Frequent Miler on the Air - Award Booking Artistry | Ep136 | 2-5-22

Episode Date: February 5, 2022

Getting the best deal on an award ticket is rarely done by going to one airline's website and searching round trip. Greg & Nick discuss the artistry that goes into building a masterpiece of a booking. 1:28 Giant Mailbag 5:57 What crazy thing did Radisson do this week? 10:17 Mattress Running the Numbers: Should you product change to the IHG Premier? https://frequentmiler.com/its-time-for-a-new-ihg-credit-card-strategy/ 26:58 Main Event: Award Booking Artistry 31:47 Mixing and Matching Airlines on a single trip 33:38 Look at other International Gateways 36:30 Look at using partner miles 39:11 Throw-away return tickets 43:42 Skiplagging https://frequentmiler.com/skiplagging/ 47:25 Nested Trips 51:27 Alaska stopover rules https://frequentmiler.com/alaska-airlines-companion-fare-guide/ 53:41 United Excursionist Perk https://frequentmiler.com/maximizing-and-understanding-united-excursionist-perks/ 56:37 Leveraging off-peak pricing 1:00:00 Upgrades 1:03:48 Post Roast 1:09:47 Question of the Week: What's up with the American Airlines eShopping portal? https://frequentmiler.com/how-to-earn-american-airlines-loyalty-points-without-flying-cheat-sheet-to-play-the-elite-status-game/ Join our email list: https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ Music credit: Annie Yoder

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did City do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event. Frequent Miler on the air starts now. Today's main event, award booking artistry. Booking word flights is not always straightforward, is it?

No, it isn't. You have to be an artist sometimes. Sometimes you do, at least if you're trying to get the best deal. I mean, you could always just jump online and if you have a million points, book it for a terrible deal. Right. You could just throw paint at the canvas. Yes, exactly. But if you want to make a masterpiece, then you got to piece it together, right?

That's right. That's right. That's right. And there are all kinds of tricks and art, artistry that can be used, can be applied to put together the perfect trip. And it'll drive you absolutely bonkers trying to figure out the best way to do it. But we're going to discuss a whole grab bag full of techniques and then let the listener decide which, if any, to actually go forward with. And we'll probably have forgotten some good ones too. So, you know, send us, email us at mailbag at frequent miler.com. If you have ideas that we left out or comment wherever you see this or watch this or listen to this and let us know.

Absolutely. But speaking of mailbag, it's giant mailbag time. I thought you were about to say something. No, I was just, I was just kind of wriggling his head around. I was, I was dancing around like I was waiting for the music going on. Right. Maybe we'll put a little background music in right there so that it doesn't look so awkward. That little pause. Yeah. Okay. Giant Mail today comes from Dave in St. Louis, and this is Giant Mail in the sense that there's several paragraphs here. I'm going to read two of them. Dave says, I'm gearing up for retirement this year, and while I was working on my annual spending plan, one expense category was conspicuously absent thanks to you, travel. I never thought about points and miles being an integral part of my retirement strategy, but with millions of points I've banked, I need to upgrade my reading skills, but with millions

of points I've banked thanks to your sage advice, I'm in a position to self-fund, that's in quotes, self-fund, my retirement travel plans for the foreseeable future. This became even more apparent when I was watching your most recent podcast on YouTube where you and Nick pointed out all of the opportunities half a million membership rewards points could buy you. With an excess of 1 million membership rewards points and other points across all of the major transferable currencies, I'm truly in a unique situation as I transition from work to leisure. There you go. Pretty amazing. It's nice. It's exciting, right? I mean,

I've known a few people who've saved up like that for retirement. I actually wrote, I saw this comment come in and I wrote back to Dave and said, yeah, the person that got me into this, really, his father had saved up millions for retirement and planned that. And I don't necessarily suggest that people collect millions of points and bank them forever because points will devalue and they may not be worth as much down the road. So I wouldn't probably start that savings early. Unlike your other retirement investments. I wouldn't suggest getting started as early as possible in banking points, but when you get close to retirement, I think it makes sense to collect as many as you can and kick back and enjoy and relax. Yeah. And nice thing, transferable points, which he specifically mentioned, while they don't appreciate the way that money in the bank will, they have some

protection from devaluation because you can transfer, when one airline grossly devalues their currency, you could just not transfer to that one and transfer to other ones as needed. So I think that's a good strategy. And which is it? Is it like built rewards, which is the card that lets you earn points for paying rent and that's transferable? I think they give you some appreciation for the points that are banked, right? Yeah. Do you need to have the elite status for that? Richard is not going to be impressed with us when he listens to this.

He's going to be happy we mentioned them. There you go. There you can earn. You can earn something, Richard. We got that part yeah no i but i think it's very interesting you know when i read him when i read specifically the line i'm in a unique position not because of these points my very first reaction was well there's a lot of people doing this right i mean we got a lot of people reading and stuff it's not that unique and that was immediately followed by the fact that, but compared to the overall population, it's incredibly unique, right?

I mean, how many people can travel the way we do and collecting these points gives you a freedom that is so far beyond what the average person will have when they hit retirement. Even if they planned to travel in retirement, they couldn't possibly have saved it. Most of us couldn't possibly have saved enough money to be able to fund the type of travel that you can with points and miles. So that's really exciting. Yeah. Yeah.

The bar, it's amazing how the bar changes for what you consider doing. Like you, you wrote this week about trying to book four of you to Europe for two different trips. And you're looking at business class. And that's just not something that most people would tend to do unless they're absurdly rich. Right. Right. So you either have to be absurdly rich or in this game. Right.

And that's exactly. You don't need to be rich in this game. You just need to look for these sweet spots and then you can enjoy travel beyond what most people ever even consider. We should get into this game. We should. It's really good. It sounds like a fun game. We should play it a little bit more. All right. So great. I'm happy for Dave. All right. So that brings us to what crazy thing did Radisson do this week? Radisson Rewards getting crazy with us. What did they do to us? Oh boy, they sure did do whatever. Last week, we described a Radisson promo where you can stay three days and get 30,000 points. And we talked about how great that is and how the terms allowed earning those points on awards days.

And so if you could find a hotel that only costs 10,000 points per night, you could stay three nights and basically get that stay for free because you would pay 30,000 points for the three nights stay, get back 30,000. Fantastic. Radisson was listening and they didn't like that. I'm not sure when they changed the terms, but we got the information about the terms from the post that we had published on Frequent Miler, where we had copied the terms directly from Radisson's website when the deal was first announced. And sometime between then and once our show published, Radisson changed the terms. Now they're very specific, excluding award nights from this promo. So while you might feel just in booking an awards day and then complaining to Radisson that, hey, when I read your, you know, the terms that said it said it would work.

I don't think you'll get anywhere with doing that. So don't even try. Oh, yeah. Not worth it. Not worth it. But definitely crazy because, you know, if not for the fact that we knew that the terms had been copied and pasted from the original form, I would have thought, oh, did we miss something, blah, blah, blah. But that wasn't the case here. It was just literally it got changed after publication. And that's not the only time we've ever seen something like that happen. So it is worth going back and taking a look at the terms again down the road for things. I can think of choice privileges once or twice having updated the terms of promotion when they did those all-inclusive deals during the pandemic.

There have been some things here and there that have gotten updated. So when a deal is really good like that, it's worth double-checking the terms and making sure you keep screenshots of everything. But like Greg said, I don't think you're getting anywhere with this one. And to add a little craziness to Radisson, I don't know if you saw today, Greg, but Doctor of Credit reported, and I say today, a few days ago when this publishes, just this week, Doctor of Credit reported that the Radisson credit cards are no longer available and it's not clear what's going to happen to them. So I don't know if we'll know by the time this publishes, but at least at the time we're recording this, no idea what's going on with the future of Radisson credit cards either.

We hadn't heard anything about that. I have a Radisson credit card. I think you do too. And so I guess we'll have to see what happens with those. Also crazy. Initially, I guess it seemed like maybe because of the program split, they were taking them down initially, you know, for some amount. We don't know anything yet, but weird Radisson, all weird. Yeah. Yeah. We we'll see we'll see what happens I remember them taking down the cards in the past but I don't remember if it was because they were changing it in some material

way or if it was just housekeeping or whatever yeah when they switched from Carlson to Radisson I know they took them down for a little bit so well that makes sense yeah so maybe they're changing that to something else now Radisson America's card or something we can we can hope that it sticks around down for a little bit. So that makes sense. Yeah. So maybe they're changing to something else now. Radisson America's card or something. We can hope that it sticks around, I guess, for the fans. All right. So are there fans? I mean, there must be. I assume there must be a few. I mean, you and I have it, right? I mean, they're great cards if you want to stay at Radisson's. Yeah.

Right. So again, why do we have this? It's a good value proposition. It's too good to be true because you get 40,000 points every year just by renewing the card. But yeah. I just don't ever use that point. I know. I have to admit when I saw this rumor anyway, the card was being discontinued. I was a little excited. I was like, oh, sweet. Maybe they'll product change it to something I actually want. We can hope. That's hilarious. All right. Speaking of product changing, that transitions us perfectly to this week's

Mattress Running the Numbers, because this week we're going to talk about IHG and these new credit cards and what's going on and should we product change? And I don't know, fill me in, Greg, what's going on with the IHG and these new credit cards and what's going on and should we product change? And I don't know, fill me in, Greg, what's going on with the IHG cards? Greg Fossum, Right, right. Well, you know, IHG announced changes to their credit card lineup. Preston Pysh, And you got excited about IHG. Greg Fossum, I sure did. The IHG Premier card and a new IHG Premier Business card that's going to be coming out will both offer not just the annual free night certificate that's for worth up to 40k points, but those certificates

will be sort of upgradable with points. Meaning if you have a, if you want to book a 70k free night, you could book, you could use your 40 K certificate plus 30 K and book a free night. They also are going to allow much better earnings on your spend, you know, base rate of three points per dollar. And there's going to be five X categories and you get bonuses with certain amounts of spend, you know, total amounts of spend per year. So huge, huge advantages to those cards. So the question for today is what do you do if you have one of the cards that's not going to be as great as that in the IHG portfolio? So there's two cards I want to discuss. There's the IHG traveler card. That's the no fee version of the IHG within the IHG lineup. Although some

people have a $29 fee for some reason for that card, but either way, that one does not have an annual free night. So while it's getting some minor updates, I don't see anything about that card that makes it particularly compelling other than it will continue to give you fourth night free on awards days, which is a great benefit. But the IHG Premier also gives you that. So we're going to talk about that traveler card. And also a lot of us have the IHG Select card, which hasn't been available for new signups for ages now. But that card we've been clinging to because for only $49 a year, it gives us a free night certificate. And so, you know, if that's true, now, you know, we have some doubts about whether they're really going to

bother coding the system, you know, one way for this old card that you can no longer get and another way for the current cards that have free nights, but assuming it is true, it might be worth upgrading that card to the IHG Premier. So, I mean, that's, and that really is the big dilemma, right? So we're looking at, you might have a card with no annual fee or maybe a $29 annual fee, the Traveler, or you might have the $49 select card. Should you upgrade it to a more expensive premier card and lose a couple of benefits in order to gain more valuable benefits potentially.

So I guess let's break these up and let's break these apart. Let's talk about the traveler first. So the traveler card is, again, we call it the no annual fee card because that's what it mostly has been. But I think there was a small window of time where it had a $29 annual fee. And so some people are stuck with that version for one reason or another. But the Traveler card is the cheaper one, doesn't come with the free night certificate, does have the fourth night free on awards. So if you upgrade to the Premier, what you're getting is, well, obviously you're getting the ability to, first of all, you're getting a free night certificate each year and the ability to upgrade that with points. What else are we getting with the Premier? Right. Well, you get the Platinum Elite status, you get the $50 per year United credit, which we're told might be

doled out $25 per six months or something like that. And I think, I mean, those are the big ones, right? So is that worth 95 bucks? Yeah. I mean, is it 95 or 99? So it's worth a hundred-ish, a hundred-ish dollars. Anyway, you know, I think that's, I think it is. I mean, so to me, the ability to add points to these free night certificates means that the chance of being able to, in the real world, get the full 40,000 point value for your certificate at a stay that you really want goes up, you know, by a huge amount. Because before this capability, what we've all been left doing is we have a weekend away, we've got a couple of IHG free night certificates, and we go

look at the IHGs that are in the place we want to go. And we see that the ones we want to stay at are priced at like 41,000 points per night, 45,000 points per night. And so we haven't been able to use those certificates for those. And then it gets towards the end of the year when those certs are about to expire. And we end up like at best using them for some stay that, you know, maybe cost much less than 40,000 points or whatever, or not using them at all, which is the worst case scenario. So if you think about that they'll actually more often, and depending on travel style, maybe always be usable at full 40,000 point value,

that's a tremendous value. And to me, it would be like a no-brainer to upgrade a Traveler card to the Premier. See, the Traveler card, I feel less committed to. We'll talk about the Select in a second. To upgrading, I should say. And I should say, I don't disagree with Greg that it could be a great upgrade. I mean, between the 40K free night certificate and the $50 in United credit, if you fly United, that seems like it's almost impossible to lose, right? Even if you use the free night certificate for a really suboptimal stay, I mean, a really, really suboptimal stay, you're probably still going to get more if you didn't already have a reason to upgrade to it, if the 40K certificate wasn't already worth $99 to you, the ability to add points, yeah, it makes it a little bit more valuable. But that tells me you aren't staying at IHG properties all that often. And maybe the main reason you have the card is for the fourth night free. Were you not listening to my whole thing about how the nights are always priced at 41,000?

Yeah. I definitely was. It's just, I feel like, like I said, even if you would only get 20,000 points in value, you're talking about $100 in value. So you'd be at a wash each year with the premier card. So I feel like if you don't have the premiere card now it's because you don't need it you don't want it right i mean no but but but that's not true so so the yet if i use it for only 20 000 points it's not because i got lucky and or i don't know if lucky is the right word but it's not because i found a ihG that I really want to stay at that's 20,000. It's because I was desperate to use it somewhere. And so I stayed in IHG instead of a hotel that I really wanted to stay at. I mean, that could be.

But do you really want to lock yourself into more free night certificates right now? I mean, I feel like if you didn't already want the burden of another free night certificate that has to be used in a year, then I don't know that this moves the needle enough for me. I feel like you could upgrade at any time. So if you right now are a person who didn't already want the free night certificate, I don't know if this makes me want it that much more. I mean, a little bit more. Yes, I agree with you. Definitely. There have been plenty of situations where I was like, oh man, come on, this place is 42 or 43,000 points and my certificate's only worth 40. So I definitely understand that dilemma. I'm just not sure that there are enough of those situations

for me to want to upgrade if I didn't already feel like it was worth 99 bucks. I feel like you could upgrade next year or the year after when travel is more normal if you are going to find some value. So I feel like I could see the argument for not upgrading, though. I definitely see Greg's argument for upgrading it. I could see that going either way. The select card, I feel like is a little bit more almost like a slam dunk. Like you have to upgrade that, don't you? I mean, really? Yeah. Well, so I would look at it and say, you're already paying $49 a year for a free night certificate. So why hobble it? Like for another 50 bucks, you could get that thing where you get much more flexibility and you're going to get $50 in United credit.

I mean, $50 for 50 in United credit and a great amount of flexibility on how to use that free night certificate. I think that's almost a no-brainer, isn't it? I mean, unless you redeem a lot of points every year with IHG, where that 10% rebate is really adding up, I feel like between the flexibility and the $50 in the United Credit alone, it's probably worth it. Then when you add the additional points that you'll earn on regular spend, the bonus categories, et cetera, I feel like the Premier is a no brainer at that point for $50 more. Yeah. So, so I get your reasoning there. The, the one thing that, that gets me is that you'd be forever, ever giving up the 10% rebate on awards to be gone forever and ever and

ever. How many, I mean, in an average year, how many IHG points do you redeem, Craig? Probably about zero. Right. So 10% of zero is going to really add up for you over the years, I know. Yes. Unless you redeem a lot of IHG. I mean, even if you redeem 50,000 a year, it's what, 5,000 points a year, you're going to get back. And instead you're going to get a whole bunch more flexibility with the free night award and $50 in United credit, which I don't know, you don't fly United that much. So maybe the United credit doesn't matter enough for you to want to upgrade, but I know it doesn't people who do fly United with any kind of regularity or even a couple of times a year, 50 bucks should be pretty easy to use.

Now if it's doled out to $25 credits, I won't be too impressed with that, but yeah. So the rumor is not only will they be doled out to $25 credits, but, um, with six month windows or so to use them. So, um, you know, or maybe it was seven months, but anyway, the, the point is that for me, the chance of them just coming and going without being used are very, very high. Very high, yeah. Yeah. So that, I guess, would not be compelling for anybody who's, if you're in a Delta hub

or an American hub and you almost always fly with that airline, then I could see those wouldn't be particularly useful. I end up flying United, it seems, in a more normal world anyway, at least once every six months. So I feel like I would probably use them, though maybe not. And I don't love the temporary expiration stuff. I mean, I used to love free night certificates, and I definitely love them a lot less now than I did two or three years ago. I mean, I think that's a pretty universal thought, right? Sure. Absolutely. Do you know whether United credits can be used for award booking fees? I don't know, but I wouldn't expect that they could. That's a good question.

Because that would be the one place where I think I would definitely use it because I'm sitting on a lot of United miles, thanks to lots of trips getting canceled. And so even though I don't fly United much, I do use United miles to fly Star Alliance carriers. And so it would be really nice to be able to pay the fees with that. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't count on that. I'm not positive, though. But I guess my point still is that I think I would pay the $50, I think. I mean, I'm on the fence a little bit because I've got that $49 card and I'm not really holding it

for the 10% rebate. I'm holding it for only paying 49 bucks for a 40K certificate. I mean, that's a pretty good deal too, because like I said before, even if I only use that for a property that costs like 20,000 points for a hotel that would cost a hundred ish dollars for the night, I mean, I, I won, right. I mean, I won the game. I came out 50 bucks ahead. Um, so it's an easy, easy, easy win, even if I use it for a suboptimal use. So that's been my hesitation, my lack of desire to upgrade mostly that why make it a more difficult win than it already is? I'm pretty tempted. What are you going to do? You've got to select. Preston Pyshko Well, yeah. I mean, I'm going to wait,

first of all, to see when they implement this ability to add points to a certificate, what happened. I'm going to wait and see what happens with my, um, select certificates, because if they're, uh, if they do work the way the premier one, then it's no question. I'll keep it. Right. But so we'll see. We'll see. Um, if that changes, I don't know. I could see myself going for the premier also for that fourth night free, because I think that I would get more value out of that in the relatively few times that I use it than I do out of the 10% rebate. Because I don't book a lot of IHG stays, but I could see myself looking for one where I maximize that in order to get a really good discount on a nice property. You've talked about the Six Senses

in the Maldives before, and I could see really leveraging it for an awesome property like that. And if I do that once every 10 years, I'll probably come out ahead of what I've'm going to get that and also the ability to top up the certificate and also the United credits and also better earning on the card, then I'm starting to feel like the $50 upgrade is worth it. But like Greg, I won't upgrade if that certificate, if the 40K cert from the select turns out to be upgradable, despite what they say, then I'll probably hang on to that.

Now, don't forget the business card is coming out. And if you can get that, now that will probably require getting under 524 so that you haven't signed up for more than five new cards in the past 24 months. But in order to get any of these IHG cards, you'll need to be under that. But if you can, that'll give you the fourth night free on awards days. Plus, if you have the old select card, you'll also get the 10% back on those same awards days. So for example, the Six Senses booking that I talked about was 100,000 points per night. But for four nights, if you have a fourth night free, that drops the total four night price down to 300,000 points. And then if you have the 10% rebate, it drops the

total price after the rebate to 270,000 points. So that's a really great deal to have both in your portfolio because of that. It is. It is. And for that type of situation, I mean, that certainly makes the Fortnite free hugely appealing and the ability to stack them even more so. So, and the reason you mentioned the business card is because you won't be able to get both cards, right? I mean, have the, get the, have both the select and get the premier, they're going to limit that. So you'll have to get one personal card and one business card. Right, right, right.

So, I mean, I think if you can sign up now for the Premier, if you're eligible, I think you could have both. But if you're not eligible right now to sign up, then you're going to be out of luck by the time they roll out the changes. Right. So then you'd be stuck getting the business card, which isn't a bad problem to have. No, I mean, I'd rather sign up for that anyway over the personal because it won't, while you have to be under 524 to get it, it won't add to your 524 account because it's a business card. It's not reported to your personal credit report as a new account. Right. So it has that advantage. Very good.

Okay. All right. That was the longest mattress running the numbers ever. I just realized. That really was. Ridiculous. That was way too long. I don't think we the longest match just running the numbers ever. I just realized it was ridiculous. That was way too long. I don't think we're going to have time for all this working artistry. Editor's going to have to get on that,

slice and dice that one. So welcome to the main event. Let's move on to the main event. Let's do it. Award booking artistry. So you wrote about your planned trips, plural, to Europe and wrote about how it would be nice to fly British Airways nonstop business class and how when you looked at business class award prices along with the fees that would be involved, you actually found that there was a better way potentially of booking the same trip. Do you want to describe that briefly? Yeah. So essentially you can upgrade from

premium economy to business class. You can upgrade any British Airways paid ticket using Avios. You can only upgrade one cabin class. So what I talked about in the post, mostly focused on, was paying for a premium economy ticket and upgrading that to business class. And when you upgrade, you just need award availability in the cabin you're upgrading to. And then they charge you the difference in price between the cabin you're upgrading to and the award price of the cabin you've paid for with your cash ticket. So for example, what I was looking at from London to New York, usually a premium economy award would be 26,000 points one way, and a business class award would be 50,000 points one way during off-peak

dates. The difference is 24,000 Avios. So if you buy a premium economy cash ticket, they will charge you that 24,000 Avios to upgrade to business class, which you can do again if there are award seats available. And British Airways frequently has business class award seats available because they're known for such high fuel surcharges. So by doing it this way with a premium economy flight, you would earn miles on the flight and pay just a little bit more for the cash ticket than you would in fuel surcharges alone. And then, like I said, earn miles. And then furthermore, I took it a step further and said, I think, and now we've had a couple of reports that maybe this isn't the case, but I thought anyway, that you would likely be able to have booked this using, for example, Chase Ultimate

Rewards points or Amex points through one of the credit card portals, and then call British Shareways to use Avios and upgrade. Now, we had a report from someone who said they were unable to do that. So I'm not positive whether or not that can be done. But another option would be to use Capital One Miles to buy your premium economy fare and erase the purchase with your Capital One Miles and then use Avios to upgrade. And so in the end, what I was showing is that with about the same number of Avios as you'd pay for a typical business class award, in this case, it was just over 60,000. So a little bit more than the British Airways award would normally cost. You would end up covering the entire cost.

You wouldn't have to pay any additional fuel surcharges. So for about 60-ish thousand points, you could book your premium economy flight as a paid ticket using some sort of cash-like points and transfer points to British Airways to operate it. So that was essentially a short version of the story. Yeah. And so that's just one example of what seems to happen to me, and I'm guessing to you too, almost anytime I look at booking international travel, sometimes domestic travel as well, but where I at least explore many, many options beyond just booking a straight up round trip ticket on a single airline. You know, that seems to be like a rare thing that that's the answer of just, you know, booking what I want. Right, right. I mean, you know, I think I can probably count on one hand the number of times

that I have booked a round trip award with a single program. It's just not usually the way it works out that that's the best option for me. Normally, I'm piecing together multiple different things. And in this case, in the post, what I was writing about is I had already booked a one-way award to Europe and I have two trips planned to Europe. So I talked about nesting and booking a round trip from Europe to the United States and back to Europe for the second trip. And so it'd be kind of splitting different things up and connecting the dots with different types of awards. And so that's kind of what we wanted to talk about today is what are the various ways to do that, to kind of piece things together, to get a great deal and build yourself the itinerary you want? Because again, it's usually not the case that the answer is just to go to one airline and book a round trip award.

Right, right, right, right. So I sort of made an outline with the most maybe simplest or most obvious types of creative options in the beginning, moving on down the list towards the more difficult, clever, out of the box type of thing. So the first thing is simply sort of mixing and matching airlines on a single trip. So for a very simple example is, you might find your outbound, for your outbound flight, you might find through United Airlines, you can book a good flight, but for your return trip, maybe American Airlines or Delta or someone has a better award price for your return. And when booking award flights, it's often the case that one-way travel costs exactly half of what round trip is. So there's often no incentive to book a round trip all in

one. And so that's a simple way of dealing with it and sort of dealing with the fact that award availability can be scant. Right. That's exactly the point I was going to make. The advantage to me behind booking with separate programs for each leg, each direction, is that it gives you access to all of the award inventory again. Instead of being limited, if you book a round trip with just one program, then you're limited to whatever's available on that one program's partners. Whereas if you book your outbound and return as totally separate awards, then you just look and see, okay, well, what's available? Maybe the same program has the best availability for you, but maybe it's somebody else just like Greg explained with his example there. So I think that that definitely helps to save or to alleviate the problem of award

availability. Right, right. And let's level up the mixing and matching a little bit to say another way that we often do that is to look at flying internationally from an airport that has either the best award availability or the best award deal or both. And that's often not my own home airport. So then you need a positioning flight. So you might look at, it used to be, we'd talk about, um, positioning with Southwest because Southwest had free changes. And so if something happens with your main, you know, international flight, you can change your Southwest one for free or, or, you know, cancel it for free and get your points back if you booked it with points.

Um, but now, you know, all the domestic airlines have, airlines have no change fees, at least for now, all the main ones. And so you can position with just about anyone. And boy, we did a whole show, I think, on positioning flights and talked about how it can make sense to actually book multiple positioning flights in case something goes wrong. If you have a big international flight out of, let's say, DC, and you have a flight booked on United to get to DC, you might also want to book a flight on Delta or American or Southwest or whoever

to also get to DC and cancel that when you realize you don't need that one. But I think the bigger point here is to be open to leaving from some other airport, to not only look from your one home airport. There was just a question in Frequent Miler Insiders this week, someone who was looking to go to the Maldives and they wanted to fly Emirates first class. And they've been looking from JFK and couldn't find any availability. And somebody answered and said, well, I've been seeing a lot more availability out of Chicago. And I don't know, another city, maybe it was DC or something like that.

And Chicago and Dallas is what it was. And so the original poster said, well, I don't really want to fly west to fly east. And somebody responded and said something to the effect of, you're not willing to add two hours of flight time west to fly more time in first class. Isn't that the point? Isn't that the point? Isn't that the point to fly two hours West of Chicago so you can fly an extra two hours in first class? And, and, you know, maybe not. I mean, that might not be ideal for everybody, but I think then the original poster was kind of like, well, you're right. I do get two extra

hours of Dom Perignon champagne and nice. You know what, when, when flying in that direction too, you know, the outbound flight when flying in that direction too you know the outbound flight is going to be an overnight flight in most cases and so uh it's actually can be very helpful to just get a good night's sleep to have a couple extra hours of flight time so but that was a great example of someone who's based in new york so she i'm sure she wasn't thinking of starting her trip in chicago it wouldn't have come to my mind necessarily either when i first started in this, but it's worth being open to those options to broaden things.

Another really simple one that we've talked about many, many times is not using the carrier's miles that you want to fly. So for example, you want to fly Delta, Delta miles aren't necessarily your friend. So sometimes Air France is the best option. Sometimes Virgin Atlantic is the best option for flying Delta. Same thing with United American. Their partners often have better deals for flying the carrier you want to fly. Yeah. And sometimes you can save a lot of miles, but the difference can be really significant. I mean, Delta is a great example, because if you look up a Delta business class award flight to Europe, I don't know what they're going to charge you, 100, 200, 300, I mean, they're going The award inventory ebbs and flows. But if you can book it through Virgin Atlantic, for instance, it could be 50,000 miles one way for the same flight that Delta might want 200,000 miles for. Oh, absolutely.

And it's not mythical. I actually was at the Detroit airport the other day and ran into Matthew from Live and Let's Fly. And I asked him, hey, what are you doing in Detroit? I know he lives out in California. And he said he was flying Detroit to Amsterdam on the A350, which means he was flying in the Delta One Suites. And he had booked that with Virgin Atlantic miles for 50,000 points. So it does exist. There you go.

There you go. It does. It does. So you want to check partners for better prices because there are often are a lot of sweet spots out there and we have a whole bunch of sweet spot posts. So if you're looking for those, you can just go onto frequent miler.com and type sweet spots in the, the search box or hit our resources page. And we've got best ways to get to lots of different parts of the world.

You know, I heard somewhere there's a great way to book United to Hawaii for really cheap. Some really cool blog broke that story a few years back. And yeah, I mean, United will charge you. It's another great example because they'll charge you what, like 22,500 miles for a saver award ticket in an economy class from the mainland U.S. to Hawaii, or you could book the same flight, potentially with some headache, but potentially with Turkish Airlines miles and smiles for just 7,500 miles. And that was not a typo there. I mean, what I said, 7,500 one way in economy. Now, like I said, there's some challenges and difficulties sometimes in booking partner awards and Turkish is definitely an example of that. But it's also an example of the fact that there are some fantastic values out there with partner awards. Absolutely. Absolutely. All right.

Now we get into throwaway return bookings where you book a round trip ticket, even if you only want a one way. And at this point, what we're doing is we're getting into some things that airlines really don't like you to do. So you have to use caution if you're going to be doing this kind of thing, but let's talk about why it can be a deal. Um, there's actually a number of reasons why it can be a deal. One is, um, sometimes you're just going to find way better pricing for round-trip travel than one way. And when that happens, if you don't need the return, you can book it and obviously throw away the return. You can't throw away the outbound, though, because that will cancel the return. So that won't work. But I had a few years ago an example where there was a a particular Delta flight I wanted and Delta was charging a crazy amount. And this was in miles

at the time I was trying to book it with Delta SkyMiles. They were charging a crazy amount. And I found that if I booked a round trip, it went down a little bit. And the other tip here is the return doesn't necessarily have to be to your point of origin to count as a round trip and get the discount. So I found that by returning in quotes to Chicago instead of Detroit, I not only saved a little, I saved a lot. So for whatever reason, Delta was charging a lot less to return to Chicago. And so I booked it that way and threw away the return. Again, let me caution when you do that. Airlines don't like it. I don't recommend doing it often. If you only do it once in a blue moon, I wouldn't worry about it. If you, if for some reason you're going to do it often, don't attach your loyalty account to the ticket when, when booking it, if possible, hard to do when you're using miles, but, um, uh, because they could, they could take some kind of, uh, action against you, you know, freezing your account or something. Right. Right. But, but like you said, I mean, if this is something you're going to do once a year or something

like that. It's not going to be a problem. Yeah, that was going to be an issue there. Another good example, ANA, they have some great award prices on their own flights, but they require booking awards round trip. And so a common trick, oh, let me also say that they also have better award availability for their own flights than partners do for ANA flights. So what you could do, let's say you're flying to Japan from the US, you can book, you have to book round trip

from the US back to the US, but you could book to Japan and return to Hawaii because the return to Hawaii is cheaper than return to the mainland and throw away that return to Hawaii. And then the overall price is still pretty good. And of course, make sure that return is in economy, not in business or first. Preston Pysh, CFP®, I'm not throwing away a return to Hawaii. Are you crazy? That's not that I throw away. Well, the other thing to know about this is if you're planning to throw away returns, the nice thing is, and you're doing this with an award ticket, nice thing is you're flexible at finding award availability, which might not have anything to do with when you'd be really available to return to Hawaii or elsewhere. So that gives you some flexibility to make this an easier trick to

do. It sure does. And while you're on ANA there, just one other quick tip on that is that ANA allows a stopover in Japan. And so what I did one time was I booked a round trip. I was in China and needed to get back to the United States. So I booked a round trip from China to the United States, back to China, but I didn't actually need to return to China. So I just built in a long stopover in Japan and just never took the onward flight to China and just stayed in Japan. So on the second trip, so to speak, back out. So you may sometimes do things like that with stopovers where you are able to have a leg because it's again, requirement there was round trip, like Greg said, and you throw away that last leg. So that's

definitely a technique we can use. Now, what about when we're talking about throwaways and things the airlines might not like? What about skip lagging? I've read a little bit about this. You've written a little bit about this. I haven't done much of it myself. Tell us what's this risky business about? Yeah.

So skip lagging or hidden city ticketing, as it's sometimes called, is where we've all seen this, where an airline charges less to go further. So for example, maybe you want to fly from the East Coast to Denver, but by booking a flight, not just to Denver, but to, I don't know, let's just say Colorado Springs. So it includes that little short hop that the whole ticket could be cheaper. And that's true both with cash prices and miles with a number of types of miles that they'll often charge less. Like I've seen that often with Southwest, for example. And so the idea of skip lagging is to skip that last leg of the flight and book to Colorado Springs, fly to Denver, get off the plane, and you're good to go. What could possibly go wrong? What could possibly go wrong with that plan?

Well, a lot of things could go wrong with that plan because obviously if you have any kind of irregular operations, if your flight gets canceled, the airline might try to reroute you to Colorado Springs and it may not go through Denver. You may connect somewhere else. So if you really wanted to be in Denver, you're in for a car rental and a one-way drive, I guess, at the end, or you're going to have to come up with some sort of a reason why you really need to connect in Denver when they rebook you. So that's a potential issue. If there's any kind of irregular operations, and if you're going to check bags, your bags are going to go all the way to Colorado Springs and you're going to be in Denver. So that's not going to work out real well, either. You got to be able to do that. Or if you're going to do that, you have to not check bags, uh, or

know, really know what you're doing. I mean, I think, for instance, if you're doing that on the way back to the United States and you're relatively confident that you're not going to get rerouted to some other city or something, then probably, I believe, all the airports in the US, you're going to have to pick up your bags when you get to the US anyway and recheck them. So if you did that on the way back to the US, you really wanted to stop in New York, but you booked a ticket to Cleveland or something, well, you will pick up U.S. anyway and recheck them. So if you did that on the way back to the U.S., you really wanted to stop in New York, but you book a ticket to Cleveland or something, well, you will pick up your bags in New York. So if you miss the flight to Cleveland, then all's well that ends well,

probably in that type of a case. But the Denver-Colorado Springs one is a great example where you're not going to be able to get your bags in Denver. So you can't check anything if you're going to try that move. Right, right. And don't forget what we said before that airlines hate this. So again, if you do it once in a blue moon, I'm sure nothing bad will happen, but if you do it regularly, watch out, you're in for some danger. So it's a other warning, you know, anytime you're dropping a segment, I know I mentioned this before, but it has to be the last segment of your trip that you're dropping because once you miss one, they're going to cancel the whole rest of the itinerary. So don't do that.

Right. Right. So, and we do get that question a lot where people are like, oh, can I just skip the first sec? No, no, no, no. Can't skip the first. I mean, there's, there's a couple of really fringe outlier situations with countries that have special laws on the books where maybe you could theoretically get away with it, but the airline's probably going to cancel it and you're going to have to fight somebody to theoretically get away. So you need to be prepared if that's going to be your play. But yeah, for the vast majority of situations, that's not going to work at all. You can't skip that first leg. Right, right, right. Okay. Another technique, nested trips. This is where you know you have,

let's say an example that you gave. So you have two trips to Europe planned and it could work out better for you to book the outbound for trip number one one way, the return for trip number two another way, or maybe that could even be a single round trip if round trip works for you. So you're sort of bookending these two trips with a single round trip potentially. Whereas in the middle, you could have a round trip that starts from Europe to the US and back in order to nest these two trips. And that's a simple example. There's many examples that get way more complicated than that. Right. And the advantage there is that sometimes either A, award availability might be better or B, cash prices might be really good. For instance, it's pretty common to be able to find round trip business class on many of the different international carriers from Europe, departing Europe for the US for about $1,800 round trip. Now, obviously that's going to change over

time and it could be more, it could be less. I've seen it as low as like $1,200 or $1,300 on some routes. So, but even at 18-ish hundred dollars, right? So let's say 1800 bucks. If you're using Chase Ultimate Rewards points to book that, you're talking about 120,000 points round trip, 60,000 each way. That's pretty typical what an award flight would normally cost you. And in this case, it's a cash ticket. You might be able to book through Chase that way and earn miles on your flight and earn elite status credit and things like that. So you may want to do it that way. You may prefer to book that round trip from Europe if you're planning to go to Europe

twice anyway. Now, in the current environment, maybe that seems a little foolish because of all the various uncertainties regarding international travel. So that might not be a technique that appeals to everybody in 2022, but it's a technique that in more normal times anyway, lots of people use because it can be advantageous. Right, right, right. And we've seen some incredible business class fair sales out of Europe to the US that make it almost like hard not to do that. Oh yeah. I mean, Tap Air Portugal frequently has from a number of cities, sub thousand dollar, one way business class, one way you could book it one way, not even have to book a round trip

if you don't want from Europe to a number of cities in the United States. And I booked it as low as like just over $400 once, one way from Oslo to New York. And it wasn't even a price mistake. It hung around for a while. So sometimes you can get really, really cheap business class fares from Europe to the US. So that can make it worthwhile. I remember frequently saying prices around $1,600, $1,700 round trip from europe to the u.s uh on major carriers and right uh so yeah and what nick said before about you're gonna be earning big miles too uh depending on who you credit those flights to right you can do really well with those and so in order to take advantage of it if you're based in the u.s you got to basically nest two trips to do it right exactly

you know and i what I didn't put in the post that I wrote this week was that really what I'm thinking about probably doing is flying from London to Rome, if you read my post, and doing a round trip from Rome to New York on British Airways, because right now it's about $1,800 for the dates I need. So it'll cost me about 120,000 chase points to book it through Chase. And I'll earn a boatload of Alaska miles because Alaska earns lots and lots of redeemable miles on British airways, premium cabins. So I'd be looking at 250% of the distance flown. So I'd earn like more than half the miles back basically.

So that's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. So, so there's situations where that can be useful. All right. So nested trips, good. Europe origin for cheaper flight prices. Good.

Uh, what other techniques do we have here? So talk about Alaska. All right. There's some shenanigans you could get into with Alaska stopover rules are published, but there's a lot of flexibility in them. And so it's one of those things that I haven't even played with these in a long time, but Alaska allows a stopover on a one-way. And so as a general example, and I haven't checked this specific one lately, but as a general example, let's say you're New York-based and you're flying from Europe back to New York, you might be able to do something like, say, fly from Europe, let's say fly from London to New York on British Airways, which would probably be a bad redemption, but it's an easy example for this. Do a stopover in New York. And then like six months from then in the future, continue on to Hawaii and get yourself a second trip.

So you could add sometimes a free one-way at the end of an Alaska award. So especially if you're booking these one-way, you're booking separately, it can make a lot of sense to turn something into a stopover to get yourself a free one-way flight. And often with Alaska, there's, like you said, a lot of shenanigans. We have a post about the companion certificates with Alaska. And I talk a lot in that post about some of those shenanigans you can do in terms of the stopovers, because in a lot of cases, the flights don't really need to line up quite as much as you might expect. You have to, you know, if you're booking in one direction, you have to kind of keep going

West, but you don't really necessarily need to connect the dots as much as it looks like you, or you think you might need to. So, uh, so that's one that can be a lot of fun to play with. If you have Alaska miles, playing with the stopover rules can be great. You can do that, obviously, on the way to Asia or back, et cetera, also. So there's definitely some neat tricks there. Now, you can't do necessarily everything you want to do. I did try to book a really complicated one with a stopover on the way back from Asia with Alaska miles. And I found that I wasn't able to stop over for instance, in New York on my way from Hong Kong to San Francisco, which I really kind of wanted to do, but I wasn't able to do in that specific instance,

but there's a lot of that, that gives you an idea anyway, of the types of things that you might look to try to do. Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, there are some shenanigans you can do with United as well with their excursionist. You've done some shenanigans with United, where I booked an award. The first round trip was to fly from Washington Dulles to a small town in West Virginia with a return. And again, this has been in quotes. The return was many months later from Chicago to Houston. Wait, what? Both of-

Where are you returning? I haven't even gotten to the shenanigans part of that yet. Yeah. trip award, uh, will let you get a free excursionist perk flight. So a free segment, as long as it's not in the, um, in the, in the, in the region of origin of your, of your round trip award. So I included in the middle between those two flights, a trip across Africa. So from Dakar, Senegal, all the way to Johannesburg, that segment, that whole very, very long segment was free because of their excursionist perk rules, which are apparently very loosely coded. Yeah. I mean, round trip.

I mean, let me recap that for you. His outbound on the round trip was Washington DC to West Virginia and his return on his round trip was Chicago to Houston. And if you're sitting there saying, how did he get home? Well, there's clearly two separate trips, right? So he had to nest that and book some other things too. But when you think outside of the box a little bit with it, that can be a good technique. And that's a great one. The United Excursionist Park is one that can be a lot of fun in that regard, because if you're planning on booking a one-way United Award, don't do that. Just add on, like, for example, if you're leaving the United States to fly anywhere else in the world on a United award, all you got to do is

book some simple one way within the United States, many months down the road. And you just bought yourself a free one way within another region around the world. So, uh, so depending on how much flexibility you have, that can be awesome. And we've got a post that'll be linked in the description about flexing the United leverage or the United, uh, excursionist park, because it really has potentially a lot of fun factor. Not necessarily going to save you tons and tons and tons of miles, but it'll save you some miles. And there's a lot of fun factor there.

There is. There is. There is. Then one other thing I want to talk about, I don't even know off the top of my head if there's any programs where this makes sense anymore, but, and maybe you, you know, of one neck, but, but there are some mileage programs where, you know, flights are cheaper, uh, off peak than peak. And that's still true. But, um, when you mix that with the ability to have like a free stopover, you could do some of this stuff that Nick was talking about with basically booking multiple trips with a single award by using the stopover creatively.

But the other thing you could do is start the first segment during off-peak travel so that the whole thing is cheaper. So for example, if you could start, let's say you have a return flight from Europe to the US that is during off-peak travel that starts your award trip. And then you have a flight much later that goes to Hawaii and then back to the US. That could be during peak travel time, but still booked at off-peak travel rates because you started your whole itinerary in Europe during the off-peak time. Yeah. And I don't know which programs that might still work with, but it's a good point that sometimes checking those various options might yield you something you didn't expect. I mean, there are certainly times where I've looked up an award, for instance, and it didn't price the way that I expected written about a number of times that can be

leveraged. I mean, I didn't mention this also in my Europe post, but I was strongly considering and still am flying Tap Air Portugal to get to Europe because there's this weird sweet spot from New York to Lisbon where the one-way business class flight that should be 63,000 miles prices only 35,000 miles one way. And there's no real explanation why, but I've seen four seats available on that flight at times. And that's through Avianca LifeMiles. And it's just this weird route, but it can be a great way to get to Europe. And then from there, flights within Europe are really cheap. So I can fly wherever it is I really want to go in Europe for probably 100 bucks more.

So piecing things like that together or searching around and seeing what you come up with can be worthwhile. And that's part of the fun, I think, right? And playing this game is just doing those searches and seeing what's out there and stumbling on things like that and saying, oh, wow, this could be a great deal. So some people are probably listening and saying, why would I want to waste all this time? I just want to go to delta.com and book a round trip. And hey, if that's your game, that's fine. I understand that. But for me, it's fun doing these searches and finding things. Yeah. One person's fun is the other

person's nightmare, right? Right. Right. But yeah, for me, it's fun, but it also, it's an unbelievable amount of time, right? It is. Each of these things we talked about, you have to like do all kinds of searches to figure out where's the word availability, you know, what situation makes the prices cheaper, all that kind of stuff. Before we end this topic, I do want to, one more thing to talk a little bit more about is upgrades. So if your

heart's set on business class or first class travel, don't forget about different ways to upgrade. We talked a little bit about Nick's idea of booking British Airways and using Avios to upgrade. I'm going to mention a couple others. So Delta, even if you don't have any upgrade instruments, what people frequently find is they book an economy flight with miles, let's say, and get offered a upgrade that's much cheaper after you book the economy award. That's much cheaper than if you had just booked business class to begin with. And so it's almost worth just like, because the award flights are fully refundable, it's almost worth just booking them to see what happens and see if you could get a good upgrade deal. Yeah, that's a great point. The chance of getting a good

upgrade deal with Delta. We've heard some stories about some really fantastic upgrade offers with Delta. So it's a great point. If you've got a bunch of Delta miles, it might be worth speculatively booking some stuff and seeing what happens. And that's another great point that I should make. I mentioned briefly in passing in my post about my trip to Europe that I've already booked the outbound to London. And I booked something that I'm relatively happy with, but I booked it with American Airlines knowing that I could cancel that with no penalty. So that's part of the reason I booked it. I said, you know what, there's no penalty to cancel. I can keep looking if I see something else that's super exciting. Found out this week that you can use Emirates miles to fly on JetBlue, for instance, and

fly JetBlue Mint, which I would probably rather fly than American Airlines. So if that were to open up at the last minute, the week before my trip or something, then I would certainly book that and cancel my American Airlines award and get those miles back. So being able to be prepared for those different flexible situations can be good too. But yeah, I think the upgrade's definitely something worth looking at. Also, it's funny this week,

I think Han posted on Bougie Miles about his experience with upgrading to La Première Air France's first class, which is something that lots of people talk about because it's a cabin you can't usually book with miles unless you have high level elite status with Air France. And even then it's a lot of miles to book. So typically the only way people fly a lot premier is either you have a lot of money and you pay for it or you get an upgrade offer and pay for it. And it was interesting because he wrote about an exact situation that we faced

exactly when we were leaving Dubai. I went to check in and we got an offer to upgrade to first class. And we didn't do it, but I could definitely see some people doing it because the price on that particular leg was about the same $1,200 that Han wrote about, actually. We ran into that same pricing, more or less, for a first class experience, which some people might go for. So again, it can be worth keeping your eye out for all of those types of upgrade situations and learning about them and which ones are available. Right, right, right. Absolutely. Wow. That just makes it mind-bogglingly complex. There's definitely some complexity, but I think that that's part of what makes it fun. You wrote this week about choice privileges, points, and all the difficulty you've had in booking them. And I'll roast you on that in a

second. But one of the things that somebody brought up in the comments was if it was easy, everybody would do it. And sometimes that complexity is what makes these things last so that we can continue to enjoy them. The fact that they aren't just going to one place and searching really easily. So that makes these things possible. That's for sure. All right. Are we ready to post-roast? I think we are. Is that what time it is in the show? I think it is. All right.

You go first. I foreshadowed there, so I guess I better. So you wrote this week about choice privileges, about using your choice privileges points to book preferred hotels, and how you went in to make this change. It took you three hours, first of all, to book an awards day with preferred hotels through choice. And then you realize you have to change the dates and changing the dates took you another three hours, right? I mean, so we're talking six. That's not even counting the hour I blew on the Friday. So I started on Friday, blew about an hour trying. And then Saturday, it took me three hours to change the

dates. Three hours of your Saturday, just to change the dates of a hotel stay, right? Oh man, what a weekend. Wow. I mean, I can't wait to read the bottom line review of the place that took you seven hours to book. Because that place has got to be great. So you did that. And then you called again to book another preferred rewards hotel stay. And then on top of that, you said, despite all of those things, you would do this again. Are you a glutton for punishment or what? Are you nuts? Why would anybody? Yeah, I guess I am. Let me just correct something you said. I didn't call again. I had the people on the phone already and just had them book the second one.

So the second one only took half an hour. Only a half an hour to book. After four hours to get the right person on the phone and to deal with the first reservation, it was only half an hour to get the second reservation. Okay. All right. So seven and a half hours and you got yourself one fixed reservation and one new reservation. And you'd go back for more, Greg.

You're excited about using your city points this way what's wrong with you excited about i don't know if i'd use it that way but um yeah you know i think it's a great that's a great topic to bring up after what we just talked about right like why would you do why would you spend the type types of award tricks we were just talking about booking. I guarantee you're going to take you more than four hours to iron out, right? Right. More than seven hours, whatever it was I spent. Um, so, you know, why would you do all that, all that pain? And yes, talking to choice or at least getting the right people on the phone was more painful than trying to find

award tickets. But, um, but, but the, the, the, the, the driver is the same as trying to find award tickets. But the driver is the same, is trying to get this great deal, trying to get an extraordinary experience that you wouldn't normally get because you wouldn't normally be willing to pay the kind of prices that some of these hotels would cost if you're going to pay cash. And so you have the points.

And I'm not happy about how hard it is, except for the fact, as you said, someone pointed out when these things are hard, they're more likely to stick around. They're less likely to devalue because so few people are booking them. So that's good for us, I guess. You keep booking them and you work them in there, right? You get those reps ready. So they just need a little practice. You get them all practiced. They need a lot of practice. All right. And then once you get through all that, then I'll start making calls myself. Yeah. So what we need, first of all, is for all of the reps to have heard of preferred hotels and the ability to book with choice points.

Just that. Just like, no, that's such a thing. I thought you were going to say, we just need a Lizzie at Choice Privileges. Just a Lizzie. Well, she would be great. Oh boy, she'd be great. But anyway, that's the first part. And then the second part is like, when getting points refunded to your account when you cancel a reservation, they shouldn't have to move the points one at a time back into your account. You know, I had like 110,000 points that had been put back in and boy, did that take a long time. Preston Pyshko, MD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD,

PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, I'm just crying to my ears when it's not instant. I mean, come on, it's 2022 guys. Preston Pyshko, MD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, Only there were computers that could do things like that. Preston Pyshko, MD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, I'm just grinding my gears when it's not instant. I mean, come on. It's 2022, guys. It's clickable. If only there were computers that could do things like that. You know? Right. Formally.

All right. All right. So you don't have a roast for me. My turn for a roast. My turn for a roast. So, all right. So on the blog this week, somebody wrote, best uses for Marriott free night certificates. And that was a update to a post that I wrote

years ago, well, a year ago, maybe or so. And I had included all kinds of new to the post, great uses for free night certificates based on reader feedback and so on. And based on our experience flying to the Maldives and staying at La Meridian. And what the author of this post didn't do, the author being me, is… I was waiting. I was like, I didn't do anything here. Yeah, I'm roasting myself if you didn't already get that. Okay. Nick's been sitting there in a very defensive position like, how can he possibly blame me for this What that guy, Greg, failed to do was include Marriott Menna House in Cairo,

which Stephen went to. It's extraordinary. He wrote a whole post for Frequent Miler about his stay there. And when I read it, I was like talking to my wife, like, we have got to go. You basically sit outside in the sun for breakfast with the pyramids, like overshadowing you basically. It's incredible. And somehow I forgot to put it into that post. How did you forget? I'm just jumping on the bandwagon here because it's kind of fun to roast. I appreciate that. I would have forgotten about that until I decided to book my trip to Egypt. And then I would have looked for the best uses of Marriott Free Night Strip.

It gets me very disappointed with you, Craig. So I'm glad that you caught that. And you've updated the post, right? Not yet. Okay. All right. So that'll be in the next publication of the post. That's right. All right. Very good. OK. So that brings us, I think, to the question of the week. And this week's question of the week ridiculous disaster American Airlines e-shopping portal is turning out to be? I usually shop via Rakuten for membership rewards points, but I've been using American Airlines as of January 1st for earning loyalty points. Like many here, I took advantage of the large point deals like a thousand points for a thousand miles for baby list sign up

1200 miles for wall street journal etc blah blah and at this point many of those have not tracked showing pending points and those that have in many cases have been clawed back of course the only way to contact them is submitting an inquiry via the portal and they won't even let you do that until 15 days have passed since you did your shopping activity. If American Airlines means to advertise earning loyalty points via its shopping portal, they need to address what an absolute mess it is. What are your thoughts about that, Greg? Well, first, I have a question. When he said something about the advantage of doing something, did he spell it advantage like the AA? He didn't, but he spell it advantage like the AA?

He didn't, but he put it in parentheses. Okay. All right. That's good. That's good. He was definitely meaning for the joke to be gotten there. All right. So the pun was intentional. The advantage portal is almost certainly run by Cartera, which runs almost all of the airline

portals. They've always been problematic in some ways. It's not all their fault. They're relying on the vendors to tell them if the consumer fulfilled their end of the deal. And so if a vendor initially says that we did, and so the portal credits us the miles, they're also going to trust that vendor when the vendor comes back and says, wait, no, I was wrong. No, they didn't fulfill their end of the. I'm not going to say that by a long shot, but I don. We're finding, we're finding situations where we could get a bunch of miles for nothing or for very little, the vendors, you know, didn't realize that, that their thing could be used in that way. They have to pay for those miles. It's not, this is not free for them. So, um, excusing them. If what we did fulfilled the terms,

they should not tell the portal otherwise, but I think that's what's happening. Yeah. I mean, clearly that's the case. And oftentimes when we see people have problems with shopping portals, I remind people that the portal is in the business of earning a commission when you click through and passing on a piece of that commission to you. They've got no reason not to pass you your piece of the commission because they want you to keep coming back. That's what makes them money. But if they don't get paid, then they're not going to print money and give it to you. So they have to get paid by the merchant. So yeah, totally agree. And 99% of the cases it's on the merchant end when these things go wrong. And so like, exactly like you said, I've gone into all of these shenanigans, like it'll probably post, but maybe it won't. And if it doesn't, I'll move on to the next one. You know, I'm not going to get you to invest it. And let me say, there are portals that will go above and beyond, and Cartera portals are not them. For example, we've seen situations where TopCashback, through no fault of their own, a deal isn't paying out, but they've sometimes stepped forward and said, we're going to pay out of our own pockets to keep the customers happy.

Now, that's great. I can't remember ever seeing Cartera portals do that. No. And it's not a common thing either, you know, but something that, yeah, we've definitely, we have seen from Topcash back a few times now. But yeah, so going to these things, especially the things that we're listing as here's ways to get loyalty points for almost free or free. Go into them knowing that there is some element of the game here where, you know, you're going to win some and lose some. Sometimes you're the windshield. Sometimes you're the bug. You'll be able to accept that. OK, well, I'm probably going to win more than I lose. And there's going to be some frustration here and there, but you know, at the end of the day, like, you know, the baby list miles, for instance, that we all got a thousand miles for no purchase, nothing other than taking

a few minutes to do. So they took those back. You know, they took mine back to guys. I'm not going to cry myself to sleep. It didn't cost me anything, but a few minutes to make the list, you know? So if they don't want to give me the miles on that, oh, well. And like you said, I'm not really excusing them because they created the terms and created the situation. So I totally get the frustration. It's just, I'm not going to tie up the mental bandwidth. I'm getting too upset about it, you know, like, all right. Right. We'll find plenty of these in order to earn enough miles to get elite status. I imagine. I think so. I think so. All right. All right. Very good. That brings us to the end. So if you've enjoyed what you've been hearing today and you'd like to get our

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