Frequent Miler on the Air - Best Bonuses for Huge Spend | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep356 | 5-1-26

Episode Date: May 1, 2026

In today's episode, we'll talk about how Chase Point Boost is going bust, how Avianca sucks some life out of LifeMiles, and rewards for spending BIG.Giant Mailbag(01:16) - Mike says "I have a subscription to Award Wallet Plus, and it has a “Merchant Category Lookup Tool,” where you can enter a merchant name and it will give the related merchant category name..."Find our Wells Fargo Journeys Forward episode 354 here(05:50) - Visit frequentmiler.com/awardwallet hereUpgrade to AwardWallet Plus for 6 months (one time upgrade only): Click the down arrow next to your name within AwardWallet, and click “Upgrade Using a Coupon”, then enter: FrequentMiler (this will only work for those who have never upgraded before)Card News(07:18) - Royal Caribbean launches two new credit cards: Royal One and Royal One PlusCrazy Thing(10:20) - Finnair 18 month expirationMattress Running the Numbers(17:37) - Buy Marriott Points for as low as 0.89 cents eachBonvoyed(21:33) - Chase Points Boost goes BustRead more about Chase Points Boost going bust hereRead more about Chase reducing redemption rates here(35:46) - Air Canada Aeroplan devaluationLearn more about Aeroplan devaluing their award chart here(38:58) - Avianca LifeMiles changesAwards, Points, and More(45:31) - Wells Fargo adds transfer partner: Cathay Pacific (Autograph, Autograph Journey)(47:16) - See our Instant Gift Card Deals post hereMain Event: Best Bonuses for Huge Spend(49:47) - Today we'll focus on cards that earn big rewards after really big spend ($50K or more)(52:24) - Bilt cards $50K: Platinum status(56:49) - Marriott Bonvoy® Brilliant® American Express® Card $60K(1:02:15) - Atmos™ Rewards Summit Visa Infinite® Card $60K (100K Companion cert)(1:09:00) - Chase Sapphire Reserve® Card $75K(1:15:17) - Sapphire Reserve for Business℠ Card $120K:(1:17:13) - The Business Platinum Card® from American Express $250K(1:23:43) - Aeroplan® Credit Card $1M: Free award companion for the rest of the calendar year and all of next year with $1 Million spendSubscribe and FollowVisit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media.Music Credit – “Ocean Deep” by Annie YoderMentioned in this episode:Frequent Miler Beginner's Guidehttps://frequentmiler.com/start-here/Check out all of our other travel podcasts from around the worldThis podcast is part of Voyascape, a podcast network that brings together the world's best travel podcasts. You can find all of our podcasts from around the world at Voyascape.com. If you are interested in advertising or sponsored content on any of our shows you can find out more at the link below.Voyascape Podcast Network

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world atvoyescape.com. On today's show, Chase Point Boost is going bust. Avianca sucks the life out of life miles. And we discuss rewards for spending big. Frequent miler on the air starts now. Today's main event, best bonuses for huge spend. When Chase, refreshed the Sapphire Reserve card. They introduced a bonus for spending $75,000 within a calendar year. It's actually a set of bonuses, which we'll discuss later in the show, but that got me thinking, you know, there are other cards that offer similar things. And Amex Business Platon, for example, introduced a new even much bigger spend bonus. And so we're going to look at those type of really big

spend bonuses, discuss them, come up with our ideas of which ones we think are best and worth pursuing. Absolutely. If you want to jump ahead to that or you want to come back to something later on, don't forget you'll always find the timestamps in the show notes. Just expand the description box to find those and jump around. And wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to give this a thumbs up, a like, leave us a review.

We always appreciate your feedback on the show. Now let's drag out this week's Giant Mailback. Today's giant mail comes from Mike, who wrote in response to our show, Wells Fargo Journeys Forward, which was episode 354. In that show, we talked about the Wells Fargo Attune card, which has a massive number of categories in which it earns 4% back. And we kind of discussed how that's great, but also really difficult to work with. So Mike is proposing a solution here. Mike says, you two spent some time discussing. merchant category codes suggesting a trial charge to see if it works for the elevated card

multipliers. This is particularly relevant for that 4X card, the Wells Fargo-Atoon card. I have a subscription to a WardWallet Plus, and it has a merchant category lookup tool where you can enter a merchant name and it will give the related merchant category name. It's not always definitive, as you can see below. And he gave an example where a single merchant showed up with multiple categories in the tool. There's also merchant category code reverse lookup in beta where you can put in the credit card, the bonus category, and then it will give you the eligible vendors for that.

This is not as reliable as the first tool, but it's an interesting start. So what do you think? So Mike's proposing a tool to use to basically find out where you can earn, 4x on that attune cart. Yeah, I mean, it's a great suggestion and sounds like a terrific resource to check out. It's probably worth looking. And for merchants that are listed there, that's going to be super helpful. I think, you know, it's going to vary in its usefulness.

If you're somebody who's looking at like a local place, the chances of it being in there feels slim to me. But I guess if you're in a big city, maybe there are enough other people that have added it too. But good to add your data points to that. Dr. Credit used to have something similar. They called it the payments workshop. I think it's just hard to keep it up to date because things change.

You know, maybe a business sells to another entity or whatever. And I don't know how they handle changing that stuff. But this does seem like it'd be a really good start to check it out and see how it has coded for other folks before. So I would certainly use that tool if I had the attune card for a good idea as to how something is going to code probably. Yeah. I have award wallet and I use it. I took a look at this. I'm pretty sure that the way they do this is that a lot of their members add their credit card logins to award wallet so that award wallet can track their points within, you know, Chase Ultimate Awards, Amix membership rewards and so on.

And so the tool can also see what they're spending and where their earning bonuses on. So I think it uses that kind of live data. The downside is that it is limited to what their members who have allowed access to those accounts are actually doing in real life. And so, for example, when I looked up bookshops, it actually showed me a list of cards that would get earned better than one X at bookstores. But it didn't show the attune card. And the reason I think is because maybe nobody is using the attune card who has allowed award wallet to look at their Wells Fargo account. So that's my guess of what's happening.

And, you know, but still, there is a wealth of data there. And, you know, assuming I'm right about how it's populated, I think it's kept up to date automatically, which is great. There are some quirkiness things to it. So, for example, you can pick a card to see, you can pick a credit card and a category to see, like, what vendors are known to work with that category. The problem is the list of credit cards is not alphabetical, at least at the time of this recording. And so finding any given card is difficult. Anyway, so there's some weirdnesses like that.

But WordWallet, of course, has a lot more great benefits. reason I use it is more to keep track of points and free night certificates, companion tickets, things like that. So it alerts me when those things are about to expire. I can make sure I can use them. That's like the main reason I love using award wallet. If you're interested in award wallet yourself, check out frequent myler.com forward slash award wallet. There you'll find a link to sign up and you'll also find a code, which even if you're an existing award wallet, customer, you can get six months of a word wallet plus, which is the paid version for free.

As long as you've never done one of these free upgrades before, then you could put in our code frequent miler, all one word, and get that upgrade for six months. Very cool. Very cool. One other caveat that I realized that came to mind while you were talking is that you should, if you're not familiar with this, you should know that sometimes the merchant in category code can be different between Visa and MasterCard. So just because you saw a merchant coded under one particular category code, make sure you know that which network your card is running on versus what's been reported because sometimes there's differences there. And there can even sometimes be differences between issuers of a card also.

I have this weird quirk where my local Walmart shows up as grocery when Chase offers a temporary grocery bonus of some sort. And so if they offer a couple extra points per dollar for grocery, it triggers that. but it doesn't trigger grocery on other cards that I have. Yeah. I have grocery bonuses. So I don't know why that's the case. But there are quirks is my point anyway with the way that these things get applied sometimes.

So it is a little complicated. Yeah. All right. Let's move forward to card news. In card news this week, Royal Caribbean has launched two new credit cards, the Royal One card and the Royal One Plus card. Are you excited about that, Greg? No, you know I'm not a cruiser.

However, it does have me wondering. is this a path towards free cruising? We talked on a recent episode about all the ways to get free cruises in 2026, and a lot of it had to do with getting status with one program and then matching over to others. So when I see new credit cards with a cruise program, I'm thinking, oh, they probably give you a way to get high-level elite status with that cruise line. and so therefore maybe you can match to others and get free cruises. Is that the case? Nope. Unfortunately, no, none of that.

I love the fact that you think about this, though, because I think that this really is maybe a lesson that we can all take out of this. Greg has no interest in cruising whatsoever, but he has so much interest in the game that he put that together and thought, oh, I wonder if there's a way to play this to make this interesting. And I think that, you know, when you enjoy playing the game, sometimes you can take yourself out of your box and be like, oh, well, there's other people, though, that might be interested in this. And I think that's not

always natural for people to imagine the other circumstances that, you know, that people with a different set of interests have. But I love that about you. So, no, unfortunately, that is not, not something that got added here. These cards might be of interest if you want to book a cruise and you want a discount. The points can be used on Royal Caribbean, Celebrity, or Silver Sea. And so the no annual fee card at the time that we're recording this has an intro bonus of, essentially $450 off of a cruise. It's 45,000 points. They're worth $450. After 2K spend in the first few months, the card with a $99 annual fee, it's essentially $700 after $3K spends. So they're decent bonuses if you want to book a Royal Caribbean cruise. They're

pretty light on benefits. I mean, there's some priority boarding. A couple of things added on the $99 card. Nothing super exciting. And unfortunately, you know, again, to your question, there was no accelerated path towards status. I hoped that maybe they would have that in there too. That was my first thought too. I was like, is there going to be an easy path to, you know, crown and anchor, what is it, Emerald status, which normally requires 55 points we talked about recently.

But nope, none of that. But I guess on the flip side, they're kind of branding these now in a way that's not Royal Caribbean branded. I mean, we're saying Royal Caribbean has these new cards out, but the new cards have the logo for all three cruises. And I think they kind of intentionally called them the Royal One and Royal One Plus

and took the word Caribbean out of there so that people think of them more broadly in the sense of those three cruise lines. But I mean, they're not, again, not wildly exciting. But if you're going to book a cruise and you'd like a discount and you're somebody who doesn't mind applying for a new card that's going to count against 524 and all the rest of that, I mean, there's a lot of kaffiats there. But maybe they're of interest to some folks.

All right, that wraps up card news. Let's move on to what crazy thing? What crazy thing did Finn Air do this week? This is nuts. It is. We heard of this from our frequent Miler Insiders, Facebook. group where a participant wrote in saying that he lost all of his finare auvios because of the following. He had created his finare account. You know, let's say it doesn't matter. He had created

his finare account and less than 18 months later, he moved avios into that account. And then when his account became 18 months old, all those avios expired and he couldn't get them back. So he had just parked some of his points in that account and can't get them back. Now, he had moved them in from, I think it was British Airways. It's a known thing that moving avios from like one program to another where the points are in Navajo does not reset your activity counter, but this is just so odd because he's, he's never had a chance to have activity. He, like, created the count, and, you know, you would think that once the first time you

get points, they would be good for at least 18 months. So Finare has a policy that points expire after 18 months of inactivity. Fine. but who would think that they would expire within a couple months or even less than a month if you've had an account if you if you set up your account more than like 18 months ago yeah yeah so to be to be clear because i feel like this could be confusing if you if you don't know like if you haven't already seen it like gregg and i it could be confusing so let's let's create the example scenario that this reader created an account and 17 months

after creating an account was the first time they'd done anything with it. They moved AVIOS from British Airways to Finair. So it's the first time they've ever had Avisoos in their account. And a month later, the Avisos expired because it had been 18 months since they created the account. So again, I mean, I know that's what Greg just said, but I feel like it could be very easy to have misheard that and thought, you know, oh, yeah, they expire after 18 months of inactivity. But in this case, they were accounting activity from the day he created the account because he never earned any Aubios or transferred directly. to Finair, instead he transferred from British Airways to Finair. And so it expired based on the

account creation of the Finare account. Who would ever expect that? Right, right. Totally insane. So I started doing some research because when I first read this, I thought, that can't be right. They wouldn't do that too. No way. Right. I had the same thought. Yeah, then I found it happened to a lot of people. People reported it through Reddit and there was a thread on a blog post about it. And the The situation, some people who had their accounts open more than 18 months found that their points expired like days later after transferring them in. And a friend reached out to me and told me what's happening is that, yeah, you move in points from, let's say, from British Airways to Finare.

and if your account is more than 18 months old without any activity, your points expire sort of immediately, but what they really do is they process, they always process the expiry at the end of the calendar month. So it depends when you transfer your points in as how long they would last before they go poof. And so, you know, because one person said that there's expired 10 days after transferring in. So people started thinking, oh, 10 days is the key. No, that's not it. They just probably transferred in on the 20th of the month, for example, right? Right. So anyway, it's really easy to avoid losing your points if you know about this problem, because all you have to do is make sure you keep your points in another AVOS account like British Airways,

where you occasionally have activity. There are the expiry is 36 months. So you could just, for example, make sure to transfer in a thousand points from a transferable points program once every 36 months to keep your points alive. And so don't move your points into Finare

until you need them. So if you're about to book a Finare Award booking, you know, transfer in the points to Finare, but just make sure you make that booking and finalize that booking before the end of the month that you transferred things in. Then you'll be fine. And that booking should then count as activity.

So if you have a few points left over, you know, in the Finare account for some reason, they should be okay. But I would still say, I think I would just move them right back to British Airways personally or to Qatar or whatever is your favorite obvious program that doesn't have this horrible rule. The other thing is if you end up to the way, up having to cancel your Finair booking and you get points back, I would also, as soon as you get the points back, move them to British Airways, because I don't know. And it probably won't be clear to you either, whether the activity still counts as activity when those points come back.

It might just erase the activity because you've undone the activity that you started by booking the award. Wouldn't a simple solution there be to just transfer a thousand from, if you've got Capital One miles, transfer a thousand miles from Capital One to Finair because Finair is a transfer partner of Capital One. Maybe. I chatted with a Finair agent who doesn't think that would be valid as activity, but it probably is valid as activity. I just don't know for sure. So, you know, personally, I just think it's safer to work with a program that we understand better. And you know, just don't use the Finare account itself as the source of where you keep and hold your points, I think is better. And, you know, the reason you can move points around is all the programs that do obvious allow you to move points back and forth.

We've done a how to on how to do that. And, you know, even if you understand what resets the clock and everything, it hasn't, Finare has an 18 month clock. Why not go with a 36 month clock? Yeah, yeah, great point. Great point there. And if you're new, relatively new to this, this is like one of the first shows you've listened to. Just, it's worth probably a mention that Avios are very unique in the ability to move them

from one airline to another. In most cases, you cannot transfer miles from one airline program to another airline program. You might build a book partner airlines, but you can't necessarily move them to another airline. Obvious are the unique exception, really, in that way, or one of the most unique exceptions anyway. All right. So that's the crazy thing. Next up, mattress running the numbers. Mariah Bonvoy has points on sale for as low as 0.89 cents per point. Should I go buying points? Maybe. Probably not, but maybe. So they are targeting people. You have to log in to your account and you'll see what your bonus is, but for some people, they're getting a 40% bonus on points purchased, and that works out to 0.89 cents per point. The reasonable redemption value we calculated

in March for Marriott points is 0.77. That means that's the median or the middle point value you can expect to get when redeeming Marriott points for a Marriott stay. That is, that is, so that means that on average, you can expect to get less than 0.89 cents per point value from your Marriott points. So buying them sounds stupid. But if you look at the 75th and 90th percentile, at the 75th percentile, you get 0.91 cents per point value. At the 90th percentile, we're seeing 1.1 cents per point value. And it does go up from there. So what does that mean? It means that if you're good at cherry picking the more valuable award stays, there are definitely opportunities to get significantly more than 0.89 cents per point value from your points. But you need to know

that's possible, likely, maybe have an exact plan in place for how you're going to use them before you buy these points. I wouldn't buy them with no plan at all. That'd be crazy. No, I only buy them if I had a near-term valuable use in my, So you really just need to have that. And there are times I just recently took a screenshot that I think I forgot to share to Instagram, but I meant to share it to Instagram and say, who says you can't take good value out of Marriott points? Because I made a booking that was more than one cent per point.

So in that case, if I were low on points, then obviously it would make sense to buy them at 0.89 overpaying the cash rate. But those situations are few and far between. So don't do it speculatively. Only do it if you've got a booking you want to make. And you know you're going to get good. value and that's the booking you want. And, you know, it's tricky. You know, well, we give you these reasonable redemption values, but it is a little tricky. You might have to get into some math,

particularly if it's close in terms of considering, okay, well, how much will the taxes be if I book it? Can I go through a shopping portal and what kind of a return can I get to actually figure out what the best deal is? So, you know, if it's really close to 0.89 cents, then there may be some more complicated math to figure out which is better. Or maybe you just prefer having the points in order to make it simple. Who knows? That'll be a calculation you'll have to do. Yeah. Also, don't forget, Mary, it does have Fifth Night Free-ish awards. And I say yes, because it's really the price of the Fifth Night is taken off. And that might be, or no, price of the lowest price night of your five nights that's removed. And so if there's a lot of variability, it might be

not as good as Fifth Night Free. But, you know, that can certainly improve the value of a redemption. So it really just depends what you're doing. I've already booked a stay for after Christmas next year with Marriott Point, a five-night stay at a place that it used to be a preferred hotel. I actually wrote about this hotel on the blog. It's called the Seagate Inn in Delray Beach, Florida, that used to be bookable with choice points as a preferred hotel, and it's now bookable through Marriott. So we'll see how that goes, but I'm hoping that we'll have a good stay there.

And it was certainly very, very high value for points doing that. There you go. Absolutely. That's the perfect type of example where you can really do well with this type of sale. But you do need to be that strategic about it. All right. Next up, let's talk about being Bonvoid. This week, Chase has bonvoid us and not through Marriott.

Chase has bonvoid us because Chase points boosts have gone bust. What's that all about? Yeah. So when Chase refreshed the Sapphire Reserve card, they at the same time eliminated fixed point uplifts on their cards. What I mean by that is before this refresh, the Sapphire Reserve card would get 1.5 cents per point value for all travel book through Chase Sultimate Awards or Chase Travel. and other cards like the Saffra preferred and the ink business preferred would get 1.25 cents. And they replace that whole scheme with something called points boosts where you actually only get one cent per point value when redeeming through chase travel except in certain circumstances. And those circumstances are when booking certain hotels and when booking certain flights.

there's no more, you know, boosted value for cruises or other travel-ish things that you can book through Chase. And they made it seem appealing at the time because they showed, especially for Sapphire Reserve card holders, opportunities to get better than 1.5 cents per point value. That was kind of the selling point. It's like, yeah, you're not going to get 1.5 everywhere, but occasionally you'll get, you know, as much. is two cents per point value. And so, you know, depending on your perspective on all this, that was either good or bad, but it at least was a, you know, if you could use those two cent per point redemptions, obviously a good thing in those in those situations. Anyway, things are

looking bleak on that whole front now. You know, they, we've talked before about how they started off with the hotels. They started off saying all of the edit hotels, which is the Chase's luxury hotel collection, bookable if you have a Saffir reserve card, that they started off saying all of the edit hotels would be boosted at two cents per point. And at that time we, and on this initial launch, we also saw that there were some other hotels boosted that were not the edit and those were boost at 1.75. So both of those were decent, you know, boost rates. But then a few months later, all of a sudden, we started seeing some of the edit hotels boosted at only 1.65, which was a pretty big devaluation then. And when I looked at it in December, I was seeing, for a couple

cities I looked at, roughly half were getting 2.0 and half were getting 1.65 of the edit. Things, things have changed quite a bit. So first, the easier story to tell is about the non-edit hotel. So remember I said before they were all boosted at 1.75. That is, there's a random collection of hotels that are boosted. All the boosted ones were boosted at that right. Yes. All the ones that were boosted, but not the edit, were 1.75 originally.

But now I'm seeing a whole range of boost from as high as 2.0. that's really rare, but I do see that now. But they started only 1.15. There's 1.15, 1.25, 1.5, 1.5, 1.5. So, you know, you're looking at some of these going, wow, you know, I could see why they didn't lead with this because people were losing their 1.5 everywhere. And so they wanted to show better numbers. And now we were seeing significantly worse numbers. That's for not the edit.

Now, what's the situation with the edit? Right now, we're seeing. 1.65, 2.0, and a handful of 2.5 cents per point redemptions. We mentioned on a previous show the 2.5 that they just introduced as a promotion, a set of 11 hotels, I think it was, at 2.5. Great. The bad news was, it looks like they had drastically decreased the number of 2.0 options at the same time. The tool provider who creates the tool edit maxer, I think it's called, which is a map to let you see all the edit hotels on a map, reached out because what they found was that before April 23rd, they were seeing 33% of the edit hotels were boosted at 2.0,

which is less than I saw in December, by the way. But after April 23rd, they were only seeing 11%. that's a huge drop all of a sudden. And that's around the time, you know, when Chase introduced this 2.5 for a handful of hotels. So it almost seems like they were like, hey, look over here while we do some bad stuff over here, right? Right. But weirdly, a week later, the same tool provider reached out to say, well, something weird's happening. Now I'm seeing 30% at 2.0 or 2.5, you know. So it seems like maybe the publicity around the drop, cause them to go back, but I'm not sure.

I don't know what's going on here because let me tell you about some analysis I did myself. Back in December, I'd looked at the edit hotels in New York and London. And I picked those because those are two cities where there are a lot of the edit hotels. And at that time in December, I found 47% were boosted at 2.0. Okay. Now, on April 28th, which is the day after the Edit Maxer people said the numbers have gone back up to 30%. I did an analysis and I found New York and London only 13% of the hotels were at 2.0 or one of them was 2.5. And I checked again this morning as we're recording this on April 30th. Still that way. It's still only around 13%. I mean, I didn't do that. the math, but I saw how few the edit hotels were there was similar to when I looked a few days ago. So anyway, I have no idea what's going on. All I know is clearly the number of hotels that are in the edit that are boosted at 2.0 or above is much, much lower than we saw last year. And there's

much more variability now, and you're going to have to bust out a calculator to figure out what you're getting, which is really the annoying part. I was just actually this morning looking at hotels in Zurich, and I saw the park high at was at the 1.15, and I was like, that's not even a boost. And, you know, like, that's not even considering the fact that I could probably find it cheaper somewhere else or book it with Rove Miles or, you know, so it doesn't really even feel like I'm getting 1.15 cents per point. So I, so I didn't book that property, obviously. And that wasn't part of the edit. That was a non-edit hotel, but it's definitely a bummer. And it's a bummer that it varies and that I've noticed anecdotally that properties have like been added in that weren't boosted before. And I'm

sure that means also that some that have been boosted probably drop out and aren't boosted at some point. And so it's, it's become very unpredictable. And I, I hate that about it that you have to varies so much and that you have to calculate it. And then in a lot of cases, the value is just lower than it was. And that's a bummer. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's just hotels. We haven't talked flights yet. But before we do, I just want to mention a side thing. The Points Path Chrome plugin that, well, it's Chrome and other browsers plug-in that we use to show us the point prices in Google flights.

It now has a feature. And unfortunately, I don't know off the top of my head if that feature is only for founding members or also all pro members. I don't think it's base free members get this. but where when you're browsing Chase Travel for flights and hotels, it calculates the boost for you and shows a little bubble of what the boost is. And so that's really helpful. It made my job in checking New York and London so much easier because it showed that. So thank you to Points Path for that.

All right, flights, when Points Booth boost first appeared and talking now about the points boost for the Sapphire Reserve cards, what we were seeing at the time was, oh, let me, let me, preface this. When you're booking flights through Chase travel, there's no guarantee that any of them will be boosted, but some of them will be boosted according to whatever logic Chase uses. It seems to be concentrated within certain airlines. Originally when I looked, for example, it seemed like almost all United flights were boosted, and there was a handful of like Air Canada and I can't remember what else. But over time, that's changed. Like people have reported American Airlines appearing on there, but most recently when I looked, I didn't

see any American Airlines, but I saw lots of Southwest, very little United, a lot of jet blue and even Alaska was on there, some Air Canada and so on. So anyway, so which flights get boosted varies over time. But what I did see at the time of original launch of this new capability was that if a flight was boosted, the economy flight would be boosted by 1.5. Economy plus slash premium economy would be boosted at 1.75 and business and first class would be boosted at two, two cents per point. And that seemed great because the prices mostly matched what I'd see in Google flights. And so it was a really good way to get good point value when we deeming, especially for business in first class. Now, of course, you're not going to be surprised to

hear that I'm not seeing the same patterns anymore. For one thing, it's not at all predictable what you're going to get. And second of all, the rates are very a lot. So even within one airline and one class of service. So for British Airways flight, for example, I saw one case where economy was boosted, I think it was 1.5, and another case where it was boosted 1.15, so barely boosted at all. I saw some boosts at 1.3. I saw some boosts at 1.75, some at 2.0. The latter, really rare. I didn't see any 2.0 for domestic, even first class flights, but I did see some 2.0 for international business or international first class, which of course is extraordinarily expensive. So it kind of makes sense. There's probably some, you know, premium to those that Chase is

earning more on those bookings so they can afford to give us more value for our points. So that's what we're seeing now. There's still value to be had, but it's harder to find. Yeah, that's a big time bummer. You know, I think it just makes the whole refresh a little bit more disappointing that, you know, the loss of the 1.5 cents per point gets highlighted all the more. And it's kind of interesting because I think, well, at least I can speak for myself. I had rarely used the 1.5 cents per point redemptions before, but I'm leaning more in the direction where I would maybe now, although I definitely don't want less than 1.5 cents. And even the 1.5, I'm not wildly excited about.

1.75 and 2, I was like, okay, well, maybe I can, I can get into that a little bit, but there's just not been enough opportunities and it's too variable. And I hate having to log in and search over and over again. So, so I find that to be annoying, although I suppose that Chase, that Edit Maxer site, rather not Chase, but the Edit Maxer site could reduce the path there and the pain point there. So I will probably just have to get into using that tool more. Yeah. Last thing. A lot of of us who had our cards before a certain date, I don't remember the exact date, probably have points that are grandfathered in to that 1.5 cents per point redemption through a certain date in 2027, I think it is. So, you know, if you're saying, wait, I'm still getting 1.5, that's because

of that grandfathered in capability, not because of what the current boosts are probably. Yeah, yeah. All right. So bummer there. Chase's Bonvoy to. points boost, you'll have to take a look. And maybe now and then you'll find a good deal. I did see some good deals recently. There was a specific hotel I was looking for. And of course, the hotel I want is not boosted, but a bunch of hotels nearby are. So if I wanted one of those other ones, there's a couple that were boosted at two cents. That would be nice if that's what I was looking for. But unfortunately, it's not in my case. Yeah, I mean, you know, when it works, it can be really good. You do have to watch out for sometimes the edit has like, very.

vastly inflated prices, but not always. And so there are situations where you can get 1.75 or a 2.0 boost. And, well, I shouldn't say 1.7. You can get a, you know, there are situations where you could still get that 2.0 or even 2.5 boost and where the number of points you'd spend per night may be significantly less than what you'd pay like in points by transferring your chase points to Hyatt, for example, in booking through Hyatt. Or similar to what you'd get booking through Hyatt, but you'd get to book.

other hotels. You get to book Four Seasons or St. Regis, whatever, other stuff is available. Yeah, absolutely. So, it's worth looking. It's just disappointing that it's so hard to look these days. All right, another Bonvoid news, Air Canada Aeroplane

has increased award prices on many of their routes. They've devalued the award chart some. Now, the headline that was written, I think, by Stephen here on this was, but it could be worse. So it's not, world's worst devaluation ever unless you're looking to fly from the Atlantic Zone to the Pacific

Zone and business class on Air Canada or a select partner, in which case it's awful because that particular award in a specific distance category, I think it's 7,500 to 11,000 miles, goes up from 60,000 miles one way to 100,000 miles one way. That's an awful increase. But most of the other increases were 5 to 10,000 miles each way. First class sees slightly more significant, increases. I'm pretty bummed about that, particularly between North America and Europe, because I have a situation where I'm booked on Laftonza in business class where I was hoping first class might open up later on and I could transfer in the miles to upgrade to first class. And now if I want to do that, it's going to cost an additional 10 or 20,000 miles per passenger.

So that's disappointing, unfortunately. But most of the increases were more like in the 5 to 10,000 mile range. So most of them were relatively moderate. And again, I say most because there are some that went up by more. There are a couple of decreases, but the decreases are almost insignificant. They're typically like 2,500 miles of fewer points now that you'll pay versus before. And in many of those cases, they're pretty, I don't know, it seems like niche redemptions, like an economy class award under a thousand miles within a particular zone. You know, they're kind of things that are not wildly exciting. I don't think in the changes where there were reductions. I think most people, probably the most popular awards, have increased somewhat. Or I say have increased. Really,

these increases were announced as of June 1st. So you do still have another month from the time we're publishing this or almost a month anyway to book under the current award chart before it increases on June 1st, 2026. Once it does, you'll pay a few more miles. I don't know, what are your thoughts about this? Are you kind of like, ah, this stinks, but it's not terrible. or are you feeling more of the pinch? Yeah, no, more of the former. You know, I looked at the changes that I'm on routes. I'm likely to take advantage of.

And, you know, of course, we don't like any kind of inflation. But, you know, on the other hand, when I see, you know, a route that I'm interested in and only going up by 5,000 points, you know, 70,000 to 75,000, for example, I'm like, I'm not even going to hardly notice that. So, you know, I'm okay with that. And with respect to your Liftonza example, I think another option for you is to book Liftonza first with your Avianca Life Miles and cancel your Air Canada Award. And then with Life Miles, you should be able to take advantage of their great mixed cabin award pricing so that you can save a lot on those first class awards, right? Ouch,

outch, outch, Greg's digging into that there because he knows that the next piece of our Bonvoid news here is Avianca Life Miles has Bonvoid us. So no, what Greg just said is not true any longer. So, yeah, a number of things have changed

for the negative with Avianca Life Miles. For starters, some routes to Europe and business class are now north of 90,000 miles one way. And that's just a huge increase. So a couple of years ago was 63,000. miles each way in business class to Europe. And now some routes are over 90. Quite a few others are over 80,000 one way, particularly if you're flying United. Those flights are more expensive. Some routes,

and I say some, and there are quite a few, are still at 69,000 miles one way. And that's before the discount. If you're a life miles plus subscriber, then you only pay, I think, 62,100 on those routes. And when I say those routes, there's quite a few. I mean, to give some examples that pop off the top of had. I looked up like Paris and Prague and Geneva and, you know, a bunch of Barcelona, a bunch of places that you would probably consider anyway if you're going to Europe are still in that 69K range with most of the partners. So there are some that haven't changed. And there are others that increased a bit. JFK to Zurich for a while now has only priced at 55,000 miles one way. It's been, I think the cheapest that they have now for transatlantic business class. Unfortunately, that went up to

63,000 now. But, you know, that's 8,000 miles more than before. And if you've got the Life Miles Plus subscription, then you're paying about 57,000. So it's more than it was before, but it's not terribly painful, sort of like the Aeroplan ones. But where the pain really comes in, in my opinion, is that they have tanked their mixed cabin award pricing. Life Miles has been famous for a long time for kind of charging sort of a pro-rated amount. So they roughly calculate the percentage of your trip that's in a premium cabin and the percentage that's in a different cabin and charge you that percentage of the award price for the origin and destination combination. In short, in short, by doing that, it was often the case that by adding a economy leg to a business or first class award, it would make the

total price go down. So by going further, the, the price would go down. And so that's a great feature of this program until now. Yeah, unfortunately. And so there's actually kind of mixed news here. So on the one hand, what has long been possible is no longer possible. For instance, I looked up a flight from JFK to Frankfurt and then one from JFK to Frankfurt to Athens. And, And flying that second leg in economy class, I think, I don't know if that's the right example, but I think that one or one like it was actually more expensive to fly mixed cabin than it was to just fly business the whole way. And like that's painful, unfortunately, because it used to be that that long economy class like from Frankfurt to Athens, that's a decent distance. It's about a quarter of the distance flown in that case.

That used to decrease the award price significantly. and unfortunately that's not the case anymore. Now, the reason I said there's mixed news here is because JFK to Frankfurt, for instance, was one of the routes that went up in price. There was a higher price now than it was before. But if you connect and end up going to Zurich, for instance, then it prices as only 63K. It costs less than just flying to Frankfurt. So depending on your destination, you may still get some of those situations where if you ultimately really care about flying to Frankfurt and business class, if you connect onward to one of the many destinations that are cheaper, then you are going to pay less. It's not the mixed cabin thing. It's

just the destination of your ticket that's going to determine that. Right, right, right, right. So to sort of say it in a different way is Nick's identifying a different way to save by adding additional segments. And that is the fact that Life Miles oddly prices awards to different cities within Europe differently. And so if you want to go to an expensive city, but there's a way to connect onward to a cheaper city, and basically you don't have to fly that segment, then you might be able to take advantage of that and get the lower price. There are potential issues with doing that that you have to be aware of. Like if you check your bags, you might be doomed because your bags might end up in that other city. Loyalty programs don't like when you're,

do this, so be careful about doing it too often, things like that. The safest way to do something like this if you want to do it is to try to find where the onward connection is the next day, because then even if you get forced to check your bags or whatever, you can say, well, I need my bags for the overnight and get them out there. Yeah, and one last point that's worth mentioning here that Thrifty Traveler, Thrifti Traveler, to my knowledge, was the first to report on this and they identified something else that was interesting. And that was that the award pricing was different depending on which way you search in some cases. And so what I mean by that is we've mentioned before that Avianca Life Miles on the website, when you go to search for an award,

there's a drop down that by default starts on smart search. And out of that drop down, you could pick Star Alliance, you could pick an individual airline out of that drop down. And the same award on the same airline was pricing differently depending on which of those options you searched with. And so, yeah, that's nuts. And I don't know whether that'll stick or that was just a little glitch or what, but it's worth being aware that you really, I mean, you have to, you have to be willing to play the game to get enough of your Uncle Life miles. They are certainly making it more and more of, you know, you got to be somebody who, who wants to play the, you know, the long game of chess and not somebody who just wants to play checkers

and get it over and done with. So if you're willing to play some chess with them, then Avianca may still have some bright spots, but unfortunately, this really does harm the value of life miles overall. So bummer there. All right, awards points and more. This week in awards points and more, Wells Fargo is moving on up by adding a couple of transfer partners, or at least they added one recently. We mentioned they had added Wyndham recently, I guess it was, and now they've added Cathay Pacific. So that sounds somewhat interesting. what do you think about adding Cathay Pacific to Wells Fargo? I mean, it's a good addition.

It's not a super exciting edition on its own, but this trend is super exciting. When Wells Fargo first introduced transfer partners, their list was terribly tiny, and the list of transfer partners is still fairly small, but we've seen in very quick succession, them adding Wyndham 1 to 2 and now Cathay Pacific 1 to 1.

and if we keep seeing this happening, that's really good news for that program. So I'm excited about what the future holds with the Wells Fargo program. I hope they keep improving it like this. Cathay Pacific Asia Miles are good for booking Cathay Pacific itself, because Cathay Pacific has miles have better access to Cathay Pacific Flight Awards than other partners will have access to. And it's also a particularly good one for booking British Airways Awards when they're available through Cathay Pacific from Eastern-ish U.S. to London.

You'll find much lower surcharges booking through Cathay than if you booked with like American Airlines miles or Alaska Airlines miles, something like that. Yeah, so it's got a couple of particularly good uses to be aware of there. All right. Next up in awards points and more, we got into. Instant gift card deals. Instant gift card deals. We have a post about instant gift card deals. These are situations where you can buy a gift card and use it right away. And we say buy a gift card, buy a gift card to earn some type of reward, some type of miles, right? Yeah. Yeah. So we've updated the post, or I should say Stephen Pepper has updated our post where we collect all of these types of things.

And the idea is that there's a section in there where it's all the options for, where you could get a gift card so quickly that you could actually be lined up at the cash register. You could be at a store and be like, oh, I wonder if I can, you know, buy a gift card to cover this purchase and earn miles or earn cash back or earn some kind of rewards for doing so. And so we list a bunch of options for doing that. Then there's other options where it might not be fast enough to do this at the register, but maybe if you're shopping online, you could, go through one of these other options and get rewarded getting the gift card and then complete your purchase online. So, you know, I just wanted to point it out today because I think it's a really good resource to look for to just, you know, bump up your rewards when you're shopping.

Yeah, absolutely is. It definitely is. And it's nice with some of these, you know, like the mileage plus X app where you can buy an exact value gift card for the purchase that you're in line to make and earn some miles while you're doing it. So if you're going to spend the money anyway, you may as well increase the number of miles you're earning. I will add here, and this is going to be obvious to those Costco shoppers out there probably, but if you have a warehouse club subscription is some sort, check the warehouse club website also, because there's oftentimes gift cards for certain merchants are significantly cheaper. I was about to buy one of these instant gift cards. My wife needed me to buy one for a gift for somebody just the other day and a particular merchant

that she asked about, I was about to use one of these instant gift card deal options, and then I realized, I should check and just see, does Costco sell those? And sure enough, they were 20% off at Costco. So I saved significantly more than the miles would have been worth to me. So always worth taking a look for Sam's Club or Costco or whatever your wholesale club of choice is to see if they have discounted options available to. All right, we'll be right back after this with our main event. Jamie writes in, love the show, But I have no idea what you're talking about. Please help.

That's true. Well, this can be confusing. And luckily for you, Jamie, we have a beginner's guide that can help. You want to go to frequentmiler.com slash start here to check out our full beginner's guide. And we're back with today's main event. Best bonuses for huge spend. There are a number of credit cards where you'll get some kind of perk, some kind of bonus when you spend a lot, usually within a calendar year, sometimes a membership year. And by a lot, we're going to be

focusing on those bonuses that happen with $50,000 spend or more. And we're not going to be covering all possible bonuses at that level. There are things like, you know, you might be able to get a hotel free night or some extra perk for getting into a lounge or something like that at high spend, but we're just going to focus on some that we think are notable, and we're going to then discuss, are these any good? Are these actually worth pursuing if you have the ability to make this big spend? But wait, Craig, with $50,000 in spend, I could open like 10 new credit cards and earn welcome bonuses on like 10 different cards, and that's going to be worth more than any of these things, right? Yeah, true. And, you know, that's always the case when we're looking at any kind of, you

know, big spend bonuses. It's always the case that if you can open a whole bunch of cards and split your purchases across a whole bunch of cards, you can do better. But first of all, not everybody wants to do that. There's a lot of people who are like, no, I'm good with a few cards. I'm good with one card, two cards, three cards, whatever. There's others that, you know, maybe you've got a huge purchase. You're buying that yacht and they'll let you pay with a credit card and and you don't want to go like here's 10 cards. I'll say, can you split it across these 10? So, you know, we're going to be looking at just where within one card, you get something special and evaluating those bonuses. Very good. Yeah, that makes. I mean, some people have high

spend, right? I mean, there are some folks out there that just have a lot of spend to do and or don't want to do it on a bunch of different cards. So if you're in that situation, this is for you. And if you're somebody who's like, I want to open 15 cards a year, then by all means, keep doing that because you will earn lots of points that way. That is not the wrong approach. It's just there are different approaches for different people. Right. You also might be, you know, you might be a cardholder of one of these cards

and wondering, is it worth going after that bonus or not? And so we'll talk about what it gets you and whether we think it's worth it. All right. So starting up, we're going to start at the lowest, end of the 50K plus bonuses, and that's with any one of the three built cards that are out now. So with one of the built cards, any one of the build cards, if you spend $50,000 on the card, you'll earn built platinum status. And built platinum status comes with a few benefits. First of all, access to the bigger transfer bonuses when they run those.

Of course, you know, you never know if they'll continue to run those, but we've seen them continue to run transfer bonuses thus far and platinum members always have the best of the various transfer bonuses in those cases. You also get one free Blade helicopter transfer per year. Blade has flights between New York JFK and Manhattan. And also you can fly between I think Nice and Monaco with your free Blade flight if that appeals to you. That would appeal to me. It'd be an awesome way to to arrive in Monaco. I feel like. I was just talking about that the other day. I was like, oh boy, if we could fly to nice and do that helicopter transfer. That'd be so much fun. But we don't have built platinum status in my household for the record. Just dreaming. Just daydreaming. And finally, you can get flying blue

gold status. You can do a status match to flying blue gold status. But you do have to transfer 10,000 points to flying blue in order to do that. But that could be kind of nice because that gives you a sky team status that gives some sky team benefits on other airlines as well, right? Yeah, totally. So, you know, overall, my opinion is that this particular big spend perk has potential huge value. And that's mostly in the bigger transfer bonuses. So if you're someone who likes to take advantage of the fact that built points on occasional rent days, on occasional first of the month days, they have these transfer bonuses where often having platinum status means, getting as high as 75% or even 100% transfer bonus,

then, you know, you're getting, often you're getting 25% more than the next level status and so on. The number of points you end up with when transferring your built points can be really huge. And so there's really concrete value there when using that perk. Absolutely. So I think that that could be huge. if you are somebody who, A, is going to take advantage of those transfer bonuses and B, if they continue to run them. I guess that's really A should be if they continue to run those transfer bonuses that way,

because there's no guarantee. And if you're able to take advantage of whichever one or ones they offer in a particular year. So there's some gamble there. But I think for the gamblers among us, that can be appealing. Are you going to go after built platinum status or have you gone after it already? Yeah, I am. I think that the, you know, I have the Palladium card, which earns 2x everywhere as a base earning rate. And there are ways to earn even more than that for your spend, which I'm not going to get into now. And then on top of that, by achieving platinum status, meaning I'll get like the best transfer bonuses. So let's say I then average 100% transfer bonus when I transfer these points out. I'm earning at more than two X, but let's just call it 2X as the floor, but I'm really earning, because of the transfer bonuses, I'm going to end up with four airline miles, you know, for example, per dollar spent with a card.

But as I said, it'll really be more than that because of the ways to earn more than 2X for all my spend. So I think that's a really, really valuable option. So I'm pretty excited about that. And I am trying to get there. Yeah, as long as they continue to run the transfer bonuses, that will be terrific. and we've been putting all of our purchases on a built plodium card, all of our non-bonous purchases, I should say,

on a built pladium card with an eye toward platinum status. Also, you know, we'll see whether or not we hit it in when we do and whether it works out. It's definitely there's some gamble there. So it's absolutely worth calling that out. But it does have, I think, like you said, the most potential value. If they continue to run those bonuses,

if they continue to be really good, if they don't cap them, you know, the May transfer bonus was capped. So maybe that's a sign of things to come, and that may reduce the potential upside in some cases. We'll see. The next one up is the Bonvoy Brilliant card. Now, is that Chase or Amex, Greg?

Because I can't keep all my bees straight. That's an American Express card. It's one of those really expensive cards. I don't remember the annual fee off the top of my head somewhere in the 650 range, I think. And what that card offers is a annual. choice award once you hit $60,000 of spend. At that point, you can choose one of these things. You can choose 50,000 points, five nightly upgrade awards, an 85K free night certificate, or here's the big one, $1,000 off a Marriott Bonvoy brand bed.

Well, you know, don't underestimate that one. We're laughing because you probably get a discount in that range if you just shop well. It seems like something that's very, very variable as to the value to be had there, although I'm sure some people have bought them and been happy with them. So are any of those worth spending $60,000 in order to receive? This one, I think, is a tough call.

And mostly because on the $60,000 of spend, you're earning just two Bonvoy points per dollar for most of your spend. There's some bonus categories, but let's say you're spending it in a non-bonous category, then you're earning 2x for that spend, which Bonvoy points tend to be worth less than a penny each. So that's less than 2% back on your spend to get there.

There's a big opportunity cost in putting that much spend on this card versus a card that earns like 2x transferable points everywhere, like the built palladium card we mentioned before. And so I think that has been. be taking an account. And then so if you get, for example, the 50,000 points, that's not even adding another point per dollar. It's short oferting, you know, giving you another point per dollar. Five-nightly upgrade awards, those are nice-ish when they work out, but there's no guarantee that you'll actually get upgraded when you use them. The 85K free nights straightway, that has real

value. So if you know you can use that, that gets up there to where it might be worth considering that spend for, but it's, to me, it's really close. I wouldn't, I wouldn't do any spend for a discount on a bed when, when there's discounts all the time when if you just shop online and look for like pop-up beds and things, you'll find, you'll find coupons and other things that'll give you a discount off a bed. Right. My wife just got targeted for 90% back at Tufton Needle again the other day through Capital One shopping. So, I mean, there's, there's so many different and that's not the same bed that Marriott uses necessarily, but my point is just that there are so many ways to kind of stack a discount on a bed that I wouldn't be spending $60,000 in order to get a

discount on that either. The 85K free night certificate, you know, we always say, I don't know off the top of my head what our value for an 85K free night certificate is. We always say that you should value it at less than the value of the equivalent number of points based on a reasonable redemption value from area at points. That's about $650 if you were valuing it at the full 85K. So if we just call it 600 to keep the math easy. It's like an extra 1% on your spend. And so that's, I mean, maybe good if you know you're going to use the 85K start really well. You know where you're going to use it. You know, you're going to be getting, you know, better than one cent per point out of it. Then it could move the needle enough. But it's not like a wildly outsized value. I don't

think I would, yeah, I wouldn't probably pursue this one. I can't imagine it being enough of a deal to attract me. Right, right. You know, also, especially when you think about that, we're not talking about, you know, less than 50K options, but like Hilton has some options to get their uncapped free nights with 15K spend or 30K spend on different cards. And so, you know, having to spend 60K to get one of these just and it's capped at 85K points is, doesn't seem like, you know, if you're spending on the card anyway, great, but, you know, great, I would take it, but I wouldn't, I wouldn't, you know, target my spend towards us for that purpose. I wouldn't recommend that for most people. And the cap versus uncap is actually a great point because the Amex Hilton Aspire card offers a free night certificate after 60K spend, I think, in addition to the one that the card comes with. And I'd much rather have that

uncapped free night certificate if I were going to spend $60,000 to earn a free night certificate because there are some really high-end SLH properties that cost, you know, begillight. points that that are, I say a be a trillion, 240,000, I think, maybe is around the cap on those nowadays, I think, maybe. So anyway, you can do much better with that one, I think, in general, if I were going to spend 60K. And even that is questionable because like Greg said, there are ways that you can earn free night certificates with less spend on different cards without, well, getting, actually, you know, I just said 60K. I think it's actually 30k on that card that you earn a free night certificate at. Now that I said that, I think I was wrong. But at any rate, I don't,

I think maybe it's at both levels, 30 and 60, I think. But don't quote me. Don't quote me on that either. The point is that I wouldn't do it on the brilliant card, all right? That's my point. All right. The Atmos summit card is up next because if I were going to spend $60,000 on a card, this is one I might be more apt to consider, I think,

because at 60,000 spend on the Atmos Summit card, you'll get a companion certificate good for a companion for up to 100,000 points off of a companion's ticket on an award redemption. And of course, you'd also earn some other stuff along the way, which is the case with some of the other big spend bonuses here, probably as well, that you'll earn some status with Alaska and milestone benefits along the way. But 60,000 spend to earn a 100K companion certificate.

What do you think about that? I mean, I said I feel kind of good about this. What do you think and why? Yeah, I think this one's really interesting. You know, the Atma Summit card gives you three, for dining and international spend. So if you can put a good amount of your 60K spend in those categories, you'll be earning at a really nice clip with the 3X. We find at most rewards points. This is Alaska and Hawaiians program to be really valuable, not just for flying Alaska and Hawaiian, but for

booking partner awards. And the companion cert works for partners. So you can book, you know, any of Alaska's partners, all their one-world partners, but also their individual partners that they have with your Atmos points and get a up to 100,000 points off your companion. So where, you know, 100,000 points, if you know you're going to be able to use it for that full value, then right there you're getting, you know, what is it, one point, a little or the 1.5. Yeah, a little over 1.5 points per dollar extra on top of your base earn rate. And, but you do need to be aware that this certificate is worth nothing to you if you don't ever fly with companion.

And it's worth less than 100k points if you redeem it for a flight where the, the first person costs less. than 100,000 points because then the second person, you know, you'd be flying for free, but, you know, let's say you're booking a ticket for yourself where, you're booking a ticket where the award for one person costs 70,000 points, then all you're saving is 70,000 points, not the full 100,000. And so it makes, you know, it makes me think of doing things that I wouldn't normally do. For example, like, I like to book one-way award tickets, but one-way awards are usually not 100,000 points or more. So then I'd be looking at, you know, oh, how can I make this into a round trip or a multi-stop award so that it'll cost more so that

I'll be able to get full value from the certificate. So there are definitely those kind of downsides to being able to maximize it. But if you think you can maximize it pretty easily, then I think this one is a really good choice. Yeah, I think that that's the last thing he said, if you think you can maximize it, then I think it becomes really good. But I think for us, for people like Greg and I, it's easy to look at this and get excited about it because we got a lot of flexibility. So, you know, we could book that round trip award, you know, and even if I don't use it quite to full value, there's some routes, for instance, from the East Coast of Europe that are 45,000 miles each way. So if I used it on a 90,000 mile round trip and got 90,000 off, that's still

pretty good. It's not quite 100K, but it's still like an additional. additional one and a half points per dollar on my spend. And I have the flexibility to say, oh, well, the day I want to come back isn't available at 45K, but three days later is. And so I can do that. And if you're in that situation where you have the ability to say, okay, well, yes, I will make my plans around maximizing this. Then I think it could be really appealing. But I think you need to know that you're going to be able to do that to make this worthwhile. Or that you care enough about the status that you want to spend that much anyway. And this is kind of like an added bonus. That's what I was going to say is, is this all works really well altogether for people who are

also interested in earning elite status with Alaska because, you know, spend on the Atmos Summit card earns you loyalty points, status points towards elite status. And when you actually book an award with those points, you earn status points for the flight. And so it all works very nicely together to be like a, you know, holistically valuable program combination, credit card, and spend. So you have to want all of that stuff for it to be really attractive. If you do want all of that, then I think that's a really great choice. One other sort of semi-related point I want to make is that I think a lot of people are excited about the fact that this card earns 3x on foreign purchases, which is really unique. There aren't other cards that offer that specifically as a bonus category,

to my knowledge, at least not a 3x. So that's really cool and interesting, though, I have to point out that the built palladium with the right strategy, you could be earning three points per dollar on many purchases. And I caveat that, because if you want to make a single $50,000 purchase, this isn't going to work. But, uh, but, but you could essentially set yourself up to generally be earning three X and it has no foreign transaction fees. So you can be earning three X on foreign purchases and domestic on that. So then it's going to come down to, well, do I value the 100K companion cert and the atmosphere status more or do I value the bigger transfer bonuses with built and, and, and that stuff more. So, uh, there's a lot of personal calculation that goes on and

determining which of these is better for you. Yeah. There's usually a universal answer. There's, There's also other consideration. So if you have high taxes to pay and you like to use a credit card to do so, which can be done, that's great with the Atma Summit card, not so great with the built card because they do not reward you with points on tax purchases. So, yeah. Great point, bad point, no points. I don't know how to say that. It's a big downside of the bill card.

It has a lot of upside, but that's one. one really significant downsides, especially when we're talking about big spend. Absolutely. Great point there. Okay. All right. Sapphire Reserve is up next. If you spend $75,000 on the Sapphire Reserve, you get some benefits.

What are those? You get IHG Diamond Elite Status. You get World of Hyatt Explorist status, Southwest Airlines A-list status, and $500 of Southwest Airlines credit, which needs to be booked through Chase Travel. can't be used directly through Southwest. And do you get $250 credit to spend at the shops at Chase? What do you think? Is that all great stuff?

That's a different question than the one I thought you were going to ask. Is that great? I mean, there's some stuff in there that's okay. Is it worth spending $75,000 to get? I wouldn't think so. I mean, IHG diamond status could be pretty valuable in some cases. Of course, you can get that with $40,000 spend, I think, on the on the IHG card right so so you know this is a lot more spend to get that and some other stuff

can be valuable explore status with Hyatt eh not worth a lot late checkout is basically the benefit you're going to get there and it's a 2 p.m. late checkout right so and not worth much to me south-west a list status is almost worthless to me because you get almost the same benefits with a southwest premium credit card i say almost worthless i shouldn't say that if you're keeping being a Southwest priority card or the performance business card, I guess you could look at this and say, well, I could have A-LIS status and not have to pay the annual fee on one of those Southwest premium cards to get very similar benefits. There's not a lot that gets added with A-List status. You get the priority check-in line at the airport. You know, there's some tiny little benefits, but not a lot.

The $500 Southwest Airlines credit, I mean, you do have to book through Chase, but maybe that's worth somewhere approaching face value to you. And the $250 credit to the $250 credit to the the shops at Chase, I have no idea what that's worth. But let's pretend that that and the $500 Southwest and the 250 shops at Chase are actually worth $750 to you on $75,000 spend. That represents an additional 1%. So you've got to value the other stuff in order to make this appealing at all, I think, right? I think you do. And I do think the other ones are, can be appealing, especially someone who doesn't want to carry a whole. whole bunch of different cards, right? So if you're, you know, maybe you like the idea of IHD diamond

status, but you don't want to carry one of their cards, you like the idea of, you know, the Hyatt 2 p.m. late checkout, but you don't want a Hyatt card. And Southwest, maybe you're going to fly that a couple times a year, but you don't want a, you know, a card. Then all those things taken together, it's like those give you something, right? You get, you get some benefits out of all of that and then you get these credits which I could totally see the $500 Southwest Airlines credit being treated as close to face value for a lot of people but the $250 credit at the shops at Chase that's really hard to value at full value in my mind because while I haven't done comparison shopping I have a hard time believing that that their prices are as good as you can

find elsewhere for the same products but maybe for things like Apple products, maybe they tend to be at retail price everywhere, so maybe that would be a good deal there. So overall, you know, I would not, even given all that, I would not recommend spending $75,000 at one X on your Sapphire Reserve card to try to get there. If you're someone who spends a lot on travel, now if you book travel, if you're okay booking travel through the Chase travel portal, you're getting 8X on those things, so you're earning incredible rate for book travel, and then you get this on top of it would be terrific. Of course, other spend categories are like booking hotels or airfare directly and getting 4X and things like that.

If you're doing those kind of things, then this is nice like icing on the cake, I think. Yeah, no, I totally agree. I was thinking to myself, you know, if you have a job where you're traveling a lot for work and you're getting reimbursed for that traveling. You're spending somewhere approaching the 75,000, even if it was a 50,000, something like that each year in categories where you're already earning well at the 4x or 8x levels. And then it's a small gap that you have to bridge in order to get to the 75K. Then, all right, maybe I could get down with some 1x purchases in order to get to the 75K for this other stuff. So I think that that's really the, to me, that's the sweet spot. If you're somebody who spends somewhere around that on flights and hotels, whether you're booking those direct or through the Chase portal, then it becomes much more intriguing.

Yeah. One thing, I just want to back up a little bit before we go further, that Chase and sort of to a lesser extent, Amex also have features that you can use online that make this really big spend more conceivable because they'll let you, request a moving credit from one card to another. And like with Chase, it just happens automatically. Amex has certain limits on to how much you can do that, how often and stuff. But either way, the point is like, if you're really looking at a giant, you know, 60,000, 75,000, whatever it is, purchase and your card limits aren't that high, but you have a number of cards with one of these issuers, it might be possible to move credit from other cards and instantly get the, you credit line you need to do this kind of thing, whereas something like built, they don't let you

even have other cards right now. And a lot of credit limits are lower on those cards, to my knowledge. So like I personally wouldn't be able to come anywhere near a $50,000 one, you know, single purchase with my built card because of that. Yeah. Yeah. Excellent point that Chase does allow that. All right. What about the Sapphire Reserve business card? That offers some similar benefits. So the same type of stuff. IHG, Diamond, World Ohio, Explorer, Southwest A-List, the $500 Southwest Credit. And they bump up the shops at Chase to $500 in credit, but you'll have to spend $120,000 to get all of that on the business side. What do you think? You spend an 120K for that? Big thumbs down here. You know, once again, if you're spending that much on the card anyway for other stuff, great. It's a nice little

filler, but I would not go out of my way to try to come anywhere near that spend at 1X, especially just to hit that bonus. It's just not worth it. No, there's not enough there. I don't even understand what the thought process was there. But then I don't really understand the Sapphire Reserve business card for most people anyway. So I'm not really sure that I get the card, period. Forget about that. 120K big spend bonus. I agree. I keep looking at it.

Like, I can make sense. Like the Safare Reserve, the personal card definitely does not work for everybody. It doesn't even necessarily work for the majority of frequent travelers. I think. I think it's a hard sell for many. But for some people, it's a good fit. And but the business card, I really stretch to figure out who it's a good fit for. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, that could be a whole other show probably talking about the confusion there, but it just, like you said, I think a lot of situations I can imagine the person for whom it's a fit. Even if it's not a fit for me, I can imagine, okay, well, this is who the target market is for that. I have a really hard time for that with the Sapphire Reserve for business. I mean, apart from somebody who's got a business where you just spend a lot of money on travel, you know, so you're earning constantly at the 4x and 8x levels. It's just a weird, weird card.

Anyway, so no, we wouldn't do the 120k there. So let's bump things up a notch, Greg. kick it up a notch here. So forget about 120k in the Sapphire Reserve for business card. Would you spend a quarter million on an Amex business platinum card? Oh, in a heartbeat. Let's talk about what we got. Spending a quarter million will get you with the American Express Business Platinum card. You'll get up to $1,200 in statement credits to use in the next calendar year on flights booked on AmexTravel.com. So that amounts to, if you got full value from the $1,200 that amounts to about half a percent of extra value from your $250,000 of spend.

Weirdly, I had to look this up because I saw it was written that way as to use in the next calendar year and I thought, oh, that's weird. Normally these kind of benefits are like you can use it for the rest of this calendar year and all of the next. But I looked up and no, it specifically does say basically the benefit when you start getting to use the credit starts, you know, January 1st of the next calendar year. I find that oddly, you know, this isn't like that rich of a reward to begin with for that much spend. And so to constrain it like that is weird. But don't worry, that's not all you

get with a quarter million spend. You also get up to $2,400 in statement credits. So it's starting to sound good, right? In the next calendar year, on monthly fees for the American Express 1 AP. Now it doesn't sound as good anymore. What's that? You don't want some 1 AP? You know, I wouldn't know if I do, but I don't know what the monthly fee is either and what this covers in regards to that. So that's Amex's business accounts payable solution. And so if you're, you know, if your business needs some kind of software for helping, you know, simplify the process of paying your accounts payable, maybe one AP is your solution, and you'll save a bunch of money off that.

So that's, of course, a very, very targeted, very specific benefit that is going to help, I would think very few people. But there's some things to consider. about this that make it less awful. Not about the one AP thing. Forget about the one AP thing. If you're someone who's a one AP customer great, then you already probably know about this and maybe are thinking about it. But for everybody else, why would it be worth even thinking about this? If you really have a huge $250,000 to spend on something, for one thing, the business platinum card is a for a time charge card type of thing where,

there's no set limit. So you might be able to make the whole purchase at once, which is, you know, really unusual. But also along the way, spending $250,000, you get some other stuff. Like so at $75,000, you get to add, bring in guests when you go to Centurion Lounge. You get to bring two guests. You also, instead of getting a limited number of Sky Club visits, you get unlimited visits just for yourself to SkyClubs for the rest of that year and all the next. year. That's just for yourself, though. No, no free guests in the Sky Club for you. You also, if you're making large purchases, you're presumably spending more than $5,000 at a time. And so you're earning 2x. That's one of the benefits of the business platinum card is any purchases of $5,000 or more, you get two points per dollar. So the, you know, so there's very little opportunity costs by putting a lot of spend on the business platinum card when it's big spend like this. So again, it's one of those things like, I've got to spend $250,000 quickly on something. I don't think this is a terrible choice. I wouldn't drive that by that $1,200 in flight, you know, in flight credits.

But it would help maybe if I'm trying to decide between a. couple options. It's something to consider. Yeah, you know, I think that this is a situation that's going to appeal to people who would just legitimately have a lot of spend to do. Like Greg said, the, the MX Business Platinum card is an example of a card where you legitimately could potentially put a single $250,000 purchase on there. And, and, you know, if you're thinking of a $250,000 purchases like, you know, a Ferrari or Lamborghini or something like that, you might be like, well, what do you care about the points? But, uh, but, uh, but, you know, I, I remind you that there are a lot of people that have small businesses that buy and sell things that are perhaps order.

I mean, I had a friend who sold some stuff that they would buy containers load from, you know, overseas. And the container would cost them like 100 grand when they'd get a container load of the materials that they were selling. And so they were able to put that on an MX business platinum card because that's a card that would approve those $100,000 purchases to get the materials. And it was part of the business. So, you know, if you're somebody like that, that monthly, you're, you're buying a shipment for 100 grand once a month or something of that sort. This is a card that maybe you could do that on. Now, I'm sure there are people out there say,

oh, but you could probably do it without the credit card, maybe negotiate a better price, blah, blah, blah. There's a lot of ins and outs. But if you're in that crowd, then maybe this would be the right card because you're already, like Greg said, earning two points per dollar. So an additional half a percent just bumps things up. And that would push me towards this card over another card that earns 2% on its own.

And then when you figure the fact, that also, again, you can potentially put those really big purchases on this card. I think this is a reasonable situation or if you're somebody who has a big tax bill, you know, whether it's because you earn a lot of money or you, you know, you owned a business and sold it. And so you had a sudden influx or you had a house that you sold and you earn or you owe rather a ton of taxes on the house or whatever it might be. I can imagine a lot of situations where somebody would have a few really big purchases to make. and then this might bump me to the business platinum card over other options. Yeah, yeah.

So it's not maybe the sexiest option as far as what you get, but it's a really good one that's practical for those kind of situations. Yep, absolutely. All right. Now, if you're really a baller, though, if you've got a ton of spend, if you are spending that $100,000 a month and you get the credit limit to support this, where could you put a million dollars in spend, right? If I really wanted to go all out and spend a million,

bucks on something. What card should I put that on? You should consider spending it on the Chase Aeroplan card. That's the Air Canada Aeroplane card from Chase. With a million dollars in spend, you get a free award companion for the rest of this calendar year and all of the next. So basically, you can book awards to your heart's content once you've spent a million dollars and add a companion for free to all of those awards. Now, that's not all you get. I mean, that is amazing by itself. But you also get what I call priority rewards at 100K spend, 250K,000k, 500K, and 750K spend. And those are valuable primarily if you have high level elite status. So the way, The way those work is they give you 50% off flight awards, but they're very heavily restricted

for those who have no status. You're looking at, like, economy, domestic awards only. If you have a little bit of elite status, then I, you know, maybe it'll give you a little bit international economy. If you're a little more, you get like premium economy international flights. You have to have like their highest level or one of their highest levels in order to get, 50% off business class awards. So really, whether this will matter to you at all is going to depend on whether you're big into the Aeroplane Elite Status Program. But anyway, I'm going to turn this over to you for a moment, Nick, and then I'll talk about

what I think about this as an award. All right. So, yeah, I'm not excited about this one. So first of all, you would need to be able to spend a million dollars on it, which means you'd have to have a pretty high credit limit because with most issuers, most issuers don't particularly appreciate when you cycle your limit. And that is like use your entire limit, pay it off and then use it again. So you would probably need to have a really high limit. Now with Chase, that's possible because you can move around limits on the different cards you have. So it's not inconceivable that somebody

could have a limit that would support that type of spend over time. Not a million dollars, probably all at once for most people listening to this. But, but maybe over the course of a year, it's possible. but man, you'd have to be somebody who's going to fly a lot of award flights for this to be worthwhile. Because I look at it, even if you earn, let's say, a million points on your million-dollar spend, so you did it at 1x and you redeem that entire million over the course of the year, and you redeem them really well. So you get two cents per point there. Then you're talking about an extra 2% with this ability to bring a companion.

And again, that's assuming that you redeem a million points in the year and that you get two cents. per point when you're redeeming them. There's a lot of assumptions there. Maybe you redeem more than that. Maybe you're somebody who's got a lot of amex points and a lot of other transferable currencies that you're going to transfer to aeroplane and you plan to have a huge year where you just go and redeem everything to travel all the time. Then I guess maybe there's a world in which this would make sense. I'd have a really hard time imagining that will apply to more than like two people listening to this show lifetime. I just don't think it's a pretty small, narrow group of people. I don't know. What do you think? Am I wrong? Yeah. Yeah. No, if you were,

if your goal is to do this to earn aeroplane points that you would then spend over that next year and, you know, and you spend them all, and you're not supplementing that with external points or from transfer, you know, transferring in from other places or whatever, then it's a terrible idea because you could instead be spending a million dollars on any transferable points card that earns 2x everywhere. And then you'd be getting, instead of earning just a million points, which then sort of gets doubled with this companion award, you'd just be earning the double points from the get-go. And you could transfer those points to AeroPlan or a whole bunch of other programs that might be more. more valuable and useful for whatever situation you're actually going to book. Yeah, the one situation I can think of where I could imagine this being an attractive idea is maybe a couple has been

building up, you know, big hordes of points for a long time and they're planning to, maybe you're about to retire or you're taking a sabbatical or something or you're planning to just like travel the world and and you want to go in full luxury and therefore the idea of having you know being able to get basically half off because you're traveling as a couple in this scenario half off all your aeroplane awards and you're planning to do that a lot might make sense but as nick said i mean one or two people listening i mean i can't imagine there's too many people where that that's your scenario and and where even with that it would make sense because you're still, you know, it sounds like very freeing,

but you're committed to booking through aeroplane. And maybe you're finding all these great awards that are one world because aeroplane is Star Alliance. And what, you know, you might be finding all these great one world awards. Then you'd feel like, oh, I can't really book that because I, you know, I have this companion thing. I really need to use. And so I, not, not many people.

All the more, all the more reason, like you said, I mean, you made a fantastic point that if you put that million dollars on an Amex business platinum instead, you, you'd have 2 million transferable points that you could then transfer to era plan or whichever program is offering the best deal, maybe get a transfer bonus, you know, because there are transfer bonuses to various programs at different times and maybe end up with more than 2 million points worth in the end. So yeah, I think you'd have to, you're right. You'd have to have significant reserves and other programs that you intend to transfer in to really kind of splash out and go wild for a year. And that's just, I don't know. hard to imagine. What if I spend like $90,000 a month at a grocery store where the card earns 3x, then should I do it? I mean, if you've got a credit limit that supports that and if Chase isn't going to shut you down for eating so much, then maybe. But I mean, I think that's another piece of this that there's also the risk of whatever you're doing, making the card issue are nervous, because in order to spend a million, presumably you're going to have to spend pretty close to

whatever your credit limit is every month, probably for most humans. So that level of purchases, who knows? Your card gets shut down 11 months into that. I mean, that would really stink. So, yeah, I wouldn't, I don't think I could imagine risking this. Yeah, no, I agree. I agree. All right.

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and in every episode, in about 10 minutes, we give you a smart, practical overview of destinations all around the world. We cover what to see, where to stay, where to eat, and what actually matters when you're planning out a truck. It's designed for real life. Listen on the way to the airport, in the car, or while you're thinking about your next getaway. So if you want expert advice, zero fluff, and travel inspiration that you can actually use,

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