Frequent Miler on the Air - Announcing the 100K Vacay Team Challenge! | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep309 | 6-6-25

Episode Date: June 6, 2025

On today's Frequent Miler on the Air, we look at 2 cards offering 5 free nights, we recall the 5 ways we've been Bonvoyed recently, and we announce the 2025 Frequent Miler team challenge! (01:41) - We learn how to pronounce Dugroz(02:53) - "...any tools or shortcuts you use to quickly size up a biz class product without opening 6 tabs and a YouTube black hole? I know equipment swaps happen, but I’d love to avoid turning every redemption into a minor research thesis."(09:05) - Best Offers Card Exploration Tool (Beta)Try out our card exploration tool here.(11:30) - 5 free night offers from ChaseSee how we value free night certificates here.(16:36) - Capital One Shopping pulls even more gift card redemption optionsRead more about this here.(20:16) - Venture X (& Venture X Business Card): lounge access changes for additional cardholders & primary cardholder guestsRead more about this here.(26:50) - Iberia devaluation: Business class between US & Europe now starting at 40,500 miles one way (previously, 34K for off-peak)(28:08) - Citi replaces Rewards+ card with new Strata card (not to be confused with the Strata Premiere)(29:51) - United Excursionist Perk killed off(31:57) - You can still upgrade to Emirates first class without elite status(33:37) - Tim published: How to book EVA Air Infinity MileageLands awards (for multiple people)Read more about this here.(35:12) - Earn Hyatt bonus points when using Peloton during staysRead more about this here.(37:01) - JetBlue / United partnership, some details announced(39:26) - What are IHG points worth?Read more about this here.Main Event: Announcing the 100K Vacay team Challenge!(44:26) - Compete to see who can book the most amazing 100,000 point vacation(44:55) - The 100K Benchmark Trip(46:42) - Three challengers, each with 100,000 points from a different currency(48:25) - Two Judges(49:21) - $1,000 cash budget(50:49) - Rules(57:11) - Who will win? (strengths and weaknesses)(1:11:18) - Are the no preset spending limit cards actually more restrictive than the standard cards with credit limits?Visit 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 Frequent Mylar On The Air, we cover two cards offering five free nights, we describe five ways we've been Bon Voyed, and we announce the 2025 Frequent Mylar Team Challenge. Frequent Mylar on the air starts now. Today's main event, announcing the 100k VK Team Challenge. That's right, we're back with a new Team Challenge.

We do these every year. In fact, last year we kind of accidentally did two of these, but you know, we couldn't help it. But normally we do one a year where we challenge each other to make the most of points and miles, see who can stretch miles and points the furthest. And this year we're going to be competing to see who can build the best vacation out of 100,000 points. And I got to say, I'm pretty excited about it because the whole idea kind of started back with the fact that there was a good 100k offer out there and I started thinking about,

oh, you know, what could you do with this? Could you plan a whole trip with just this hundred thousand points? And then, you know, I went from feeling pretty good about that to thinking, oh, I don't know what you really could with all the points out there to now being really excited again and thinking, man, you could do some cool stuff with just 100,000 points. So I can't wait to see what everybody pulls out of the bag, so to speak, on this one pulls out of the hat, whatever you want to say. But we'll talk more about that later.

Remember if you want to come back to stuff later on, you can always find the timestamps in the show notes or you can jump ahead and return to something so on and so forth. And wherever you're watching or listening to this this don't forget to first of all like it give it a thumbs up Give us some stars leave us a review leave us a comment. We always love to hear from you All right, so now I think it's time to drag out this week's giant mailbag Yeah, speaking about pulling things out of the bag Let's pull some giant mail out of the giant mailbag. First up is from PDXBeach on the episode last week, It's Reigning Mail from the giant mailbag episode.

So PDXBeach says D-U-G-R-O-Z. So this was someone who wrote in a couple times that we read mail from last week, is actually pronounced do Graz You you actually pronounce the Z even though it's a play on his name with a Z instead of an S So there you go. Good tip from PDX Beach So do Graz reports on YouTube that was That's who the comment came in from so you you can check that out and double check our pronunciation.

Right. So someone else wrote in saying it's really worth checking out his channel. I haven't yet, but I intend to check it out soon. Well, I took a look at a couple. I saw the cottages.com review. He did a while back of a place they stayed, I think in Scotland, it looked fantastic.

So yeah, there's some good stuff there. Oh, cool. All right. Thank you Thank you do grass too. All right, Lisa wrote in She said hi friends I say friends because I listen to you constantly on walks flights errands doing dishes So at this point it feels like we hang out more than I do with some actual friends No offense to them, but they don't help me book a in a first class I'm only a few years into the them, but they don't help me book ANA First Class. I'm only a few years into the hobby, but I've already reached the absolutely ruined-by-points

phase. After flying ANA First on the A350 from Honolulu to Narita for 40,000 virgin points, I became that person. I now reject perfectly reasonable flights because the seat shell looks a little too 2016 or the footwell isn't giving room to wiggle, not wedge. You've joked about this first world spiral on the pod, so I'm hoping you've got a system. Any tools or shortcuts you use to quickly size up a biz class product without opening six tabs and a YouTube black hole? I know equipment swaps happen, but I'd love to avoid turning every redemption into a minor

research thesis. Thanks for making the show such a fun, genuinely helpful guide for all of us chasing the dream of flying fancy for almost free. I loved this. I saw this come in and this was one of my favorite pieces of giant mail to come through in a while. So, thank you, Lisa. I'm glad you wrote in with this.

And you know, it's funny because we can laugh that we've all, not all, but many of us, I guess, who redeem a lot of miles and points have at some point found ourselves in that situation where we're kind of comparing little things that in the overall scheme of things probably don't really matter. But if you're listening to this and you're like, oh my goodness, this is ridiculous. Why do you go into all this detail? And Lisa's defense, you know, when you're listening to this and you're like, oh my goodness, this is ridiculous You know, why do you go into all this detail and Lisa's defense? You know when you're earning your points and you're working to earn the points you want to use them Well, right and and there can be a pretty big difference sometimes in Products and so you want to fly comfortably and for a lot of people they have gotten into this hobby

Anyway, the flight is part of the vacation. It's not just a means to get there, but it's part of the trip. It's an exciting part of the trip. So I totally understand where Lisa's coming from on this because there's so much variance. You know, you look at like a, uh, an airline like Qatar, everybody talks about Q suites and you hear how fantastic Q suites is and the lounge in Doha and blah, blah, blah. But I've during three cards, three continents, I flew Manila to, to Doha. When I first booked it, I hadn't even looked. I just assumed it's got to be QSweets, right?

Isn't that all they got? Not really. I knew better than that, but I didn't realize how bad some of their business class products were. And it was a pretty bad business class product. That said, it was much better than flying in economy. So I try not to overly obsess over those details. I generally pick, generally, the flights that we want, the times that we want over the product, especially, you know,

one plane to another, because equipment swaps do happen. So I don't really obsess over that very much. But I do take a look at a few reviews and whatnot. I don't know, how do you avoid going into the black hole on this, Greg? Yeah, you know, for me, it depends on the situation. Most of the time, all I'm looking for is, you know, if it's a long distance flight, lie flat seats, ideally, direct aisle access as well, I like to have. And although if it's, you know, me and my wife flying,

and so one of us doesn't have direct aisle and has to walk over the other, that's not the end of the world. So yeah, I usually don't sweat it unless I'm really excited about trying out a particular flight, like ANA's A350. You know, that's where you would sweat it, of course. But if you're going out for that particular flight, you already know that information

that Lisa was talking about. So there is one trick that I would recommend is A350, you know, that's where you would sweat it, of course. But if you're going after that particular flight, you already know that information that Lisa was talking about. So there is one trick though, that's really helpful for getting a rough idea of what you're gonna get, which is if you look up the flight on Google Flights, just look up the exact, you know, time, date

and destination, everything, in the search results, as long as you search for business class or first class, when you expand, you know, from just seeing the price, you expand it out a little bit, it'll say things like lie flat seat or something like lie flat suite. It'll say suite if it's like, you've got a door that closes.

And that gives you a pretty good hint about the quality of what you're going to get. It does. That's a great shorthand method and I've certainly used that before too. So great shorthand method. And like I said, you do want to have that. I mean, over take Emirates A380, not A380, they're a 777 business class for instance.

That's like, I don't know, was it like four across in the middle or something? Maybe it's not, I don't know. But it's more than two across in the middle. And you don't want to be in the middle seat in that case. So it's worth taking a look, I guess. But yeah, I don't know. Right. Right. I'm a little obsessed. Also, one of my favorite flights ever was a Qatar flight from Croatia to Doha in business class on a small jet. So single aisle jet, it was two by two seating.

The seats weren't, those seats were big and plush, but not even lie flat, I don't think. I'm not sure about that. But it was a daytime flight, so I didn't care about that. And the catering and the service were just beyond anything I'd experienced elsewhere. So, you know, you might be losing out. If you held out for something better in that example, you might be losing out on the best experience. That's true. That's true. The Google flights tip though, that is a good one. Recently, I ran across Copa flights to and from South America and I, I didn't think that Copa had life flat business class. They fly 737s mostly. And, but

lo and behold, Google flight said, this is a lie flat seat. And I was like, wait a second, wait, is they have a lie flat on a 737? And sure enough they do. So, yeah, well that's actually because the seat backs are broken and they just fall back into the lap of the person behind you. Oh, oh. All right, yeah, so that's that.

Hopefully that helps you. I just. We know, we know. All right, let's get into card news. We got a whole bunch of card news going on today. So first up, we've got something new that we launched. We did, we launched in beta a new version of our best offers page. So yes, we're messing with

perfection because our best offers page is great in that it lists the best card offers that are publicly available, regardless of whether we get paid if you click through or not. But what it's not great about is filtering, sorting, finding what you want. It's a pretty static page. So we've introduced a new version

where you have actual filtering and sorting and even a search box. So we're not done. We're not ready to launch it yet. It's very much in beta in that we know there are important things missing, but we wanted to get it out there so that people could give us feedback right away

about like what is most needed, what do you most need in that tool? For example, the first version let you filter to a single bank at a time. And people wrote in saying, well, I wanna be able to filter to everything except for the banks that hate me, right? Like I was shut down by Chase or Andamex, let's say.

So I wanna deselect those two, not pick just one bank. And so we've already updated it to allow that kind of thing. So that's what we're looking for. So check it out. If you go to our best offers page, there's now a button that lets you view the dynamic version of the page. And so check it out and it'll be changing regularly

as we go. Yeah, I'm excited about that. There are a lot of those filtering options or things that I've wanted also myself. And I think I say, I, all of us probably have wanted at some point and it just, it's not as easy as it seems to make it work. But you know, it looks pretty cool and we're getting there.

And so please do give us that feedback. We know that there are additional things that we want it to have already too. So it's like Greg said, I just want to re emphasize we know it's not done. That's why it's a beta. But but you know, let us know so that we can take into account what people are most interested in and prioritize. Yeah. All right. Let's talk about other card news. So speaking of new card

offers, we have five free night offers from chase. Now I've been on vacation all week, so I think Greg, you're going to have to tell me what these new offers are all about. Sure. Um, so there are two different. Hotel cards that are offering five free nights. Um, first up, well, okay. Let me just say both of them require $5,000 spend in three months

in order to earn your five free night certificates. And those certificates are good for one year from issue. The first up, IHG Premier Card. That's a $99 a year card. It has a number of really good perks if you stay at IHG properties. And it's offering 560k free night certificates. The downside of this one is you cannot top off those

certificates. So if you want to stay at a hotel that's charging 61,000 points per night, you're out of luck. You have to find one where it's 60,000 points or less. So you're almost certainly not going to get 300,000 points worth of value. I mean, that would be a miracle. Especially also considering one of the perks of this card is fourth night free on award bookings, but you don't get that with free night certificates. You only get that on points booking. So even if you found five nights at 60,000 points exactly that you use this for, spending with points would be four times 60 to get the same number of nights.

So anyway, next up we have- Wait, wait, wait, hold on. How much are those free night certificates worth? I mean, how much is a 60k, to give me an idea as to whether this bonus is worthwhile, how much is each 60k free night certificate worth? I don't know off the top of my head, but if you go to our reasonable redemption values page, we have a section on free night certificates and you could, you could check there what we estimated them to be worth. There you go. Good. Good.

Okay. Sorry. I didn't mean to cut you off. I did mean to cut you off, but I apologize. Did you expect me to have an answer off the top of my head? Well, I mean, I thought you might. I don't know. You're Greg the frequent miler.

I don't know what you have memorized. All right. Um, next up we've got the Marriott Bonvoy Boundless card, which is a $95 annual fee card, and that's offering five 50K free night certificates. Now those can be topped off up to 15,000 points to each one. So you can stay at properties that cost up to 65,000 points per night. The irony about this.

So, so it used to be, um, that it was difficult to get full value from Marriott's 50 K certs because they had, they had a bunch of properties that were. You know, priced around 40 K and a bunch of properties that were priced, um, you know, 70 K and up. And so it was hard. But the good news is most of those properties that were priced, you know, 70K and up. And so it was hard. But the good news is most of those properties that used to be priced 40K are now like 55K or so. So you can get you can get full value from the certs now, thanks to Marriott's continued

bonvoying you efforts. Yeah, you know, I think the interesting thing about a lot of research on that. And I'm going to be doing a lot of research on that. And I'm going to be doing a lot of research on that. And I'm going to be doing a lot of research on that. And I'm going to be doing a lot of research on that. And I'm going to be doing a lot of research on that. And I'm going to be doing a lot of research on that. And I'm going to be doing a lot of research on that. And I'm going to be doing a lot of research on that.

And I'm going to be doing a lot of research on that. And I'm going to be doing a lot of research on that. And I'm going to be doing a lot of research on that. And I'm going to be doing a lot of research on that. And I'm going to be doing a lot of research on that. And like Greg explained already, both programs here actually have a mechanism for getting one night for free when you're staying four or five nights. IHG, it's fourth night free when you're using points for your cardholder. Marriott, it's stay four, stay five, pay for four, whatever. So you're not going to get the full headline point value.

And ironically, because of the way that works, the certificates are probably more valuable if you don't need them for a five consecutive night stay, right? Because if you need a five consecutive night stay with IHG, for instance, you could buy the points for that for 1,200 bucks. And you might get more than $1,200 worth of value out of five separate nights.

So it's kind of wonky like that, where I think these offers are better for people that don't need a five night stay. Right, right, yeah, you're much better off if you end up using them in like a three night stay and a two night stay or whatever, right? Yeah. That's true.

On the other hand, you know, if you have them and you have a five night stay, use them because it's much better to use them than to let them go go to waste I've known too many people who end up end of year like end of the You know as the certificates are about to expire End up staying somewhere that would have cost like 25,000 points or something just just to use them at all and and That's a shame of if you if you do that. It is it is.

All right. Next up today is Bonvoid five ways. Been Bonvoid five ways this week. Wow. I go on vacation for a week or two here and we're getting Bonvoid everywhere. So what happened this week? Yeah. First, let me say I don't think Marriott has made the Bonvoy happened this week? Yeah, first let me say I don't think Marriott has made the Bonvoy list this week. I must be missing something in this outline because they usually work so hard to get in this list. So we must be missing something. But let's start with what Capital One did. There you go. Yeah, I

can start with this one. So Capital One shopping, of course, I've talked a lot about this and how much I love the portal. And then they go ahead and slap everybody across the face by pulling away most of the good gift card redemption options. And that really stinks because tons of the options that were worthwhile are gone for most people. And that makes it even more confusing because if you're paying attention there, I didn't say gone across the board. Different people have different gift card redemption options. So Capital One Shopping is a reminder, is a shopping portal anybody can use it. You don't need a Capital One account or a card.

You just need an email address in order to use Capital One Shopping. And they advertise these big sort of cash back rates, 20% back, 30% back, et cetera. And oftentimes they're really good, but the rewards come in the form of dollars that you can only redeem for gift cards. And they only have certain merchants. And up until recently, they had enough that were useful enough for enough people, I think, to make Capital One Shopping pretty compelling at those 20 or 30% back rates, but they've pulled so many of the good ones at this point.

And in fairness, we've seen gift card redemption options come and go over time. So we've seen some of the good ones get pulled and then come back later and they get pulled again. But this was really kind of a big pull of lots of them for most people, but not everybody. Go figure. I don't really understand what's going on.

And just as a reminder, Capital One Shopping is where you don't actually need a Capital One card. It's just a online shopping portal, and it advertises cash back, but what you really get are the ability to redeem for gift cards. And the fewer gift card options they have, the less valuable that those rewards become to you. And that's a shame.

I mentioned on our Ask Us Anything last night, as we're recording this, it's last night, that I'm thinking, myhotels.com was gone last I checked and I'm thinking of just redeeming all of my rewards for the Expedia Global Hotel thing. I checked a couple of hotels I'd been looking at and made sure prices were actually reasonable, you know, they're a tiny bit higher than what I could find elsewhere, but not bad, of the couple I looked at. So, you know, just having a slush fun basically to book hotels when points aren't a good option would be better than

waiting until even that option is gone from from the shopping reductions. That's definitely quite a bummer because I had been redeeming for hotels.com gift cards and just assumed I would probably continue to do that using it exactly as Greg said. Yeah, so I guess I do probably need to redeem the rest for the Global Hotel Card. I'm not excited about that and I'm going to be even less excited if they suddenly bring back a bunch of gift card redemption options. Thanks for that, Capital One. All right, so that's Capital One shopping, but that's not it this week.

Capital One was getting to business this week. They wanted to make the list not once, but at least twice. Yeah, yeah, twice on the Bonvoy list this week. So they announced changes to the VentureX and VentureX business cards as to lounge access policies. So as things stand right now, if you have the VentureX personal card, you can go into priority pest lounges and Capital One lounges and add,

and bring in a couple guests for free. You can also, if you have any authorized users, they can get into lounges for free and bring in guests. Well, all of that's changing. So the starting February 1st, 2026, no more free guests. If you're using the Priority Pass access, you are going to... Well, this one, Priority Pass is state... If you have the business version, you'll still be able to bring in two free guests.

But if you have the personal version, you're going to have to pay $35 per guest for priority pass. So that becomes like really one of the worst versions of priority pass that are out there. You know, it started off, Intra-X started off having one of the best and now they've dropped to they're not even in competition anymore unfortunately. Although the business one is now sort of equal to many other options I guess you could say. Now as far as getting into Capital One lounges, you also have no free guests unless you spend $75,000 in a calendar year on your card in which case then you can bring in two free guests.

You would be able to bring in guests for the rest of that calendar year and all of the next. Or you can pay $45 per adult guest and $25 per child. So that's all, Mickey. And then if you thought that was bad enough. Uh. They weren't done, they weren't done, they weren't done, you're not done. Those, those authorized user cards that you handed out so that your friends and

family could get into, to lounges. Those authorized user cards will no longer have lounge access of any kind unless those authorized users pay $125 per year to add on lounge access benefits to their card. And those lounge access benefits have the same limitations I was just talking about, about no free guests unless you spend $125,000. Now, luckily that... $75,000.

Not $125,000, $75,000. Luckily that spend is across all. So if you have a card, if you have Venturex card and four authorized users, you just have to spend $75,000 all together across all of them. And then all five of those cards will have guest access. Man, man, this is rough. This is rough.

And it's, on the one hand, I don't use that many priority pass lounges anymore. I shouldn't say anymore. I mostly travel using my miles in business class when I'm flying internationally, so that I'm usually using a business class lounge. And domestically, I don't just end up traveling through a ton of airports with priority pass lounges. So it's not something I use all the time, but it's something I use from time to time. And if you don't have a good version of this, you can't be the only

rewards card in my wallet. And that's the problem here because the Venturex, I feel like was a pretty good solution. If you wanted a single good travel rewards card with all the right perks Because it really ticked all the boxes in terms of having a good base level return two points per dollar everywhere that you could transfer To a bunch of good airline partners and some okay hotel partners Maybe and then it had the travel stuff that you would want like this and so you take this away and it's like well I can't just have a venture X card then I need to have something else that has a better version because I can't go to the airport and not bring my wife into the lounge. You know, and usually we're traveling with the kids too.

I'm not paying $45 for my wife and $25 for each of them. $95. Forget it. I'm not paying all that. Right. In the lounge. Get out of here. Capital one.

Right. Right. So, so yeah, so real quick, um real quick, two options for getting good versions of Priority Pass that are shareable with your family are the RITS card. So you can, that Bonvoy Boundless card we talked about before, after you've had it for a year, you can ask to upgrade to the RITS card and that gives you free priority pass and

free authorized users and each authorized user can get their own priority pass and they can have unlimited free guests. In fact, Nick you just tested that theory right? I did yeah so we flew out of JFK terminal one for the beginning of this trip. I'm so I'm in Europe as we're recording this and and we flew out of JFK terminal one and JFK terminal one does not have clear, crazy right, but terminal one has a priority pass lounge that sits airside right next to the security lanes. It's just to the left of the security lanes in terminal one and the key benefit, I mean there's a little lounge there if you want to sit need a snack

or something, but the key benefit of that lounge is that they have a private entrance to security. So you go directly to the TSA agent, you skip the whole line. So I wanted to test it out. I have, my wife also has a Ritz card and I've added her sister as an authorized user. So we had enough priority passes

that it wouldn't have been a problem anyway, slice or dice it, but I wanted to just test it out. There were eight of us traveling. So I handed my Priority Pass over and said, I'd like to bring seven guests and they, you know, boop, boop, boop, and I didn't get charged anything for the seven guests. So that's awesome. So that was great.

Yeah, yeah. The other option I wanted to call out for a great version of PriorityPass and Shareable is the Bank of America Premium Rewards Elite Card, which gives you a full PriorityPass, including restaurant access, which the Ritz card does not do, and lets you give other people and lets you give other people priority pass memberships, even without them being authorized users. So you could just skip that authorized user part and just give people. I can't remember how many it gives, but there's three or four, I think that you can dole out. So that's a really nice option as well. There you go. All right, let's talk next about Iberia. Iberia broke my heart and I didn't even know it happened until I started seeing comments about it.

And I was like, oh, whoa, what happened here? Because again, I've been out of town. The Iberia devaluation, I guess business class between the US and Europe no longer starts at 34,000 miles each way. How much does it cost now? Yeah, now it starts at 40,500 miles one way and when it's off peak, as you said before, it was 34,000 off peak. Now this was just for routes that were particularly short,

like from New York or Boston to Madrid, or there were a handful of airports where you can grab that and now it's a bit more. Yeah, I don't know about the other guys, but this was one of the things I had been considering looking for when trying to design our challenge trip that's coming up is could we make this work? Now, 40,500 miles is still an incredible deal, but not as incredible. And, you know, because before 34,000 was like what you'd pay an economy with most programs

and you got business class with Iberia. Now it's a bit more than that. So anyway, yeah, a shame. Okay, next up, City replaces the rewards plus card with the new City Strata card, which is confusingly named because it sounds a lot like the strata premier, but it isn't. And unfortunately, really what stinks is that if you currently have a rewards plus card, it will be forcibly converted to a strata card soon starting July 20th of 2025. And the bad news is that neither the rewards plus is 10% points rebate.

So as a reminder, the rewards plus card gives back 10% in points redeemed each year up to 10,000 points back. So you've gained 100,000 points, you get 10,000 back each year. And that feature is not going to be part of the Stratocard and neither will the roundup feature where it rounds up your points to the, what is it, the nearest 10 or something like that. So, none of the key features of the Rewards Plus

are moving over. There are some things that might be decent about it for some people, but it's a big bummer for anybody who had and held and loved the rewards plus card. Yeah, I really thought the rewards plus was gonna be a collectible where, you know, it's no longer available new, but you get to keep it if you have it.

And that 10% rebate was a great little perk for a fee-free card. So if you have the card, make sure to ideally redeem, make sure you've redeemed 100,000 points this year by before July 20th so that you'll get your full 10% back. And yeah, that's a shame. Armored dude. Yeah. Yep.

All right. Next up, United has killed its excursionist perk. This was a perk that you had really enjoyed and written about a couple of times already. And the excursionist perk is where you get a free one way when you're booking a round round trip award sort of round trip award. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there were lots of ways of, of kind of tricking and into doing a lot more than what it's intended for.

And yeah, United's killing it off as of August 21st, 2025. But so that is a shame, especially since I, I'm going to be using chase points in the upcoming challenge. And my goal was to like identify the places where chase has an edge over others and one place is the ability to transfer points to United but now like I don't even know of any great uses of United miles right off the top of my head.

At least that would be within the hundred thousand point threshold. So anyway, that's dead, but I did want you, Nick, to read your little ode to the death of this perk. I'm glad you said read and not sing. I'll let the readers add the music. A long, long time ago, I can still remember how that UA Perk used to make me smile. And I knew if I had my chance that I could make my miles dance and maybe I'd be flying free for a while. But August 21st, 2025 made me shiver with every email I delivered. Bad news on the website, I couldn't redeem one more time.

I can't remember if I cried when I read that UAs killed free rides, but something touched me deep inside the day the Excursionist perk died. I love it. Nick published that on the weekend review right after that happened and right as he was heading off on vacation. And I just enjoyed that so much. So forced him to read that. Hopefully a few of you stuck along. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. I'll be here all week, folks. All right, now let's talk about awards points and more, which also has like a whole bunch of things going on here this week.

Yeah, yeah, will we ever get to the main event? I don't know. I don't know, maybe, maybe sometime. First up, you can still upgrade to Emirates first class, even if you don't have status. And we know that because you did it. Yes, I did. So if you don't have status. And we know that because you did it. Yes, I did. So if you've been following along,

you know that Emirates made an unfriendly change to their ability to book first class awards with Emirates miles. They now say you have to have elite status with Emirates in order to do that. However, that left a question. What if we book business class with miles and then use miles to upgrade at the airport? And I was in that position. I had a

business class flight booked to return from Italy to the US and was hoping to upgrade it at the airport. When the news broke, I was like, uh-oh, what's gonna go on? What's gonna happen here? And to further compound the problem, transfers to Emirates are temporarily down across the board. And I knew that was coming before my flight.

So I had to, I made a gamble. I transferred the required number of points in order to upgrade at the airport. Showed up at the airport on May 31st with my wife, hoping to upgrade it first, went to the counter, said, hey, we'd like to do this. And boom, it worked. So that was great news that you can still do that.

That's excellent. That's really good news. Awesome. All right, that's the first piece. Next up, Tim published a piece that I had been waiting for him with bated breath to publish. He finally published how to book

EVA Air Infinity Mileage Lands Awards, or is it EVA? EVA, I think. EVA. EVA, okay. The airline based in Taipei. So how to book those awards for multiple people, which is much more complex than it is with some other programs. Or at least it feels that way.

It feels intimidating. And I know that Tim's redeemed with them several times now. So I was glad that he published a post on how to do that. Yeah, I was really glad because when I've read before about how to do it, like other blogs have kind of said, well, we just each redeem points ourselves because it's very complicated to redeem a single award for multiple people. And it's even kind of complicated to redeem an award for one person, but it's even kind of complicated to redeem an award for one person, but it gets next level when you're doing multiple people. So Tim has the guide. You

do have to do some strange things to make it happen. Tap your head and rub your belly or whatever at the same time and hope for the best. But it doesn't, while it's confusing, I think Tim laid it out very clearly and it's, I don't think it's that scary now. It's just, you got to just jump through some hoops and follow along with what he said. Yep. But maybe jumping through those hoops will give you the result that you're looking for. Speaking of getting results, HIAT is now giving you an opportunity to earn points while you're working out. So you can earn bonus points for using Peloton equipment at participating HIAT properties for a while. I can't remember if there were certain dates on

this or not, but I know you earn 100 points per workout of at least 20 minutes. So, you know, no five minute bike rides, you're going to have to work out for at least 20 minutes. So, you know, no five minute bike rides, you're going to have to work out for at least 20 minutes. And you can only earn up to 1000 points per month. So if you're a frequent, you know, workout person, then you'll hit that limit probably. But I mean, that's still it's not bad and easy 1000 points a month. And there are 730 participating properties. So it's not every high, but there's quite a few anyway, where you could potentially earn this. So I'm gonna be on the lookout.

If I'm staying at a Hyatt that has Peloton equipment, I'm certainly gonna look up and see if it's participating. Might as well try and pick up some free easy points. Easy, easy, easy. Absolutely. It's great that they encourage you to get some exercise too. You know, why not? Now this isn't actually new.

This has been around for a bit, but Stephen reposted information about this. And I'm glad he did because I forgot about it entirely. So whenever it came out, it was something that kind of came and went. And I didn't think about it at the time for some reason. And it's not a lot of points that we're talking about obviously, but but, you know, Hiatt does

let you transfer points to another person for free. It's unfortunately not an online process, but you can do it. And so if you travel as a family and work out together, you know, you can increase this point total pretty easily and get in shape. So that seems like a good thing to talk about and do. Yeah, absolutely. Great tip there. All right. JetBlue and United, the partnership is developing there and they've announced some details, not all the details,

but we now have some details of what this JetBlue United partnership is going to look like. For instance, there is going to be reciprocal mileage, redemption, and earnings. So you're going to be able to redeem miles through United to fly on JetBlue and vice versa, and also, of course, earn them on either airline. And there are also going to be reciprocal elite benefits.

Do we know much about what redemptions are going to look like yet or which benefits are offered with this reciprocal benefit situation? Yeah, we don't know anything about award pricing or award availability. They did put out a chart showing what you'll get as a like United elite member flying JetBlue, and it's kind of, you know, you pick a preferred seat or whatever. There was nothing too exciting in that list. You're not gonna be, I don't know.

It's not gonna be something to aspire to, to go out of your way to aspire to, but if you are already either a JetBlue flyer or United flyer, having the extra flights available to you should be really good. The other thing out of this, United is going to get some of JetBlue's gates at JFK, in New York's JFK airport, which they don't currently fly to JFK. And that could be really big for connectivity to international flights. So that's a nice change theoretically, although it scares me because right now I'm relying

on JetBlue has a Detroit to JFK route that has come and gone and come back over time. And I'm really worried that that's going to be one of the gates that JetBlue gives up to United. And I promise you United is not going to fly from Detroit to JFK. They're not going to use that as their primary route, you know, to use one of their few gates they get. So yeah, for me, not as excited as I was before about this situation, but that's just based on that one very specific issue. Yep. All right. So there we have a little bit more information on that. IHG points.

We now have a new look at what IHG points are worth thanks to looking at some data from Gondola. Yeah, so Gondola is that hotel award search tool that I've talked about before. It's free to use and it does a good job of showing what hotels are available with points and lets you sort by best value of your points, things like that. So I'd like it for that. But what I really love is that the founder of Gondola has worked closely with us to allow us access to their data.

They have huge amount of data on the cash prices and point prices for hotels around the world. And they developed a tool to let us explore that data. And they've modified it for our needs in order to let us use this tool to generate these reasonable redemption values that we do so that we have a good idea of how much different hotel points are worth. So we're using that tool. We're starting off with IHG and you'll soon see other hotels updated, our reasonable redemption values updated for other hotels thanks to Gondola.

So with IHG, for example, you know, so before we were manually searching a bunch of cities and a handful of dates and all the combinations thereof to get the data for this. And it was a big pain. Now we let Ghanela do the work. They have over 2 million domestic and international searches at almost 6,300 different IHG properties, so it's a much, much broader range. And yet, at least with IHG, the answer came out almost identical to what we had come up with through our manual process. So with with Gondola, the median point value that they show is at the time of our recording is 0.61 cents per point. That's how much value you get per IHG point. We had in our data before that 0.62. So, you know, not even a difference that would matter to anybody.

So that that sort of helps us feel good about a couple things, one that, you know, that the way we were doing it was before wasn't that bad, but even more that since we're going to be moving on to this new automated process, like, it gives us a sense like, yeah, how they're collecting data and reporting it to us seems to be accurate. So it's sort of a check in both directions there. And it also gives us the ability to publish percentiles, which we've done before in our posts about these things. And so like the 75th and 90 percent percentiles with IHG only come to like 0.66 and 0.71 respectively, which means like if you cherry pick awards with IHG, you're going to have a hard time doing a lot better. So you're doing a little bit better than the median, but not a lot better.

Their range is really tight, unfortunately. Whereas some other programs like Marriott, the range is much, much wider. So there's more opportunity to get a lot more outsize value. There you go. But really, I think it was really cool. I thought it was awesome to find out

that our RV was so close with the system that we had, which was so much more limited. But I always thought reasonably good alternative since we didn't have the ability to collect such a wide range of data points. And I think it was pretty amazing to see just how close that methodology hit. So well done, Greg, on developing the methodology that we've long used, but now we have even more accurate data or more data points behind it.

Yeah, and again, big thanks to Gondola and the team there for supporting us with this. They're not charging us for access to the data, so in turn giving them some free publicity by talking about their tool. And it's so valuable what we've developed here. Also, we're not ready for any of this yet, but it lets us look at things like

what brands are most valuable to spend your points at. And so we're gonna be doing some analyses with different programs. They're not that much interesting with IHD along those lines, but there's some really interesting data with Marriott and some others. I think you'll see some really interesting stuff about Hyatt as well coming soon.

Very good. Awesome. All right, so that my friends brings us to this week's main event. Main event time, announcing the 100k vacay team challenge. This year we're going to be competing to see who can book the most amazing hundred thousand point vacation. That's it.

You've got a hundred thousand points, build an entire vacation around it. Who's going to, who's going to come up with the best. I'll tell you what I'm hoping it's not me. And the reason I'm hoping it's not me. And the reason I'm hoping it's not me is that I'm not really gonna be a challenger. I'm gonna be sort of the pace car in this. I'm gonna be doing a trip before the other guys do. And we're sort of referring to it as the benchmark trip.

I'm gonna be taking 100,000 Chase Ultimate Awards points and building the best vacation I can out of 100,000 Chase points and that'll be the benchmark. Of course, the reason that we picked 100,000 points, or part of the reason anyway, I should say, is because of that big chase Sapphire preferred 100k offer that expired in May. Now we feel like lots of people have 100,000 points and wondering what they can do with them and we want to show some really cool things that you can do. But at the same time, it would be kind of boring to just limit it to just chase.

So the other guys aren't going to use chase points. Before we get into what they are going to be using though, the reason chase points are the benchmark trip is because we are requiring at least three nights hotel stay on this vacation. And we believe that whoever has the ability to transfer to Hyatt has a huge advantage because Hyatt has their award chart and it starts at only 3,500 points per night at the far lowest end.

And that's like way better than what any of the other like hotel transfers will allow. So Chase has a big, big leg up. And so the benchmark trip is gonna be using Chase points, has the ability to transfer to Hyatt, has a big leg up and so the benchmark trip is going to be using chase points, has the ability to transfer to Hyatt, has a big leg up. The challengers though don't have chase points. What do they have? Nick, do you want to read those?

Sure. So Tim, and I should say we each picked the currency that we wanted to use for this one. We were originally talking about maybe drafting or something, but then we realized that we each had one we were really excited about digging into and I think that's gonna make this even more fun than if we had just stuck somebody with one they didn't pick Because I think we're all kind of motivated to show what you can do with our particular currencies So Tim picked city thank you rewards So he's got a number of obviously, of course airline partners

But then also he's got things like one to two Detroit's privileges. He's got Leading hotels of the world. He's got one to four to preferred hotels He's got a number of interesting lodging options to go along with the airline partners though his airline partners are perhaps more limited than say Stevens because Stephen took capital one miles and capital one has some transfer partners that city doesn't So Stephen will have more opportunities to redeem miles for flights Presumably, but on the lodging side Stephen, of course has like Windham at one-to-one and core at two to one and

or a two to one and is there any? I don't know. Is it a choice? There's not much going on there. I don't know, not very much. So good luck, Stephen, figuring out how to do that. Right. And what about you? And then of course,

I have American Express membership rewards points, which I have long been a proponent of Amex membership rewards. So I am excited to show people how much better they're gonna be than Chase Ultimate Rewards Points for planning an incredible vacation with just 100,000 points.

I'm gonna have some questions for you about that as we get towards the end of this, but let's get into more details about the challenge. As we've done in the past few challenges, there will be two judges of this. I'm gonna be one of the judges and Kerry will be the other. And we felt like it was important to have two judges and even more than that, have one of the blog authors not traveling at the same time as everybody else. So, because despite, you know, us doing a big challenge, the rest of the world doesn't

stop and so big things tend to happen that need to be reported on. It's very frustrating and I do wish we could just like stop, you know, all other points and miles events from happening while we are doing our challenge, but we can't. So, so anyway, so two judges will be at home while the three guys are taking their trip. This will all happen in the fall, by the way. There is gonna be a thousand dollar cash budget. And what that means is, you know,

we're all expected to use points as much as possible to book flights and hotels, but there are other things. There's taxes and fees. There are airport transfers. There is food. There is outings and things like whatever. Everything else. Activities.

There are activities, right. So everything you spend has to be limited to 100,000 points and a thousand dollar cash budget. Now, you might ask, well, what about if someone, let's say, pays for an activity through a shopping portal that gives 20% cash back, can they sort of expand their budget that way? And the answer is no. We're going to be evaluating the cash budget, a hard cash budget. That's how much out of pocket you can spend regardless of what kind of rebates you get. However, we are going to be judging everyone based on their, uh,

their, the affordability of their overall trip. And that's where the rebates will come in. We'll be looking at, you know, yeah, Nick spent $1,000, but he got back $800 or whatever it is. And so that would look really, really good for evaluating his trip at the end. But that's not the only rule. There are a whole bunch of different rules, right?

So, I mean, and people want to know, what are the rules, Greg? So that's going to be rule there are a whole bunch of different rules, right? So I mean and people want to know what are the rules Greg? So that's gonna be how we're gonna determine the thousand dollar cash budget portions gotta cover everything and you can't expand the budget You also can't expand the budget. Well, you know what? Let's get let's get us to start at the top of the rules and work our way down So first of all by popular demand this challenge has to be round trip. Now, past challenges have mostly been one way challenges under the premise that if you wanted to make it around trip, you could just double the points if you wanted to copy the same thing in reverse, so to speak. But this time around, you have to start and end in the same place. Now,

I mean, maybe we'd be a little liberal with that. Like if you departed from, you know, Washington and Dulles and you returned to Washington Reagan, okay. Sure. That's probably fine. But you can't open jaw and say, okay, I'm leaving from New York and returning to Los Angeles. It's got to be like kind of coterminal sort of a situation. So round trip, starting in the same place. You can pick wherever you want though in the US. And I know a couple of people commented and said,

oh, it would have been great to have Stephen start in Europe because he's based in the UK now. And I thought so too. I tried to convince Stephen to start in the UK cause I thought, oh, that'll produce some different stuff. But he really felt like it'd be more widely applicable to everybody if he started in the U S too. So we're all starting somewhere in the U S nobody knows where everybody else is

going to start yet. Each one of us can start wherever we want. Uh, I, I will probably start in the Northeast, but in order to make it as applicable as possible, we'll each pick probably a pretty major airport somewhere in the US. Minimum of three nights in proper lodging. Now this was how Greg worded this, and I feel a little judginess here.

I mean, what makes lodging proper, Greg? I don't know, three nights in a hotel? I wanted to, I mainly wanted to avoid someone sleeping on airplanes for the whole trip. And so I don't count an overnight flight as proper lodging. But if you're on a cruise ship for three nights or more, that counts. If you are in an Airbnb that you somehow booked with,

with your points, then that's fine. You do have to book the lodging and the and the most of the flights with hotel points or airline miles for all of that though. We're not we're not letting you do for the majority of it cash, you know, cash equivalent points where we use bank points to book through their banks's portal kind of thing, or we're not letting you use your cash budget to handle most of that stuff. Now, I'm hedging on that because there are situations like, let's say someone flew to the Maldives and they have to pay they have to pay $300 for the airport transfer

to their island where they're staying. Well, that has to come out of the cash budget. Kind of obviously, there's also things like someone might end up, let's say somewhere in Europe, with the, you know, maybe cross the Atlantic with miles, but now to get a short distance within Europe, maybe they take a Ryanair or something with their cash budget, you know, those kinds of things would be okay. Very good.

All right. But now here's a question that somebody out there is thinking of. If the budget is 100,000 transferable points and $1,000 in cash, can you buy some more points? What if Hilton points are on sale and I want to buy some Hilton points? Can I buy those? No, no, because we're going to be keeping in mind the judges that, and we want the contestants to keep this in mind too, that the goal is really, are you able to build a great vacation with a hundred thousand points kind of full stop, right now we recognize there's cash is Required as well, but but we really want the majority of the trip to be based on those hundred thousand points and not

And also to show off what you could do with the particular transferable points you have if you end up buying points That's kind of going around the whole purpose. And it would be interesting, maybe as a separate challenge to see who could build the best trip out of purchase points within a given budget, but that's not what we're doing here. All right. And you can't cash out points, right? So you can't say, okay, I'm going to cash out 20,000 points and have an extra $200 in my cash budget. None of that. We're going to use the points for flights and hotels and use the cash to pay the stuff that you really have to pay for with cash.

So we're not cashing out points. We're not looking to showcase great cash bargains. We're looking to showcase great uses of points, like Greg said. The rebates, like we said, don't affect the budget, but they will affect your affordability score. So if you manage to find a way to spend a thousand dollars and get a hundred of it back well great that'll help you with the affordability when they they kind of and style points when they evaluate how you did spending your budget so the goal here is not necessarily to spend the full thousand dollars even it's really

to showcase the best use of the points and the less money you spend the full thousand dollars even it's really to showcase the best use of the points and the less money you spend the better almost though, of course, obviously within reason because everyone wants their vacation to be relatively comfortable and of course transfer bonuses are almost certainly going to be part of this all of the transfer bonuses that happen during the travel planning phase are fair game. So there are already some transfer bonuses out, and if one of us could take advantage

of one of those transfer bonuses, we can go ahead and use that. We don't need to declare it in advance. So, you know, we have the opportunity for any of the transfer bonuses that occur during our planning phase. We can take advantage of any one of those. And I'm, again, almost certain that some of us will can take advantage of any one of those. And I'm again, almost certain

that some of us will probably take advantage of the opportunity to sort of expand our budget, but not really. It's using the points we have and using one of those superpowers in the sense that a transfer bonus can kind of supercharge your points. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's let's talk about who's going to win. I've sort of laid out the odds in a way based on the strengths and weaknesses of each of the points programs. So let me go through first. So I ranked the strengths from best to worst for this particular challenge, as starting with city thank you rewards as number one. And the reason I did that is because I think that the ability to book hotels

with a reasonable number of points is such an important part of this challenge that I think Tim has a big advantage here because he can transfer his city thank you points one to four to preferred hotels or one to two to choice. And I think both of those have some incredible opportunities to get really nice hotels at a very reasonable rate. If I was Tim, I'd be scouring the preferred hotels program for like, what is the most awesome hotel in the world that can be booked for a reasonable number

of preferred hotel points, and then you only need a quarter of that many city points in order to make that happen because of that one to four transfer. And then I'd be secondarily figuring out, well, how the heck am I gonna get there? That's how I would approach that if I was Tim. And of course, he's not limited to just that.

He also has Windham. And then on the flight side, he's the only one that has EVA, which has some unique benefits. He has Turkish one-to-one, so does Stephen. So if he chooses, for example, to do a trip, you know, fly to Hawaii, he could start in US Northeast and fly to Hawaii for 10,000 points with Turkish or to Alaska. You know, so there's some things that are pretty good there that they can do travel-wise

because you do not have to travel internationally to do this challenge. So that's Tim with City Thank You Rewards. Stephen, Capital One Miles. Now, the main hotel thing that's available through Capital One Miles, where it's possible to get outsized value is Wyndham rewards. I mean, as far as what I know of. Now, Stephen may know of some tricks that I

don't, I'm not thinking of, and he probably does, but I'm kind of guessing he's going to take advantage. Wyndham has some partnerships like Vacasa Vacation Rentals, like Cottages.com in the UK, where you can book some pretty amazing vacation rentals for as low as 15,000 points per night. My guess is that's what Stephen's gonna be going for there. Nick has an Amex membership rewards, which great program for airline transfers, airline miles transfers,

not much going on in the hotel space. You've got one-to-one to Marriott, you've got one-to-one to Choice, you've got one to two to Hilton, but Hilton points are so sort of worth so little compared to other hotel points that one to two isn't even that exciting. I think Nick's main advantage here is that Amex has more transfer bonuses than any other program and that could make his points go way, way further. So there's a possibility of him, you know, really acing this because he's going to have a he will likely have a lot more points available to him than the other guys will thanks to transfer bonuses.

Okay, so now I've given my outline of this scenario, but now I want to hear from Nick. What are you thinking of, you know, the strengths and weaknesses are particularly, I'm particularly interested in why you're excited to use Amex membership rewards. Well, I'm excited about a lot of different things here. I'm excited because I think you are gonna set a high bar. So, you know, I think that I don't know what you're gonna do yet, but I imagine it's gonna be good enough

that a number of readers are gonna say, whoa, how's anybody gonna top that? And Greg does have a strong advantage here because, you know, he mentioned that high category one start at 3,500 points per night and that's true but probably most of those category one hiats are not wildly exciting but the thing is like even a category two and category three we're talking about 8,000 points per night standard 12,000 points per night standard Greg wouldn't even use half of his budget if he stayed at a

category three hi-hat for three nights. By the time you get to category three there are some reasonably nice places in there, certainly some in category two as well. So he's got a number of really good lodging options. So I think that he's going to come up with something that really surprises us. He already hinted at one thing he could do earlier because if he was able to you know take advantage of that Iberia sweet spot he could potentially fly business class to Spain, stay a few nights and come home in business class which is pretty good for a hundred thousand points. So I'm excited to see what he does because he kind of threw that out like it was not good enough and and he's right it's not good enough because we are going to outdo that, I think. I think all three of us are going to come up with

something pretty cool. I'm excited about Amex for a number of reasons. Number one, because I think Amex has the best flight transfer partners and I most often talk about that in context of business class and first class awards because they do have so many great opportunities to get great deals on business class flights. We don't talk as much about the great opportunities in economy class because I'm not generally as excited. There aren't as many opportunities for way outside value or so I thought until I started digging into it and I realized

you know what there are lots of really good opportunities to redeem for economy class or premium economy potentially so I'm pretty excited to showcase what you might be able to do with just a hundred thousand points by stretching things that we haven't written very much about before so I'm I'm pretty I got some ideas going. I got some things building that are certainly exciting to me. And to use Greg's example again with Iberia, I could do the trip that I just mentioned as long as I can find the lodging portion of it because with the current, I think it's a 30% transfer bonus to Avios as we record this. So if I were able to find a flight for 40,500 miles in business class, that's what something just over 30,000, 33,000, I guess, MX points each way, which would leave me

with if I'm doing the quick math around 34,000 MX points after a round trip flight to Spain in business class. And I think there's also a targeted transfer bonus to Hilton and I haven't even checked to see as we record this whether I'm targeted for that or not. But if I were, then I think at 34,000 MX membership rewards points left, that would give me what 70, 80, I don't know, somewhere around 80,000 Hilton points. I bet I get three nights at a decent Hilton with that. So you know, and I, as I say that, that kind of should give you an idea as to why I think it's going to be pretty easy for me

to come up with three nights. I think the transfer ratio and current bonus to Hilton, if I'm targeted, cross my fingers because I literally have not checked. I haven't logged in to any accounts like that while I've been on vacation here. So I don't know yet. But I'm hoping that that might happen. And so there'll be a number of different options. And I think a lot of people have overlooked certain parts of the world where Hilton does have opportunities for good value still, because there are quite a few, I think,

where at the lower end of the spectrum, Hilton has outsized value. And so when you get, if I'm able to get one to 2.6, that's really good. Now all that said, don't forget about Protea in Africa, because there are some really well-priced Marriott properties throughout Africa. I had booked one during the, or for a summer trip to Victoria Falls last year for, I think it was 10,500 points per night at the Livingstone. Which is Marriott, by the way.

The Livingstone or something near Victoria Falls, which is a Marriott, yeah. So don't count Marriott out either. Right, right. That's what I'm saying here, because it's not uncommon to be able to get more than one cent per point, again, especially at the lower end of the spectrum. I think actually, when it comes to hotel points

between Marriott and Hilton there are way more opportunities to get good value at the very low end or at the very high end. And obviously with this challenge I can't go for the very high end and the middle is where things get murky. But at the low end believe it or not I have found a number of good opportunities. So it's just a matter of figuring out which of those trips I'm actually going to book. But I think I have quite a few different options. That's pretty exciting.

And I want to point out something we didn't mention yet on the show is that three nights is the minimum, but if people do more than three nights, we're going to be giving bonus points for that. And both Marriott and Hilton, which Nick was just talking about, have fifth night free benefits. And so if he could just eke out enough to get four nights, then that really means he could do five nights and have a lot more bonus points that way. So I'm really excited to see whether- That Greg Gifford-Gilmiler, he he's good at math guys. He's good at math.

He's got this. I'm really excited to see whether he can, he can pull it out. Cause you know, if he could show that you can actually do amazing things with, uh, Amex membership rewards and in the, on the hotel front, then, uh, he's going to be, uh, that's gonna, that's gonna be great because as I started off saying, Amex membership rewards is considered the least likely to win the competition because it's so weak on hotel transfers, but maybe next gonna figure out how that's actually a strength.

You know, I think so, and I'm gonna say that if you watch or ask us anything this week as we publish this, then you probably heard us talk about how this is gonna be sort of a more hotel centric type of a challenge because you gotta find hotels that fit the budget. And that is true, but don't forget about my flights because I think I have a superpower in the flights.

I am excited because I think I have quite a few different hotel options and I think I have a superpower in the flights. I am excited because I think I have quite a few different hotel options, and I think I got flight options that at least some readers won't see coming. So we'll see. I can't wait. I'm chopping it a bit to get started, and I haven't been on the computer because I've been on vacation, but I just can't wait to dig into it. All right. One question about that, though, is are some of those things things that you're going to be able to do because you know about them and the other people don't or because you're the only one who can transfer to those particular programs. That's a great

question and one that I will leave Tim and Stephen to ponder. All right Dr. Evil. But do remember so Greg talked about I don't know did you get into this when we talked about scoring so when it comes to scoring this thing, you're going to be scoring on a number of different criteria, one of them being affordability. Of course, you know, whatever kind of pizzazz people pull out of the bag. But one of the things you talked about was applicability. And so, you know, we want the things that we do to be applicable to a lot of people. And so, you know, for instance, I have a and a is one of the options and we can

book now as we record this. And as we record this right now today, it's still June 5th, 2025, as we're recording this actually. And so I could book an a and a around the world ticket, but you're not going to be able to do that anymore. After what is it? June 24th, June 30th, sometime this month, sometimes later this month, that's gonna end and you won't be able to do that at all anymore. And so doing that would be useless because it's not gonna be applicable to anybody else. So there's a number of things like that

that might be really cool opportunities, but if they're too narrow, then they're not gonna be broadly applicable enough for a lot of people. So I think that's something we really have to balance out with this challenge is trying to make it broadly applicable and hopefully find some things that are useful for a lot of people. Yeah, no, I'm glad you pointed that out because that's really important.

That's going to be really important to how we judge the trips. It's why I mean, I could also a similar thing is I could use United's Excursionist perk because that doesn't end until August something. So I could book that even for our fall, my fall trip, but then it would be totally, you know, useless for anyone to learn about. It wouldn't be, we wouldn't be saying here's what you could do now with a hundred thousand, we wouldn't be saying here's what you could do now with 100,000 points. It would be here's what you could have done a couple of months ago. And we don't want that. And of course, any one of us might book things that will

disappear by the time we fly or soon after. We can't help that, but at least we can try to make what we do as applicable to a wide audience as possible so that we can really show what's really possible to do with 100,000 points, that's the goal. One of the things I'm gonna mention. Can't wait, it's gonna be fun to see. One of the things I'm gonna mention is that audience participation, we haven't figured it out yet.

We want to provide ways for the audience to contribute their own ideas, maybe to compete with us. We don't know, if you have ideas, please write in to the mailbag at frequentmiler.com or find our post on the blog about this and write in your ideas in the comments there. That would be great. Very good.

All right, I think that wraps up this week's main event for now, but stay tuned because obviously there will be more to come of the 2025 Frequel Myler Team Challenge. And I can't wait to see what that's going to entail. And you're gonna wanna stay tuned. And again, Greg said the trip's gonna be happening this fall. We haven't released precise dates yet,

but that's all stuff that is going on behind the scenes and we'll get out there eventually. And I look forward to getting out some posts about scheming, about the various things we could be doing. Just to tease Stephen and Tim a little bit, throw them off the track. So that'll be coming soon to a blog near you. That wraps up the main event though and brings us to this week's question of the week. This week's question of the week came in via the mailbag.

Andy writes in and says, Dear Frequent Myler, I'm a huge fan of the podcast. So I hope you can address the credit limit slash no preset spending limit topic. I went headfirst into the points and miles game in February and I've earned a couple hundred thousand miles already to apply to a first miles and points trip to Europe in 2026. One snafu that I've hit is the fact that the no preset spending limit cards might actually be more restrictive than the typical ones with credit limits, at least when first receiving the card. A couple of weeks ago, I had to complete a purchase from a card dealership for $35,000

and Capital One had their Venturex business offer of 150,000 miles for 30,000 spend in the first three months, so I got the card. I thought this would function as a charge card like Amex But the Capital One system had essentially held me to a credit limit of only ten thousand dollars or so now I'll just interject here to say that's a card with no preset spending limit So presumably you can spend as much as you need to but of course behind the scenes There are limitations as to how much you're going to be able to spend based on your profile whatever it is capital one decides you can spend until you've established some sort of a pattern with them so he wasn't able to put the whole

charge on the card goes on say that a while later still seems to be bumping up against this ten thousand dollar a month limit with capital one. But, you know, Amex cards, he hasn't had that problem with before on the cards that have no preset spending limit. But he says to me, it's frustrating. This is so restrictive, particularly in light of the thirty thousand dollar spend threshold. And let me know how can one rack up the two hundred thousand dollars and spend needed for the higher welcome bonus if you're restricted

to a piddly ten thousand dollars a month. Now, let me also interject with the fact that $10,000 a month is not piddly spend to many people. But of course, if you're trying to achieve the 200,000 spent, if you've got a business that you've opened this card for, it's certainly not a number that is huge for many business people to be spending more than $10,000 a month. So he says, I think it would have preferred a card with an upfront $25,000 credit limit so I could just spend to the limit and know what it is.

So if you could address this no preset spending limit phenomenon, I think it'd be valuable to those of us learning these quirks for the first time. Thanks, Andy. All right, lots of stuff there. First, let me say the mention of the $200,000 spend for the bigger offer.

I think that particular offer will have ended by the time you listen to the show or will soon end anyway. And so I just want to get that out there. But another thing is that once you've had a card for a while and spending a lot on it, they'll adjust their algorithms and allow you to purchase more. But that of course doesn't help if you're trying to hit a welcome bonus. So I think the thing to do, if you have a large purchase,

you could try it, but if it's denied, try calling the bank right then and say, hey, I'm trying to buy a car, they're letting me use a credit card, can you authorize this one payment? And I've had that work with other banks before, not for a car, but for big purchases. I don't know for sure it would work with Capital One,

but I'd be kind of surprised if you couldn't, if they wouldn't at least consider doing that for you yeah and if you happen to have a capital one branch near you maybe reaching out to a business relationship manager would help to get somebody whose job is to help businesses and develop a relationship and spend money on their cards of course so that might be another opportunity if just calling the number on the back of the card doesn't help you finding an actual banker if you happen to live in a city where there is a branch, then that would be a potential option. Greg mentioned calling the bank. And when I was I was purchasing a car on an Amex card a few years ago, and I hadn't been spending that much money on my Amex cards at that point. I hadn't been spending that much money on my Amix cards at that point. And so I called and I offered and I think I did this.

I can't remember now for sure, but I remember offering to pay up front. I could send a payment ahead of time, prepay the $25,000 or $30,000 or whatever it was that I was spending on the car. And I feel like I did that. I prepaid that and they they were like, Oh, yeah, there'd be no problem then. And I think if I remember correctly, I don't I have to go back to the post and see what it was that I did. But I remember that coming up as a potential issue, whether or not I'd be able to spend it because I was putting it on a

platinum card that had no preset spending limit. And it was new. And so I didn't know when am I going to be able to spend that all at once or not. So again calling the bank and seeing what ways there might be around it would be a useful tool and again I don't know what that's going to be like with Capital One. Capital One specifically might be more difficult than some other issuers in that regard but there aren't that many no preset spending limit cards on the market apart from the Capital One business cards and the Amex membership rewards cards basically at this point, right? I mean, there's the Chase Inc. business. Yeah, I don't know off the top of my head.

What is it? Premier? The Premier. So there's not very many of those out there. Yeah, not that are relevant to the rewards world. So it's not going to be a broad issue. Right. There is going to be a broad issue for rewards card terms. But that would be I think my technique to would be calling Capital One and explaining and seeing though you may not get anywhere. And that would be a bummer if that's the case. And I don't know as though there's a much

better solution for that, unfortunately. Right, right. But hopefully it'll work. I mean, if it was me just because Capital One hates me they would they would just say no we're just closing your account because we don't like you. But for most people that shouldn't be what happens. All right well my friends that wraps up this week's episode. If you've enjoyed this episode and you'd like to get more of this stuff in your email inbox each day or each week you want to go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media join our frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list follow us on all the various social media

Join our frequentmiler insiders Facebook group And if you have a question that you'd like to be considered for a future question of the week or a piece of feedback For our giant mailbag you could send that to send it to mailbag at frequentmiler.com. Bye everybody Hi, I'm David Brody, co-host of the Travel in 10 podcast. Together, myself and my co-host Tim Johnson have travelled over 150 countries around the world and all seven continents. Now we're sharing our favourite places, some of our best tips and experiences from all around the world in just 10 minutes on Travel in 10. Join us at foyescape.com.