Frequent Miler on the Air - Award Booking Stories | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep305 | 5-9-25

Episode Date: May 9, 2025

In today's episode, we'll talk about how The Standard is coming to Hyatt...(but we're too old for it). Nick will enlighten Greg about the fact that Air France flies to French Polynesia, and we'll talk through our recent award booking stories.(01:24) - A correction about the Delta Business Gold card (with a $150 hotel credit, not $200 as mentioned in the episode).(02:23) - Would a speculative Discover Miles card be worth it for the 3x everywhere for the first year, with the chance that those all become transferable to C1 miles when the merger goes through?(08:05) - Greg acquired Smartly 4% card, downgraded Chase Sapphire Reserve, and got approved for Chase Sapphire Preferred(20:06) - Citi Rewards+ may be achievable for some(22:54) - Cardless removes one card per lifetime limit(24:10) - Qatar cards increased offers(29:54) - Rakuten’s shopping portal has a great new trick | Coffee Break Ep55 | 5-5-25 (Earn Amex and Chase cards at once)Check out the coffee break episode 55 here.(34:52) - TPG: "Chase Sapphire Preferred vs. Amex EveryDay Preferred: A $95 annual fee showdown"(37:57) - Hyatt integration of The Standard(43:15) - Air Tahiti bookable via Flying Blue(47:19) - Nick: Hilton free night extendable(50:43) - Gondola no longer requires access to your emailMain Event: Award Booking Stories(52:09) - Greg: Booked premium cabin flights to Japan for his sonRead more about this trip here.(1:01:28) - Nick: Booked unexpected trip to Bora Bora(1:18:54) - Greg: Booked lie-flat round trip to London for 3(1:34:28) - Why do people choose to do all this work for travel rather than just cash back?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

On today's show, we talk about the fact that the standard is coming to Hyatt and we're too old for it. Today I'll teach Greg that French Polynesia is served by Air France. Go figure. And we'll talk about our recent award booking stories. Frequent Mylar on the Air starts now. Today's main event, award booking stories. Today, Nick and I are going to just talk through a few examples of recent award bookings that we made. And the point isn't really to teach exactly how to do it. And we're not going to claim that we booked the most perfect trips possible, but rather, I think it'll be instructive to walk you through what we booked and why and why we made

various decisions along the way about what points to use, which airline to fly, that kind of thing. So we'll see. We'll see how it goes. Yeah, I love story time. My kids love story time, so I'm looking forward to telling some stories. We'll see what we have up our sleeves. But don't forget, if you want to jump ahead to something or you want to come back to it later on and review it again, you can always find the timestamps in the show notes. So just expand the show description to find that. That's also where you'll find links to more information about what we've been talking about today.

And wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to like this. Give it a thumbs up. Leave us a five star review. Give us a comment. Let us know what you think and what you would do differently. Always love to hear from you. OK, let's drag out this week's giant mail back. All right. Today we've got two pieces of giant mail. First is from Colin. Colin says,

was just listening to the most recent podcast episode and wanted to point out that the Delta Business Gold has a hundred and fifty dollar hotel credit, not $200 as mentioned by Greg in the episode. Yes, that's true. Okay, I was going to say, I hope you've got this one because I was counting on you for the delta cards, Greg. I'm not taking any credit on this one at all. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's still, you know, it's still the fact that for the $150 card, you get $150 worth of hotel credit. I had said $200 during the show. So I was wrong, Colin, you're right.

Thank you for that correction. I'll forgive you. Hopefully Colin does too. Colin and I are buds. I have a feeling. I don't know, Colin, but I have a feeling. I have my fingers crossed for you, Greg. All right, next up is from Josh.

Josh says, I remembered your tip about the Capital One Venture Card turning your saver cash back into miles. And just as an aside, what Josh is talking about is that you can take, if you have multiple Capital One cards, you can take cash back from cash back Capital One cards, move those rewards to a Capital One miles card,

and then those rewards become transferable to airline partners, airline and hotel partners. So that's a really cool trick. And Josh says, this got me thinking, would a speculative Discover Miles card be worth it for the 3X Everywhere for the first year with the chance that those all become transferable to Capital One miles when the merger goes through. Okay, so a little aside again. So Capital One is in the process of trying to acquire Discover and I don't really know where they are in that whole process.

At one point, it looked like it was all going to be shut down, but then it was back on. So I think it's back on right now. Um, and so what Collins or what Josh is saying is that, so the, the discover miles card for the first year, uh, they double all your rewards earn. So it, by default earns one and a half percent cash back. So, uh, at the end of your first year with the card, you get, so you get another one and a half percent cash back. So at the end of your first year with the card, you get, so you get another one and a half percent. So total three percent cash back everywhere for the first year only with the Discover Miles card. So why Josh is saying is maybe if this

goes through, maybe you'll be able to take that cash back, move it to your like venture card, for example, and it becomes miles. And then he goes on to say, what would you say the chances are of this happening if the merger goes through? Would be interested to hear your thoughts. By itself, 3% cashback isn't that compelling with the Robin and gold card always being 3% cashback,

but three capital one miles per dollar everywhere is more compelling. I gave it about a 1.87% chance of coming true. That's very, very low and very, very specific. Well, you know, I didn't want to confuse anybody and start talking about 3% or 3.5. So I wanted to make it very clear. Yeah, that I, I, I, I wouldn't count on that. And the reasons why, well, first of all, let me say it's not 0%. There's some chance and maybe it will. And so maybe I'll be totally wrong here. And this will be an interesting gamble. I wouldn't count on it though, for a lot of reasons. Number one, Capital One might keep

discover as a separate brand. I don't think it's like, they haven't even gotten anywhere near the point where they've announced any intention to get rid of one brand or the other, I don't think. So I don't know that they're going to merge the brands and even if they did, like I wonder how long it would be

before the computer systems would get merged to get both like operating on the same system. Banks often have different systems and so swallowing up another bank is pretty complicated, I think. And so the idea of your Discover accounts and your Capital One accounts kind of showing up in the same system, whether on your side or the agent side, seems to me like it'd be years down the road, not like a year or two down the road. Now, I don't know what I'm talking about when it comes to IT. The IT people can chime in and correct me and tell me that it's much easier than I think. But my impression is that those things don't happen so fast.

And that's why you end up with something like Bank of America having a website that looks like it was designed in 1996, because they've swallowed up so many smaller banks and they got to make all these different systems work together. And so, you know, ends up looking old and archaic. And I just don't see it. I don't see it being very likely that the systems get melded together soon. Now, will they someday maybe is it worth spending on a Discover card this year? In order to get that? I mean, that seems kind of farfetched to me because if it happens,

it's probably not going to be next year or the year after that. It's probably going to be four or five, six years down the line, maybe even longer. Will they even allow that still when it comes to that point? I don't know. I wouldn't bank on that strategy. It's an interesting idea. And hey, if you've got a lot of spend to do and you'd be happy with 3% back, I'm not telling you don't get the Discover card because that actually can be a pretty good card

for the first year, essentially 3% everywhere is potentially a really good deal, especially if you only want to get one card. But that's not a gamble I would make. Do you disagree with me, Greg? No, I agree totally. The only disagreement I have is in the percent chance. The actual percent chance is 4.13%.

4.13, okay. Yeah. You'll have to share the math with me later on. You'll have all the percentage. It's very low is what we're telling you. We don't have a lot of faith. Yeah, but next is even lower than the actual. Right, okay.

Somewhere in between there. All right, there's a good idea though. Interesting, interesting. It is, it was very good thinking in between there. All right. Let's, there's a good idea though. Interesting, interesting. It is. It was very good thinking by Josh there. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe it'll turn out that you were the brilliant one and you'll be laughing all the

way to the bank. And, you know, we'll report about how this was a great opportunity we missed. I hope so for your sake if you're getting it. And it's worth saying, I love that kind of thinking that that style of thinking, looking for, you know, where is there opportunity that's not obvious? And that's a that's a great example one that it does have a four point, what did I say? One right on three percent chance of happening. So it's not zero. It's not zero.

And I love that creative thinking, too. I mean, that's the kind of stuff that we kind of thrive on and enjoy about this game. So great idea. I don't know. We'll see. All right. Let's talk about Card News this week. We got a few things up for card news. You've got some news to share of your own because I saw that you got pushed into a new card because of a really weird US bank card. Yeah. So I had applied for the US Bank Smartly card, the one where it's possible to earn 4% cash back everywhere. I had applied for it like two days before it became a lousy card.

So there was a very short- Not so Smartly. There was a window of opportunity where we learned that they were gonna move on to version 1.1 of the card, which is not interesting. But the news was that people who had the version 1.0 of the card would still have the possibility of earning 4% cashback everywhere with this card.

And even though I'm not like eager right at the moment to do all of what it takes to get this card into a 4% everywhere earning card, it was my last chance to get it. And separately, as you know, I'm such a nerd when it comes to these credit cards. And I love the opportunity to get cards that are no longer available,

especially if they have some kind of superpower to them. And this has that superpower, the 4% everywhere, at least the possibility of getting that. So, so I did apply, but I was a little conflicted because because I wasn't like anxious to get the card. You know, when I immediately got a denial, I was just like, Oh, well, whatever. Um, the, and I thought, well, the good news is it doesn't hurt my chase 524 count. I, because you get a new personal card in it. Well, um, then, uh, week or two later, I started getting these emails from us bank saying, complete your application for the smartly. And I realized later that it was actually for the smartly savings account, which I guess

By applying for the credit card. Maybe I was automatically also applying for the savings account. I guess have both You have to have yeah. So so that must have sort of happened, but I think I didn't quite realize what was going on So I and I didn't read the email very carefully obviously, but anyway, so I thought okay So they think we're shadowing they think- Poreshadowing. They think my credit card is still like in play, my credit card application. So I thought, well, I should just call them and see what's going on.

And I called and they transferred me to their security department. It turns out the only reason I was denied was because I applied from Washington DC when I was traveling. And instead of telling me, you know, call to clear up a security concern, they just denied the application.

And so anyway, so it was really easy once I got the right department to get that pushed through and then I got approved. So good news there. And then like I always do when I get new card, I went into travel freely to say, I've got this new card on this date because I use travel freely to, uh, keep track of what cards I open. And,

and I saw then after adding it that that card puts me at 524. Okay. Normally that wouldn't be a big deal. I'm a few months away from going under 524. So that would be okay, except a couple of things happen at once. One, as you know, the Chase Sapphire preferred 100K offer was out, is out as we're recording this. Although we've been told that the offer

is gonna end any moment. We don't know when exactly, but it won't be live too much longer. And so that was available. Now I couldn't apply for it because I've long had the Sapphire Reserve card. I didn't intend to get rid of it. So I was just like, well, I can't apply for it. It's great offer.

But then I updated the post comparing the Sapphire Reserve card to the Sapphire Preferred and did an analysis where I actually looked at my actual spend on my Sapphire Reserve card and said, is it worth the extra annual fee on that card versus the preferred? And I realized in writing that post and updating that post that no, it didn't make sense for me. So suddenly I was like, oh shoot, I shouldn't have applied for that Smartly card because now I do want to downgrade my Sapphire Reserve to a Freedom card and then apply for the Sapphire Preferred. Right?

But I was like- You've got a window of time maybe. Well, so yeah, because Charles Freely told me I was at 524, which would tell me that most likely Chase would not approve me because it means I've opened five cards in the past 24 months. But then I remembered that most banks don't report the new account to your credit report for about 30 to 60 days after you're approved. Yes, not right away. Yeah, like you said, most of them are 30 to 60 days. I will say recently I opened those two Hawaiian cards and within about a week I got the alerts that they got.

Yeah, on my post about this, a couple of people wrote in that their Barclays in particular reports it really quickly. Luckily this was US bank, not Barclays. And so I was like, I will, I checked my credit report and it wasn't there yet. And so, okay, so now I have a window of opportunity to apply, but I have to downgrade my Sapphire reserve first and then I have to figure out when can I apply for the Sapphire Preferred? When does Chase acknowledge I don't have the Sapphire Reserve anymore so that I can get

approved for the Sapphire Preferred? So I did an experiment. I called, I downgraded to a Freedom card, and 15 or 20 minutes later I applied for the Sapphire Preferred. I immediately got a, no, you can't get this card because you have a Sapphire card open. Okay, that was kind of as expected. And the good news is there was no hard pull. So there was no downside to doing this multiple times.

The next morning, I tried again. I figured surely overnight, they would have updated their systems. But no, same thing happened. Then I thought, well, it was less than 24 hours. Maybe surely within after 24 hours, they'll have updated. So I waited until it was about 25 hours later. Still didn't work.

The next day after that, so two days after I product changed, the application went through, it was pending. The day after that, I got an email saying I was approved. So it all worked. I got in and that window of opportunity. Nice. You know, the whole time you were telling the story, I was hearing, the heat is on.

It's on the street. Anyway, because yeah, I mean, you were in a race there, right? What if they hadn't cleared the system soon enough? Anyway, because yeah, I mean, you're in a race there, right? I mean, what if it hadn't cleared the system soon enough and we don't know when the Sapphire preferred 100k offer is going to end. So you know, if that had taken too long, you might have missed out on the Sapphire preferred. If you had banked, you know, gotten froggy and jumped early and reported the account before you're able to actually get your application in with Chase.

There's a lot of things that could go wrong there, but it was also great data because we found out that it only takes a couple of days. And actually the thing that I found equally interesting along with the number of days it took for the system to recognize that you were no longer a Sapphire Reserve card holder was the fact that those multiple attempts to apply for the same card over a few days didn't result in an instant decline for like a fraud alert. Cause I might have thought that if you kept doing that, right, it would just be like, Oh no, this must be a fraud thing. Nobody, nobody applies for the same card four times in three days.

But apparently that's not a thing. So that's good to know actually. At least not with that number of, of attempts. Yeah. Um, I, I do want to point out that, uh, readers have since followed up that apparently it's That's good to know actually. At least not with that number of attempts, yeah. Right. I do wanna point out that readers have since followed up that apparently it's more than two days if you span a weekend, so it might be two business days.

It might vary by situation. All I know for sure is it took me two business days for it to clear. That's interesting, very interesting. So that's that. And now when I'm booking travel, I have to use a card that's not the Sapphire Reserve. It was such my ingrained thing to use the Sapphire Reserve

because it earned three points per dollar for all travel plus has great travel protections. So now- So what are you doing now? Yeah. Yeah. So now it's kind of a mishmash right now because like, so if I'm booking a trip

where I want the, where I think travel protections might be important, then I use my Ritz card. It has the same travel protections as the Sapphire Reserve but it earns three Marriott points per dollar instead of three Ultimate Rewards points per dollar, which to me are worth about half. So that's not great. But if I'm booking other certain types of travel that my City Prestige card earns three points per dollar or five points per dollar, depending on what kind of travel you're booking. I might use that. I might use an

Amex Platinum card for five points per dollar for airfare. I might use my US Bank Altitude Reserve to get three points per dollar for miscellaneous travel. So I think that one is my the US bank altitude reserve is sort of my primary go-to after the Ritz card at this point. But I'd say it's still in flux because this is brand new for me. Yeah, you know what I hate about that strategy is that when it comes time that something goes wrong with your trip, then you got to go back and figure out which card did I use to pay for it in the first place. I was really good for a long time in terms of being being organized on that where I used my ritz card if I Was traveling by myself and my wife's sapphire reserve if it was a family trip that way I would always know if something went wrong which card it was on but I've gone to a mishmash also for various reasons And that's the part that's driven me nuts a couple of times. Yeah. Oh, man

I don't know which card I used for a what and that's the part that's driven me nuts a couple of times. It's like, oh man, I don't know which card I used for what and that's annoying. I 100% agree with that. Yeah. And so I'm not thrilled with that. And you know what? I think I have a certain amount of time, I think, to change my mind on the product change, I believe. So I'm not really sure how that works, but I think even at even though I have the Sapphire preferred, I think I could unproduct unproduct change if I want to. You know, so my wife was actually under 524 is under 524 as we record this. And and she has a Sapphire reserve. And it's been more than 48 months since she earned the welcome bonus. So

there was a large part of me that was very tempted to downgrade and then just have a reply for the Sapphire preferred for the 100k bonus. But my problem is that we've got a lot of travel booked this year on the Sapphire reserve for the travel protections. Right. So if we downgrade that to a freedom card, I assume that we lose all the travel protections. And even if we re-upgrade it later, I have no idea if the travel protections will stick So that's to me. That's enough of a risk that I I feel like we can't do it But yeah, somebody somebody wrote in saying that in they had a situation like that where their their original original card Terms apply to their their protections but I don't know how.

Right. Right, who knows? In practice, it all comes down to whether or not the human being looking at the claim approves it, right? And any extra reason you give them not to is a risk, I guess, right? Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Yeah, all right, but interesting. Fun stuff there, fun experiments. But that's not it for Card News Yeah, all right, but interesting, fun stuff there, fun experiments, but that's not it for Card News. If you thought that that was all of Card News, you were wrong because we also have the fact that the City Rewards Plus card, the Rewards Plus card, I kind of said that funny, didn't I? The City Rewards Plus card may still be available

for some people. Yeah, so we previously announced that it's a new unobtainable card, collectible, because our understanding, it's definitely no longer available new for new applications, but our understanding was that it wasn't available for product changes either. But we've had a few reports of people who called to product change different cards. And a few of them were offered to product change to the rewards plus card recently, which was a surprise. Now the city's doing something weird where,

like which cards are available to product change to does not seem like fixed anymore. It used to be you could product change to does not seem like fixed anymore. It used to be you could product change to pretty much anything. Now it seems like the computer decides. I mean, other banks do it that way too, where the computer decides what they allow you to product change to. I know Chase does, for example, but we're not used to that with Citi, but that seems to be happening here that you may or may not be offered the ability to change to the rewards plus, but it may still be gettable. Yeah, you know, I there's so the contrast with chase though is that like chase yes,

you only have certain options you can downgrade to a product change to, but you just have to stay within a card family as long as you stay within a card family, all the cards in that family are should be available to you. Whereas Citi has historically let you product change between like an American Airlines card and a double cash card, for instance. Now not the case necessarily for everybody anymore. And that's more similar to Capital One.

Capital One also will let you product change to all sorts of different stuff, but only the stuff that the computer says you can product change to, which is so weird. So those are the two that seem to operate that way where the computer picks which of numerous different cards that may or may not have anything to do with each other. Yeah. Well, the reason I mentioned Chase is there was a time I wanted to product change. I can't

remember to what, but I had to like, I had to product change. I think it was my Sapphire preferred to like the old fee-free Sapphire before, they would then let me product change to the Freedom, or it was something like that. And I was able to do it immediately. Like I just called right back after changing to one and then was able to change to the other. Yeah. Okay, anyway.

All right, there you have it. Yeah, so that's good news for credit card collectors and anyone who wants to get in on that pretty cool card that's within the Citi ecosystem. So if you're interested in Citi Points, and anyone who wants to get in on that pretty cool card that's within the Citi ecosystem. So if you're interested in Citi points, the rewards plus card is a good one to have in your collection, it has no annual fee.

There you go. In other good news for credit card collectors, we've got the cardless cards out with a new rule or removing a rule. They've removed the once per lifetime limit on cardless cards. If you're not familiar with cardless cards, they are actually cards, not cardless. But cardless is an issue. The issue, the cardless guitar card and the cardless live miles cards and cardless tap card,

Tapir Portugal and probably a couple others. Maybe now they've had some that have come and gone at any rate for a long time until just recently. They had a limit to one cardless card period. If you'd ever gotten a cardless card before, even if you got like the old Manchester United card or they used to issue a New Orleans Pelicans card. Yeah, I have no idea what was up with that.

But if you had gotten one of those, then you wouldn't have been able to get a Life Miles card or a guitar card, which just seemed nutty and weird to me. And they finally removed that limit. Yeah. Yeah. I believe it was just a technical limit. They didn't have any desire to keep it there, but they did want to be able to prevent people from signing up for the same card over and over. And so I believe that's in place that you can't sign up for the same card again,

but that's reasonable. That is reasonable, yeah. And the good news is, this is just in time for the Qatar cardless cards have enhanced offers out. So you have the Privilege Club Signature Card, the $99 card out with a 70,000 point offer and the Privilege Club Infinite card. That's the $499 card out with a 100k offer. But it also comes with enough queue points, which I guess are points needed for elite status. Enough queue points to get, I think, gold status, which gets you one world,

what, Sapphire and whatever, it's enough to get you into one, one world airline business class lounges. So if you get this gold status, it's only good for a year, but when you have it, you'll be able to then, let's say, flying around the US, you'll be able to get into American Airlines lounges, for example. So that's a nice little added perk there. I don't know. What do you think? I don't know. I mean, you know, anytime we diss the American Airlines lounges, somebody chimes in to be like, hey, this one's actually pretty nice, and that one's pretty nice, and you guys sell them short. And so I know that there are some nice ones out there

and the signature flagship lounge in Miami and New York, they're decent. But I've been in a number of American Airlines clubs over the years that had like just trail mix basically and some drinks that you know, didn't, I wouldn't go out of my way to get access to AA lounges, unless I lived in a city where I knew that the lounge I was going to get into was worth some amount of effort or a credit card account. Yeah. And then some Alaska lounges are nicer, but there's a, there's a, there's a gotcha there, which is in order to get into an Alaska lounge with your one world Sapphire, you actually, you have to have that frequent flyer number

on your ticket. And so if you're flying, you know, let's say Alaska Airlines, then you're crediting your flight to Qatar, not to Alaska Airlines, which even on award tickets is problematic because like Alaska now gives you gives you gives you elite credit even for award tickets, but only if you have your Alaska number on the on the ticket. So so you're giving up quite a bit as well as quite

a bit of valuable Alaska miles if you if it's on a paid ticket. So so that's not too exciting to me. And it doesn't excite me. No, and Avios can be really useful, but you can transfer to Avios from basically all of the major transferable currencies. So 70,000 Avios or even 100,000 on the the expensive card the premium card don't excite me that much because they're pretty easy to collect with other currencies and if you catch a transfer bonus then it costs even fewer points to end up with 70,000 or 100,000 or whatever obvious so i don't get as excited about an Avios welcome bonus really i mean if you use Avios a lot then sure i can see why you might be but uh but yeah yeah, so I don't know. I'm Luke warm on these. I'm sure that there's the right crowd out there the right customer for it, but I'm not it.

So if you're kind of like in a position where you've, maybe you're in pop-up prison with all your Amex applications and maybe you're over 524 with Chase and so on, here's an opportunity to grab some points that can be valuable. Yeah, okay, fair enough, fair enough. It does require, let's see, how much spend to get the, oh, it's 20K after the first transaction and then 50K after 3,500.

So it's actually a really reasonable amount of spent too It is yeah, that's a good Okay. All right. You want me over Craig? You want me over? All right. All right So what about the the infinite card it comes with a bigger welcome bonus, but it's like 500 bucks a year, right? Yeah, so And it doesn't have like a lot of like high-end perks that you'd expect from a $500 card. So doesn't have a priority pass Right. So Yeah, you can spend your way to elite status with it So if you're interested in in one world elite status ongoing, not just the first year

Maybe it has some value there. Otherwise, yeah I mean, I guess you could think of it as spending $499 or the, $400, because that's how much more it is than the other card. $400 for the extra, what, 30,000 points plus lounge access for a year. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Could be. Could be.

Could be. All right, that out of the way, let's talk about what crazy thing, and we've got a double header today. So what crazy thing did Rakuten do this week? Yeah, first, I have to say, we've got thing one and thing two going on today, which I would think as a father you would have noticed from the notes.

But no. Oh my goodness. You know, I saw that in the notes. And for some reason, it didn't, you know, like just didn't ring a bell with me, which is silly because my wife and I, oftentimes, when the kids were a little bit younger and we didn't want them to know who we were talking about

or what we were talking, we'd be talking about thing one or thing two all the time and they wouldn't know we're talking about them. And so it's kind of silly that I didn't catch that, but yeah. Yeah, that's one of the few I didn't catch that but yeah yeah that's one of the few Dr. Seuss references I can remember it's been a while for me okay so one let's do thing one Rakuten so we we did a whole we did a whole show

on this that we called Rakuten the shopping portal has a great new trick that was coffee break episode 55 earlier this week. Oh, well, as we're recording it, it was earlier this week. What happened is Rakuten has started, the Rakuten shopping portal. You know, you click through the Rakuten shopping portal and you can earn cash back or MX membership rewards when you click through, go to a store and buy something and then you earn points.

Well, they added three Chase credit cards to their shopping portal. So you click through, you click through and if you get approved for one of these three cards, you earn Rakuten rewards on top of the welcome bonus. And they also, I don't know if this will still be available when the show goes live, but Rakuten is also offering an incredible bonus on these cards. $300 or 30,000 membership rewards points for the- Signing up for a applying for a chase card? Yeah, for either the safe, either the Chase Sapphire Preferred or the

Ink Business Unlimited, I think it was. This is wild. So not only is that a strong, strong candidate for Deal of the Year, but this is the most insane thing I've ever heard of because you can earn Amex a whole lot, like almost a welcome bonus worth of Amex membership rewards points when you sign up for a chase card.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, really 30,000. So I think that's probably more than the business green card comes with for a welcome bonus. And it's nearly as many as the consumer green card has had for a welcome bonus. Yeah. So it is. It's like an Amex welcome bonus for applying for a chase card. Right. Right. Right. So weird. That's so weird. I know. I'm just kind of dumbfounded that chase allowed this. Like, I mean, whoever approved it had had to like, not really know what was going on because what I mean,

so, you know, we're we meaning the frequent miler we're incentivized to tell people how valuable Amex points are in the context of suggesting that it's a good idea to sign up for a chase card. And I can't imagine chase wanting that no I can't either you know and I've got to imagine I've got a guess that Rakuten probably pitched this as their shopping portal and they Wanted to offer cash back, you know to their customers for for you know applying for this

And so it was probably discussed in terms of cash back At least that's what I if I were better than that I were betting anything, I'd bet it all on that. And I'm thinking that just whoever it chases agreed to this probably just didn't know. They just, they just didn't look at Rakuten. They don't know how they Google it and didn't look up frequent Mylar Rakuten to see how it works. You know, and that's just, maybe that's the crazy thing.

I mean, it's kind of crazy that you could earn, you know, it's more than kind of, it's very crazy that you could earn MX membership rewards points while applying for a chase card. And again, to be clear for anybody who's hearing this and you're like, but just only 30,000 points, that's on top of the welcome offer you get from chase. Like this is not in place of it's along with that's what makes this really interesting. Uh, but yeah, crazier still that chased probably just didn't do their homework on it and make sure that they wouldn't be given away at these points.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in case you're wondering, no, this offer was not out when I applied for the Sapphire Preferred, so I did not earn 30,000 points, unfortunately. Yeah, yeah, I mean, you and a lot of other people, there were plenty of people who were disappointed about that, yeah.

And to be clear, Greg said this, but just to reemphasize, that has been the offer for the last few days, like as we're recording this, but by the time this publishes, I have no idea whether that'll still be available. So you'd have to have to go to Rakuten and see what is it suggests. The page suggests that 5000 points or $50 is the normal reward. Now I say normal. A lot of people asked I didn or said, I didn't know Rakuten's been giving away bonuses like these for applying for credit cards and me either. I don't think it's a thing that's existed. This was new as far as I know anyway, just for this.

So whether or not that normal $50, $5,000 point sticks around, we don't know. But I guess it's at least worth checking Rakuten to see. And of course, you know, you always got to be careful, make sure that you're getting the best offer because every now and then Different credit card companies out there will have one affiliate offer, but then there's another better offer available That's why I always recommend checking against our best offers page to make sure you're getting the best offer But in this case it was it was the best It was the 100k offer that you can get anywhere else too. And, and just get extra points on top. Yeah. Yeah. So that was a lot of craziness, but that was just thing one.

Let's go on to think too. Uh, all right. I don't usually like to pick on other publishers of points and miles stuff, but I couldn't help it here. This is just too nutty. I can't even believe that this happened. Um, the points guy published a post, um, This is just too nutty. I can't even believe that this happened. The points guy published a post

the day before we recorded this. That's titled Chase Sapphire Preferred versus Amex Everyday Preferred, a $95 annual fee showdown. All right, Nick, why is this crazy? Why is this crazy? What's wrong with comparing to $95 cards that both have preferred in their name? You know, I mean, it's kind of like being like, who would win

in a fight? You know, a Jaguar or an extinct animal? How are you going to compare against a card that's no longer available? Yeah, I guess the one that's available is the one that wins, right? And I mean, 10 times out of 10, if it's actually still available, that's going to win this fight. So so we're laughing. Yeah, I didn't I didn't read the whole article, but I did read enough to see that it didn't just have one line saying, no, I did.

So I preferred is available. Everyday preferred is not therefore separate preferred wins. I mean, what? Yeah, I mean,. Sapphire preferred is available. Everyday preferred is not. Therefore, separate preferred wins. I mean, what? Yeah, I mean, that's that's pretty nutty. So of course, to be clear, as you hopefully have surmised from this, if you didn't already know, the MX everyday preferred card hasn't been available for new applicants for at least,

I don't know, like eight or nine months already, probably longer than that, even in a while. Yeah, it's been almost a year anyway, that this card just hasn't been available at all for new applicants. And of course, because it's a credit card and the currently available consumer Amex cards are are well, you know, I guess the blue cash every day perhaps, well, that earns cash back. The ones that earn membership rewards points are the gold, the green and the

platinum, and you can't product change those into an everyday prefers It's not even like it's something you could product change to if you don't have an everyday or an everyday preferred already It's just no longer available to anybody. So Which is the better airline is it United or TWA That would be an equal useful post, yeah. Which one should you fly to get to Los Angeles? United, right? Help me out with that TPG.

Write that piece so I can make my decision about who I should book. Oh my gosh. All right. That was just so crazy. I actually checked it today before recording to see if they took it down, because I thought maybe it got published by accident or something.

Right. They had an old old post and someone said, well, we've got to republish everything about the Sapphire preferred. So here's one, but. Well, truth be told, I bet you maybe that's what happened, that it was an old post and just did get republished cause they were republishing J Sapphire preferred, but still, still.

Ideally somebody who has a clue would like make a decision that makes sense. Just saying, just saying. Just read their own site. Sorry to pick on you. at least somebody who has a clue would like make a decision that makes sense. Just saying, just saying. Just read their own site. Sorry to pick on you. Sorry, I love some folks over there, but yes. It's just funny.

Could not help it. All right, all right. Let's get into awards points and more awards points and more Hyatt has integrated the standard. Yeah, so we heard about this coming forever ago. So so I looked it up. It was August 20 of 2024 that Hyatt publicly announced the planned acquisition of the standard. And I would not have guessed that it would be this long before they

integrated them, but it is. And as you're listening to this, the first hotel or hotel should be online and they're going to dribble out into the Hyatt system over the course of May. And there's really good news there. When they came out with the Mr. or Mrs. Smith situation where they didn't shoehorn Mr. and Mrs. Smith hotels into Hyatt's award charts and they made them available for points at bad point value. And then we saw that happen with some other partner type of things like under Canvas with

Hyatt. Some of us started to worry, are they going to do the same craziness with the standard hotels? And luckily, that's not the case. They've fully incorporated them, or they're going to they are in the process of into the regular award chart. And it's not even that bad. Like, so they have they have some very high end hotels and the highest category that they're gonna at least premier with is a category six. So that's like including like the standard Maldives. So that's not bad at all. That's great news.

I'm really happy, Hyatt, if you're listening, that these are gonna be on the award chart. That's what I'm talking about. Yeah, yeah, it's huge. And there's gonna be some good ones bookable within category one through four. So if you have one of those free night certificates, there's the standard Brussels.

It's not yet open, but once that's open, that's supposed to be category four. There is, last year I published the points bookable hotels that were on the Travel and Leisure's 100 best hotels of the world list. And one of those, I said it's not bookable yet with Hyatt, but one of those was the standard, I don't know how to say this, Hua Hin or something like that, which I think is Thailand maybe. It is, yes. I'm told that it's the Hamptons of Thailand. Okay.

Well, it's a category three, so you'll be able to use your category one through four cert and have a category left over. Well, no, I mean, that is great, though. I mean, that's category three. And of course, obviously hotels in Thailand tend to be less expensive. So it's not shocking that it's a category. But at the same time, I'm sure it'll probably be quite a nice hotel. Yeah, yeah.

The other good news is this this acquisition introduces three new brands to hi it. And the brands are the Standard, The Standard X, and Bunkhouse Hotels. And the reason that's good news is because, you know, Hyatt has this thing called Brand Explorer Awards, where every five brands that you have visited over your lifetime, you get a category one through four certificate as a free like thank you for

trying out their different brands. So this gives you three more to to work on. Very good. And that's always a good thing. I think getting that brand Explorer is a lot of fun when you get that notification that you got one. So I'm glad to see that. I don't know much about the standard. Have you ever stayed at one of these? No, no. All I know is I think they're very, very trendy. I think that they attract people younger than you and me. What are you saying, Greg? We're not trendy. You and I aren't trendy.

I'm saying that, wait, dads are probably not their core demographic. Well, that makes sense then, because I've looked at a couple of them and I've been like, oh, they speak to me. And maybe that's why I'm not trendy enough. It's not made for me. Yeah, other than that, I really don't know much about them.

No. We'll see, I'm curious. Well, as you mentioned, I noticed in looking at that list, I was peeking at that list myself the other day, the best points bookable hotels in the world, and I noticed that there was at least one if not two standards. I know the Hua Hin one was on there. I felt like maybe I saw another one somewhere, another two. So I'm excited. I'm interested. I think the standard New York, isn't that the one that's right above the Highline?

Yes. Yes, I believe it is. Yes. So that's famous for people like undressing in the windows of the hotel, so people walking on the High Line can see them naked. So there's that. You know more about that one than I do, Craig. So I remember this sign. I was picturing this sign for the hotel

from the last time that I walked the High Line, but that was wild. So now finally we'll be able to use our points Finally to be one of those. to address in a window. Yes. Okay, well, hopefully not Greg. All right, let's move forward

and keep it family friendly here. Let's talk about Air Tahiti now. Air Tahiti is bookable now via Air France. And that's exciting, even though some of you might be hearing that and thinking, but wait a second, you can already book Air Tahiti, Nui through Alaska Airlines or American Airlines, etc. And you would be right about that. But this is not to be confused with Air Tahiti, Nui. Air Tahiti is the

domestic. Why would anyone confuse them? Who would? Who would make that mistake? That's clearly Air Tahiti and Air Tahitiiti Nui are different things. One is Nui. But yes, they're totally different. There's Air Tahiti Nui flies intercontinental flights. So you can fly from the United States to Tahiti, for instance, to Papua Tahiti. But Air Tahiti, different airline, operates the domestic routes. So if you want to go to Bora Bora, for instance, then you have to

fly from Tahiti to Bora Bora. And historically, you've had to pay for that. It's a cash ticket, there was no way to book that with miles until now. So it's kind of exciting that Air France now has that available. It's 15,000 miles each way. It looks like an economy class. I saw the business class price, but I can't remember maybe it was 30k. I can't remember for sure. I've taken those flights before, visited Bora Bora once.

I wouldn't probably bother with business unless you have a bunch of luggage I guess maybe because I assume you get more luggage allowance that way but anyway at 15k each way that's not a slammin deal but here's why I like it. So I say it's not a slammin deal round trip flight from Tahiti to Bora Bora is around 450 ish dollars. And the time we went, I booked that actually through Chase Ultimate Rewards to use my ultimate rewards points at one and a half cents per point. And so I used thirty thousand points. But what I like about this instead of doing something like that is that Air France is a lot easier to cancel. So, you know, I think they have a $70 cancellation fee, which is certainly not free.

However, it's a lot better than just being out the full $450. And personally, as somebody with a speculative trip booked, hopefully to Bora Bora, I had been very hesitant. I have not yet booked the cash tickets between Tahiti and Bora Bora because I didn't want to be out $450 times for passengers. If the trip doesn't go through, it doesn't happen. So I would be much happier to book it. If there was only a $70 cancellation fee per passenger that I have to worry about. Now I say that when I looked, availability only existed for the next couple of months. It was like May, June, July. So it wasn't too far out. So maybe that's gonna be the standard

that you're just gonna have a few months in advance. But even that, that's better than not having this available. So I'm a fan. Yeah, no, that's great news. I'm excited to hear that that's the case. I guess you can't get to Tahiti using Air France miles in the first place place so you can't look like or can well so air tihiti only flies domestic so you're not here no i know yes right but is

there another well yes there is air france you can fly air france it's a right from the u.s french polynesia they do yes uh yeah they fly from los angeles so they fly from los angeles so yes that's a very good question because i see where you're going next. And I've been thinking about that too. And we'll come back to that later on. I have not yet looked to see if you can combine that flight together with the Air France flight from Los Angeles. But that would be pretty cool if you're able to book it all as one, you know, one fell swoop, one ticket. Theoretically, it would price, usually when that's possible, it prices the same as without the extra domestic leg.

Yeah, and even more exciting, if that works, you can theoretically have a stopover on an Air France award, so maybe you could stop over in Tahiti on the way. I'm just kind of laughing because of how poorly implemented their stopover thing is. Their ability to stoppers based on the knowledge of whoever you get on the phone to try to do that but yes that

would be really great if you could do that for sure so so we'll see an interesting development nonetheless all right next up i i had a report this week of some success with a hilton free night certificate i had posted a long time ago that it was possible to extend a Hilton free night certificate. If you have one that's about to expire, you can call in and usually an agent will extend it a little bit. Over time it became clear that that little bit, the standard is two weeks. So if you have a soon to expire Hilton free night certificate, you can probably get it extended for two weeks. So if you have a soon to expire Hilton free night certificate, you can probably get it extended for two weeks. And I say you can probably because an agent still has to be

willing to do it, they may be more likely to do that for you if you have some level of elite status, although I've heard from some readers who've done it without elite status also. So so usually two weeks is okay. But in our situation, we had one long story as to how we ended up with one, but we ended up with one that was going to expire very soon. And so, so we had one long story as to how we ended up with one, but we ended up with one that was going to expire very soon. And so so we had to do something with it and we wanted to make a reservation that was about eight weeks in the future.

So the day before it was set to expire, my wife called and asked if there was any way to extend it for that reservation eight weeks in the future. So much farther than the standard two weeks and the agent that initially answered said he could only do a two week extension but he said hold on and he'd see if he can get in touch with somebody else who can extend it longer put the call through to the diamond desk and the diamond desk representative

initially said we normally only extend these for two weeks and then said but the previous agent probably told you we could do this right and so my wife paused for a second she said weeks and then said, but the previous agent probably told you we could do this, right? And so my wife paused for a second. She said, yeah. And so again, dead air for a minute. And then the agent was like, okay, so that was such and such a date. And so went ahead and just did it after like, pausing for some dead air. So obviously it can be done. So that was nice. Actually, she ended up extending it about nine weeks from the date that it was scheduled to expire. She said, this will probably never happen again,

but we've heard from other readers who've been able to do it too. So. Right, right. So it sounds like a few things went on there, but one little takeaway out of that is that I've found when asking for an exception to a policy, having a specific need as opposed,

so asking for like a specific property and a specific date like here's where we want to go and why it can be much more successful than just not ready to use it yet. How far can you extend it? Right? Because then the answer would just be two weeks and you'd be done. Yep. Yeah, absolutely. I would have expected to just get two weeks, if that were the case at most. And if any. Reports. Yeah, if any.

Yeah, because we've definitely received reports from people saying that they had to be ready to make a reservation on the phone on that call for whatever the extension was for. And in this case, we did. We had a place picked out and a date that worked and everything. So she was prepared with all of that.

And then if they said no, then I was prepared with a backup plan to ask for a different date and stay that was still more than two weeks, but less than eight weeks out. So I was ready with a backup if need be. But wear them down until they agree. Eventually, eventually, right?

You get something more than two weeks out of you, whether you like it or not. So there you go, There you have it. Don't I really the reason I reposted this and shared that was to say, don't give up on it, because I'm sure that there are some people that are familiar with the kind of standard two week extension and or the old conventional wisdom that you couldn't get those extended. And as it turns out, you can.

Mm hmm. All right. One more piece of award news is that a tool that I really like for booking awards, it's called Gondola, for booking, for finding hotel awards, it had a major problem before, which is it required you to give it full access to your email inbox. And I did not like that, but they now have it as optional. So now you can just say, no, I'll enter information myself. So don't do that.

And you don't have to give it full access. And you could still like search. The way it works is you search a city, give it a date range, and it finds all the hotels bookable with points and compares that to the cash rates. And we'll show you, you know, the cents per point value and let you sort by value and things like that.

So I'm pretty excited because I like that tool and I just hated that one thing about it. So I'm glad to announce that that's that's fixed. And I think it's directly because of our input to them about about that problem. Yeah, that's great. I'm really excited about that. I'll be excited to play around with it a lot more now. So awesome. Big news there. I look forward to seeing what we find as we dig further into that too because I think it's gonna be really useful. So yeah, very good All right main event time Main event time award booking stories all right, we're gonna we're gonna tell a few stories here if we have time and

Basically The idea again is not to Say like what we booked was the ideal thing. It's more to walk you through our thinking process, what we use to try to find awards when they're hard to find, how we picked which miles to use, that kind of thing. And hopefully that'll be instructive and maybe that might, you know, make you realize things that you didn't already know or ways to think about things that you didn't think of before.

Okay, first story is, this goes back a few years, the origin of this, because my son graduated from his undergraduate program about three years ago, and maybe four years ago now, I don't know. And I offered to send him and some friends to Hawaii using my miles and to put them up at a hotel and everything. He was very excited about that, but he never got around to organizing it. I just said, you have to tell me who and when and I'll do the rest, but he never did. So fast forward about three or four years and he's

like, remember that graduation gift? Is that still on the table? He wants to go to Japan with a friend of his. And I was like, absolutely. So his friend lives in Los Angeles and my son is here in Ann Arbor, Michigan. My son was expecting to fly economy, but I thought if I could do better than economy, I will. I mean, it's a gift. I'd rather he fly something nice. But awards to Asia in premium cabins are not easy to get right now and we had to work around his friend's work schedule when he could get away and so the date that

we didn't have a lot of you know flexibility in the dates so that's that's a situation of course they prefer to fly together but that's not required so you know I thought what we'd probably do is fly my son out to LA and they both go from there. But I did check on flights from Detroit and I was actually surprised to find. So the only non-stops to Asia from Detroit are Delta, you could fly to Japan, South Korea or China, nonstop on Delta. And I checked, you know, prices on Delta award prices and was surprised to find that there were actually

really good prices for Delta to fly to Seoul, South Korea, which is not that far from Japan. You're in the neighborhood at that point. But the dates didn't work. So it was like, ah, that would have been really nice. So on to plan B. So the other thing is that I had 148,000 Singapore Airlines miles that are expiring in a few months.

And I had no idea what I was gonna do with them. So I was like, I need to use them for one of the directions of travel for these guys, right? And I knew that Singapore has a flight between LA and Tokyo, NRT. So I looked up, there are various award search tools that support Singapore Airlines, but support for Singapore keeps coming and going. And I think at the time I was looking it was more going than coming. So I logged on to Singapore Airlines directly to search and there was nothing in business class

available and that didn't surprise me. I've never had good luck with Singapore award space even with their own miles but premium economy was pretty widely available for the return. So flying from Tokyo to LA, good availability. So okay, great. So now the question was, how do I get them to Tokyo? And then I can book the Singapore part to come home. Oh, the other part I meant to say, the price for premium economy for two people was only $2,000 less, 2,000 points less than the amount of points I had that were going to expire. So I would be able to use all but 2,000 points and I'll just let those last 2,000 go. Or maybe I can figure out. I think there's a way to get like a dollar worth of Amazon credit or something.

Yeah. So, whatever. I mean, I'm just thrilled to get, be able to get good value from those miles. That's fantastic. So, okay. So now finding them, ideally business class to get to Tokyo is what I really wanted.

I did a bunch of searches. One of the things I used was seats.Aero. Their search let me say like from LA area airports to, and they have these like codes that let you sort of, that have already bundled up lots of airports. And so I did to Asia and also two Japan airports. So it did all the major airports within Japan. Because just Asia would just include probably just Tokyo, the two in Tokyo, I would guess.

Anyway, that's what I did for that. And I was surprised to find on the sort of exact best day for them to leave, it wasn't like cheap, but it 95,000 Alaska miles to fly Hawaiian Airlines business class. So Alaska has moved some of the Hawaiian's long-haul flights to fly from Seattle instead of from Honolulu. And so they have this flight from Seattle to Tokyo, right? So I had first was looking from LA so I could get my son's friend from LA to Seattle to Tokyo for 95,000 points. The leg to Seattle is in first class on Alaska Airlines. And I'm separately booking my son to get to Seattle. So they'll meet up there.

So I booked two separate tickets, 95,000 miles, whether you include that leg from LA or not, it was 95,000 miles. And they get to go in business class to Japan. So I feel really good about that whole booking. And my son was so excited when he heard about what I booked for him. Oh, I'm sure, yeah, that's awesome.

That's great. I mean, what a gift. What a graduation gift. Yeah, Dad of the Year there. Well done. So I'm curious about the Hawaiian Airlines flight because I hadn't realized before this that there was a nonstop Seattle to Tokyo now that's on Hawaiian ish airlines. I say Hawaiian

ish because, you know, Alaska and Hawaiian have merged. So it's a Hawaiian plane, but, you know, it's sort of a Seattle ish, you know, Alaska sort of flight because it doesn't pass through Honolulu, right? It does not, right? It's, it's, it's direct. I should also mention that, um, I did check to see whether Hawaiians other partners could book because I thought it'd be less, probably less than 95,000 if I booked with American miles or JetBlue miles. Um, but no, they, they could not see this flight. So Alaska already seems to have access to more of Hawaiian's own award space, which makes sense. It makes sense, yeah.

Do you know if it's operated by the 787 or if it's one of their... It's their old first class that's all open. You've flown it and I think you liked it, right? I do, yeah yeah and not everybody does like us because it is very open there's not much privacy and they give you a big iPad instead of having like a regular in-flight entertainment screen which also means they take away the iPad well before a land are you land yeah and so

so there's definitely some drawbacks but I actually really like it feels really open and airy the seats are pretty pretty comfortable. There's plenty of space. If you're somebody who likes to kind of move around and have more space for your legs, I feel like, I don't know, I like it. So I'd be totally happy to fly that from Seattle, Japan. I asked about the newer one because they're 787 with suites, looks really nice.

And I was booked on it actually last year at some point, but then changed the way the trip routed. So I did end up getting to fly it. Yeah, yeah. So I was the trip routed. So yeah, I'm getting a flat. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know because I picked their seats. I know it was not the new, because it's too, too by two by two. I think it was. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Right. Which like I said, I, I don't know, I like it. So I'd be happy to fly that one for 95 K. So well done. Well done, Greg, the frequent Mylar and a great job explaining how that all worked together in order to get that booked. All right. So I'll share a story. My own booking story for a trip coming up later this year. Maybe probably. I think it's not totally finished yet, but I booked a trip to Bora Bora tentatively. Now I should lead with the fact that it's tentative because it's not completely booked yet

You'll hear why or how or a little bit more about that in a second And then also gonna lead with the fact that well actually let me say This all started because somebody posted in frequent Mylar insiders that they had just found a bunch of availability on air Td. Newy from the west coast to Tahiti. And it was in January that they had found four seats and specifically they reported that they found four seats and that's what caught my eye because Air Tahiti Nui more often if they release business class space, it's more often two seats, I think, at least in all my past experience looking, I've had a really hard time finding seats for four. And so as soon as they said four seats, my ears kind of perked up when I saw that.

And I said, oh, well, let me go take a look. And as it turns out, we have plans to take our kids out of school for a quarter and homeschool and travel as we homeschool. And so that was something I side note never realized was possible before. And so we've been kind of laying the groundwork for that for a while to do, because we learned from other people that It was possible to disenroll kids for part of a school year and then bring them back in so whether or not that's easy To do or ideal or whatever else is totally you'll know soon

Yeah, well, I want to find out just back up for a minute Freak Mylar insiders in case you don't know is our Facebook group So if you go on Facebook and search for Freak and Mylar Insiders, you can join there. It's free to join. Yeah, very good. So January was during that time period when we planned on having the kids out of school. And so I jumped on it right away and I booked, as soon as I found a day with four seats,

I booked using Alaska miles because it was 60,000 miles, I think each way, yeah, 60,000 each way. So I booked one way anyway, right away with my Alaska miles, the existing Alaska miles we had. And I was pretty excited about that and had to put together some other pieces. I found some hotel availability, but then, then I said, you know, what's Bora Bora like in January? I don't know. Is that a good time to visit? Is it not a good time? Is it one of those places that's good all the time or what? And so I sought out Tim's post on the best time of year to visit all the various regions of the world. He collected information from a variety of sources in order to kind

of mark what the best times are to visit a wide range of places. And I realized that January was not in the best times to visit Bora Bora. And as I researched that a little bit more, I found that it's rainy season and sometimes it's okay, but sometimes it ends up raining all day long. And so that seemed less exciting. And so I said, Oh, bummer four seats, man. I didn't want to give that up, but at the same time I thought, well, I would also be a bummer to spend the time and effort and money to get there and back

and have it all rained out. So as it turned out though, I wasn't willing to give up and I kept searching. And I found that there were four seats available coming back from Tahiti to the West Coast of the U S in November. So I found a date with four seats just in that one direction. And I looked at Aaron, you can get there in January and get back in the November beforehand. Now all I needed was a time machine. Time machine, that's all I needed. And 88 miles per hour in the DeLorean.

Yeah, so I cancelled, or actually I changed. Let me take that back. I didn't cancel. I changed my January booking to, which I think was Los Angeles to Tahiti, changed it to come back from Tahiti to the United States. Now, why did I do a change instead of canceling and rebooking, Craig? To avoid the partner award booking fee, the $12.50 per passenger that you had to pay initially.

If you canceled, you wouldn't have gotten that back and you would have had to pay it again to book, but when you change, you don't have to. That's right, that's Alaska. They charge $12.50 per passenger for a partner booking. So exactly, that's exactly it. I changed instead of canceling. I was about to cancel, figuring all the miles will

get deposited right away. And then I remembered that trick that I've learned from other folks, that, oh, that's going to cost me $12.50 a person. It's going to cost me $50. And essentially, I would have lost. So instead, I changed. And so I changed it to come back. So I now I had a flight coming back from Tahiti to the United States and I found a five night

stay available at the Saint Regis Bora Bora and I just happened to find that and I left a gap between that reservation and the flights home from Tahiti intentionally for a couple reasons. So first of all standard room for five nights with Marriott was ideal because Marriott has a deal where you stay five and pay for four. So you get the cheapest night for free out of that.

So that dropped the average nightly cost of the stay to a more reasonable number of points. Not reasonable, more reasonable. But I think it was $120,000 a night. Slightly less unreasonable? Yeah, yeah. So I mean, I made it come down to around 100 or so ish. So yeah, not not not a great deal, but also a good deal for that particular property, the St. Regis Bora Bora, we've been to before I love it's beautiful.

Film the movie couples retreat there. It's a great place to visit. So I was excited to get that. And there were several five nights days available at the time when I booked this so I was happy to find five nights and happy to find them such that I could leave a few nights gap between the end of the stay and the flights home and the reason for that was twofold number one you have to fly between Bora Bora and Tahiti as we said before and so ideally I don't want to check out of like my perfect hotel stay on the day I have to be in Tahiti to fly home I want't want to check out of like my perfect hotel stay on the day.

I have to be in Tahiti to fly home. I want to fly to Tahiti probably the night before ideally. And I don't want to have to leave the hotel too, too early. So I wanted to leave some time, some buffer zone in before I had to be back in Tahiti. That way, if I found availability to another hotel, I could book another hotel and, or, uh, book some nights on Tahitiiti if if that's what I decided that I would prefer to do so I figured to give me some freedom later on to play with that so I did that book that and then as it turned out actually I ended up booking a couple of

nights we waited for free night certificates to post from our Ritz cards my wife and I both have Ritz cards I actually have two of them and she has one so we would get three free night certificates every year that are good for up to 85,000 points per night. And you can add of course, up to 15,000 points per night on top and the West end Bora Bora, which I think was the Limeridian Bora Bora and they closed it, renovated it, reopened it last year. So it's new ish.

Yeah. So, and that's nearby and, and, and in the past we hotel hopped in Bora Bora Bora It's different than the Maldives in the sense that you can book a private transfer in between hotels and not pay as Exorbitant amount of money is what it would cost you if you wanted a hotel hop in a place like the Maldives So so I know that we could reasonably transfer between the two hotels So I use those 85k certs to book the Westin which by the way was only 70,000 points per night So I didn't max out value in terms of the number of points per night But the property would have been a thousand dollars a night or more I can't remember exactly how much off the top my head

But enough that I felt like I was getting a very good deal with our Ritz free night certificates So that was half the battle. So now I have a hotel and I have flights home all I need now are flights to get to Tahiti. And so of course some people would be like, wait, you don't have a way to Tahiti? What are you doing booking hotels and flights and everything else? You don't even have a way to get there.

But I wanted to tell this story in part because this is definitely how I attack booking trips. I don't wait until I can find both directions and the perfect dates and flights. I wanna book something that's good enough that I can work around and then work to improve it later on. And we've talked about that a lot of times before how I don't magically expect to find four seats in both directions on the same day. It's just not likely. So, so I, I did what I could and booked those first, uh, or booked the four seats home. And so then I set an award alert with an award alert tool. So I used a word tool. And

I set an alert for flights to Tahiti from any of the West Coast airports, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, I included Honolulu because I could, if I had to position to Honolulu relatively cheaply, since if I can find a United availability, I could use 10,000 Turkish miles per person to get us to Honolulu. And so I figured even if I had to position to Honolulu and spend a few days in Hawaii, I could probably stop that. Yeah, not the worst. Not the worst punishment in the world. Yeah, right. So, so I set an alert for all those airports. And a couple weeks later, I got the

award alert from award tool that there were two seats available on Air Tahiti Nui from Los Angeles to Tahiti. And so I said, oh, that's awesome. That's great. I was so excited to find two seats. Now, I should back up and say I set the alert for two seats. And the reason for this, I have a family of four, of course. But I knew it would be next to impossible to find four seats

in business class, or at least four all at one time. So which two, so is it, is it your wife and one of your sons that gets left behind or your two children? How do you decide? Good question. Well, you know, I knew that in the future, so I booked my wife and I, then I'd end up in a situation where I have to book two miners on a flight that seemed unaccompanied.

So that's like, that's going to be messy and hard to do if it's even possible. So, so no, I set the alert for two figuring I'll get two people there and hopefully get the rest of us later on. So I booked for my wife and one of my sons and then another son and I will fly separately if we absolutely have to, hopefully not. But anyway, so the alert came up two seats I snagged those two seats right away now I had the option when I went to book to either use Alaska miles or 60,000 miles one way from the US to Tahiti in business class or use American Airlines miles 80,000 miles per passenger in business class with American Airlines now for some reason I decided to use the American

Airlines miles I know the reason the I decided to use the American Airlines miles. I know the reason. The reason is because my wife already had enough miles in her American Airlines mile or her American Airlines account to book those two seats. And I was nervous that they wouldn't hang around long enough for me to transfer, you know, log in AMX transfer points from AMX to Hawaiian, move them from Hawaii into Alaska and book this thing. If you could even move from Hawaii to Alaska at that point. I think maybe you weren't able to yet when I initially did all this.

But at any rate, I was nervous about that process. And so I said, you know what? Let me just get these locked in right away and make sure that I get these two seats. So I booked with my wife's American Airlines miles. And I really, really regret that now for a number of reasons. Number one, because as Greg mentioned earlier in the the show Alaska offers elite credit for award bookings even

on their partners and so that's a reasonably long flight that if we booked it with American or with rather with Alaska Airlines miles my wife and son would earn Alaska Elite qualifying miles and together with the rest of the trips we have booked this year they would be very very close to elite status with Alaska and of the trips we have booked this year, they would be very, very close to elite status with Alaska, and very likely that we'll end up booking another thing or two and they would end up with a level of elite status with Alaska. So I'm like, man, I would have paid 20,000 miles per person last, and they would have

earned elite credit. Yeah, and because it's been possible here for so long to transfer Amics membership rewards points to Hawaiian and on to Alaska, they're a lot easier to replenish than the American Airlines miles, which now I have found I would have liked to have had a number of times already. So, yeah, that's a bummer.

So now I'm still sitting though, two seats short. There aren't even main cabin economy class seats on the flight that my wife and other son are booked on right now So there's no regular economy. There's no premium economy It's just business class for two hundred and twenty thousand points per passenger and that's that I'm willing to pay. So yeah Yeah, so I don't know we might end up booking premium economy and just going into 80 a few days earlier than You know the my wife and the son she's flying with if we have to like I don't know

We have time to get this worked out and well, then I assume you have alerts still still rolling so that because at any given time, I mean you you may You may find four seats at some point and and it might come not because of those alerts it may come because Someone suddenly, you know finds oh that new route between X and Y is wide open for awards every now and then that kind of thing happens right and then you jump on it and book it and then you just cancel for free that American Airlines award that you booked.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's why I'm not sweating it at this point. Because I figured there's all sorts of things that could happen between now and then, or different routes, like you said, that might open up, or maybe we decide, oh, well, we found availability to get to Tahiti from Japan, and look, there's availability to get to Japan, like, you know, a week before that,

maybe we could fly to Japan first and then go on. So there's all sorts of different possibilities that could yet happen. So I'm not worried about it at all, but this explains in part why I'm so pumped about being able to use Air France miles to book those air Tahiti flights because I Really? I'm not in a position where I feel like I can book the air Tahiti flights yet Because I don't know for sure what day we're gonna get to Tahiti. I know what day I need to be in Bora Bora, but I But maybe it'll change still.

So maybe I'll end up adding some nights at the Conrad Bora Bora beforehand or something if we find a word availability on a different day. So I will be really excited if and when I can book the domestic flights because I would like to have those locked up to have that stuff figured out. But I not enough that I want to risk $450 a person times four. So I'll be very happy to do that with Air France miles once those dates open up. I think you better make sure you've got award alerts on those Air France flights from LA,

because that would be really cool. And sometimes, sometimes, if you have the award search looking for LA to the particular island so that it would be a two hop sometimes there's more award availability that way than just the nonstop. Yeah, you know, truth be told, I didn't even look for that yet. I have looked as recently as today. I double checked again, even though I have the award alert set up just to see and it's like 176,000 points of passenger on the Air France flight. But I didn't actually check all the way to Bora Bora now that they partner up

because it just didn't even pop into mind yet because it's so new. So I will search for that and set an award alert. That's a great tip, a great idea. Yeah, yeah. So that's exciting. And this is fun listening to the story for me because it's so similar too to how I've been booking awards for myself as well. So many of the award booking hijinks we've done in the past years through our challenges that we do each year or through my own personal little challenges, like when I had ANA miles that were expiring. And so I booked a particular United route for a different time period, knowing that there's a good chance that as it got close to the day when I really needed to fly that route,

that the award seat would open up even though it wasn't available and you know, and it worked. Like I was able to actually fly that exact flight that I was looking for that one specific day, one specific time. And so like living through that and learning that things do change. When you do an award search at any given time, that's not even close to the end of the story. That's the beginning of the story. Right. Right, and in the past, I was used to having

to constantly search and search and search and search and search. And I don't mind doing that, but it did mean that I would spend a lot of my free time searching, just seeing what's available and what's available. And award alerts and award search tools have really taken a lot of the stress out of that because I know that there's these tools in the background that are searching for me and I still even still now and then like I said just today I took another look. I'll search behind them to make sure they haven't missed something.

You know, I had I haven't missed something in the way I set up the alerts, I guess. something in the way I set up the alerts, I guess. But yeah, I mean, it's great to have that because I feel some sense of security that if something becomes available, I'll at least find out about it. And if somebody else sets an alert to and they beat me to it, so be it. But I'm at least setting myself up with a pretty decent chance of finding something that'll work. Yeah, no, totally. And it'll I have no doubt it's going to work out. So that's and anyway, that's, anyway, that's all part of why

I love this game. Once you get good at it, you get past that, the earlier stages where it all seems so overwhelming and you start booking a few and they get more comfortable and start learning different tricks and then it all starts falling together and it's so awesome. And there's such a thrill to getting it all when it all falls together and you get all

the pieces and you try telling like a normal person what you did and they don't have any idea. Or, you know, or if somebody asks me, Oh, what are you doing in November? And I'm like, well, I don't know. I might go to Bora Bora. It sounds ridiculous. Well, I got a whole hotel and I have flights home booked and only two seats there.

That doesn't make any sense to the average person. I don't tell that story on a day-to-day basis. Okay, speaking of ridiculous, I'm gonna go into my story. Very good. So my wife's birthday is in August and I wanted to do a special trip for her. August. And I wanted to do a special trip for her. And there was a play that we wanted to see in London. And for various reasons, there was a particular day I had to book that play. So I just booked it. Then I had to figure out how to get us there in time. And then in the meantime, my son said, yeah, he'd like to go to England with us.

So now I need three people because of points and miles. We only fly business class or first class. So economy is not an option here for us. And, but our time window for the outbound, we're flexible on the return, but our time window for the outbound, we're flexible on the return, but our time window for the outbound is very, very limited. We wanted to be able to be in town in Ann Arbor on a Thursday, the play's on Saturday.

Okay. So we could take a late flight out Thursday night, but if there's a connection involved, most flights, like, so for example, for flying out of JFK at like 9 p.m., most flights out of Detroit to JFK would not be late enough for us to spend our day in Ann Arbor, and would not be early enough to get us to JFK in time to have a reasonable chance of making our next flight.

So very, very few opportunities to do that. So yes, we could have flown out Friday night, but then we'd be arriving on Saturday and then go right to a play where we're like totally wiped out. So I didn't like that option. What I liked the best was trying to find a way to fly. I mean, if we could have flown out Thursday night, that would be great. But the next best is to fly out Friday morning. There's a handful of morning flights to London from the East Coast. So most of them are from JFK, but there's some from Boston. And what I found was a, on Friday, a 7.20 AM British Airways

flight to London. I saw, I saw it had a couple of first class award seats available and a couple of business class award seats available. I thought, good, wife and I can fly in first. Our son wouldn't mind flying in business. That's good. But as you know, with British Airways, fuel surcharges on the premium cabins are insane. It's like tpg writing about the everyday preferred card insane How expensive those charges are? It's almost it's approaching. It's a process. It's a almost approaching. So But I have a whole bunch of Cathay Pacific miles from when we we were Going to fly to Singapore using those miles, but

then pandemic and had to cancel it. So I have all these Cathay Pacific miles. Cathay Pacific does not pass along most of those surcharges when booking British Airways. So I logged on to Cathay Pacific. I did a search. I searched for first class and I saw there were two available. I searched for a business class and I thought I saw there were two available. I searched for a business class and I thought I saw there were two available, but in retrospect, it may have been not the 720 a.m.

flight, but the 745 p.m. flight that was available. I'm not sure because here's what happened. I booked two first class seats for my wife and I, and then I went back to run the search for business class to book the seat for my son, and there was nothing. So then I searched again first, now it's still nothing. So I don't know whether they somehow, so a couple of possibilities. One, I just got it wrong. And that's the most likely. It's also, I guess, conceivably possible that British Airways somehow contingently release space.

There's two premium cabin awards available to partners, regardless of whether it's first your business class. I mean, I don't know. Anyway, the two first class seats cost me a hundred thousand Cathay miles each and $190 in surcharges. Yeah, versus I can't remember what it was, like a thousand dollars or something. I mean, it was a lot. It was a lot from when booking through like American or Alaska or British Airways itself. So I'm hunting around like, okay, how do I get my son on this flight? Well, British Airways provides more award space to its own members than it allows partners

to book. So if you remember, British Airways sometimes, I don't feel like I always see this, but sometimes they offer the ability to use more avios for much lower surcharges. So I checked and sure enough, business class was available. Actually, there were quite a few available that way. And what it cost me was 90,000 avios, now this business class, not first class, but still, and $375. So not cheap, but compared to the alternative, that was way better.

And then suddenly I was feeling really good about the fact when earlier this month, Bilt had their, no, sorry, last month in April built had their rent day promotion where you could get a hundred percent transfer bonus to avios British Airways avios. And I went back and forth about whether to do that. I finally decided, yeah, I'm going to pull the trigger and do it completely, you know, do all my bill points that way. And suddenly I'm looking at going, Hey, that was a good move. Cause 90,000 obvious, it costs me 45,000 built points for that.

Um, so, so done. So, okay. So it's a lot of miles, uh, for business class, but for the exact flight, it fit the time period. We want perfectly. I like those daytime flights. You get in, you're tired because you got up early in the morning to catch the flight. It fit the time period we want perfectly. I like those daytime flights. You get in, you're tired because you got up early in the morning to catch the flight. I booked a really cheap JetBlue flight to get us from Detroit to Boston the night before. I booked a Hilton at the

airport and I'm going to use all the Delta Platinum and Hton credit card credits to pay for that Hilton. So those are basically that's going to be basically free. And then, you know, so then we'll fly that daytime flight, get in at night in London, should be able to just fall asleep and have a good night's sleep, theoretically. Now, yeah, nice. That's really nice. You know, those daytime flights are ones that my wife has always asked me, can we get a daytime flight to Europe? And we always ended up booking an overnight flight,

but there's just those few options to London really that are daytime flights, right? It's just a few. And every now and then I see a word availability never when I'm actually planning a trip. It's only when I'm not planning one. But yeah, if you can get one of those, I feel like that's got to be the ideal way to get to Europe, right? You know, because, yeah, yeah, I've done it a few times. I just think it works really well,

you know, it's because when you go to bed, it's still early back home. But as I said, you got up early to make the flight, most likely. And so you're tired anyway, and it kind of is a quick way, I think, to get back to get onto that time zone. Yeah. Great tips there. I mean, between the fact that Cathay Pacific often has British Airways space for much less in surcharges. And so I think you said 100K in first and business class, I think would have been what,

like 61K? Yeah, I can't. I didn't. I'm not sure how much business class, I think would have been what? Like 61 K. Yeah, I can't. I didn't. I'm not sure how much business class was. It was definitely considerably less, maybe 70 K, something like that. I don't know. Yeah. So you pay less in terms of the number of well, decent or reasonable number of miles

if you're booking with Cathay Pacific and significantly less than surcharges. And then, yeah, the tip that you could also alternative play, pay more obvious to pay less than surcharges. That's another one that I think is really easy to forget. And if you're primarily using award search tools, then you're probably just going to see the low availability in terms of the low number of obvious with the really high surcharges. And you might forget that you do have the option to pay some more and obvious and get a good deal because what you reduce in surcharges

is worth enough that you're not getting a bad value for the additional obvious. Yeah, yeah. What I can't figure out is I don't always see that option. I don't know why. You're right, yeah. But luckily I did for this because I don't know. I mean, I could have flown my son a different time.

He didn't actually have to be on our exact flight, but it's really convenient that he is. For the return, it was surprisingly easy. American Airlines, it turns out has tons of, or at least for the time period we're looking at, tons of business class award space available, bookable even by partners to fly from London back to the States, either to Charlotte or Chicago or Philadelphia. Although Charlotte and Chicago are the two that I particularly looked at. I found I was able to book London to Chicago to Detroit for 45,000 Alaska miles per person. 45,000, 45,000.

That's a great deal. That's a great deal. Yeah, I mean, I'm just loving those Alaska miles these days. And now you do have to, anytime if you're flying from England in a premium cabin, they impose these huge ridiculous departure taxes. So it was a total of $380 per person, I think, to just pay for the benefit of being able to fly.

Now, if we'd gone over to Dublin or something and flown from there, there'd be virtually no taxes, and you'd be able to fly, again, $45,000. It would be to fly, for example, Aer Lingus to Chicago and then onward on American, for example. But anyway, so, so that was surprisingly easy. And I found out, I suspect it because I've read about this, but, but I found out later for sure that this happens to be on American Airlines' new flagship suites that they're going to be flying. Their first international route is actually between Chicago and London, so we're going to be on that new. Those are the suites with doors,

so that'll be nice to try that out. And that's cool. So no question, I'm gonna book with my Alaska miles in order to get those flights for only 45,000. The flight from Chicago to Detroit was economy. So fine, it's a short flight, but now I had a question, okay. I have American Airlines elite status right now, but I kind of want to work on getting Alaska elite status instead. So one was like, which frequent flyer number should be on this itinerary? If I put American Airlines on, then we'd have a chance, I guess, of getting upgraded,

or at least being able to pick a preferred seat on the economy leg. It's really short, though. Do we really care that much? Or do I keep my Alaska number on there and earn frequent flyer, not miles, but elite qualifying miles from the flight. I kind of hemmed and hawed about it for a while and finally decided it, I think it was more just easy to just like leave my frequent flyer number because you have to jump through some hoops to not put your frequent flyer number on a booking that you make through Alaska.

And so I decided to do that. And then I went to pick my seats and I was surprised to find, and I don't know if you have you ever seen this before? Um, it let me pick main cabin extra on the American airlines flight for no fee. And so I'm assuming that's because it's like overall a business class booking. That was my, that was what I was going to guess. It's overall business class booking. That was what I was gonna guess. It's overall a business class booking that it's allowing you to meet other people.

But I've just never seen that happen before that I can remember. Usually it's like, yeah, you would get in first class if it was available, but if it's not, you're just an economy and you have no particular rights, you know, special privileges. But it turns out there is no first class on this economy, on this short flight.

So we're in the best seats we could get anyway. And so it was the right choice. There you have it. There you have it. Yeah, that's interesting. I wonder if that it just happened standard with Alaska or if it's because both legs happen to be un-American that they recognize that you're connecting

on a business class itinerary or what? That would make sense if it has something to do with them being together. Because that that's more likely that you know, American would see terms of like there wasn't a business class seat available. It's just there are no business class seats period. So I bet you that's probably because yeah, it's just being classified as a business class. Yeah. So probably that's what it, that's what it is. But still nonetheless, interesting and, and you know, cool that you were able to get that without even having to worry about jumping

through hoops to get an American airlines number on there. The other thing I was going to say is I don't know how much main cabin extra costs from Chicago to Detroit, but it's probably not a lot anyway. If you were, I mean, I don't know, but I can't imagine that it is. It wouldn't be worth paying for even if it's such a short flight. It's like a 40 minute flight. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, so I wouldn't pay for it. But I certainly wouldn't lose out on the chance to earn Alaska elite credit for, I mean, Kevin extra seat. Right, yeah, no, totally. And that is probably why I picked that for real.

So yeah, and so I was stunned. When I booked the play, knowing that I'd have a bit of a challenge in booking the flights. I just assumed that I would do my searches and then set up a word alerts because the chance of getting two people even on that with with such constrained timeline, at least on the outbound, uh, just seemed impossible, but it was there. So very lucky. Well, but when a plan comes together, that's exciting.

Very good. All right, so those are just a few award booking stories from our recent award bookings and upcoming travels for the year. And there's probably plenty more where those came from. So maybe we'll spend another day sometime talking about other award booking adventures of ours. But for now, since we're kind of running low on time, we're going to go to this week's

question of the week. So this week's question of the week came in in our Facebook group. And so Ryan asks, I think an interesting question. Plenty of people responded. So other folks found it interesting too. We'll see what you think. Ryan asks, one thing I don't see talked about very much is why people choose to travel, play this game, keep track of all the points, currencies and cards instead of just getting all the cash back possible. I have my own reasons why I value travel more, but I'm curious about the group. What's the best thing you've been able to do with miles and points not in cents per point value, but in personal value that you wouldn't have been able to do

otherwise. So I'm curious, Greg, like, well, why do you, why do you earn the miles? We've talked lots of times before about how when you have a lot of miles, eventually there comes a point where you maybe focus more on cash back because adding additional mile isn't necessarily worth it. But why do you chase the miles in the first place? And what have you, what's one thing that you got out of it that you're like, that's, that's the something I really value out of this game? Yeah.

Well, just sort of in general, as opposed to one specific thing, in general, by chasing the miles instead of the cash back, it frees you to be able to do things that you would have never done if you had to pay cash. So even if you take away the fact that like we learn how to get so much more value out of points and miles than the cash equivalent, you take that away and just say, well, I would never be willing to pay, you know, $3,000

a night for that fancy hotel, but I can, I have points that I earned. Like, it's easier to say that, but, and then you can book these things that you just never dreamed of doing. But a big part of why that's possible is because you are getting outsized value. You know, it's not unusual to use sort of what would be the equivalent of $500 cash back to book a 2000, $3,000 hotel room or a $10,000 flight for the equivalent of, you know, $1,000 in cash back. And so, you know, it's not that it gives us,

if you play it that way, it's not that it gives us if you play it that way, it's not that you're necessarily getting more travel than you could have done with with cash back, but you're certainly getting a level of experience that you'd never get otherwise. But the the the if you're going to have me pinpoint one particular experience that would have never ever happened with Cashback, it'd be when my wife and I spent a week on Richard Branson's Necker Island.

We used entirely points earned from playing the game to book a week on Necker Island. Got to hang out with Richard Branson, made some good friends, just had the best time. And it's an experience of a lifetime. And seriously, like it just never would have, you know, I would have never come close to doing anything like that had it not been for Points and Miles. Yeah, you know, and that's such a good example because I think they used to sell those celebration weeks.

I don't know if they still do. And it was something crazy, like $30,000 for a week or something. At the time I went, yeah, they've gone up since then. But yeah, $30,000 for a week. I can imagine. Yeah, and so even if you had the extra $30,000, like the disposable $30,000, it's probably not something

that most of us would consider doing with that money, right? I mean, it would feel irresponsible to part with $30,000 for something that seems like you shouldn't spend that much money on it, right? But when you're able to kind of generate these miles and points, and you know, if you get into this and go after the hobby a lot,

it's a lot easier to accumulate the miles to do wild and ridiculous stuff like that than it is to generate the extra $30,000 for most people, right? I mean, that's not something that most people have access to generate over the course of a year. You'd have to really be thinking outside the box for most people to come up with an extra 30 grand of found money. But you can in a year come up with the miles and points to have a $30,000 experience like year after year too, potentially,

if you play the game. I mean, exactly. I mean, I mean, you know, Nick and I and others that we know that that that do the same thing. I mean, just get used to flying, not just international business class like we talked about in the show, but we'll fly international first class in these incredible suites. We'll stay at over water bungalows and in the Maldives or wherever,

and just have really sort of unbelievable life, really. But it becomes something that you get to do whenever you have the free time to do it if you have enough points and miles and so Yeah, it's the best. It's the best hobby in the world. Yeah. Yeah No, it is it is and it opens destinations and places that I wouldn't have dreamed of, you know Like there are places that I again, you know I dreamed I'd see Rome and I'd see Paris and like, you know, a couple of places like that, but I never would have dreamed that I would see new a little Island in the Pacific that I went to one of our challenges like that.

At first, I didn't even know it existed. Forget about dream about going there or something like Bora Bora. I would have seen that in a movie on a postcard, whatever else, and never realistically even considered it because it just wouldn't have been something that would have seemed like a realistic thing for me to do. And Miles and points has made all of those things really accessible and it makes it possible to say, Oh, there's some really interesting thing in this far flung. I want to go to the Hamptons of Thailand and stay at the standard and a trendy place that I don't belong at.

I can do that. And so it's a lot of fun, like you said. So oh my gosh do that. Yes. You know, and so it's, it's a lot of fun, like you said, so Oh, my gosh. Yeah, yeah. And and and beyond like going to remote place also, just going places like doing ridiculous things like earlier in the spring. My wife said, Hey, I've got like four days, you want to do a long weekend somewhere? How about London? And like, sure. We, do you want to do a long weekend somewhere? How about London?

And like, sure. And so we flew to London for the weekend, you know, and it's just something that most people who, who don't collect points and miles, I mean, unless you're very rich, would, you must feel, wouldn't, you know, consider doing, but for us, it's like, I mean, right, right. Well, most people that have become very rich

have become very rich by not, you know, like being kind of like, you know, reckless with their money and being like, let's take a long weekend in London. But you can do that when you when you collect enough miles and plans. It's not cost prohibitive anymore. And you lose some of that guilt. Now, you know, all that said, there's probably a couple of people out there that are like, yeah, but a lot of these miles and points you're earning could be cashed in for money.

And so there is still a cash cost. It's not really free. And you're absolutely right. And it's not, it's not free. And certainly you could cash in a lot of those points for actual cash. So there's definitely some trade off there and everybody's going to draw their line in a different place on that. But it's certainly been a lot of fun and opened up a lot more of the world and experiences that I think neither of us would have ever dreamed of. So I think that's part of the fun and the thrill of the hunt and the chase. We enjoy kind of eking value out of stuff and looking for those opportunities. So here's to looking for lots more. Here's to that. All right. It's time for the end. So if you've enjoyed today's 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 subscribe to join our email list, follow us on all the various social media, join our frequentmiler insiders, Facebook group, and wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to leave us a like or a thumbs up or a comment. We always appreciate that. If you have a piece of feedback that you'd like to be considered for a future giant mailbag or a question of the week, you can send that to send it to mailbag at frequentmiler.com. Bye everybody.