Frequent Miler on the Air - American Airlines AAdvantage vs Alaska Atmos | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep321 | 8-29-25

Episode Date: August 29, 2025

In this podcast episode, we'll talk about Frontier's Million Mile Match, we'll get tripped up by The Seattle Seahawks 12s, and we'll debate which loyalty program is better: American Airlines' AAdvantage program or Alaska's Atmos program.Giant Mailbag(01:26) - Lisa gives us an update about the question of whether or not she had a no-show fee when she cancelled her 2 LifeMiles flights.Mattress Running the Numbers(05:05) - Frontier Match your MilesRead more about Frontier Match your Miles here.Bonvoyed(13:13) - Wyndham/VacasaAwards, Points, and More(17:02) - Delta 12Status is back: Washington state residents earn 1 SkyMile for every Seahawks passing yard(19:06) - Delta not changing elite requirements in 2026(22:25) - Condor flights now bookable with JetBlue points (54K biz class from east coast to FRA; ~100K from west coast)Read more about Condor flights with JetBlue points here.Main Event: American Airlines AAdvantage vs Alaska Atmos(25:15) - Similar programs(31:25) - Earning Redeemable Miles(38:27) - Elite Status(54:29) - Using Miles(1:05:53) - Final Word?Question of the Week(1:13:23) - Questions about rebooking options with Hawaiian Airlines with a route termination.Subscribe and FollowVisit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media.Music Credit – “Ocean Deep” by Annie Yoder

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyescape.com. On today's show, we'll talk about Frontier's Million Mile Match. We're going to get tripped up by the Seattle Seahawks 12s, and we'll debate which is better, American Airlines or Alaska's loyalty program. Frequent Miler on the air starts now. Today's main event. American Airlines Advantage versus Alaska Atmos. So these are two programs that are both part of the One World Alliance.

They have a tight partnership. And there's a lot of similarities between them. And it might make sense for people who fly American Airlines to actually earn status with Alaska, earn status endpoints with Alaska, or vice versa. Alaska Flyers, it might actually make sense to earn points. to earn points and status with American Airlines. And so we're going to dig into the details today and decide in today's main event, which is better.

I'm really excited about that, in part because I'm kind of working my way towards both right now, and I don't need both. So I would love your help, Greg, and figuring out which one I should get. So anyway, remember, if you want to jump ahead to that section or you want to come back to something later on, don't forget, you can always find the timestamps and the show notes. Just expand the description box. And wherever you're listening to this, watching this. Don't forget to leave us some stars. Give us a thumbs up. Like the video if you're

watching on YouTube. We always appreciate all of that feedback from you. Now it's time to drag out this week's giant mailback. Today's giant mail comes once again from Lisa. On a recent episode, we read Lisa's email where she talked about being able to cancel Avianca Life Miles award flights after the date of flying, and that her, it was sort of implied from her email that she wasn't charged a cancellation fee because she had Life Miles Plus subscription, which gives you free cancellations. We had a discussion in that show about, okay, yes, Nick already knew that you could cancel after the date of the flight, but what we didn't know is do you really get the cancellation for free afterwards if you have Life Miles Plus. And Lisa wrote in to answer that.

She says, me again. You asked on your show whether I had to pay a no-show fee when I canceled my two Life Miles flights. I did have to pay a $25 fee for each flight, but they said this was a Star Alliance Service charge, which is always non-reimbursable. They never mentioned a no-show fee. I check Life Miles terms and conditions, and they do say there's a $25. Star Alliance service charge, which is always non-reimbursable. Yeah, that was great to know. And to add a little bit of framing to this, Life Miles Plus offers free cancellation 72 hours in advance.

And that's where our confusion was because the Life Miles Plus benefit is free cancellation, but it has to be done 72 hours in advance. And what we talked about on the show is whether that's because Life Miles has this weird thing where awards can't get canceled within 72 hours of departure. If you wait longer than that, if you're closer to departure, you have to wait until afterwards and cancel it after the fact and get your miles back after you've no-showed it, which is so weird. And this is actually, I think, a great deal. I mean, only paying $25 to get your miles back after a no-show, that's, I don't know,

that seems pretty awesome to me. That's almost like free. Yeah, it really is awesome. I mean, I wouldn't love paying $25 by the same time. I mean, the alternative with most other programs is after the flight. I mean, it's just gone. So that's great. And that's great to know.

I mean, I think that greatly increases the value of the Life Miles Plus subscription. It does. It does. Because we had talked before at some point, probably about the fact that the Life Miles Plus is good for the free cancellations. But, boy, it's kind of a bummer that it had to be 72 hours in advance because sometimes things come up close to departure. I don't know necessarily that my kid's going to be sick two days from now. So that was actually, I think, a great piece of information. So thank you, Lisa, for sharing that with us.

Yeah. I just find this so weird because doesn't Avianca Life Miles have to pay the partner airline, whatever they have to pay them for the flight? I mean, even if there's a no-show, I just find that really bizarre. Maybe not. Maybe they don't. I don't know. It's hard to say.

I don't know the inner workings of. award tickets and how that all works out they're not the only program out there that offers reinstatement after no show turkish does also so right off the top of my head anyway there might be others but i know turkish does also so so maybe it's a star alliance thing where no shows aren't penalized that much it's hard to say interesting yeah anyway let's move forward into the next section today which is mattress running the numbers i love mattress running the numbers and we haven't had one in a while and this week frontier makes us bust out the calculator yeah yeah this one's more like mileage running the numbers but we can't change the name of the segment just for frontier no nice

try frontier yeah so frontier is out with a promo that is eye-catching it's uh they will match your miles up to one million miles one million miles and um the the the The idea is this, that you have to be a new frontier member, so they're trying to attract those Southwest and other flyers over to Frontier, so you have to be new to Frontier, and you can show them your balances in any number of partner programs and up to a million miles, and they will match you to that, but there's some pretty strict restrictions on that. So the big restriction is that, or the big sort of gotcha here is you have to earn that many miles with Frontier over the next year in order to get the match. So what they're really doing is letting you get kind of double your miles up to a set threshold.

And so, and the problem is if you don't reach that threshold, you lose, you don't get any bonus. So, for example, let's say, let's say I show them that I have over a million miles with a bunch of programs, and I set the match at a million. You get to set what you want to match to, how many miles. I mean, you've got a million SaaS miles, right? So you can show them your million SaaS miles. There you go. So let's say I do that. Great, except now I have to earn a million frontier miles in order to get that extra million of the match.

And so, and if I don't get it, if I get $9009,000 in the next 12 months after starting the match, I don't get any match at all. Yeah. So there's a bit of a game here in figuring out, well, what do you want to match to? And that really needs to be based on figuring out how many miles you're likely to earn with Frontier over the next 12 months and setting the target somewhere around there so that you're sure to get the match. if you do this. Wait, you skipped a step. You skipped a step in there. So the second step should have been in deciding whether or not you care about earning that many frontier miles in the next year. Because, you know, for sure. Yeah. So it's a cool offer. But if you say, okay, well, I can, you know, spend $20,000 on their credit card over the next year. So I'll match to a program where I have $20,000.

Is it worth like spending $20,000 on a frontier credit card in order to get that extra $20,000? or whatever, flying with Frontier because you're going to earn them a little by little. So you really got to ask yourself, do I care enough? How much is that extra 20,000 frontier miles worth? And is it worth the effort that I'm going to have to put in to make sure that I get that and exactly that? And when I mentioned the credit card, you know, there's obviously there's many people out there listening that probably have a million miles or hundreds of thousands of miles spread across different programs.

And so, you know, like you say, okay, well, I have a, I'm a big spender. I have a big capacity for spend. So let me show them 100,000 and I'll do 100,000 in spend. Well, but what if they shut down your credit card account at some point? You know, when you get to like, you know, 95,000 miles or something and your card gets shut down for spending so much or something. And there's just too much risk here. I don't find this.

I find it very interesting and cool and smart marketing. I don't find it all that compelling. Yeah. A few other details just people should know is if you are interested in this, you have to register by September 26th. I mentioned already you have to be a new frontier member. So you almost certainly don't have a frontier credit card yet. And so I think there's more risk than Nick mentioned so far.

Well, you, I already mentioned how you have to earn enough. You can earn from, you can earn from Flying Frontier. You can earn from spending on the Frontier Airlines credit card and other ways, which are not mentioned. So does the Frontier credit cards welcome? bonus count? We don't know. Would you want to gamble on that? I wouldn't. I mean, if you, if you live in an airport that's well served by Frontier, I don't know, maybe. Maybe, maybe. Double the, for maybe. Yeah. Well, I mean, if you're going to be starting Frontier new and you know you're going to be earning miles, you might as well sign up. Right. Right. It doesn't hurt.

There's no cost to signing up. So you might as well. But I don't imagine. There are going to be many people earning anywhere close to a million miles with this promo. And if they are, it's probably because they're doing something very intentional with a huge amount of spend, like Nick was suggesting. And that just seems crazy to me because, so let's say it works for you. You spend a million miles, and so you get another million, I mean, you spend a million dollars on the credit card just to keep things simple. So you end up with 2 million points, maybe a bit more than that if you've spent in some bonus categories. But what if you just spent the money on a 2X earning transferable points card? Just spend on like your venture X card to get 2X everywhere.

And then you've got you've got 2 million transferable points or your city double cash. You know, there's a lot of better ways to spend your credit card. to use your big credit card spend, I think, than this promo. But I applaud them for making it a really interesting promotion. Yeah, and if you, like, if frontier status is important to you, and you intend to spend your way to Frontier status, or actually, it shouldn't even say intend because you have to be a new member, right?

But if you are newly deciding that you would benefit from having status with Frontier, Maybe you just move somewhere where Frontier has good service, and so status would help because you get your free bag or whatever other pet fee waiver I think you can get with Frontier, if I remember correctly. So there's a few benefits that might be worth it. And if you're going to do that, well, then you might as well try and get your miles doubled, right? So go ahead and do this. And I want to say that I don't think, like Greg said, I don't think it would be worth spending a million dollars on a frontier card to get an extra million miles. I think Greg's probably right that that million spent on a 2x card would be better. Though I have to qualify that by saying that I haven't spent much time looking at the value of

Frontier points lately. So I would guess that they're worth around one cent each, but that'd be a guess for me. I don't know off the top of my head how much the points are actually worth towards awards. I have been surprised a couple of times recently with Spirit that the points, Spirit's points were worth a bit more than I might have expected. I booked a redemption that was, I don't know, about $1.4.4 per point, and I was pretty surprised at how good that one was. So I don't know, maybe Frontier has some outliers out there that could be worth it. Not worth a million, I don't imagine.

But if you're in that strange situation where Frontier is great for you for some particular reason and you're going to spend. And yet you're new to Frontier. That combination is going to be really rare, I think. Yeah, yeah. I think so, too. you'd have to be somebody who newly moved to Denver or something maybe, you know. Oh, there you go. Yeah. Yeah. But if you're in that case, then it might work out.

Yeah. Yeah. Hey, let us know. Send it to mailbag at Freakumiler.com. If you're one of those people where this is a really attractive promo and that you're planning to go big on. Yeah, that's true. I'd love to hear about it. Yeah. And why and all the rest of that. Awesome. All right. Let's move on to Bonvoid. This week, we've been Bonvoid sort of by Windham and Vacasa. So we've been getting some data points. We've given quite a few data points from people who have had trouble booking Vicasa vacation rentals via Windham rewards. As a reminder, Windham has a partnership with Vakasa, which is a vacation rental company, sort of an Airbnb competitor, where you can use Wyndham points to book Vakasa vacation rentals, starting at 15,000 points per bedroom per night. We have a full post about how to book Vakasa vacation rentals with your Wyndham rewards points. lately we've had a few data points from readers saying that phone representatives have told them first of all that you can now book a maximum of six months in advance using your Wyndham points and that is a bummer because if you want to go somewhere that's popular during high season or something six months in advance probably isn't far enough to get a good deal yeah yeah and I I haven't double checked this yet but one of the readers also wrote that it's now in the Wyndham's terms and conditions as well oh interesting rule. So I think this one is set. And that's a bummer. Yeah, that just makes it a lot harder than before to

use your points to book Vakasa Vacation Rental, which real shame. Yeah. And so we've also gotten some data points about not being able to book specific areas, specific places. Quite a few readers have pointed to the same sort of response that agents have sent them or told them that following Casago's acquisition of Akasa and recent changes to the booking systems and processes. It's affecting availability, et cetera, et cetera. And so, unfortunately, Pigeon Forge, for instance, is a destination that they're saying they just can't book anymore. Now, I don't know if that's going to be a permanent change or if it's a temporary thing

or if there's any agent dependent anything here. But it seems anyway, for now, there's a bunch of places. just aren't bookable. And that's, again, a huge bummer. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But I think you said that one person wrote in with a way around this, kind of. Kind of. Yeah. So we had one reader who commented, who owns a vacation rental, Vakasa vacation rental. And so this reader had said that somebody tried to book their Vakasa vacation rental using points and was told by Wyndham that it wasn't available because of the Casago acquisition and the changes in booking systems. And so presumably I would guess that this reader, owner of the Vicasa, knew the person trying to book with points. So that's how they found out, I would guess. And so anyway, the reader who owns the Vakasa vacation rental reached out, created a support ticket with Vakasa as an owner saying, hey, listen, I want people to be able to book my place. And apparently it got fixed. It took about a week, they said. And then it got fixed. and now their property can be booked with points.

So maybe this is just a matter of there is some incongruence between the systems that hasn't been worked out. And maybe they have to actually go one by one and move properties over or fix them. Maybe they intend to do that. Maybe they don't. I don't know. But it does seem that there's a way for an owner to make it bookable. But I don't know how as a guest you would actually get somebody to do that.

right right challenging at best so i don't know maybe there's some hope that it's going to get fixed because apparently there is a way to fix it but overall this will be a big bummer if if you can't book places more than six months in advance and if you can't book popular destinations like vision forge that'll be a big bummer right right all right let's move on to awards points and more under awards points and more this week delta there's a delta promotion now right yeah so uh delta's brought back their promo for Washington state residents. It's called the Delta one-two status. I'm not really sure why it's called that exactly, but... One-two status! Come on, you go say it in like the football. Football way. Come on, Greg.

Okay, there you go. But it doesn't have to do with status. It has to do with earning points. So Washington state residents earn one sky mile for every Seahawks passing yard. So apparently the Seahawks. tend to throw about 4,000-ish passing yards each season. So if you're a Washington State resident or Delta believes you to be, you can register for this promo and just earn that many free points. All right. So before the Seattle residents jump on me,

I've got to say that I know it's not one-two status. It did take me a second to realize. they refer to the crowd, I believe, at the Seahawks Stadium as the 12th man, because it's one of the loudest stadiums in the NFL. And so I think it's like the 12th man status, so to speak, because I think there's 11 and play. I don't know you can tell how much football we watch. As a Detroit Lions fan, I had a lot of years where football was not enjoyable. It's been great these last couple, though. So anyway, I think that that's where it comes from.

The 12th man. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I think that's what it is. So that's, that's almost embarrassing. Okay. Well, well, I'm glad you corrected it before this. Right. Before it published and we got a whole bunch of Seahawks fans jumping all over us. Like, come to the stadium and then you'll find out. Anyway, yes. So there you go. There you have it. You can earn some points if you live in Seattle. I think you have to live within a certain number of miles, like 70 miles of Seattle or something. You have to check the exact terms. All right. Speaking of terms is Delta,

changing the requirements for elite status next year? They are not. So you might remember a few years back, Delta drastically increased the requirements for earning status for a few weeks. There was so much outcry that they rolled that back and made it easier than ever to earn status. So it went exactly the opposite way. They were trying to decrease the ranks of high-level elites, which were overblown.

a little bit of history lesson. During the pandemic, they were letting people roll over all their status earnings every year. And so their elite ranks like swelled up to such a huge amount that it's one of those things where if everyone's elite, no one is, because the upgrade list is like, you know, 89 people long on a 60-person flight. And so their original intent was to decrease their elite ranks and but they got so much public outcry they went the other way reduce the requirements added these like status boost thingies from the credit cards and now it's like way easier than ever so we assumed that the following year they would increase the um you know increase it partway towards the eventual big amount that they they had said before they didn't and now

again, for 2026, they're not going to increase it again. So if you've been hoping to earn Delta elite status, it's good news for you. If you easily earn Delta elite status and hate that the ranks have swollen so big, it's not so good news for you. Yeah, yeah. This is surprising to me. I expected for sure we would see some creep over the next few years. And I'm not talking about a specific person when I say some creep. I mean, some creep in the requirements to go up over the next couple of years. So I don't know. I'm surprised.

Are you surprised? Yeah, I'm kind of surprised, although I'm kind of in the mindset now that Delta has decided that rather than make elite status better by thinning the ranks, they're going to instead get, you know, sort of better reviews for making easier to get elite status in a way. like that maybe there's maybe overall it's better for their business or they think it is to have more elite members who don't necessarily get great benefits than fewer elite men members who do yeah i mean i don't know if they're wrong if there's people that get elite status relatively easily but don't fly a lot that has only so much impact on anybody really you know and so so yeah i don't

know that they're wrong what we don't know is is whether they're going to reduce any elite benefits. So we know that they're going to keep the elite status requirements the same, but are they going to keep the same benefits for elite? We don't know. Interesting. Well, I mean, with Alaska introducing a pretty new program here, and the two of them kind of competing in some markets,

it'd be interesting to see if they add anything to compete or if they keep things the same. So we'll keep an eye on that. In the meantime, another thing we've got our eye on is the fact that Condorfly. are now bookable with Jet Blue Points. So Condor is a subsidiary owned by Lufthansa. They have a nice-looking business class product. I'm booked on it later this year and I'm excited about it. It looks pretty nice. And now you can book it with JetBlue points. And JetBlue from the East Coast to Frankfurt's charging just 54,000 true blue points in business class at the time of recording this. And I say at

the time of recording this, because several times now when JetBlue has launched a partner, award prices have been great for a hot minute, and then they've increased substantially a few weeks later. So if you've got a lot of jet blue points, you may want to book if you want to book something sooner rather than later. From the West Coast, the story isn't as good. About 100,000 points one way in business class, I think. Yeah. Yeah. That's pretty pricey that way. I want to correct one thing. Condor's no longer owned at all by Lufthansa. Yeah, they're completely separate. And in fact, they're trying to get out of a law that required them to Lufthansa to provide feeder service from Condor

flights at a reasonable rate, they've made headroom in getting out of that agreement. Oh, interesting. Yeah, yeah. I did not know. They need to change their logo then, too, at some point, because often when I see their logo in award searches, I think that it's Lufthonse. Oh, interesting. similar, and then I expand the details. I'm like, oh, that's Condor. And I'm talking about when I use

award tools, because, of course, they show flights that are, you know, bookable through many different programs. At any rate, speaking about booking Condor Award flights, the nice thing here is that Condor Award availability can be really good. I was just looking at some stuff for next year, and I was looking at days that would probably be popular departure days where there were like eight or nine seats or more available in business class. So it's worth taking a look if you're interested in going anywhere on Condor and you have a lot of jet blue points. Of course, 54,000 jet blue points each way from the East Coast.

Alaska charges 55,000, a thousand more from the East Coast for those same Condor flights. Emirates can also book those for 77,500 points. I know that because I have a bunch of Emirates points. So I'm looking to use those too. anyway so there you have it that's a new development it's good to see jet blue continuing to expand and that makes me a little bit more excited about this 25 for 25 thing and hopefully having a lot of jet blue points sometime soon because this will be something we'll find particularly useful i'm sure yeah yeah and don't forget if you have a jet blue credit card you get a 10% rebate on those awards so you get some miles back when when you book them as well that's right great cool all right that brings us i think to this week's main event main event time American Airlines Advantage versus Alaska at most. So American Airlines loyalty program advantage and Alaska's loyalty program at most rewards, they share a lot of things in common.

They're both one-world alliance programs. They have a close partnership. They both, and this is unusual these days, they both have award charts, at least for when flying their partners. So those are, that's a good thing for both of them. They both in recent years have simplified how elite earnings work into a single metric. Alaska calls there's status points. And American calls there's loyalty points, but it's same idea.

And you have reciprocal elite benefits. So if you're elite with one of these programs and flying the other, you get benefits for your elite status, even though you're flying the partner. Maybe, Nick, can you summarize what you get in that case? Well, let's, yeah, let's dig into that a little bit because I think that's an important component of deciding which airline you want to chase status with,

knowing which benefits you might be able to get when you fly on the other. Let's say you fly American a lot, and you're asking yourself, well, should I earn status with Alaska? you probably want to know what benefits am I going to get if I have Alaska status when I'm flying American and vice versa. So let's start out with your reciprocal elite benefits. The first one that probably matters to a lot of people is how to get main cabin extra seats on American or extra legroom seating on Alaska. So if you have status with American Airlines and you're flying on Alaska, then American Airlines gold members get free extra legroom seating within 48 hours or at booking.

with certain fair classes. Platinum members, American Airlines, platinum members get that extra legroom seating 72 hours in advance of departure, again, or at booking with certain fair classes. Executive platinum members get extra legroom seating on Alaska at the time of booking. So you need top tier American Airlines elite status to get it at the time of booking on the flip side. If you have status with Alaska and you're looking for extra legroom seating on American, so main cap and extra seating. If you have Alaska silver status, it only takes silver status to get that extra legroom seating within 24 hours of departure. And if you have Alaska gold or higher, then you get the main cabin extra seating at the time of booking. So that's a pretty significant difference.

You need American Airlines executive platinum to get it at booking on Alaska, but with Alaska status, you get it on American with just gold or higher at the time of booking. Yeah. Yeah. And, And, you know, Alaska gold is, even though it's the second level of status, it's not that hard to achieve. We'll talk more about status levels later. Correct. Okay. Then, so that's the extra legroom seating.

Complementary upgrades. So if you're looking to get upgraded for free, if you have status with Alaska and you're flying in American Airlines, those can clear as early as 72 hours in advance of departure. Gold and above get one companion. So if you have Alaska, gold. status or higher than you and one companion could receive a complimentary upgrade when you're flying American. On the flip side, if you have American Airlines elite status and you're flying in Alaska, any status level qualifies for a complementary upgrade can get an upgrade for you and

one companion on the same reservation. If you have American gold status, then your upgrades can clear as soon as 48 hours prior to departure with American platinum, as soon as 72 hours prior to departure and platinum pro are higher as soon as 120 hours prior to departure now i'm saying as soon as because those complementary upgrades don't always clear in advance of you know before you get to the gate anyway right so you don't know for sure that you're going to get upgraded could end up going right down to the wire but those are the earliest windows where you could expect yeah yeah also um the upgrade order uh is complicated but in general If you're like, if you have Alaska status flying American, you're going to be below, on the upgrade list, below American Airlines elites who have similar level of status than you.

And same thing the other way around, that if you're flying Alaska with American Airlines status, you're going to be below the Alaska elites who have similar level of status than you. Very good. All right. So that gives you a little bit of a peak at reciprocal elite benefits. There's a lot of standard stuff like the priority check-in and free check bags and stuff like that that is pretty standard that you get on both. And so we're not going to dig through all of those individual things. Those are the more important benefits, probably for most people in terms of reciprocal benefits.

Yeah, yeah. All right. Now let's dig into these programs. We're going to talk about earning redeemable miles. We're going to talk about elite status. We're going to talk about elite milestones and elite status levels. We're going to talk about using miles, all those different topics and comparing these two programs. For the purpose of this discussion, I want to use the term miles to represent the points that can be used to redeem for award flights.

So Alaska now calls those points. American still calls them miles, I think. But we'll just refer to those as miles. And then for the points you earn that get you towards elite status, we're going to just tend to refer to them as status points, which is the term that Alaska uses, American uses loyalty points, but I think status points is equally good term. They mean the same thing.

Okay. All right. So let's talk about earning those redeemable miles, that you can redeem for an award ticket. And so at a base level, it's relatively similar, right? You can earn from flying from credit cards, from making purchases through the shopping portal, different partnerships, and also from point transfers. So there's a lot of different ways to collect them. Yeah, yeah.

So let's drill in just a little bit to earning from credit card welcome bonuses and spend. So on the American Airlines side, you've got several different Citibank, American Airlines cards. You also have Barclays American Airlines cards, which are going away at some point and going to become American City Bank cards. So you have this situation of two different issuers right now, but that's going to be consolidated. Alaska, you've got a very similar thing going on, where you have Bank of America being the primary issuer. and the only issue for Alaska branded cards, but you have Barclays issuing Hawaiian branded cards. And Hawaiian, starting October 1st,

is going to be on the exact same rewards program, and already the points are transferable back and forth. So those are two banks issuing cards that can earn these miles. I don't think we're clear yet on what's going to happen to those Hawaiian Airlines cards, whether they're sticking around or not. Yeah, I mean, I did.

expect them to stick around, particularly based on things that Alaska had said, it didn't, it sounded very clear that they were interested in maintaining their partnership with Bank of America. However, word on the street is that they're going to continue on as normal after October 1st, whether or not they're still available for new applicants. I don't know. And I don't know how long those cards will last. There's been nothing, going back to AA, we know that city is buying the Barclays cards. So if you have a Barclays American Airlines card, that will eventually become a city card and eventually is going to be sometime in 2026. We don't know that about the Barclays Hawaiian cards. There's been no mention of Bank of America buying that backbook. So we don't know

what's going to happen there long term. But for now, anyway, you've got a bunch of different cards on which you could spend to earn redeemable miles. Yeah. So I'm not sure there's a clear advantage to either one in terms of the ability right now to earn welcome bonuses or to earn from spend there's there's a lot of opportunities in both cases there's not a lot of category bonuses um within the airline branded cards um other than the new there's there's a few two x opportunities um off the top my head the only three x opportunity i could think of is the new uh alaska atmos summit card which has 3x for dining and and for international spend yeah yeah okay uh you also have the ability though with both programs to transfer from some transferable points programs so american airlines you can

transfer now from city thank you rewards and alaska you can transfer from built um and uh the built partnership also has an interesting aspect where if you have rent to pay, you could pay your rent through built rewards with your Alaska consumer card, not a business card, and earn three Alaska points or miles, as we're talking about now, three Alaska miles per dollar. You do have to pay a three percent fee, but it could be well worth it depending on what you're doing, whether you're trying to earn elite status and things like that. Yep. Okay. And then finally, from flying, you can obviously earn redeemable miles from flying. With American Airlines, you're going to earn five miles per dollar spent on American Airlines flights. And then you'll

earn bonuses with status. So depending on what you have gold, platinum, platinum, pro executive platinum, you learn anywhere from a 40% bonus to a 120% bonus. On the Alaska side, you have some options. So you can choose whether you want to earn distance-based, where you'll earn one mile per mile flown, whether you want to earn based on the price of your ticket, very similar to American Airlines, five miles per dollar spent, or you could choose to earn per segment, or earn 500 miles, redeemable miles per segment flown. So which is best for you will depend. And there's still, of course, the bonuses with elite status. And on the Alaska side, those range from 25% at the bottom all the way up to 150% bonus for top tier Alaska members,

which is, as you may have heard there, higher than it is on the American Airlines side. In fact, the bonuses, once you get beyond silver status, are all a little bit higher on the Alaska side. Yeah, yeah. And it's worth mentioning, like, American doesn't have a silver status. So if you just compare gold and up, they're all higher bonuses on Alaska's side than American side. So you could argue silver is also higher because that's comparing to zero bonus with American. That's true. That's true.

So your status bonuses are all a little bit higher on the American side. For comparable status levels, you're talking 40% for gold with American versus 50% for gold with Alaska. or platinum gets you 60% with American. Platinum with Alaska gives you 100%. So we'll talk more about that. So better earnings with Alaska. With Alaska elite status. Okay, so for this section,

as far as the ability to earn redeemable miles, you know, I think there's a slight edge, as we just mentioned with Alaska in terms of earning for flying if you have status. but I actually think American Airlines has the advantage here if you're going to earn right if you're going to earn through spend on Citibank cards because city cards have lots of opportunities to earn anywhere from 3x to 5x actually 6x and on on that weekend evenings

with the Citibank thank you rewards cards And then you could transfer those points to Americans. So overall, I'm giving a slight nod to American Airlines for the ability to earn redeemable miles. Yeah, I think that totally makes sense because you can earn way more redeemable miles. Thanks to that transfer partnership with city nowadays. All right. Let's talk about elite status in general, though, because if you want to earn elite status, certainly may be a focus, then things start to become maybe a little bit more different.

So you can earn a course from page. flights, which is sort of similar, except that Alaska gives you a couple of different ways to choose to earn status points from flying. Just as we just mentioned a few moments ago, you can choose to earn same thing as with paid flights, one status point per mile flown, or you could choose based on the amount of money you're spending on your flights, or based on that minimum of 500 status points per segment. So you've got the option. to choose which. Yeah.

And Alaska also has an incredible trick up its sleeve. In addition to letting you choose, they let you earn status points for award flights. And so if you choose to earn based on distance, then you'll earn status points based on the distance flown. But if you decide to earn based on the price of your ticket, you'll earn what one status point for uh every 20 20 points redeemed 20 points redeemed yeah per 20 points right um and so uh yeah anyway so uh that's that's a really cool uh feature with alaska um in both cases you can also earn from credit card spend uh with american airlines

it's it's straight up you earn one loyalty point uh per dollar spent very simple uh Alaska is not as good with that. You get one status point per $2 with the summit card or one status point per $3 spent with the other Alaska cards. Yeah, so you can't earn with credit card spend, but you're going to have to spend significantly more on your Alaska cards in order to earn those status points than you do with American Airlines. For clarity, for anybody who's not familiar, like Greg said, you earn one loyalty point per dollar spent on American Airlines. Airlines cards. And to keep in mind that that is regardless of the category bonus you're spending in. So if you happen to have an American Airlines card that's earning some category bonus, you're not going to earn two or three loyalty points per dollar spent. You're still going to earn

just one loyalty point per dollar spent, even if you earn more redeemable miles per dollar spent. Alaska on the other hand, well, no, I guess Alaska is the same kind of a thing. It's one status point per $2 or $3, depending on which card you're used. using. So it's different than redeemable points. Right, right. And I want to say I mentioned a second ago, you know, American has the advantage there of having a better ratio to dollar spent when you're earning status points from your credit card. Some people might be saying, but wait a minute, status with American requires a lot more status points than Alaska does. And we will get into that further in the show. I don't want to brush past that fact that while American you can

earn more from credit card spend, you may need more to get to a level level status. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you can also earn it through portals. So through the shopping portals and through American Airlines simply miles. So American Airlines, you'll earn one loyalty point per mile earned. So if you're going through the shopping portal and doing an offer to earn a few miles per dollar at Macy's or Bloomingdale's or wherever it is you're spending your money or you're doing one of those like Blue Apron deals where you get I don't know 4,000 miles for signing up for Blue Apron you get the same number of loyalty points with Alaska it's one status point per three miles earned so you're going to earn fewer status points overall though again like Greg said it all depends on what you value

and we'll get further into that. But again, one loyalty point, one status point, we'll call it per mile earned for American, one status point per three miles earned for Alaska. Yeah, and I should have mentioned at the outset of all of this that most of what we're going to be talking about when comparing Americans program to Alaska's is based on Alaska's program as of January 1st, 2026. So, like, as we're recording this, there are some differences in terms of, like, what's the maximum status points you could earn for different things.

And that's going to be going away next year. So we won't get into those kind of details right now. Another way you could earn is with miscellaneous partners, you know, like sometimes there's those FTD flowers or car rental, whatever, different ways of getting airline miles. And with American Airlines, just like everything else, almost everything else, American Airlines does. If you earn a mile, a redeem-a-mile, you also get one loyalty point. So it's a very simple one-to-one. Alaska, they do, they have some partners like Lyft, or if you book hotels,

cars, cruises, or vacations through Alaska Airlines, then you get one status point per dollar spent. Now, that's per dollar. That's not per mile earned. Right. So it's still different from American Airlines. It's per dollar. Okay. And then for miscellaneous other stuff, the portal, you know, which we already mentioned, but also just the random other things where you can earn Alaska miles, you're going to get one status point per three miles earned. Right. All right. So that gives you a little bit of a glimpse into earning. Then speaking of earning, you also can earn milestone rewards in both programs. Both offer milestone awards as you earn. American Airlines loyalty points and Alaska status points, what we're kind of referring to his status points overall, you can earn certain milestones. And the biggest of those milestones is upgrade certificates. Yeah. So first, we don't know what the 2026 milestones in either program are going to be at this point. But one of the things that really struck me as I

browse through the milestones available right now in both programs is that to get a a choice to pick up two upgrade certs with American Airlines, you have to earn 175,000 loyalty points. With Alaska, you get two upgrade certs at only 85,000 status points. Wow. Yeah, so it's a huge difference. I don't know if that's going to change. It probably will change in 2026, but as things stand right now, you get your upgrade certificates much sooner.

And I also, the other thing I can't really say anything about is the difference in value of these things. So, you know, Alaska is going to start making them work on long haul international flights and stuff, but they, of course, have a much different route network than American Airlines does. No idea whether the availability upgrades will be better than American or worse than American, that kind of thing. So take that all a grain of salt there. And it's also worth mentioning that while you get those two upgrades, it's at about half the number of status points that you do with American, if you've been paying attention to the math along the way here, you're also earning status points at a much slower pace with Alaska than you are with Americans.

Well, with Alaska partners and credit cards you are. With flying, you're earning at a higher pace. That's true. Well, higher or equal. so it's yeah it's it's it's not a as straightforward as it sounds but but you're right in general for most people i think a lot of status points will be earned outside of flying and um and then american you do earn much faster you're not earning from status points from from award bookings with american though and that can make a big difference i mean i think this year alone i'm flying at least

20,000 miles a little more than that on Alaska booked awards. And so it would be 20,000 status points right there'd be a quarter of the way to earning those two upgrade certificates just on my award bookings that I made before I even knew you'd earn elite status, I think, with Alaska. So it was not something that were that influenced my behavior at all. So if I were focusing more on that, I'm sure I could have booked even more through Alaska. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So let's talk about those elite status levels then next, because we've got a number of different thresholds and the requirements to earn those thresholds start to differ quite a bit. Yeah, yeah.

Starting out at 20,000 status points, you can get, you will get Alaska silver status. You don't get anything with American. I mean, there's milestones along the way, but as far as an actual achieving elite status, You don't get anything with American at that level, at the 20K level. Alaska Silver gives you your 25% elite bonus, which we mentioned earlier. So that's earnings on flights. You also get one world ruby status. And that gives you when you're flying one world airlines, gives you access to business class check-in and preferred seating on those airlines.

So that's pretty cool. at 40K you get a level you get gold tests with both programs. I think it's worth mentioning though that American Airlines what they call gold is like what most other airlines call

silver. So it sounds like you're getting the same thing but I don't really think you should think of it that way. Americans gold gives you a 40% elite bonus and one world ruby So that's the same status in one world that you got at 20K with Alaska. Alaska's gold, you get a 50% elite bonus and one world sapphire.

Now things get interesting in the one world realm because Sapphire one world status gives you access to one world business class lounges. So say you're flying economy on a one world airline outside the U.S., then you get access to the business class one world lounge, which is great. is that's a nice little benefit to have at just 40k status points when you move up to the next level at 75,000 American Airlines loyalty points are what will be 80,000 Alaska status points in 2026. It's 75K right now in 2025, but in 2026 it'll be 80K Alaska. At that level, American Airlines would give you a platinum status, which will get you a 60% elite bonus and one world sapphire, which you could have had at Alaska at the previous level. Right.

So that's, again, American Airlines Platinum, 60% bonus, One World Sapphire. On the Alaska side, with what will be 80,000 status points in 2026, you get Alaska Platinum status, which gives you a 100% elite bonus, significantly more on the elite bonus side, and One World Emerald status. One World Emerald gives you access to first-class one-world lounges when you're flying one-world same day and there are some nice one world first class lounges out there so that can be a great benefit if you're flying economy outside the u.s anyway or business class or business class right or business class good point and you just want to be able to access the first class lounge because sometimes those first class lounges can be quite nice yeah absolutely they can be they can be really

really impressive in some cases um all right uh the next uh status level bump uh is quite a ways from the 75k 80k range At 125K, that's when you get American Airlines Platinum Pro, and that'll give you an 80% elite bonus, and you finally catch up with One World Emerald at that point, which you got at that 80K level with Alaska. shortly so so very close behind the 125k at 135k with Alaska and this is starting next year the in 2025 titanium is a requires 100k status points but starting in 2026 it'll be 135k that gets you to Alaska titanium status with 150% elite bonus which is really excellent yeah that is that's fantastic And then finally at the top end for American Airlines, if you're in 200,000 American Airlines loyalty points, you'll get executive platinum status, which gives you a 120% bonus. So less than what you would get at 135K with Alaska and a significantly higher total threshold to get top tier status with American Airlines at 200,000 loyalty points required versus 135,000 status points required with Alaska.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. So to summarize what we've learned about the comparison, the elite status comparison here, I think Alaska has a significant edge over American in terms of their elite program. Because you can earn from award flights, because it's easier to get low-level status, which starts at 20K instead of 40K with American. because it's easier to get meaningful one-world status, which happens at threshold before American does. And now, on the flip side, it is harder with Alaska to get top-tier status through spend alone because you're earning fewer status points per dollar.

But still, overall, I think Alaska has that advantage. Another advantage for American, though, is that if you like to earn a lot of status points through portals and like Simply Miles, which is where you link your card to that program, then you earn more status points through American Airlines. And so you could get to status potentially quicker that way. Yeah, I think if you're earning status from the couch, if you want to earn status from home from the couch, It's probably easier to get to a meaningful level with American Airlines. If you're going to be redeeming miles with Alaska, I think, and or flying inexpensive long flights fairly often, then I think it becomes far easier to earn a really meaningful level of status with Alaska or at the very least comparable amount of effort. I mentioned before that this year alone I'm going to fly 20,000 miles plus in redeeming.

awards with Alaska. And so then even if I were earning one Alaska status point per $3 spent, if I spent $60K on one of the cards, I would end up with gold status. And I wouldn't get something comparable spending $60K on American. And I don't earn anything for my American awards flown. So it's going to vary based on your situation. But I think if you redeem Alaska Miles at a decent clip, Alaska gets a significant advantage here. Yep. Yep. All right. Let's talk about using Miles though. So if you're doing all the stuff to earn status, you're also earning redeemable miles along the way, or you might be wanting to transfer from transferable points programs. And so which one has the most valuable, useful miles? That's really important, I think.

Yeah, and it's hard to answer definitively, but I think we're going to make a number of different comparisons here. So let's start with the partner award charts. First of all, they both have a partner award chart, which we appreciate that matters to us in terms of earning points of miles because if I'm going to earn them, I want to have sort of a goalpost as to how much it's going to cost me when I want to redeem them. So that's good. They're a little bit different, some ways similar in some ways different. American Airlines has a region-based award chart. Alaska has a kind of a combination. It's both region and distance-based, a little bit more similar to Air Canada Aeroplane in that way. But one shines over the other, depending on which types of her.

you're looking at, right? Yeah. So, you know, this isn't going to be true in every single case, but on average, shorter flights, you're going to do better redeeming Alaska miles, and longer flights, you're going to do better redeeming American Airlines miles. So which one's better?

I mean, it's going to vary so much. And, you know, I know for me, it's not that I can say, overall, I tend to do one or the other, so this one's better for me. I mean, it just varies from flight to flight, from award booking to award booking, which one is the better program to use. Yeah, and like Greg said, you know, those generalizations he just made about Alaska being better for short and American being better for long, those are variable too. You know, if you're based on the East Coast, Alaska charges a little bit less than American to get

to Europe in business class. And on the flip side, if you're based on the east coast, you want to go to Asia, you're going to pay far less with American than you would with Alaska. And if you're based on the West Coast, it's going to cost you way more with Alaska miles to get to Europe. And so it's definitely going to vary based on where you are. But I think that's a pretty good generalization for the most part. But one place that Alaska has a significant advantage is in the ability to book stopovers, to book a stopover award. You get a free stopover on a one-way award with Alaska. And that can make Alaska, a better deal for long-distance flights if your long-distance travel dreams include two

destinations. If you're going to go to at least two destinations, then Alaska becomes far more appealing. And to give one example, American charges in business class from the United States to Asia, 60 or 70,000 or miles, I should say 60 or 70,000 miles one way to get to Asia and business class. Alaska charges more. However, I was just looking last night at an award from the East Coast of the U.S. to Frankfurt on Condor and then continuing on to Asia to Bangkok on Condor. And with a stopover, that should be 85,000 miles because that's what they charge to get to Asia on that route. And so 85,000 miles one way with the stopover, that seems like potentially a really good deal if you wanted to do both. Because with American, you'd have to book those

as separate awards. So you'd pay 57,500 to get to Europe and then another 75,000 to get from Europe to Asia, whereas you could do both for 85,000 miles on a single Alaska award with a stopover. So it becomes a significantly better deal in that type of situation. Now, are there situations where you're going to want to fly to Europe and Asia on the same trip? I don't know. But there are times when the ability to have a free stopover might make Alaska a better deal on a long distance award after all. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I haven't myself booked an award like that, or at least not any time in recent years, but it's so compelling as a potential that I really like that, that that's there in the toolbox. Now, both programs will have ways to let you book and cancel

awards for free. American Airlines, it's straightforward. It's just free for everyone who's part of the program. With Alaska, you do have this like $12.50 fee, award booking fee for anytime there's a partner involved in the award, and it's a fee per person, per direction of travel. That, if you are just regular Alaska member and you have to pay that fee to book it, and when you cancel an award, you don't get that $12.50 per person, per person, per direction back unless you have the well if you have the summit of visa infinite card then you don't pay that 1250 fee in the first place and so um in that case booking and canceling is free like american um so slight advantage to american there but not a big deal if you're willing to get the

that premium card with alaska very good sharing miles if you want to share miles with other people alaska is the clear winner because they provide a way to do that an american air airlines doesn't so right now it's still possible i think to combine miles on the hawaiian side though that's pretty temporary you can transfer if you have a hawaiian airlines credit card you can transfer to somebody else and combine on that side but even moving forward Alaska is going to allow the opportunity with the summit card to create essentially like a points pool and transfer points with up to 10 other people so if you're a family traffler and everybody's earning miles on your flights then Alaska would have a significant advantage there with the summit card yeah yeah I should correct

something I'm sure that American would let you share your miles well they'll charge you quite a bit for it and and you don't want to pay uh to share your miles that's that's kind of ridiculous like buying miles for someone else and losing the miles you have right that's a great never makes sense to pay to transfer your miles except in like the rarest circumstances where they don't charge much for it um okay Now, another thing about booking award flights is the ability to mix partners on a single award. So American Airlines has that ability. They don't necessarily make it easy to, like, force it. So if you're trying to create a routing that's not coming up in your search automatically,

it's not that easy to make that happen. But they will combine partners in a single booking when it's a route that makes sense to them. And Alaska, they have been promising the ability to do this for a long time. They've dabbled in the ability a little bit. I think there's a couple awards that can be booked that makes some partners when flying to Europe or something. But they don't always price the way they're supposed to. do. It's like it's wonky. It doesn't work well. They've been, this is one area where they have been over-promising and under-delivering because they've said for too long now that it's coming

soon and it hasn't happened yet. And that's a frustration point, I think, because they do have some good partners where it would be nice to be able to mix them on an award. You mentioned Europe and that's, I mean, I just mentioned a few minutes ago booking a stop over on Condor to fly to Frankfurt and then on to Asia. But Condor only has a couple of destinations. in Asia. And so it would be much more convenient to be able to combine them with some other partner for a stopover award, but you can't do it yet. And so that's super frustrating. Yeah, it sure is. It sure is. And yeah, I mean, I just came up with that situation recently. I was looking to book an award where it would have been perfect to book a flight on Edihad with a stopover, followed by a flight

on Qatar, but can't do it. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, that's really annoying with Alaska. I hope that they get that fixed sooner rather than later. I assume that they will. I mean, they've said that they intend to, but I don't, it can't happen fast enough. I don't know what's taken so long there. I'm sure it's complicated on the back end, but enough other programs make that easily doable that there ought to be a technology solution for that. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of partners, what about booking non one world partners who's got the advantage there yeah both programs uh have partners that are not part of one world and both of them let you use your miles to book a lot of those partners

um you know i think alaska has probably more like a higher number of these partners but i'm not even positive about that american airlines has a pretty large number of them um but But regardless, which one's better is going to really depend on your situation. Like, I've loved the fact that American Airlines partners with Eddie Had and has great award booking prices, which I just realized when I said my example before with Alaska, wanting to book an Eddie Had and Qatar flight, that that wouldn't have worked anyway because Eddie Had is not a one-world partner or a partner with Alaska. but so so i like edihad uh they also have like air tahiti nui as a as a partner which can be

uh very useful but alaska has partners like uh condor and singapore and starlux which you know all those can be really uh terrific partners so it it kind of depends where you're flying um as to which one uh would be best for those things i think yeah and boy if they get those mixed partner awards going then i think alaska may end up with some advantage there because of the the way that those non one world partners kind of cover places that some of the one world partners don't right right you'd be able to get just about anywhere um which would be really terrific um a lot like you know air canada has that now they have so many um miscellaneous partners that you can tie in and and you can get to really remote areas with with that um and uh the alaska

it'll make sense once you can mix those partner awards. Okay, and we've mentioned this before, but I'm just going to repeat that with Alaska, you could actually earn status points on your award flights. And you can't do that with American. So in a way that makes your Alaska redeeming your Alaska miles more valuable because you're also earning status from it. Yeah.

Yeah. In fact, I was just kicking myself the other day because I was like, oh, I booked something with American miles that I realized I could have booked with Alaska and credit towards elite status. And so that makes a difference now. And when I look at the two options and think about, am I willing to pay a little bit more

in Alaska Miles, during the status points, et cetera. So it's kind of an interesting piece of Redeeming Miles. So speaking of Redeeming Miles, what's your verdict? Who's the winner here? Who's got the better program for redeeming Miles? Yeah. I mean, I think it's mixed, but I think Alaska has an edge because of the, you know, the stopovers and maybe more interesting partners.

And, you know, but there's a, there are advantages to American, too. So I'm not going to declare a set winner on this category. What about you? I agree. My American Airlines miles have been really valuable for lots of great redemptions over the years. So it's hard for me to definitively. say Alaska is better. I've redeemed far more American Airlines miles than I have Alaska miles, but I'm really intrigued by the ability to earn towards elite status with Alaska award bookings

and the stopover thing has always been appealing to me. And I've used it before and I haven't used it in a while and now I'm looking to use it again. And stopovers, I think, really are something that appeal to me. I like to be able to see a couple of places on a single trip. So I probably slightly prefer Alaska here, but it's very close, and I could totally see why someone would prefer American. So it's a toss-up, depending on your use case. All right. So we've covered all these different categories. What's the final word? Which one? Which one's better, Nick? I don't think that's easy to answer. So just to recap some of the stuff we talked about, you got similar options for earning redeemable miles on both of them, credit cards and shopping portals, et cetera.

elite status might be easier to earn because it has lower requirements and award bookings count. And I say might be because it depends on how you're earning. If you're earning just based on credit card spend, then it's not easier. But if you're earning based on booking awards, then it becomes a significantly lower bar in many cases. So, and certainly if you want to get to top tier status, then American Airlines is going to be probably easier unless you're flying tons of award tickets with Alaska. Value of the miles, again, tough. They're both pretty valuable.

I would say that both programs offer similarly valuable flights. American, probably better on most long-distance awards to a single destination. Alaska, probably better on short flights and stopover awards. If you fly one or the other, often, it might be worth sticking with the program that you fly more, you think. Is that what you would say? So there are cases where, let's say you fly American Airlines a lot where when things go wrong, if you have American Airlines executive platinum status, you're going to get covered better than if you have Alaska status, for example.

Another thing is redeeming miles for the airline you want to fly, there are many cases where I want to fly that particular American Airlines flight, it's not available to partners. So I can't use Alaska miles to book it. I can use American Airlines to book it. Same thing on Alaska side. If you really want to use your miles to book an Alaska flight, you might need Alaska miles for that to even be possible, depending on whether they've released that to partners. So there are cases with those kind of elite benefits and using your miles where if you're really loyal to flying one of those programs, airlines, then there might be an advantage to you to sticking with that. If you're more of an occasional flyer of one of them, though, I think those things are less important. I'm personally saying a lot more to like in Alaska's program overall than Americans.

Yeah, I'm far more excited about Alaska's program than Americans. And that's saying something because when American changed the loyalty points metric, I think all of us were pretty interested in that and in the fact that you could earn those loyalty points and earn status by ordering from Blue Apron and spending obviously, of course, in a credit card. But there are just so many different ways to earn it. And we kind of created a game out of earning American Airlines elite status without flying American. And so for Alaska to develop something that interests me even more, or interest

both of us, I think, even more says something about the creativity, I think, of the changes here. So I think personally, I will be more excited about chasing status with Alaska because I think in any given year, it's pretty conceivable that I could be flying 10 or 20,000 miles on award tickets booked via Alaska. And so then my path to Alaska gold status is really not all that far, particularly if I were able to get the Summit Visa card because then, of course, one of the benefits on that card is it gives you 10,000 status points and you earn your status points at a better clip. So it would make it easier to earn a pretty meaningful status. I'd be pretty happy, I think, with Alaska gold status, with being able to pick main cabin extra at the time of booking

when I fly American, because I do fly American more often than I fly Alaska, and then getting one world sapphire benefits. So I think that particular level really appeals to me as a more casual flyer who doesn't buy a lot of paid tickets. Most of my tickets are award tickets. I think that makes Alaska far more appealing to me. I'm not saying that it should be more appealing to you, the listener, necessarily, unless your patterns happen to match mine. There are situations where obviously having American status will matter more to some folks. But I find the Alaska angle more interesting for me. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, where I am with it is Alaska's appeal is partly dependent on that getting that summit card because I like the idea of being

able to earn status from a combination of credit card spend and award bookings. And so that the addition of the award bookings, I think, makes up for the fact that the earning rate of the loyalty points is not as good with Alaska's program, but yeah, and then Alaska's program has much lower status point requirements for each threshold. So that combination is really good, plus the Alaska Summit card has that 60K threshold, where if you spend that much, you get that 100,000 point companion award thing. So you're getting more than just the status benefits of spending that much.

You're also getting that extra award. So that whole combination, I think, works really well. all together, get the free cancellations or, you know, free partner bookings and things like that, too. So, yeah, I still like where American went with their program. They gamified it. They simplified it like crazy. Like no one's done before or since. And that's all great. But I like a little bit more where Alaska's going. So let's hope they can complete this trajectory and not not introduce negatives to it. Right.

We'll hope for the best there. All right. Let's move into this week's question of the week, which is one of those situations where we got a negative to deal with from a reader who ran into a situation. And I'm wondering what your thoughts are about it. So let's see. Prince writes in and says, I recently booked a vacation to Hawaii, which is my first major points in miles trip. The highlight was supposed to be our return journey from Maui to Boston. Boston with a short island hop from Maui to Honolulu, followed by the direct flight from

Honolulu to Boston. Eventually managed to upgrade my entire family of five to first class for 125,000 miles in addition to the approximately $2,500 I spent on economy tickets. These were lie flat business class seats on an overnight flight, so I was really looking forward to this first big first class award flight, which had a high value. However, then Prince came to find out that Hawaiian Airlines is cutting the Honolulu to Boston route in November, and their flight is in December. So that flight is going to be gone. They're eliminating that particular flight and planning to reach out to them soon about rebooking a different flight. What would you expect from Hawaiian regarding rebooking options? And do you think we should also expect additional

compensation? Is there anything specific you would ask for? There aren't many lie flat options on the overnight portion of the return trip except possibly JetBlue Mint. Do you think Hawaiian might consider booking us live flat seats on JetBlue Mint is compensation. I need to add quickly because the Hawaiian Jet Blue Partnership ends on September 30th. What would you do? What do you think? What are you entitled to?

And overall, just what are your thoughts about that type of situation? Yeah, I mean, that's unfortunate. I don't think you're like necessarily entitled to anything specific, but you know, most airlines will try to

do their best, I think, to to kind of make you whole and and and and and to put you on the next best option, which which would include for their own flights, probably. And I'm just saying probably. I don't have experience with Hawaiian doing this, but United did this for me, for example, once. They would put me on another flight in Lye Flat, even if that flight didn't have any upgrade availability or whatever. So they can break those kind of rules to put you on. their own flights. So if there's another flight that's like, you know, maybe nonstop to New York

and then maybe, I don't know, if they could connect you somehow from New York, maybe that's where JetBlue would come in. Then I imagine they can do that. But whether they could put you on JetBlue Mint, does JetBlue doesn't fly to Hawaii, do they? No, they don't. So you'd be talking about trying to get a Hawaiian flight to the mainland U.S. and then JetBlue Mint from like Los Angeles to Boston, I assume they must have. Yeah, that seems unlikely. I don't think that's going to happen. That seems very unlikely to me that they would be able to do that for you.

In general, when something like this goes wrong, it's highly unlikely, not necessarily impossible, but highly unlikely that they're going to put you on some other airline in order to fix the problem. So don't expect that in general. Like Greg said, they have power to do it. what they can for you with their own flights. But with partner flights, it gets much more complicated and probably depends on the partnership. I would expect that maybe they could, now, even American. I would not even be sure that they could help you out there. This really stinks. And one of the

reasons I brought this one up is because at least within the United States, you're not guaranteed. Like if you book, and it's not even just within the United States, if you book a business class, a lie flat seat, you're not guaranteed the lie flat seat. Right. I mean, you're guaranteed the business class booking. But equipment swaps do happen. And so even if they hadn't canceled this flight outright, they could have just swapped in a different plane and you could end up not having the lie flat seats. That hasn't happened to me in all my years of award travel, but it can. And it stinks when it does. So it's part of the risk of this. And, you know, I really sympathize here. Because if you spent $2,500 on these seats because there was upgrade availability and you wanted the lie flat

overnight, man, that stinks because that's a lot of money that you put into something. Maybe you would have booked something entirely different if not for this. So I sympathize 110%. Unfortunately, it's one of the risks of the game in general. And it's a low risk, because I haven't had many situations. In fact, like I said, I haven't had any equipment swaps that have taken me out of a lie flat and into a non-life flat, but even that can happen. So with the route cancellation, like Greg said, I would expect that they could get you

to Boston some other way. or at least to New York, and then maybe that New York to Boston on American Airlines would be something that they could work out somehow. But, yeah, I think that's probably about the best you're going to do in that case. Do you worry about this when you make bookings? Do you worry about? No, I don't. But let me first introduce it. Another potential solution is I think Alaska is going to be trying to build out some live flat transcon routes.

And you should be looking at what they're doing there. If they're taking out some Hawaiian lie-flat options, maybe Alaska's putting in some. So you maybe could get routed through Seattle or L.A. And then to Boston on Alaska Airlines. I'm not saying anything like that is definitely happening. I'm just saying it's plausible that that could appear. And I would expect that that would be doable.

Flying in Alaska may not be life. but flying anything. Yeah, that's what I mean, I think getting rerout on Alaska is like, should definitely be possible because of the, of their now one company. But what, and that's why I say, watch out for what Alaska is doing with live flat routes because they might be introducing one to Boston that doesn't exist right now. Yeah, that's a very good point. It's very good point.

And when I say I sympathize with you, Prince, I really do because I am booked on the Air Tahiti Newy flight from Tahiti to Seattle and a couple of. months and just saw the article yesterday that it sounds like they might cut that route. Oh, no. And in my case, I don't know what that's going to mean because they, they don't fly another way to Seattle, right? I mean, there's no other way I'm going to get there. And so I don't know what that's going to mean for my booking if they cut that route.

And I may end up in a very similar situation. But like I said, it's not something I generally worry about. It doesn't happen all that much, but it does sting when it happens. And for what it's worth, Prince, it would have happened that way also if you had booked entirely with cash. You know, you could have booked that ticket entirely. It's not, not just a casualty of the game, so to speak. It's something that happens when airlines make their decisions on cutting and changing routes. And, and that's unfortunate. All right, I think that brings us to the end of today's episode. If you've enjoyed this and you'd like to get more of this

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