Frequent Miler on the Air - Amassing American Airlines Miles | Ep199 | 4-22-23

Episode Date: April 22, 2023

Want piles of American Airlines miles? Here are your best strategies for amassing a massive amount of miles in the valuable AAdvantage rewards program. 00:00 Intro 01:03 Award Talk 01:04 Booking The Signature at MGM Grand via Airbnb https://frequentmiler.com/hacking-las-vegas/ 07:10 Roame.Travel adds JetBlue 08:07 Seats.Aero helps Greg find Qsuites availability 09:28 Giant Mailbag: Laddering flights 12:40 Giant Mailbag: Can I transfer Ultimate Rewards to American Airlines miles at a rate of 2:1 right now? 16:10 Card Talk: American Airlines cards 16:55 Citi AAdvantage MileUp card https://frequentmiler.com/aamileup/ 19:17 Citi AAdvantage Platinum Select https://frequentmiler.com/aaplat/ 22:50 Citibusiness AAdvantage Platinum Select card https://frequentmiler.com/aaplatbiz/ 23:31 Citi AAdvantage Executive card https://frequentmiler.com/aaexec/ 28:14 Barclays AAdvantage Aviator Red https://frequentmiler.com/aviatorred/ 30:24 Barclays AAdvantage Aviator Silver https://frequentmiler.com/aviatorsilver/ 36:16 Barclays Aviator Business https://frequentmiler.com/aviatorbiz/ 38:36 Main Event: Amassing American Airlines miles 38:40 Credit card strategies 49:47 AAdvantage Shopping Portal 53:06 SimplyMiles 56:48 Rewards Network AAdvantage Dining 57:38 Hotels: Rocketmiles / BookAAHotels https://frequentmiler.com/best-way-to-earn-aa-miles-status-via-hotel-bookings/ 1:00:36 Hotel partnership with Hyatt https://frequentmiler.com/hyatt-american-airlines-partnership-now-live-link-your-accounts-now/ 1:02:46 Car Rentals 1:04:10 Shell partnership 1:04:40 Banking: Bask Bank & Citi Checking bonus 1:10:36 Question of the Week: How can you value Hyatt points more highly than Chase Ultimate Rewards points? https://frequentmiler.com/what-are-hyatt-points-worth/#How_can_Hyatt_points_be_worth_more_than_Ultimate_Rewards Music credit: Annie Yoder

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did City do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event. Frequent miler on the air starts now. Today's main event, amassing American Airlines miles. Last week, we talked about our opinions of loyalty programs going up or down, and we both talked about how much we're enjoying our great big piles of American Airlines miles. But we didn't tell people how they could earn great big piles of American Airlines miles until now. And everybody wants piles of miles, right? Everybody wants piles of miles. And so we're going to talk about how you, too, can get great big piles of American Airlines miles.

That was kind of fun to say. That is kind of fun. So maybe the main event needs to be called piles of American Airlines miles. Great big piles of American Airlines miles. Yeah, maybe we will. Okay, so we are going to mix things up. We have the giant mailbag, but it's going to go after award talk. So let's start with award talk. Nick, I believe you're hanging out in Vegas baby what are what are you

doing there I am yeah well so I have a flight out actually of Los Angeles this week so that's why we figured oh let's go out to the west coast and hang out by the pool for a couple of days and so on that note I booked the first couple of days of my stay I wasn't too concerned about how I booked it because it was before the Hyatt Fast Track promotion was beginning on April 17th. So I had to stay in Las Vegas over the weekend, Saturday, Sunday night, which if you know Las Vegas, you know Saturday can be really expensive. So I was just trying to find the best way to book things that would make the most sense. And in the end, I booked via Airbnb, believe it or not.

I booked the signature at MGM Grand. Now, that might not add up to you because if you're familiar with Vegas, you know the signature at MGM Grand is an all suites property. It's three towers that sit behind the MGM Grand, but it's part of the MGM Grand. So who would ever think to look on Airbnb? I just stumbled on the fact that some of the units there, some of the suites, it's all suites, studio suites or one bedroom, two bedroom, etc. And some of the units there are individually owned. They must have done timeshare sales at some point. And they are rented out as vacation rentals.

So, of course, I tried Vacasa, but there's no Vacasa in Las Vegas, maybe not even in Nevada. I can't remember. But sure enough, on Airbnb, I found plenty of suites at the signature at MGM that were available via Airbnb. And when you book via Airbnb, unlike most online travel agencies, you don't pay the resort fee, I assume because owners must not pay a resort fee there. So it worked out to be a much better deal. If I had booked directly through MGM, even with my gold status, my rate for two nights would have been something like $763. I know, ridiculous. Saturday nights are crazy. But via Airbnb, it was only $365

for those same two nights. So it was far cheaper even than booking direct with an MGM discount. And it worked out pretty well. Now, there are some downsides. I'll get to that in a second. But, well, one of the major downsides would be that you ordinarily would not earn Hyatt Elite credit because you're booking via a third party or, of course, MGM points, for that matter. And so I didn't expect to earn anything for the stay. But I was poking around in the MGM app and I saw that there was a way to find a reservation that wasn't automatically listed in the app.

And I figured, well, let me see if I can find mine. And it asked for a confirmation number and a name. And Airbnb had given me a confirmation number to provide at the desk when I checked in for my room. So I figured, let's pop that in and see what happens. And sure enough, there it was, it showed right up in the app and it added to my MGM app and as part of my Las Vegas trip. So all of a sudden it was connected to my MGM account, which seemed like good news to me because I figured, well, then maybe I'll get MGM points for this. And if I'm really lucky,

I'll end up getting high at elite credit too. I wasn't sure. So I stopped at the front desk just to ask if my MGM account was added to the reservation. And they looked up my room and they said, yes, it is. And then they seemed a little confused. And they said, normally these owner suites are excluded from earning any sort of MGM rewards. And I said, oh yeah, I just wanted to see if I'd earn points on the incidentals, which is true. I charged a few things to the room and I figured I'd see whether or not I earned anything on that. And sure enough, my tier credits have increased in the app, and I haven't done any gambling. So I think anyway, it seems like I'm getting MGM credit for that stay. I can't see a breakdown yet.

And of course, I won't see any Hyatt points or Elite Night credit for days, maybe even a week. But I thought that was pretty cool that maybe, maybe I'll end up earning Hyatt Elite credit booking via Airbnb. Right, right, right. Plus, you know, the Hyatt Spring promo is still going on, I believe, the bonus journey. So depending on where you are with that, you might either earn extra points or at least trigger your ability to start earning extra points because it had that weird clause about you get nothing until after your first day during the promo period. Right. And that's what I'm hoping for because that would have been my first day.

So truthfully, that's what I was hoping that that would take it off so that I would earn those points on this. So yeah, that's my hope. The other downside, by the way, that I didn't mention in my Instagram stories, I Instagrammed this as it was going on. The other downside I didn't mention is when you book the Airbnb, you don't get daily housekeeping. You have to pay if you want some sort of additional linens or that sort of thing. So that's a potential downside for a short one or two nights stay. Not a big deal, though. Right, right. All right. And so when booking with Airbnb, I usually look at two

things. One is, could I save money by buying gift cards on sale? Airbnb gift cards sometimes are available at some kind of discount. And can I earn extra miles by starting with the British Airways or the Delta website? Did you do either of those things? So I did do the gift card trick. GC Galore had a post this week about buying Kroger gift cards via or rather buying Airbnb gift cards via Kroger's online website. You bought a $200 gift card and got a $25 e-gift card for free, a Kroger e-gift card for free. So I did that. I bought a $200 Airbnb gift card. I'm going to hold on to my $25 Kroger e-gift card for a time when that comes in handy. So I figured that would be nice to save a little bit. I paid the balance

with my VentureX card, figuring maybe I'll use miles to erase the rest of that charge. We'll see. I did not start with British Airways. I knew I could have. And I usually do that if I'm going to book an Airbnb. I was just in a hurry hustling to get it booked. And it wasn't worth the hassle to figure out logging into my British Airways account. Right. It's not like you're going to get points rich with something like that. You're only earning one or two, I can't remember what it is, points per dollar. And when I say it was 365 for two nights, that's including all of Airbnb's fees. So the nightly rate was $94. So we're talking, yeah, less than $200. So a few hundred, you know, pretty sure. A few hundred points, right, right.

All right. So for me, let's see actually no before i talk about my award talk um the uh roam.travel that's a free tool that's a competitor to point.me and award logic um it added a new uh program that it searches which is is JetBlue. So that's kind of interesting because, well, for one, you can use American Airlines miles to book JetBlue. So even if you don't have JetBlue points, that might find some things for you that way. But more interesting maybe for a lot of people is that now that JetBlue is flying not just to London, but also to France, to Paris, maybe we'll be able to find Mint. JetBlue Mint is their business class and it's very, very highly rated. So I'm looking forward to trying that out someday.

Yeah, that'd be great. That'd be awesome. Right. So that's nice. I always like to see these free tools add capabilities. On my end of things, I was doing research for a post on the best ways to book the world's best business class flights. So I previously had published an article on the blog about the same thing, but about how to find the world's best first-class flights. So now I'm moving on to business class. And as I was doing that, I was using seats.aero, which is not the tool I mentioned earlier, but it's this geeky tool

I've talked about before that if you know what you're doing, it's just unbelievably powerful. And I found a whole bunch of Cutter Q Suites awards available next February. So I used my American Airlines miles and booked for my wife and I some flights just in case, you know, because I would love to fly Q Suites. I still haven't, believe it or not. And that was a nice opportunity. Yeah, that's awesome. My only QSuite experience was between Dubai and Doha. So I feel like I haven't really done it either. I sat in this seat for an hour. Right, right. That doesn't really count. Those cities are very close together. So yeah, it's not exactly a long flight.

But still, you got a taste of it. You know what to expect, I guess. Left me wanting more. Good, good. Okay, let's get into Giant Mailbag. Today's Giant Mail, we have two pieces of mail. First piece comes from Mark. Mark says, I wanted to point something out about one of the unsung benefits of getting, in quotes, stuck or carrying a balance in a given carrier in a given program's currency the ability to ladder or float flights without penalty example i'm flying home from point x and genuinely not sure what day i'll want to leave with enough miles i can and often do book flights for myself and my wife on consecutive days or even on the same day

with the intention of canceling all but the one I end up using or same day switching from, etc. I call these flight ladders and it allows me to do it using refundable float of airline's currency without committing cancelable but non-refundable cash. For this reason, I often like having $75,000 to $200,000 of an airline's currency on hand, but not if it's expirable, meaning not if it's the type of airline miles that expire without being able to be renewed through having some use of them. And he says, especially the domestic carriers in Southwest, even if I don't have a current trip on the books. So, yeah, I mean, that whole idea is a big part of why I think we've been excited about American Airlines miles and to a lesser extent, United miles, but also Southwest and Delta

when you're originating from North America. But anyway, a lot of these miles now are freely cancelable when you book award flights. And so it's great to do that kind of thing if you have more miles than you need for just the one flight. Yeah, I thought that was a great little piece that he wrote, because it's so true. I do it all the time. And I didn't even think about talking about that when we discussed it. But yeah, I mean, that's a large part of the reason we like having these cancelable currencies, right? I mean, I had to do that with several different flights to get me to the West Coast to position for the flight that I'm really out West here for. And then again, even today,

as we record this, I wasn't sure what time I was going to want to fly from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. And so I had a couple of backup options also. There you go. Yeah, I absolutely love that. It's so powerful. And it's true. It has this weird thing where miles become sort of more valuable to you. So normally if you have, if you have way more miles than you know what to do with, you know, the incremental value of getting more of those miles is lower because, you know,

you're probably never going to use those incremental miles. But if you do a lot of this kind of thing, you know, the value of having lots and lots goes, goes up. So, so sort of that ceiling at which the value goes down, gets higher and higher. And so, there's a big benefit to getting more and more. And American has moved to all award flights are freely cancelable, which is fantastic. Second piece of giant mail comes from Jim H. Love your podcast. Can I convert UR points, so ultimate rewards points, to Marriott points, getting the 50% bonus? So I guess there's a transfer bonus going on right now. And then transfer the 150,000 Bonvoy points to an airline at three to one. So get 50,000 American Airlines miles. Net result is alternate awards to AA becomes two to one, which is better than the normal three to one. What do you think? Can you? Yes. Should you? Questionable. Would I? Absolutely not.

Very well said. Why not? Absolutely not. Very well said. Why not? Why not? Well, I mean, because it's just ultimate rewards points are so much more valuable to me. A, they're more valuable to me than American Airlines miles straight off the bat. So even a one-to-one, I might do if they were a one-to-one transfer partner. But if I were comparing the value of one ultimate reward point versus one American Airlines mile, I would more highly value an ultimate rewards point to begin with. So two ultimate rewards points for only one American Airlines mile, just A, seems like a poor value proposition. Now, of course, I have that perspective in part because of Hyatt, because I can get far

more value with Hyatt points for my hotel stays. But then the other piece of that is I wouldn't want to do that because there are so many other ways to earn American Airlines miles that I would use one of the multitude of other ways we're going to talk about today to amass the miles unless you really needed them like right now for something important. Then I would work on amassing American Airlines miles differently and using ultimate rewards points for uses that are highly more valuable than two to one there. Yeah. Yeah. Plus, you know, if what you're looking for is great flight awards, you know, United, Chase transfers one-to-one to United. United also has free cancellations. They

don't necessarily have, you know, they don't have the same partners. They have more partners than American, I think, because the Star Alliance is much bigger. They have somewhat comparable, I guess, business class award pricing. It's a bit higher than American, but not hugely. Not two to one. Not two to one higher. It's not two to one higher. That's right. That's

right. That's right. So yeah, if I was going to dump my UR into a airline program, prospectively, I don't know why I would, but if I was going to, I'd much, much, much prefer to do it one to one to United than two to one to American for sure. Yeah. I mean, unless you're topping off for a very specific, you know, we're looking to do this trip and we need 50 000 more miles for that and we can't wait for a new credit card bonus or one of the other different ways we're going to talk about today i i just i couldn't see doing it so yes can it be done of course it can be uh but you know should it be done probably not now if you were talking about doing that to some more obscure currency where you're going to get higher value maybe i can't think of an example off the

top of my head but you know if you wanted something like asiana miles for some specific purpose that i'm not thinking of right now and you can't get them any other way maybe but with american there's so many other ways to get the miles I just wouldn't consider that totally agree okay um now next step is card talk card talk there we go sorry I missed my cue there yeah yeah no that was that was good that was good good makeup uh there um thank you yeah today we're going to do something a little different with card talk, which is we're not just going to talk about one card. We're going to talk about, oh boy, a whole slew of cards. Seven of them, I think? We'll see.

It's like a traffic jam of cards here for Card Talk. So what we decided to do was talk about all the American Airlines cards that are on the market in the U.S., which is quite a few because both Citibank and barclays issue uh american airlines cards so we're gonna give a quick overview of each one and let's start with the the fee-free advantage mile up card great place to start so no annual fee you do unfortunately get hit with foreign transaction fees so this is not a good card to use overseas. But while you're here in the United States anyway, it earns two miles per dollar on grocery and also on American Airlines purchases. That can be pretty useful. Two miles per dollar on grocery. That's obviously a category a lot of people spend in and there's no cap on that as far as I know. So that's decent. Keep in mind, though, you're only going to earn one loyalty point per dollar spent, even though you get two redeemable miles per dollar at the grocery store. You only get one loyalty point per dollar spent. That's a base mile thing. So you earn on the base miles, not on the category bonuses when it comes to loyalty points. That's true on all of

the various American Airlines cards in general. And then, of course, you'll save 25% on in-flight food and beverage with that card, just the same as you would with some of the other cards. So that's a benefit you get with no fee with this one. It would come on all of the other cards too. But if you're concerned with keeping it fee-free, the Mile Up card can be useful. Or it could be good for an American Airlines portfolio anyway for the two miles per dollar at the grocery store not the best return but not terrible return on grocery right right all right so uh yeah that's the fee-free card um so we're not going to mention the 25 in-flight food and beverage purchase credit for the rest of the cards since you just know now all of them have it and just one note about loyalty points is is American

Airlines lets you earn elite status by earning miles and but you have to be earning elite I mean sorry loyalty points when you earn those miles and so you still you can earn any level of elite status with enough spend on this card because you do earn one loyalty point per dollar okay so if you've if you spent thirty thousand dollars on this card at the grocery store then you would earn sixty thousand redeemable miles with two x but you'd earn thirty thousand loyalty points because you're in one loyalty point per dollar spent and that would give you american airlines gold status that's a great way to put it exactly and that is also uh that basic idea is true with all of the rest of the cards we're going to talk about as well. So we're not going to talk about loyalty points anymore, except when you can earn extra loyalty points above the one mile per dollar.

All right. Next card up is the Advantage Platinum Select MasterCard. They're all MasterCards. I'll stop saying MasterCard. This one is $99 a year and it has no foreign transaction fees, which is also true of all the rest of the cards we're going to talk about, no foreign transaction fees. This one gives you 2X at restaurants and at gas stations and of course on American Airlines itself. One X everywhere else. Same as the mile up card, you just get one loyalty point per dollar. This card also throws in a $125

American Airlines flight discount once you spend $20,000 on this card. So nice little credit there if you spend enough. And then some standard benefits, which are also true of all the rest of the cards we're going to talk about. First check bag free, priority boarding. And yeah, so those two things, again, we don't have to mention those for the rest of the cards. You get free check bag and priority boarding for all of the rest of the cards we're going to talk about. And it's probably worth mentioning the free first check bag applies to you and a number of companions on the same reservation. So if you're traveling with a family, you're not going to only get one bag. You get one bag per person. So that's potentially a decent savings if you're traveling on American Airlines miles. Now, you know, the $125 discount after $20,000 spent, I have a hard time imagining the scenarios where it makes sense to spend $20,000 on these cards.

However, if you're spending a lot on American Airlines, of course, you may want to use this card in order to earn American Airlines miles. Flip side of that is you're not going to have the same travel protections that you would using another card. So I'd be a little hesitant to spend a ton on flights with a card that has no travel protection. So then that narrows you down to restaurants and gas. And it's not a reasonable return at 2x, but it's not the best return at 2x either. So I guess I could see the situation perhaps, especially if you've opened the card and you've done the spending for the welcome bonus bonus then maybe spending the rest on restaurants and gas would make sense in order to get elite status and that hundred and twenty yeah you know and I'd say I'd say in general across

this entire board of American Airlines cards that you know they're they're mostly good for their perks or for spending towards elite status. So if you highly value elite status, then it can make sense to spend on these cards. But in general, the spending bonuses pale compared to what's available from other cards. And so sort of like our earlier discussion about whether you'd want to trade ultimate rewards points two to one to American Airlines, you know, same idea with, you know, wouldn't you prefer to earn, you know, three ultimate awards and at restaurants instead of two,

with two American Airlines miles, and I would for Alex Meadellini, MX points with a gold card. Yeah, exactly. restaurants. So there's a lot of different Yeah, a lot of different options to earn better. The thing that makes this interesting is we're going to talk about a whole bunch of different cards here and so you could earn welcome bonuses on multiple different cards and so really that's where you're going to earn a nice infusion of miles all at once is the welcome bonuses on these cards right right And we'll discuss the strategies there in a few minutes once we get through card talk. Next card up is the City Business Advantage card.

Yeah, so the City Business card, $99 annual fee, no foreign transaction fees. You earn $2 on American Airlines purchases, at gas stations, on telecom purchases, and also on car rental merchants. And then you get a similar sort of a benefit. Maybe similar isn't the right way to put it. After you spend $30,000 on this card, you get a $99 plus taxes domestic companion certificate. So you can bring somebody with you on an American Airlines reservation for $99 plus the taxes. Again, you get that companion certificate after you spend $30,000 on this card in the calendar year. Yeah, very good. Next up in the American Airlines,

in the Citibank lineup is the American Airlines executive card. This one is the $450 card, which it gives you two points per dollar just on American Airlines purchases. That's it, 1X everywhere else. But its big key benefit is Admirals Club access. So that's American Airlines lounges. And so you get access both for primary and authorized users. And what's super cool there is you can have up to 10 free authorized users. So they each get their own Admirals Club access. So this is kind of an incredible way. If you have a family who travels separately now and then, and everybody would like to have Admirals Club access,

you could literally just have one of these cards that you pay for and get everybody authorized user cards so that they get Admirals Club access. So before we go on to the other benefits, I should mention that Admirals Clubs are known to be not quite the best lounges in the world. That's a very diplomatic way of saying that you shouldn't overvalue this because they're kind of crummy. Well said. There have been some press releases about them re-renovating their lounges. So in time, maybe that'll change. But, you know, let's hope. Anything's possible. I'm in Las Vegas. So right now I'd say, oh, yeah, anything is possible. You're not ready to put a lot of money betting on it, is that right? No, I probably wouldn't.

If they were taking bets on the Admirals Club lounges becoming something really special, I wouldn't be betting on it. I mean, not to say that they're all bad. Obviously, the flagship ones are probably nice, but I don't know. The Admirals Clubs I've been in in my time anyway have not wowed me. So let's put it that way. But at the same time, it beats being out in the terminal probably. You do get something free to eat and something free to drink. It might be peanuts, but it's something anyway.

So it could be worth it for having a nice quiet place to work while you're in the airport and get a little bit of something in the lounge. So certainly if you've got a number of people and you're sharing this then i could see where this starts to make sense i wouldn't probably be excited about buying an admiral's club membership on its own but if you're combining forces with your friends or family great yep yeah exactly uh and if you're interested in elite status uh this card gives you an additional 10 000000 loyalty points after you spend $40,000 in purchases. So, you know, you would not only earn gold status after the first 30,000 purchases, but you'd be well on your way towards the next level, which is platinum status once you complete 40,000 because then you have 10,000 more.

So a total of 50,000 loyalty points. Also gives you $100 global entry or $85 or whatever TSA pre-check costs these days. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's nice. Yeah. I mean, those things are good,

especially if you don't have other cards that reimburse those things, then great. So yeah, I don't know. The A exact card, I think, makes sense for a lot of people. I did mention when we talked about the business card a second ago that one of the advantages, of course, is that it's a business card. So it won't add to your 524 count. And when we get to the application rules, the business card is treated separately from the other cards. So we'll, I'm sure, come back to that too.

But, yeah, so there's a little something for everyone in the city portfolio right from a fee-free card to a 450 card business card that city's really got you covered with every kind of american airlines card you're looking for yeah yeah except uh no travel protections as you mentioned before city dumped all their travel protections a few years ago and strange decision but there you go all right i don't even think they have car rental coverage right so you get two miles per dollar and car rentals on one of these i would never do that why would i ever use that for a car rental like come on yeah i guess if you're going to pay for the insurance or maybe you're using a corporate code where the insurance is already included then it doesn't matter to you i guess so i guess maybe

there's some scenarios where it makes sense yeah all right let's go over Barclays has a whole lineup of cards as well well why don't you talk about the Aviator red the advantage Aviator red world elite MasterCard it has a $99 annual fee so very similar to the world elite MasterCard from Citi, two miles per dollar on American Airlines purchases. You have a domestic companion certificate here. So now on the Citi side, when we talked about the Platinum Select card, you get $125 discount after you spend $20,000 in a membership year. That was on the Citi side. But on the Barclays side, with the Aviator Red card, you earn one of those companion certificates after the same $20,000 spend. So it's $99 plus tax domestic companion certificate. And given the way that airfares have gone these last couple of years,

that would probably be more valuable to me than the $125 discount. And so that's, I think, an interesting potential thing there. And then you get a $25 Wi-Fi credit per membership year so if you're paying for Wi-Fi on American Airlines flights you get a credit there and I say if you're paying for Wi-Fi on American Airlines flights because I think correct me if I'm wrong here but I'm pretty sure that T-Mobile has added the ability to get free Wi-Fi now I don't know who else gets free Wi-Fi on American Airlines, but I know we talked on an earlier show about how we see it trending more

towards free Wi-Fi in the long run. So I don't know how long that credit will be useful, but for now, I suppose it probably is. And of course, first check back for you. Yeah, I think for now it is. Delta has started offering free Wi-Fi to Delta members, which is free to join. So of course you would do that on many flights.

I don't think it's on all yet. And I don't know where, I haven't heard much about it from American doing that. I don't know where American is, yeah. Yeah. I know that T-Mobile, in the past, I have gotten free Wi-Fi on some American Airlines flights, but I think it depends on the provider of the Internet service.

So I never know which one's going to have Wi-Fi and which one's not. So there you go. $25 Wi-Fi credit for what it's worth. Probably not worth talking more about that. You could save $25. So that's the Aviator Red, but that's not the only Aviator card. There's also another color, Craig. There is.

There's the Aviator Silver, which you can't sign up for. So why are we even talking about that? You can't sign up for it. And the bummer there is that you can't earn any kind of an intro bonus on this. There's no sign up bonus on this. But go ahead. Tell us about it.

What's the deal? Why would I want it? Yeah, well, first of all, I think you could get it if you have the red, then you might get an invite to upgrade to the silver. And you might want it because it costs $100 more. Well, actually, $90-something more. $195. Is that a reason I might want it, Craig?

You know, you have too much disposable money, so you want to get rid of a little bit more. And it earns three points per dollar on american airlines instead of two so two x hotel and car rentals um but here it gets a little more interesting up to 15 000 bonus loyalty points each year uh you get 5 000 bonus when you complete 20 000 spend uh you. You get another $5,000 at $40,000 spend and then the final $5,000 at $50,000

spend. So, you know, you could get extras that way. I think you'd be very close. I forget exactly what the tier is for platinum status to get platinum status. 75. So let's give you 65 yeah so you

get 65 with 50 000 spend um and boy if you also had the city executive card and spent the 40 000 there then you're you know you're a little bit over a hundred thousand uh 115 000 total loyalty points each year from wait from spending on both those cards? You can have both? You can, yeah. My understanding is you can't have two. Well, no, you can probably get two of either one of these, but you can't earn these bonuses twice on a single type of card. So, for example, if you have two executive cards, which there's absolutely no reason to have two executive cards,

unless you, again, want to spend more money for no reason. You can't spend fifty thousand on each one and hope to get the bonuses, the loyalty point bonuses on both. All right. This one also throws in a companion cert after twenty thousand dollars spend. So you're getting quite a few things with twenty thousand dollars spent. uh if you're really into aa i think this is a really solid option um fifty dollar wi-fi credit per membership year so double the wi-fi credit and it throws in twenty five dollar per day in-flight food and beverage credit

twenty five dollars per day per day what If you fly American Airlines every single day, you can charge up to $25 in food. Well, you can charge whatever you want, but up to $25 in food and beverage that you charge to your card while flying AA will get reimbursed. So boy, if you fly every day, you can, you can earn a ton of money back just by eating a lot. I mean, that could easily make the card pay for itself. I mean, and we could laugh about flying every single day. But really, I mean, I don't know about you, but sometimes I get hungry on those flights. And of course, you don't get much of anything anymore.

And they often don't have meals even for purchase. But they do have those snack boxes and stuff like that. So I and they often don't have meals even for purchase, but they do have those snack boxes and stuff like that. So I don't know, actually, I think that this could pay for itself or help the card pay for itself pretty quickly. Yeah. Uh, although if you are flying every single day, you're probably going to be upgraded to first class where like drinks are free at least. Um, and you are going to get some kind of snack, uh, Yeah, that's true. But yeah, I think just for a sort of medium level flyer, you can do pretty well with it. That would be a nice extra anyway. Yeah.

So yeah, I actually like the idea of this card a lot for an American Airlines fan. You know, someone who flies a reasonable amount with American values loyalty points, so values elite status. The only thing it doesn't give you is that AA lounge access, but the rest of it's looking pretty good. How much are you missing there? How much are you missing there? I don't know.

American Airlines fans are going to call me out for hating on the lounge. But yeah, I don't know. I like this one. I think this is probably a pretty good card for somebody who's a big fan i'm not really sure i guess i'd i'd be interested in your thoughts on this and you probably won't be able to do it just off the top of your head but like is it worth spending 20 or 40 or 50 000 dollars on this card obviously if you uh value status but how much are you giving up in order to spend that much? Obviously, if you would otherwise earn welcome bonuses, you're giving up a lot, but let's say you get enough spend to meet

whatever welcome bonuses on whatever other cards. So how much is it costing you versus like a 2% cash back card to buy these loyalty points essentially by spending on this card instead of another card? Well, I mean, arguably the first 20,000 is, is, uh, you're, you're probably coming out ahead if you're going to use that domestic companion cert to good value, right? That could be quite a, quite a bonus. The rest of it, I don't know. Um, yeah, it is worth, you know, questioning that. But, um, again, I, you know, I keep saying if you highly value elite status, because those loyalty points, if they're, you know, let's just say, make the math easy. Let's say a redeemable mile is worth one cent to you each,

and a loyalty point is worth one cent to you each, then you're getting about 2% value. So it's roughly similar to a 2% cash back card in that way. Okay. All right. There you go. There you have it. Straight from Greg the Frequent Miler. So that's the Aviator Silver card. Then, of course, there's also one more Aviator card we haven't talked about yet today.

That's the Advantage Aviator Business card. So there's also a business version of this. This is similar to the Aviator Red. It's just a business version of that aviator red card so 95 annual fee no foreign transaction fees you get a five percent mileage bonus now that's five percent on your base earnings on this card is that right craig am i remembering that correctly do you know you know what i i look quickly at the at the website for the app you know the application landing page website,

and it sort of implied that it was an all miles earned from the card, but then in the terms and conditions, it sounded more like it was the base mile. So I'm not really sure. One way or another, it probably doesn't make a hugely consequential difference in terms of how much it's going to be worth. So 5% bonus on whatever you earn on the card. So small thing there. Then, of course, it earns two miles per dollar on American Airlines purchases, but also

two miles per dollar on office supplies, telecoms, car rentals, and 1X everywhere else. So it's very similar to the Citi business card in that regard. And again, the $99 companion certificate with 30,000 spend during your account year. So very, very similar to the Citi business card, right? Except for the, I guess the 5% mileage bonus is an addition here, but how much difference that's going to make, I don't know. Right, right. So to sort of sum up the two things that, you know, Citi is the only one that has the fee-free card, the mile-up card, but otherwise what they both have are these $95 to $99 cards that are personal cards and business cards. So both programs, both banks have a $100-ish personal card and $100-ish business card. And then both of them have premium cards, whereas Citi has that exec card that includes lounge access and Barclays has the silver card which includes you know more ways to get credits back and to earn loyalty points yeah yeah so there's a fascinating

array of American Airlines cards and so I that's I think a quite a bit of opportunity anyway to earn some American Airlines miles now are we going to talk about application rules for these here or are we going to save that for the main event? Let's look. I think we're ready for the main event. So, you know, I think the first topic in the main event has got to be signing up for cards. So, all right. Main event time, amassing American Airlines miles. What's the single best way to do that, Nick? Well, the single best way is through credit card welcome bonuses. So of course, we just talked about all of those various credit cards, and many of them come with a significant number of miles. And the requirements change and vary

as do the bonuses. But oftentimes on the Barclays side, you can earn a bonus with the Aviator red card with a single purchase. So that's a really easy American Airlines bonus to earn in many cases. On the city side, you'll have to spend something to trigger the welcome bonuses, but sometimes they're a little bit higher on the city side. So you got quite a few different cards, but then of course there are rules about how often you can earn these bonuses and which ones you can have so on the city side the rule for consumer cards and correct me if I misspeak on this but the rule on the consumer side is you can earn one welcome bonus every 48 months on the consumer side right so it's got to be 48 months since your last welcome bonus or 48 months since you last closed one of these cards Greg they don't they no

longer have the closed part of it, so it's just since your last welcome bonus. So if you opened one of them today, one of the consumer cards today, then you wouldn't be eligible for another welcome bonus for 48 months from whenever you earn the bonus. Right, right. But since there's...

And Barclays has less clear rules about how often you can sign up. But, you know, even if you you only do one of those every 48 months, just like Citi, which I of their four cards regularly have big welcome bonuses of around 70 or 75k when they're at their higher level. Executive card sometimes is higher than that. And then Barclays has the red and the business card that often have good signup bonuses. So you're talking about, what, five different cards that have yeah, five that have these big welcome bonuses. So five times 70K is what, three hundred thousand points that are available to get just from signup bonuses. Now that's if you, you know, pick them out when they're, when the bonuses are around 70 K or

higher. Yeah. Yeah. That is three 50. Right. And so, yeah, the point is that you can earn lots and lots of miles through those bonuses. And even if you spread them out a little bit, because you got that 48 month rule, you spread out your city and Barclays applications if you spread them out a little bit, because you got that 48-month rule, you spread out your city and Barclays applications, you can put together a decent number of miles with just the consumer cards. But then those application rules do not necessarily affect the business card. So you can still get the city business card, even if you have recently earned the welcome bonus on one of the consumer cards. And that city business card, again, often comes with a bonus when it hits its high point in the 70 or 80,000 mile range.

And so that can be a nice combo because between the two cards, you can earn a decent amount. So really, if you did one city consumer card, the city business card, the Barclays Aviator Red card, and then a Barclays Aviator business card within the course of a year or two, you could end up with a fair bucket of American Airlines miles just with those three or four welcome bonuses. Yeah, for sure. And if you're doing this in two-player mode, so for example, if your spouse is also willing to sign up for cards, they can also sign up for them, earn the welcome bonuses. american doesn't allow you to pull your points so you'd have your points in separate accounts it's not worth paying to

move them because that'll cost too much but um but still there's no reason you can't book flights you know even for yourself from player two's account right and even if you're you have elite status let's say and some people have asked that like if if my spouse books my flight for me will i still get my elite benefits for the flight absolutely yeah yeah and so so actually that's a good point here so to rerun the math on this so if you did one consumer and one business from City, one consumer, one business from Barclays, that's four cards. If we have an average welcome bonus of 70,000 miles, that's 280,000 miles in one player mode. Now you play the game in two player mode and you double that. So you're at 560,000 miles. You could potentially earn this year more than a half a million miles.

But if you can meet the welcome bonus requirements on four cards between you and player two, that's more than half a million American Airlines miles in one year. And like Greg said, you could still get your elite benefits and everything once you put your American Airlines number on it. That's actually a pretty quick pile of miles, right? It really is. So I think that's just a great way to earn miles quickly is with the welcome bonuses, of course. And, you know, one thing we didn't mention is that American Airlines is a bit harder than some of the other programs to mass points quickly because they are not one-to-one transfer partners from any of the major bank point programs. And that's why, you know, going directly to the American Airlines card is the way to go. And it's also why it's really great that there are so many American Airlines cards. So there's almost always at least one card that has an enhanced bonus going on.

And so it's good to jump on those when they are. For sure. Now, like Greg said, they aren't transfer partners with Chase or Amex or Citi. Though Citi has a couple of times offered short-term opportunities, or at least one time anyway, to transfer Citi thank you points to American Airlines miles. Whether or not we'll ever see them offer that again, I don't know. Obviously, people have wanted it for years and years. I'm sure Citi knows that people have wanted that for years and years. And they offered it for a brief time. Whether or not they're going to bring it back, I don't know.

But we can hope that someday they'll allow transfers from City Thank You Points again. But there is one card that you can transfer from, and that's the Built MasterCard. So if you're renting an apartment and the Built card makes sense for you because you can earn one point per dollar on your rent, you can transfer those points to American Airlines. You're not going to earn tons of miles this way. It's not anywhere near the same as these other cards we're talking about where you can earn a huge welcome bonus right up front. However, it's worth knowing anyway that the built card does

transfer a one-to-one to American Airlines miles. It offers a better return on dining spend than what you're going to get with any of these American Airlines cards. So that's one to keep in mind to supplement with here and no annual fee on that card so so that's another one that's again not an american airlines mail card but you can earn points that transfer to american airlines with it right right and it has it has better uh category bonuses than uh some of these american airlines cards and yeah and they have their rent day promos where you can earn even more points and of course earning earning points by paying rent even when you when your landlord only accepts

cash as rent uh is an amazing way to earn extra points that can transfer to American Airlines so yeah I actually I kind of temporarily forgot that when I was saying there are no major programs that transfer one-to-one uh right right I figured figured, that's why I figured I'd jump in with it. And I think the point that you just made, Craig, is one that we haven't really hammered home on the show ever about the fact that even if your landlord doesn't take your credit card, that doesn't matter. You can pay your rent via ACH with Bilt and still earn one point per dollar. So, and that's something I think maybe we've mentioned in passing once or twice, but I imagine a lot of people have missed. They've just thought, oh, my landlord doesn't take a credit card.

So the bill card isn't for me. And that's not necessarily the case. So you do have to make five transactions a month on the card in order to earn points on anything. So you'd have to do some other stuff. Like you said, rent day, you earn double points on other things. And the category bonuses are better. So and the travel protections are better. So, and the travel protections are better too. So if you're going to book paid travel, it might make more sense to use the built card than one of these American Airlines cards. Now there are lots of cards that have good travel protections. So there

are other options on the market too. But, but again, if you're talking about earning American Airlines miles, I think the built card is something to consider. It really is. You're not going to earn loyalty points when you transfer points into American. You don't get loyalty points for that, but otherwise it's definitely a better bet for your spend. Just going briefly back to the signup bonuses, I do want to mention that the 48 month rule, it's not a family rule. So at times Citi has had rules that say all of the cards that are in the same family, you can only sign up, earn a welcome bonus once in 48 months or 24 months, whatever the rule was at the time. But they no longer have that for most of their cards.

So you could literally go through Citi's whole lineup of cards and cycle through that whole lineup again, 48 months later from each one. So that's a pretty good option. For sure. For sure. So you really hit the gas pedal and accelerate. I mean, I talked about earning half a million in two-player mode with one consumer card on each side and one business card on each side. But if you hit up all the various consumer cards, then obviously add far more miles. So there's really nothing that compares to credit card welcome bonuses in terms of the speed of amassing a huge amount of miles. Those are really going to be your ticket to amassing a lot. Now, we probably should mention that there were some shutdowns a couple of years back on these cards, people that were opening tons

of the same card with different offers. And so I know that some people are shut out of these cards and that stinks. But for those that are still eligible, that was probably a short term thing that if you don't know what we're talking about, then probably it wasn't going to ever affect you. But it's something you may read about in comments. So I figure it's worth a mention that that did happen. But those are people in general who are using mailer offers and for the most part, opening a bunch of the same card, kind of getting around the rule, so to speak. So that's kind of a different thing than what we're talking about.

Exactly. Exactly. You are not going to get shut down for signing up for, you know, each of the different cards in quick succession. That would not be a problem at all. And I'm not necessarily saying it has to be quickly, like a good option could be sign up for one and then a year later, sign up for a different one and, you know, close the first one. That way you have continual free check bags for example when flying american um and you know so it's a little bit slower way but it's a way to rotate through them very good okay so cards that's certainly one way that you can earn lots and lots of miles but it's not the only way right there are lots of other ways to earn american airlines miles too so if you're trying to amass american airlines miles and get your own pile of miles, what are some of the other options? We've got shopping options up first, I think,

right? So how can you earn miles shopping? Yeah. So, you know, American has their own shopping portal, which, you know, what it means is if you're going to be buying something online, whatever merchant you want to buy from might be available through the Advantage Shopping Portal. So let's say you're going to buy something at Macy's.com. You find them on the Advantage Shopping Portal and you can earn extra points by clicking through there, still paying the same amount as you would on Macy's.com as you would have if you'd gone directly. But the end result is then you earn these extra miles and for the most part you also earn loyalty

points as well so if you if you see in the in the event shopping portal it says earn 10 points per dollar for for macy's and by the way those those payouts change all the time so i can't tell you you know oh it's gonna say two or five or. You have to look and it changes. But whatever it says, even if it says this is a special short term special deal to get 10 points per dollar, you're also going to get 10 loyalty points per dollar by clicking through and getting it that way. Yeah, yeah. So that I that I think is an underrated thing. And I say underrated. You know. I think that we talk about it a fair amount. But I think that for a lot of people, it's underrated that you can earn both redeemable miles and elite status just by shopping through the portal, depending on how much money you

spend and what the payouts are. Because sometimes the payouts do reach fairly high amounts. And so if I have a major purchase to make, it's always something I consider. Now, there's lots of other portals to consider. So you want to go to cashbackmonitor.com and check payouts at different sites because you may be able to earn more on other portals. We've talked a ton about the targeted offers on Capital One Shopping this year. So American Airlines shopping portal isn't always going to be your best bet, but sometimes it is. Sometimes I go through the American Airlines

portal for those payouts. So that's the first piece of it is you can earn one redeemable mile and one loyalty point per mile earned through those regular payouts. But then there, of course, are also short-term bonuses. And when we talk about the short-term bonuses, we're only talking about redeemable miles here. They'll offer bonuses like this week, spend $500 and you'll get 1500 bonus miles. And when they run that kind of a deal, you can spend $500 cumulatively amongst however many merchants you want to spend your money over and you'll get an additional 1500 bonus miles. Those miles are only the redeemable miles. They are not loyalty points when they offered that sort of short term bonus that generally applies

to all of your spend across stores through the portal. And those bonuses post really slowly. So if you're counting on those for some sort of redemption, don't expect them for a while. It tends to take like two months after those things end before those bonuses actually post. But it is another way to earn a few more miles. Sometimes those bonuses are as high as 5,000 miles, like spend $1,500 and get an additional five thousand miles so i always figure okay well if it's something like that where you spend fifteen hundred dollars and get five thousand bonus miles it's like a little bit more than an extra three miles per dollar spent so i'll just do that math and add three extra miles per dollar spent to whatever it is i'm looking at assuming i'm going to spend the $1,500. Yep. Yep. Okay. Next one up is Simply Miles. It's sort of like a portal. It has a similar

type of stores on there, merchants where you'll earn extra American Airlines miles and loyalty points by shopping it, but it works different. You don't click through Simply Miles to the merchant. Instead, what you do is you link your MasterCard and all the American Airlines Miles cards are MasterCards, but you could link any MasterCards, not just Advantage ones. And when you activate a promotion that says you get extra miles for a purchase at this merchant,

it watches your credit card and will assign those extra points when you fulfill whatever the terms are. One really cool thing is that sometimes both the Advantage Shopping Portal and Simply Miles have the same merchant. And so you can literally make sure that your offer is activated in Simply Miles, make sure that your offer is activated in Simply Miles,

make sure your credit card is linked to Simply Miles, and click through the Advantage Shopping portal. And so you double dip that way by getting bonus points from both of these and you earn loyalty points from both. Yeah, that's great. I think the stacking opportunities there are particularly interesting when there is an opportunity to card link an offer. So Simply Miles, think of as being like sort of like Amex offers or Chase offers that you can link to any MasterCard. So there are card linked offers. So you just have to use that card at checkout in order to earn that bonus. And yeah, so clicking through the American Airlines portal and earning that bonus on the Simply Miles side at the same time is awesome. And then sometimes you can stack a little bit further for savings.

Yeah. For instance, if you're using one of your City American Airlines cards, you might want to check for City Merchant Offers, which are sort of like City's version of Amex Offers, because you can sync that up through your City account, have your City MasterCard linked to your Simply Miles account, and then click through American Airlines Shop shopping and earn all of those things at once. Exactly, exactly. And I'll say further, while it's not all that often that I find the same merchant on the American Airlines portal and on Simply Miles, very often I find the same one on Simply Miles and City Merchant Offers. They seem to be drawing from the same pool of possibilities, let me say.

And so the nice thing there is with merchant offers, you save money. And then with Simply Miles, you earn miles. And both of those things stack together, which is great. Very good. Okay. So shopping. Those are some ways to earn on your shopping spend. That's good. But of course, if you do all that shopping and you're going to start to get a little bit hungry, so how can you earn miles when you're dining? Yeah. Well, just like all the airline loyalty programs, there's a dining program where you link your card to the dining program and you earn bonus points at certain restaurants. I so rarely do this myself because there are so few restaurants that I go to that actually show

up on these. But it is really fun when you use it. You could either be hunting them out or you could just sort of accidentally be, you know, dining somewhere and get an email that says, congratulations, you earned bonus points. But I personally wouldn't go out of my way to a restaurant to earn bonus points this way. But you absolutely can earn points. It's worth realizing, though, you can't link the same credit card to multiple of these dining programs. So if you've already set up with United's or Delta's or whatever, you're going to have to switch to this one if you'd prefer to earn American miles. Yep, yep. But I do like this because it is a nice surprise.

Like you said, I never bother seeking out the restaurants anymore. Although I have an occasion, I think when I've not really cared where I'm going to eat, I've taken a look and I can earn some extra miles this way. Especially true if it's like a group meal of some sort and we don't really care where we're going to eat. It's more for the ability to get together than it is for the food itself. And then I might look for something like this rare occasion that I would do that. But it is just a nice surprise when you find out, oh, I earned some extra miles on that meal. Awesome.

So that's nice. There was something else I thought I was going to add to that, but I guess I forgot it. So, all right, you went shopping, you ate something now it's time to rest your head. So how are you going to earn miles on your hotels when you need to check in and book a stay? Yeah. Well, let me talk first about both Rocket Miles and Book AA hotels because they're pretty similar. In both cases, these are third party hotel search tools,

sort of like Expedia or whatever. The difference is that when you book a hotel through them, you earn some number of American Airlines miles. With Rocket Miles, you can actually pick which kind of miles you want to earn, but you can't earn American as one of the options. And the downsides of booking through these third parties are the same as when we've talked about the issues of booking through, let's say, the Chase portal. When you book a hotel. You're not going to earn hotel points if you're staying in a chain hotel. You're not going to earn elite credit if you're staying in a chain hotel. So there's those downsides. In this case, also, you've got to look at pricing because very often the final price is going to be considerably higher than what you could get

elsewhere for the same hotels, but not always. It varies a lot. And so sometimes they have like promotional number of miles you can earn, but you know, for staying at this hotel and the price isn't that bad. And so it can be under the right circumstances, a really good way to earn sometimes a big chunk of miles and even loyalty points all at once. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's potentially intriguing for the loyalty point side. Actually, so I had on Instagram this week, I had done a little like a pop quiz contest of sorts to see if anybody would guess that I booked my stay at the Signature at MGM Grand V, Airbnb I talked about earlier during award talk. And a couple of people guessed that I booked through Rocket Miles or Book AA Hotels, which I had totally forgotten about until somebody mentioned that.

So this is well after the fact. I hadn't even checked those sites. Now, I hadn't checked those sites. And part of me was like, oh, I should have checked those sites. And the other part of me was immediately like, yeah, they never would have beaten the deal. Because I know in general, their prices are going to be probably a little bit higher. But I think that's almost a certainty with MGM properties. Because when you have an MGM account, they almost always charge significantly less booking direct than you'll find with an

online travel agency. And I think the maximum number of miles you can earn per night is 10,000 miles per night. So that wouldn't have been enough to make up the difference in my case. However, if you're staying at a boutique property or you're staying someplace where, again, you don't really care about elite benefits, there's no resort fee that your elite status is going to wipe out or it's an overnight stay somewhere where you don't just need the room for the night, then it's worth checking. Because like you said, sometimes those short-term bonuses can make it worthwhile. Now, that's not the only way with hotels. You also have partnerships. So

American Airlines has a partnership with Hyatt and you'll earn one American Airlines mile per dollar spent at Hyatt. I always forget about this until I have the rare paid stay with Hyatt and all of a sudden I see a few extra miles in my American Airlines miles account, but that's a nice surprise. It is. And Hyatt's not the only one. What's the deal with Marriott? I don't actually remember this.

You have in your notes that we get two miles per dollar. Well, I do, and so the interesting thing there is that I didn't know this was a thing until I was looking up ways to earn miles. And so I wondered, did I? So I was going to say, I don't think we've reported this. When I wrote this down, I thought to myself, well, I should say I don't think we've reported this. And then I said to myself, well, I don't know. Sometimes I forget about the things I've reported on. So maybe we did and I just have forgotten about it. But yeah, the American Airlines site says you can link up your marriott count and earn two miles per dollar spent at marriott so they have a partnership apparently with marriott as well do that right after this

show yeah i mean it's day coming up like tomorrow night i've got to make sure i'm i'm linked up there that's that's good i mean unless it means, unless this means you're not earning Marriott points for that stay, which would be not good. You know, that's a good question. And because this was news to me, I was surprised about it and I hadn't looked into it. But you know what? That's exactly what it is. You choose miles as your earning preference and American Airlines miles as your preferred partner. Okay. So that's much less exciting. Forget about that. And that's worth mentioning because you could also do that with IHG, with American Airlines.

And so now we need to differentiate. So with Hyatt, you link up your Hyatt account and you're going to earn miles based on that partnership. And you're going to earn both. You're going to earn your World of Hyatt points and American Airlines miles. But what we were just talking about with Marriott there

is with most hotel chains, you can choose to earn airline miles instead of hotel points but that's almost always gonna be a horrible deal because through the chain you'll earn enough points that are they're gonna be worth far more than whatever the mileage earnings exactly exactly yeah so scratch that one off the list yeah and our next our next topic is rental cars, which is kind of similar. I mean, a lot of these rental car companies will let you earn airline miles or rewards in their own program. It's not necessarily, sometimes, sometimes those, those programs have are so bad, you know, in earning rewards in their own program that you might as well earn

airline miles. Yeah. And so Avis and Budget have a partnership with American. So if you're a general American Airlines member, you'll earn two miles per dollar spent with Avis and Budget. If you have American Airlines cardholder, you earn three miles per dollar. If you have gold or platinum status, it's four miles per dollar. And if you have platinum pro or executive platinum, you earn five American Airlines miles per dollar spent with Avis and budget now if avis and budget have a loyalty program and points that you can earn well i know they have a loyalty program i know they have elite status what it's worth or what it means is kind of lost on me i don't really know so that actually that actually sounds pretty good to earn American Airlines miles with those as far as what I'm aware of.

But with like National or where they have a real loyalty program where you actually earn real rewards, I wouldn't switch to earning American Airlines miles there. No, I wouldn't at all. So that's I think all we really need to say about that. Avison budget, okay. The rest of them, eh, I would just earn with their respective programs probably. Agree. Okay. So then, of course, on cars, we should mention gas too.

There's a partnership with Shell Fuel Rewards. We should mention it but not for very long because you earn two miles per gallon through Shell. And so how many gallons of gas are you going to put in the car this year that that's going to move the needle at all? It'll move your gas gauge, but it's not going to move your American Airlines balance needle very far at all. Right, right, right. All right. So I guess the next major one is probably banking. There's Bask Bank, where you could actually earn American Airlines miles just by keeping money in the bank. What's the deal there? Yeah. So Bask offers an account that

earns American Airlines miles. It earns two American Airlines miles per dollar saved per year. So let's say you saved twenty thousand dollars and left it there for a year. You'd earn forty thousand American Airlines miles instead of earning interest. So I mean, that might not be a bad deal. Now, for a while, it was less. It was one mile or whatever, and interest rates were different. Excuse me. I'm sorry for the coughs there. My apologies. I'll have to mute that when we put this recording together. So anyway, it depends on what you can earn for interest. Actually, with high interest rates right now, maybe you'd be better off with your money in a regular account. But hard to say.

What do you think? Yeah, I mean, I think with today's interest rates as we're recording this, you can get over 4% cashback in interest. I think even from Basque Bank, I think they're up around that range as an option instead of earning miles. And so if you pick to earn miles, it's like you're paying two cents per mile for these miles. And I don't think these miles earn loyalty points. So there's way too much to give up cash wise for this mile. So I wouldn't personally do that at all. And you do still get taxed. Oh man, I got something caught in my throat. All right. I'll go over the rest of it. So yeah,

so Nick was going to say that you still do get taxed. So that's not an advantage of earning miles instead of cash in your bank account. Most times when you're earning miles, you're not cash, you're not taxed because it's seen as a rebate from like credit card spend, for example. But in the case of banking or in the case of earning miles by like referring friends, those two situations you do get taxed on the miles. So there's a whole list of other ways you can earn American Airlines miles, but we think of them as pretty niche. So wait, wait, wait. But before you say that, Citi also sometimes offers a bonus for opening a checking account.

And that is another one where you will get taxed, but sometimes it's a significant bonus. So we've seen them offer something like 60,000 American Airlines miles. Now, that usually requires an expensive account that you either need a lot of money to keep fee free or you need to be okay with paying the monthly maintenance fee for the number of months you need to keep the account open. But it can certainly be worthwhile for the 60,000 miles or whatever it is when they offer that. It's not all the time, but they do offer that now and then. So two banking options, Baskin City. Really good point so some other things you can you can do to earn american airlines miles there's uh some like energy companies that'll give you bonuses for uh you know paying for power through them um cruises

you might be able to earn american airlines miles. There's various sites where you can earn miles for taking surveys. Boy, I don't recommend that. You're going to waste a lot of time, not earn very many. At least one of those popular programs doesn't actually pay out often. Like I wrote posts about that. So boy, I just would not do that. There's the donation for like Stand Up to Cancer. And there's various things like that where you earn miles for the donation. Although I have to say, I did that once and I was really disappointed when I got the receipt because it makes it sound like you're getting miles for the donation. But when you get the receipt, what you see happens is that a portion of the money you spent went to the charity. The rest of it goes to buying the miles.

That's something like two and a half cents each or three cents each or whatever it is, which is terrible. So it's terrible in multiple ways. You know, the main way is you think you're giving all this money to charity and you're not. And I find that really disappointing and that it's not. Oh my goodness. You didn't write a post about that? I should. It's been so long since I did that, that I almost have to do it again in order to get that receipt to make sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's horrible though. If that's the case, that's a, that, that would be really surprising. Yeah. Yeah. And then, uh, I guess last thing, mortgage, um, getting a mortgage or buying a

home, there's various deals where you can earn extra miles doing that. But, uh, as, as Nick wrote in the notes here you better shop around because it's definitely not worth paying you know higher mortgage rates or bigger closing fee in order to earn some miles usually unless it's a heck of a lot of miles yeah yeah I had the song like playing in my head there you better shop around all right so just to sum up from my point of view, you know, the best way to earn miles is by signing up for new cards. The next thing to kind of pay attention to is the shopping portal slash Simply Miles, like stacking those kind of deals so that you're earning miles when shopping. And you can also earn significant number of miles from hotels if you are okay with not getting the chain benefits, the hotel points from the chain, that kind of thing by booking through Rocket Miles, for example. I think those are the three

main ways you can earn a significant number of miles. And then there's a whole bunch of other stuff. Agreed. Agreed. So that gives you, I think, an opportunity to earn quite a few American Airlines miles every year. Okay. So there we have it with the main event. I think that brings us to the question of the week. Now, the question of the week ties well into if we go all the way back to the beginning when we had that mailbag thing about, you know, should I convert ultimate rewards points to American Airlines miles? This will kind of sort of be related tangentially anyway. So we got an email from Cargo Pants Finance saying, hey, love your post in the podcast. I was wondering about in the earnings rate category, you value Chase Ultimate Rewards

points at one and a half cents per point, while you value Hyatt points at 2.1 cents per point. Assuming your readers and listeners are looking for at least 2.1 cents per point redemptions on their Hyatt stays, wouldn't they use that as the floor value for their Chase Ultimate Rewards points since Hyatt is a one-to-one transfer partner. And then he goes on to give some potential reasons why you might not view it that way that aren't really why we don't. So I know we've talked about this once before, but it's been a while and we get new people all the time that may see this and be confused, I thought. So again, what he's referring to here is our reasonable redemption values. That page lists how much you can reasonably expect to get

from various programs. And our reasonable redemption value for Hyatt points is 2.1 cents per point. But our reasonable redemption value for Chase points is, I don't know off the top of my head, about 1.5 cents per point. 1.5, I think. Yeah, 1.5. So it's actually lower than the rate for Hyatt points. What gives, Greg? Right, right. It makes no sense at all, does it?

I mean, since you can literally transfer one-to-one from Chase to Hyatt points. What gives, Greg? Right, right. It makes no sense at all, does it? I mean, since you can literally transfer one-to-one from Chase to Hyatt, and so you can, it's very reasonable to assume that you'll get 2.1 cents per point value or better. The background on this is that we also think it's reasonable to use your Chase Ultimate Rewards points in other ways. Like if you have a Sapphire Reserve card, it's not bad to use your points by clicking through the Ultimate Rewards portal and booking flights, let's say, and paying with points and getting one and a half cents per point value. So it's totally reasonable to do that. And if we put 2.1 as our reasonable redemption value, and then people start making decisions, earning ultimate rewards points based on this idea that they're going to get 2.1 cents per point value, and then they actually only get 1.5 um they're gonna be it's gonna go through a whole set of you know poor decision making now you can absolutely argue the flip side which is well aren't aren't people making poor decisions the other way like suppose

your intent excuse me is to transfer the points one-to-one from ultimate awards to Hyatt and book with Hyatt points, then you might say, well, gee, your reasonable redemption values don't make any sense because it's making, for example, if you went just totally by the reasonable redemption values, I'm better off putting my spend on a Hyatt card and getting one point per dollar than on a similar Ultimate Rewards card, which we don't believe at all. So in a way, unfortunately, because we can't tailor the site to you, we can't magically know that you're going to use all your ultimate rewards points at Hyatt. We can't, you know, change your view of the site to say 2.1. But, you know, it goes both ways.

And unfortunately, I think it's kind of it's a difficult thing where, you know, you just can't get it right in every direction. Well, the thing is, your points are worth 2.1 cent per point if you use them for Hyatt stays. Sure. That's a big F. Yeah, it's a big F. That's one of the potential uses of ultimate rewards points. And that's why you hear people like us saying that we view our ultimate rewards points like Hyatt points for the most part. We almost exclusively transfer to Hyatt where we know we'll get great value. But if you're

traveling somewhere where there's no Hyatt, then it's not worth 2.1 cents to you because you can't use them to stay there. So then you would want to use one of the many other transfer partners or be able to book through the Chase portal at one and a half cents per point. Like Greg said, that'd be totally reasonable, or certainly you can book with flights and and so when i mentioned flights if you transfer to singapore and you book a first class flight with singapore well you're going to get far more than 2.1 cents per point with that redemption so should we value chase points based on singapore first class flights you know you could pick any one transfer partner and say there are opportunities to get more that's the way transferable points work and that's why we enjoy earning transferable points, because you can cherry pick for the

best value. We're giving a floor in terms of what's reasonable at minimum. And at minimum, you should be getting one and a half cents per point out of your ultimate rewards points. And I double, I don't know, I second guess that description at minimum. Our reasonable redemption values are what you can reasonably expect to get without a lot of effort at maximization, but you can certainly get far more value and we regularly do get far more value out of our points. Yep. Yep. Okay. So there you go. There you have it, Cargo Pants Finance. And I know, like I said,

we did talk about that at least once before on the show, but it's been quite a while. So I thought that was a great question that came in this week. So if you enjoyed what we've been talking about and you'd like to get this stuff in your inbox each day or each week, you want to go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe. Again, that's frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. You can follow us on all the various social media. Join our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group, wherever you are watching or listening to this. Please leave us some feedback. Leave a comment. Give us a like.

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