to be able to fix or advise you on, unfortunately, spoiler alert. But hopefully out of the question comes maybe some useful information for other people out there listening. So this reader writes in and says, about a month ago, my wife booked a one-way partner flight through her Flying Blue account for me. I'm able to see the reservation both on the Flying Blue website and on the partner website, which in this case was COPA. I could pick the seats and got all the usual documents and notifications before the flight. But when I showed up at the airport, COPA could see my reservation, but inform me that the ticket has been revoked. No explanation was given other than to call Flying Blue. Surprisingly, I was able to get ahold of them with little wait time. They didn't seem to know

the reason for the ticket being revoked, but were able to redeposit the miles and refund the taxes and rebook. However, even with the new confirmation slash ticket, it was revoked again at the COPA counter. And then by that point, then it was past the check-in time for the flight. So the reader ended up having to cancel the trip because it was going to be a short trip anyway. The only explanation given by Flying Blue was, quote, we inform you that your booking has been canceled due to inconsistencies on elements given at the time of booking and activity of your account, which does not reflect frequent flyer activity. Miles have been returned to your account. New issue requests can only be made at an Air France or KLM counter.

No issue will be possible via the website or our call centers. So the question from the reader was, have you seen this before? And do you know what causes this or what the problem is? And then the reader also wanted to know if it was possible to get reimbursed for their Uber to and from the airport or get some miles out of Flying Blue for this. So is any of this familiar to you? Are there any tips you have for how to avoid this potential problem? And do you think there's any compensation that's going to come of this? Yeah. Wow. That's awful. I mean, gosh, that particular combination of things is new to me. That's really, you know, when I saw this question, I was impressed by how the person seemed and how

they were. Right. Because normally somebody would be like outraged at what happened. Sorry, when you get this type of email, it'd be from somebody who's like outraged. And it's like, can you please write a post and tell everybody that they should never book with Flying Blue? And that wasn't the type of email this was at all. It wasn't. It wasn't. And I appreciate that a lot. So what this brings back to mind for me is a while ago, Flying Blue was doing things overzealously to combat fraud, or at least that was what they claimed that was the purpose. And so brand new accounts that booked awards were subject to

things happening that weren't good. I don't know. I don't remember any stories of someone actually going to the airport and it all seeming to be fine, though. You know, that's that's new to me. But but if this is what's happening, like if if if this was booked from a new account and then they had just transferred in my something along those lines, that might explain why this was treated badly. And so a way you could protect yourself is if you're thinking of booking with Flying Blue someday, might as well create an account now. And that way, by the time you transfer miles in someday, hopefully your account is seasoned enough that it won't be kind of flagged as potential fraud. But I don't know. That's my first thought. Do you have any other thoughts about that?

Yeah. So I mean, the same type of thought. So I haven't heard, no, like Greg said, never heard a situation that exactly mirrored this. However, like Greg, my first thought was, well, years ago, Air France was really known for being overzealous about this. And this was exactly the type of thing that they would tell people that they'd have to go to a ticket counter in order to book a ticket when they had a fraud alert on the account. And what seemed to trigger those in the past, and again, this is not something that they've seemed to have had issues with over the last few years, but what seemed to trigger it was almost always it was a brand new account. And so if it was a new account, and the miles had just been transferred in from a partner, not earned through flying activity, then they would get overzealous about this, like you said, and it seemed like they fixed that. So I was really surprised to see this because I haven't heard a story about this in years. However, we did have a conversation a while back with someone in

the know about how these points transfers work. And they tipped us off to the fact that in many cases, there are some specific minimum requirements. And it varies from program to program in terms of how old your account needs to be before you've transferred miles in, before you try to book something, before it triggers one of these events that causes a fraud alert. And so exactly what Greg said, open frequent flyer accounts with all of the various programs that you think you may use someday now, because some of them are going to want your account to be open at least seven days before you transfer miles in some of them, it might be 30 days, it might be 45, it might be 90. So get those accounts open now for all the frequent flyer programs that you might use. My wife ran into a problem like this a year or two ago. She had a bunch of Amex points and wanted to book an Emirates award. And so it was easy to just transfer to her Emirates account or so I thought, but it was new. I helped her create an Emirates account, transferred over 200,000 miles right

away to book an award and that locked it up. And it was like a couple of months before I got the fraud alert unlocked on that. So needless to say, the award that we away to book an award. And that locked it up. And it was like a couple of months before I got the fraud alert unlocked on that. So needless to say, the award that we wanted to book didn't happen. And now she's still got 200,000 Emirates miles that we haven't yet put to use. And so this piece of information I thought was valuable for people out there to know that you want to create those accounts sooner rather than later. Right. Also, the other thing is one of the things that they're trying to prevent is resellers of miles. And so a common way this reselling works is, as you say, I've got all these Amex points I want to sell, and they would alert you, okay,

someone, or maybe they would take over your account, but whatever. The way it would work is basically your miles would get transferred to, in this case, let's say Flying Blue. And then those in that Flying Blue account would be used to book someone else to fly. And so I think this situation was probably confounded by the fact that it was his wife's account that booked him and not also her. And so it looked similar to the pattern of these selling miles situations. Yeah. And so that's also a very good point that you can do that. With most programs, you can use your miles to book a ticket for somebody else and you don't have to be traveling with them. But, and again, I don't know all the details on the wife's account here. But if the wife in this case had never booked a ticket before and just transferred in miles to book a ticket in somebody else's name, particularly maybe if their names don't match, maybe they don't have the same last name or something like that, then those are things that are more likely to trigger fraud alerts. Also, sometimes tickets to and from certain countries are more likely to get caught with fraud concerns because of higher instances of fraud, potentially. I know that, for instance, mileage brokers are from reading about it in the past that tickets, one-way tickets

to and from Asia have in the past anyway, often drawn more scrutiny if they're made for someone like Greg said, that you haven't ever booked a ticket before. Perhaps it doesn't seem connected to you in some way. Now that said, I've booked tickets for friends and family members to travel without me to and from Asia and one way award tickets and never had a problem with them. So if you're listening to this, and you're like, Oh, I'm scared. Don't be scared. In general, these things don't happen often. And they're pretty rare. And it stinks that they do. And I hate that it did in this case, especially the way it all went down, I'd be pretty upset about it. So that really stinks. But those are some safety tips anyway, that hopefully will help others not run into this problem. Now, all that said, this

happened. And so now what can you expect? And unfortunately, I don't really have any good news for you because I don't think it's likely that Air France KLM is going to cover your Ubers to and from the airport. There are no obligation to do anything, which again, really stinks given the situation. But to my knowledge, anyway, you wouldn't be due compensation. Yeah. Backing up a little, it's understandable that they may have identified it as fraud. It's inexcusable that they didn't alert at least the wife, the person who booked the flight, that there was a problem with it. Like, I mean, how can that be inexcusable to allow someone to actually show up at the airport,

not once, but sort of twice in this situation without telling them there's something wrong with their ticket? It just makes no sense. That's terrible, terrible customer relations. So that's inexcusable. So I mean, I do think that it's worth, I have no idea what they'll do, but I think it's worth both of you separately calling into Flying Blue and complaining about the situation, what happened. I'm not sure that I would like specifically be like, here's my receipts to turn into, you know, reimburse, but rather say I had to pay to go to and from, I had to cancel my trip, blah, blah, blah. Um, can you do anything for me to make up for that? And maybe they'll award you a points or something that you'll then not be able to use because the whole, hopefully not, hopefully not,

hopefully future situations will work out fine. I mean, like we said, this isn't something that's it's not unheard of. That's why we're familiar with the idea. But it's also not common. I mean, both of us have probably booked tickets for other people lots of times without issues. But we're both also probably using our own accounts often enough for ourselves to that that kind of helps even things out and season it a bit. So, so do some seasoning with various frequent flyer programs stinks that this happens.

Good luck. You should follow up like Greg said, and ask for something. I was more so saying that I don't have high hopes that flying blue is going to do a good job handling it, but you're absolutely right. You definitely should ask for something out of it and, and, you know, hope for the best. And then if not, in the future, if it's possible to transfer those to your account, if you're going to book a ticket for you by yourself,

that may be preferable. And so worth mentioning in this case, I think the transfer was, if I remember correctly, or I don't know if I said it, or I'm making this up if it was from Amex, but remember that if you're, so if your wife had transferred from Amex membership rewards points to her flying blue account, keep in mind that if she has added you as an authorized user, and you've been an authorized user for more than 90 days on that Amex card, in the future, she could transfer from Amex membership rewards directly to your own flying blue account, which would probably reduce the chance of having this type of outcome. But again, I don't want to panic people as to think that this is a common occurrence, because I don't think that it is. And it does happen with other programs. It's not just,

you know, actually, I googled the exact wording in this case that the reader had received to see if I came up with other reports on different websites with that exact same error. And funny enough, I found a bunch from Qantas with almost identical work. So it's the kind of thing that happens with other airlines too. Yeah. So create your Qantas account now, I guess. I guess. Another takeaway. Was Qantas the carrier or the mileage program? No, the mileage program. Yeah. Yeah. And a couple. And I didn't actually check to make sure that it lined up perfectly with the wording, but there were like quite a few search results that were related to Qantas specifically that came up with saying Qantas canceled the tickets. So again, it can happen with other programs.

And so create those loyalty accounts now. And I've often said, I don't really believe in test transfers and the idea of, well, let me transfer a thousand miles now. And I've often said, I don't really believe in test transfers and the idea of, well, let me transfer a thousand miles now. And once it goes through, then I'm going to transfer a hundred thousand miles because that often leads to fraud alerts. Also, if you like in close succession, transfer just a little bit, and then you transfer a whole bunch. Oftentimes that second transfer will get held up, but it all on the flip side, if you transfer a thousand now, and then you know, three months from now, you transfer in a large chunk, I doubt that that's going to be any kind

of a problem either. So you may, you know, do that too, I guess if you really want to try and season it, but but hopefully get some safety tips out of that. All right. That brings us to the end of this week's episode. Hope you enjoyed today's show. If you did, please don't forget to give us a like, leave us some feedback, let us know what you thought about the show. Wherever you're watching or listening. Don't forget that you should do those things and go to frequent miler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media, join our frequent miler insiders Facebook group, and we will see you guys again next time. Bye everybody. Thank you.