Frequent Miler on the Air - Best SLH properties to book before the Hyatt partnership ends...and more | Ask Us Anything Ep65 | 3-6-24

Episode Date: March 12, 2024

In addition to our regular weekly podcast, we also host an Ask Us Anything Live on YouTube once a month where the Frequent Miler team answers listener questions about points, miles, rewards cards, and whatever else comes to mind. This episode (65) was streamed live on March 6, 2024 and can be viewed in full here. Here are all the questions asked during this episode (with timestamps): (05:03) - Have you noticed that Emirates charges insane fuel surcharges out of countries that ban/restrict them? ​(06:19) - When you book Rio Las Vegas with Hyatt points do you not have to pay resort fee and get elite benefits like late checkout? (08:55) - ​​Would you recommend closing the Chase Marriott business credit card, waiting 30 days, then applying for the AMEX Marriott business credit card? I will keep my JPM Ritz Carlton credit card open. (11:24) - Can you have more than one Ritz card per person? (12:46) - As the SLH-Hyatt partnership starts to wind down, I wanted to ask each of you if you might give us ideas/favorites to try and book? (19:20) - ​Any tips on how to help avoid jetlag for my kids? (20:15) - ​​I appreciate your “current point transfer bonuses” page. Any plans to create a current buying points and miles list? (21:01) - ​​Which app is better for managing Flying Blue points, KLM or Air France? (21:40) - ​​I have to book a Latam flight. What's my best option? (23:20) - ​​Getting ready for the Beyonce at the Sphere announcement, as soon as those dates leak it's going to be a race to book something before the algorithm sends hotel rates sky high. Any tips or tricks? (25:35) - ​​There’s a few Marriott sign up bonuses going around. How would you choose between: 5 free nights (up to 50k each; up to 250k total), vs ~185k straight up points? (29:57) - ​​Any tools to use for planning a road trip in other countries? So many possibilities (i.e. which order to visit things in, transit times, etc) makes my planning spiral out of control. (35:40) - ​​What is the best airline to credit miles to for each alliance? It's easy enough to understand the value of the miles, but harder to evaluate all the earning rates. (39:20) - ​​Chase 5/24 question, should I tempt fate and try to apply for the Marriott Boundless 5 free night offer while currently at 5/24? (12 months left)  (41:55) - ​​Any tips for booking one of the rarer hotel points redemptions? If I book the hotel, I probably won't be able to find biz class flights for those dates. And vice versa if I book the flights first. (47:52) - ​​Despite the usual recommendation not to speculatively transfer, are there levels of earning (100s of 1000s, millions) and levels of spending that make it worthwhile? (54:53) - ​​What are your thoughts on the new Wells Fargo Autograph Journey card? (58:36) - ​​How do we manage Amex cards beyond year one to maintain good standing with Amex? For example when would it be ok to close, downgrade, apply for cards, how many months apart, etc?

This is not your usual Frequent Miler on the Air episode. This is our Ask Us Anything live session, recorded and brought to you in podcast format. Once a month, the Frequent Miler team gets together live on YouTube to answer your questions. Ask us questions about points, miles, credit cards, airline and hotel loyalty programs. We don't know what's coming next and neither do you. Enjoy. I like it. This is our monthly live brought to you not live on a podcast we're live live on youtube welcome good evening to whoever's out there on the internet

yeah we're just waiting for uh tim to join join. Kerry won't be with us today, but Stephen's going to be Kerry. So he's going to handle asking us questions and asking himself questions when needed. But while he's getting stuff set up, I'm going to lead with a question for Craig. Because you just got back from a trip, right? So you, excuse me, you flew Star you flew star lux right you posted that review how was your trip overall what did you like what did you yeah it was great uh yeah unfortunately nick's uh internet's not very good so he was cutting in and out but he was asking how how i liked my trip to taiwan and um so yeah so first of all i flew starlux business class uh took advantage of a deal that

was only available for a couple days uh last year to book for 60 000 alaska miles one way um to get starlux from la to taiwan and now it's available sometimes for 75k points one way, if you're really lucky and find that, which is still a good deal. But if you see the something like 185k, that's not a good deal. I wouldn't go for that. But it was great. Taiwan. First, let me say, a number of people suggested that i that i sign up in advance for this uh it's sort of a contest but it's a it taiwan has this thing to encourage uh visitors from other countries to visit and they they give you a prize if you win uh i signed up for it i didn't think to sign up my wife for it which was really dumb because it it seems like everybody wins. So you have to like scan, you get a code in your email, and you have to, if I remember right, about $165, something like that. And you could either pick to use it for transportation or hotels. I picked hotels and we used it.

We stayed at the Regent, which is an IHG property, and we used fine hotels and resorts credits to book the Regent. The Regent's fine hotels and resorts property credit is a spa treatment, which we had already, even before we knew that we had decided we were going to book massages for when we arrived, because the flight arrives in Taipei at like 530 in the morning. And so we were like, what are we going to do? We're going to be tired, probably won't be able to check in our room yet. Um, so what do we do? So we show up at the, um, at the hotel, uh, sure enough, our room isn't ready, but we had, we had booked massages for like 10 AM and we went for a walk at just around the town to get to know the area a little bit, and then came back and did the, did the spa treatments, which were great. And what a fantastic way to kind of ease into a new, a new place.

It was really a great, great option. And by the time we're done with the spa treatments, our room was ready just a few minutes later. Great timing there. And, oh, so, so the fine hotels and resort credit didn't cover both of us. It wasn't enough money to cover both of us for the spa treatment, but I was able to use the prize thing to cover the rest of it. So that worked out great. Nice.

That's awesome. And Nick, you asked what I like best about Taiwan. Probably the nice people. And second would be the incredible food. Third would be, it's so interesting. Taiwan knows what's going to happen next. So I found it just so fascinating learning about their history, talking to people about how they felt about it, things like that. So overall, great trip. I love it. Highly encourage everyone to visit Taiwan if you haven't. Nice. Nice. Very good. Okay. So I guess it's time to start answering some questions. So question one, have you noticed that Emirates charges insane

fuel surcharges out of countries that ban or restrict them. I'm talking 600 to 800 US dollars one way from Australia, New Zealand, Dubai, and others. Any thoughts? I will assign that one to Tim. So I'm sorry, can you repeat that one more time? So Emirates, actually, can you just summarize that? So Emirates is assigning higher surcharges to countries that what? That ban or restrict them. That ban or restrict them. Yeah. Are you aware of any of that?

I am completely unaware of that. Has anybody else noticed that? No, I haven't looked at flights. I haven't looked at any of those places now. Yeah. So, no, I mean... It's not anything, but we won't necessarily be able to... Yeah, it's not answer anything. It's just ask us anything. As far as that goes, no, yeah, I have no idea

if that's a punitive thing that they're doing or what. I guess we'll move on to question two then. I'll assign this one to Nick. When you book Rio Las Vegas with Hyatt points, do you not have to pay resort fees and do you get elite benefits like late checkout? I assume

that you do not pay the resort fee when you're using points. I don't know about late checkout, but Tim probably does. Well, I actually don't. So a buddy of ours... Well, no, I do. Right. That's what I meant. A buddy of ours, Stefan, was just staying at the Rio this week

and actually found that the front desk agents are extremely well prepared to receive globalists. He was proactively upgraded from his non-renovated room to a renovated suite. The resort fee was proactively taken off the bill. He was given 4 p.m. checkout, free breakfast. If anybody's ever been to the Rio, it's actually a breakfast chain called Hash House A Go-Go. It's known for these massive plates of pancakes. Huge portions. Yeah, massive portions.

And that's where the free globalist breakfast is. And so far right now, as far as I've seen, I've seen people able to check in. This is probably going to be the next question, check in via mobile checkout, which would be handy when you're able to do, in order to be able to do kind of a ghost stay where you make a booking and then check in by mobile and never actually are in Vegas. But the problem is they have to do it by email. So nobody that I've seen that has started doing this check-in process via email has actually finished the stay.

We're still not sure if the Elite Credit actually arrives there because it doesn't show up in your Hyatt app. They give you effectively an email check-in thing, and you can check in via that. There's some debate about whether or not you have to pick up your key to trigger the Elite Credit or not. Anyway, that's where we're at we'll we'll be we'll have a post about this tomorrow but or very soon but as far as i'm aware that's where everything's at right now i kind of want to go for hash house a go-go i there are huge portions but i like the uh the chicken and waffles is no i mean the chicken waffles is right but it's no joke it's no joke yeah it's crazy waffles is like foot high. It's no joke. It's no joke. Yeah. It's crazy. For those that like foot high chicken waffles.

Right. I mean, if you do, if you want that, and sometimes I do. I can get involved with foot high chicken waffles. Steven wasn't planning on doing a mattress run, but now he may. We're going to be in Vegas later this year. Oh, there you go. So we'll end up doing this. There we go.

So question three from Grant. Hi, FM team. I've been enjoying the Coffee Break episodes. There you go. There we go. So question three from Grant. Hi, FM team. I've been enjoying the Coffee Break episodes. Keep them coming. Would you recommend closing the Chase Marriott business credit card, waiting 30 days, then applying for the Amex Marriott business credit card? I'll keep my Ritz Carlton credit card open.

I'll assign that one to Greg. To Greg, yeah. Okay. Hey, Grant. Good to hear from you again. So I'm assuming you looked at the eligibility chart and determined that that approach would get you, make you eligible for the Amex business card, because I don't know off the top of my head.

But even assuming it is i would i would personally be hesitant to do that just because the chase business card you can't get it so you have a card now that isn't possible to get if you wanted it and who knows what um good things might happen in the future uh that card. I mean, maybe nothing, probably nothing. But, you know, if someone asked me, will the Ritz card improve? You know, someone two years ago said, will the Ritz card get better? And, you know, I would have never guessed in a million years that we would have a 85K cert with the Ritz card. And so who knows whether that Chase business card

might also become more valuable. So that's why I'd be hesitant to do that, but I can understand why otherwise you might want to. I have a small counterpoint to that one, just that I have the Chase business card and my wife has the Amex Marriott business card. If I had the choice between the two of them, I would go for the Amex one

just because of things like Amex offers. And so because I'll often get or we'll often get like Marriott Amex offers on those. And so not only are we then earning 6X, we're also like saving 50 bucks, 60 bucks, like 100 bucks, however much it actually is. Whereas I don't think I've really used my Chase Marriott business card all that much

just because it doesn't really have anything that kind of makes it worth using other than having the three night certificate. So that's just a kind of like additional thought depending on what kind of credit card lineup Grant has with Amex. So question four, this one will go to Nick because it should hopefully be a nice short and sweet answer. And his voice hasn't been feeling too good. Can you have more than one risk card per person?

You sure can. I just got my second one about half an hour ago. Yes, you can. Obviously, so that anybody not familiar with the Ritz Carlton card, you know, you just heard us talk about it a little bit. It's not available for new applicants and hasn't been for years. It's been since the Marriott merger, I guess, 2018. But if you have a Chase Marriott consumer card, you can product change to the Ritz card. Now, both times I product changed in the last couple of years, once for myself and once for my wife, they've required that we had at least a $10,000 credit limit in order to make the product change. And my old Marriott card that I was product changing did not have a $10,000 limit. So I did have to move limit. And I actually just to make sure it would work, I had them move a credit limit from a couple of different cards to bring that one up to 10,000.

I said, Oh, can you move 3,500 from this card and 1500 from that card? And, and so I just wanted to see you could do that all in one call. And sure enough, that was easy to do. So that brought me up to the $10,000 limit.

And then it was no problem to product change to the Ritz card. So yeah, you can definitely get more than one of them. You will need a $10,000 limit on that card, but it's easy to shift your limits if you have other Chase consumer cards. And so this next one will be for Tim. As the SLH Hyatt partnership starts to wind down, do you have any ideas or favorites of which ones to book? Well, I mean, this can sort of be an all play because I think we've I would tell us say which one not to book. Don't book Das Post Hotel in Austria unless you want a very expensive Hyatt Point funded sauna experience.

So, you know, I mean, I uh the one that i did i've actually been so there is a nick has has been what how many how many times you've been to grand victoria twice twice twice it feels like more just because it does yeah i've been excited it was so impactful um and i've been looking for that property and there's another property on lake como called it's like palazzo vista palazzo i think yeah vista palazzo blah blah blah yeah it uh that's the uh the italian translation is the blah blah blah um but that is available for two it's usually not available It's well over a thousand dollars a night. It gets sterling reviews. It's known as one of the best hotels in Italy

and it's 40,000 Hyatt points a night. Wow. That's a lot. But I just saw that it happens to have points availability for two nights that my wife and I are going to be in Milan, right by Lake Como in April. So I'm thinking about taking the plunge on that because it'll probably be my, Greg's going to go book it right out from under me right now. Look at him. There you go.

I think I've heard that place only has like 12 rooms or something too. Oh yeah, no, it's super small. And you do realize that we're streaming live and so there's a whole bunch of people watching who are now like... Good luck. We should have told you, Tim. That's okay, Kerry.

It's all right. But yeah, so in terms of like, have actually haven't i don't i in terms of the actual slh stays that i've had i've probably only done three or four during the partnership um none of them have been like spectacular um but there are definitely properties that i've been looking at and that's one of them i also have a reservation for one in barcelona in september um i'm not it looks a great value. It's called Claris, terrific location, great value on points. I'm not, I'm going to hold that and kind of wait and see what the state of the partnership is in September. But anybody else have like one that like a

personal favorite? I know Greg does. Yeah, go to, go to Queenstown, New Zealand. Uh, there's two fabulous properties there that are both, they're both 40,000 points a night, but, uh, I stay in the Ikeritz private hotel and I just now picked a random date, uh, just one night and, and it was available, which that's the hard part with, with these is they're small properties. So you're not, they're not always going to be available. But yeah, the iCarts is available on the random date I picked. It would cost cash-wise over

$2,600 New Zealand dollars, which is over $1,600 US dollars per night, but you can get it for $40,000 Hyatt points. $1,600 a night? Yeah. Do you get600 a night? Yeah. Do you get the whole hotel? Like when they say private hotel?

You don't, but there's not many rooms there. And you get a real, the base room is a really big suite. Really big. So one that I'd recommend would be the Gainsborough Bath Spa in England or Bath Spa, like on um like how you pronounce that so that's in the like incredibly cute um city of bath and the thing that's unique about this property is that um in case you're not familiar with bath they have roman baths and

like thermal um pools and things like that there this is the only hotel that actually has thermal pools within the hotel itself and so you can book book like an hour or two in there every single day. And so that's just a fantastic experience, just being able to go downstairs, being able to use these like private pools, basically that no one else ends up using other than hotel guests. So that was a fantastic experience. They have this amazingly delicious cayenne hot chocolate drink that you can enjoy there as well which is absolutely fantastic and it's kind of right in the town centre so that way you're walking distance to everything there that one I think it's category five if I remember I think it might have used to be category four at some point but I think it's category five now

and then we have a stay booked in a couple of months time for spirit bridge in canada so that's a place that is um kind of i want to say it's kind of like north of spokane or something like that so it's only just across the border in um in canada but that the base rooms there are one bedroom condos but they also have like two bedroom and three bedroom condos that you might get upgraded to potentially. And then because it's SLH, then you get free breakfast and stuff like that. But it looks like a fascinating property. It's got either the first or the only indigenous owned winery there and all kinds of other kind of like unique cool activities. So we've got, I think, a five or six night stay there coming up. So I'm looking forward to that one. I haven't actually been there before, but it looks awesome. Yeah. Last thing I want to say on this topic is if you have

category one through four Hyatt free night certificates, Europe is littered with really good SLH properties that are category four, three or four. You're not going to find many uh as many good category fours and none slh in in the u.s but um uh yeah spirit of the ridges category four so that would that would be um a good use of a certificate over here too yeah there's a few castle hotels in europe i think schloss hotel kronberg is a category four now if i remember correctly which is near frankfurt uh you know it's not actually terribly expensive all the time but uh but it's definitely a castle i have a castle booked in scotland uh later this year so it's that's not a category four but uh but anyway yeah i mean there's a lot of places in europe if you're going to europe then it's worth just taking look at the SLH options. There's a lot of really good ones in Europe.

Next question for Greg. Any tips on how to avoid jet lag for my kids? Leaving for New Zealand at 9 p.m. R. Time and arriving at 9 a.m. New Zealand time after 22 hours of travel total. No, I don't when i went to new zealand i had i didn't have any jet lag at all it was like we we went to bed uh late at night on the airplane and woke up in the morning luckily we were flying life flight business class so we were pretty comfortable woke up in the morning had breakfast

on the plane then arrive yeah about 9 a.m. in New Zealand. And so, you know, I think we're a little sluggish that day, but then we're good to go by the next day. I cannot promise you that your kids will have the same experience or you for that matter. We may have just been lucky. So this next one I'll assign to Greg as well, seeing as it would probably be more likely up to him as to whether or not we do this. So Jose says, I appreciate your current point transfer bonuses page. Any plans to create a current buying points and miles list?

We haven't. So the funny thing is we used to have that. We used to have a page that was for that, and I forget why we stopped maintaining that. But it's worth us considering. We don't have plans right now, though, to do it. But we'll talk about it and see whether we think it's worth doing. And yeah, I guess the tricky thing as well is that we don't necessarily

always cover every single buying points and miles thing, like Southwest and things like that. We don't tend to highlight. So that's pretty much always a bad deal and things like that so i don't know how comprehensive it would be um okay so question eight um which app is better for managing flying blue points klm or air france to nick i don't know i only use the air france one so i don't know if the klm app is better and that's not i don't use the air fr France one because I think it's better. It's just the one that I downloaded maybe because I went in alphabetical order. I don't really know. Anybody else have experience

with the KLM app? No. No. No. So hopefully someone watching along will be able to comment in the comments on YouTube if they do end up having any kind of experience with that um next question for tim um how to book latam flight um best option currently have capital one ultimate rewards and membership rewards um no alaska miles for him

uh i believe obvious would be your best option um i don't, does anybody remember, is it 45,000 each way? 40,000. It's right in that, it's right around the same area as Alaska. It's about the same where you're, I mean, and that is, I'm assuming you're, it's funny. I always assume that people are flying business. So business using Avios is I believe 40 or 45,000 each way. And then there's slightly higher fees than what you pay with Alaska, but it's a very similar price. And as far as I know, that and Alaska are by far the two cheapest ways to book LATAM from North America to South America. Difference there is that you're going to have to book just a lot of time right because you can't book well actually i guess you could book the alaska connector maybe if it's available with british airways right yeah that's that's tough though yeah and you're gonna pay more

of course obvious yeah so that yeah and that's actually a good point that you probably i mean i shouldn't say i shouldn't say you won't but but for whatever reason, Obvious as compared to like Advantage doesn't seem to often come up with the Alaska connecting flights. So you're effectively going to be, you may have to book a positioning flight on your own to Miami, Los Angeles, Dallas, New York, wherever you're flying out of to get to South America. So this next one comes from Amanda.

She's getting ready for the Beyonce concert at the Sphere or the announcement of the Beyonce concert at the Sphere in Las Vegas. Since those dates leak, it's going to be a race to book something before the algorithm sends hotel rates sky high. Any tips or tricks? I'll give this one to Tim just because he was out in vegas for a u2 concert at the sphere fairly recently so any thoughts on what the best option would be for her well and if i understand correctly you're asking about hotels and not booking the actual tickets

themselves yeah um in that case um i'm not sure exactly where the um where the announcement is in terms of dates if you know the dates just search right now and book something get something before um in my experience when there are big events that get announced it takes a little bit for hotels to catch up with that in terms of their pricing, because they're usually finding out about the same time that everybody else is, that there's something there. So I would say outside of, if you don't know the dates right now, as soon as you do know the dates, like the minute you hear them or you see them, start looking for availability at that point.

I would also say that Vegas has a lot of hotel rooms. So the odds of one 17,000 person concert making a big dent as opposed to a hundred thousand person conference is, is unlikely. So I'd say you probably don't have outside of the properties that are connected to the sphere or right around the sphere, like the Venetian Palazzo. I can't imagine that you're it's going to really affect things unless you're going on the weekend which then it's sky high anyway because it's the weekend of vegas but i but honestly you know i mean i know beyonce it seems

huge and it is but it's still only 17 000 people which in vegas in terms of the amount of hotel rooms really is kind of a drop in the bucket yeah i, I mean, the MGM Grand alone has like 5,500 rooms, like that one hotel. So yeah, that was my thought too before you got to it. I was like, there's so many rooms in Las Vegas, the concert's probably not. Like CES is going to make a big difference because you're going to get way more people for a conference like that than you are for a concert.

Yep. So next question. There's a few Marriott signup bonuses going around. How would you choose between five free nights up to 50K each, so up to 250,000 total, versus 185,000 straight up points? I will assign this one to Nick. Oh, well, you know, I think the five free nights, it depends on whether or not you have a hotel where you're reasonably sure you're going to be able to use those certificates when

at some undefined point in the future, you earn those certificates after meeting the spending requirement. What we've said, but we said on a recent podcast episode was, or maybe even the coffee break episode, it was that, you know, that offer makes sense for somebody who's willing to plan a trip around a great 50k property or 60k property or whatever the case may be. And those 50k certificates are in kind of a weird place because it seems more often than not, you're probably going to be settling for 40k properties with 50k certs, which isn't necessarily bad. You can still get lots of value out of it, but it's not necessarily as good either. And the other thing to think about is

if you found a property that was 50,000 points per night, then if you found five nights of availability with points that would only cost you 200,000 points because you'd get the fifth night free. With the certificates, it's going to take all five certificates. But what I'm saying is that 185K offer is pretty darn close to equal with the free night certificates at like a 50K redemption level. And it gives you a lot more flexibility. So I think I would lean towards 185K points. But of course, that eliminates the calculation of okay how much is the annual fee and you know which which card do you want long term and that sort of thing but uh

i would probably lean towards the flexibility of 185 000 marriott points for myself but i say probably because i'm the type of person with enough flexibility to plan a trip around a great 50k redemption i don't think most people have that flexibility to say okay well i'm just going to plan a trip at some point this year to use those certificates because remember they expire in a year the points don't so i would have more highly value the 185k points i think but if you're willing to hunt around for the perfect redemption then the 550k certs can be a little bit better a little bit would anybody value would anybody else actually take the 50K? Like for your own personal situation,

Nick did a great job of going through all the caveats and stuff. But would anybody for your own personal situation take the 50K, the 50K certs? So for me, only if I was thinking of it being more than one stay. So if I thought I was going to use them all for good value and not five in a row,

then it becomes significantly better than the points option. But would I ever be in that position? Probably not. So I would probably in real life prefer the points. Well, and two, one thing I would say, i'm assuming that the 185k question is coming from the marriott bonvoy brilliant that has that welcome offer right now it is a terrific welcome offer um understand too that if you're comparing that to the boundless card the personal card the personal card that has the 5x there's a huge difference in benefits and annual fee there if you're comparing it to the bonvoy business card that's an amex you can actually do both uh the business card doesn't

have the same restrictions that a lot of the personal cards do where you have to kind of do you know ring around the posy with the whole matrix of death and figure out if you you know went in exactly the right route through the mayor marriott labyrinth so if you're looking at the business the two amex cards it is possible to get both of those as opposed to if you're looking at the chase card and the amex card yeah that's a really good point the other another factor is that the chase card it can be a gateway drug to the ritz card if you want to upgrade to that in the future which we all most of us love our Ritz cards. So that's just another another confusing factor to keep in mind when you're when you're deciding. Some of some of us like them so much that they come back again and again.

True story. true story hey so next question um any tools for planning a road trip in other countries so many possibilities i.e which order to visit things in transit times etc makes my planning spiral out of control and i'm going to assign that one to myself um just because are you saying you're the expert? I've got a couple of tips that might help. So one thing that I do is on Google Maps, if you open that up and then go to saved, then maps, then it gives you an option to create a map. And so whenever we're visiting a new state

and we're going to be spending a few weeks there, what I'll do is I'll create this map, pin every single suggestion we've had of like where to go that people have given us, and then that way that helps us identify where it is all these things are, where we want to stay and things like that. And then within regular Google Maps, not a saved one, you can then put all of those or all of the highlights of the things that you really want to do on there. And you can just drag them around to work out the best itinerary in terms of like driving distance and things like that. So that way you might be able to reduce a 16 hour total

drive down to like 13 hours or something like that. So that's something that's useful. Something that I've seen mentioned in a few travel groups recently, I haven't actually done this myself, but it seems like it could be a good idea, is to use chat GPT. Basically, people are saying, I want to visit somewhere for four days. I want to create a road trip starting here, going there,

and find some cool stuff to do along the way. It sounds like it's actually pumping out some pretty decent itineraries of interesting things to do. I don't know if it's like pulling a lot of that information from TripAdvisor. So you might not get some like off the beaten path kind of places. You might get the kind of tourist traps. But if that's what you're looking for, then that could end up being a good option. Anyone else have suggestions?

I have a question for you, Stephen, just in terms of, so, and that's terrific stuff. But I have a question for you specifically because you do so much of this. How do you get down to the place? So let's say you say, I want to visit California. So once you have your things, you put them on the Google Mac. That sounds great. How do you get to the point where you have your things that you want to visit? Because that's a big, you know, it's a big state. There's a lot of options. There's a

lot of. Yeah, what I'll do is I'll, if there's anything in particular that we want to do, then Google Maps lets you add colors to all of the different pins. And so I'll highlight things in red or yellow or something like that that I particularly want to note as like must do kind of things but my wife and I tend to have like a fairly good idea of things that we particularly want to do and then other stuff will just work out once we actually get there so because we travel full-time it's too exhausting just to head up every single thing that you might want to do all the time like you might do um if you're traveling somewhere just for a few days you um you might see a lot more museums than we would want to do in a day or something like that so um yeah we we tend to pick out the things that are most important to us make

sure we're staying near them and then we'll like try and fit in other things around those and do you do you do that through like online research do you like in terms of deciding the the things that you want to visit do you just go online and start googling hey what what's good in california or west virginia or wherever you're going um we do that um a little bit we've had like all kinds of suggestions from people like both that we've met along um the way on our road trip and then like friends and family and then like people in our own facebook group and things like that um have given us suggestions and so i have a spreadsheet with 51 tabs for like all 50 states in dc where we've made a note of all of those so every time we're coming up to a new state then like i'll map all of that out and then um i might do like a little bit of

research as to things that are um in each day just to make sure that we're not going to kind of miss out on anything that's particularly important to us but at the same time I figure like we've hopefully got a lot more years and us if we do end up missing something on the way trip that turns out to be a must-do then we can always return there in the future and we've had that before where we've been really unfortunate where we've been in town somewhere and then they're advertising some like fantastic like festival or something like that but it starts a few days after we actually leave and it's like oh man if only i'd known about this so we were in um new harmony um in indiana um a couple of weeks ago and that's a incredibly cute small town it's like 650 people or something like that but such an amazing like peaceful place i highly recommend visiting there but the summer, they have a firefly festival where there's hundreds of thousands or something like that

of fireflies. It sounds like a really great experience. And so we'd like to go back to do something like that in the future. But we only found out about that when we were there. So that's something that happens fairly frequently. So real quick, a couple things um but our the freak miler insiders facebook group is a great place to ask for suggestions so if you're going to be going to france and driving around just ask there tell them what what you're thinking of and you'll get lots of uh suggestions i promise you other thing this is really specific but new zealand has newzealand.com, their website, has a great trip planning feature. So you can pick out from preset itineraries. You can tell it like what type of activities you like and how much time you have.

And it'll suggest a bunch of itineraries. And that's what my wife and I used and it worked out great. So next question. What's the best airline to credit miles to for each alliance? It's easy enough to understand the value of each mile, but harder to evaluate all the earning rates. So I'll assign that one to Greg. That's a big question. we should do some posts on that well the yeah i mean which which wants to credit to that's a little different from which to like

yeah points to um because it's there there's a lot of different oh. Oh, you're right. And we're all kind of laughing because Tim has started a project of trying to identify the best programs to transfer points to and having that all collated and everything. But, you know, in this case, it's complicated by things like, is elite status important to you? And if it is, the one that's best for you to credit to may or may not be the airline you fly the most. For example, Turkish is easier to get Star Alliance elite status with than many other Star Alliance programs, if I recall. And so if you get gold status with Turkish, you get to get in the lounge even when you're flying United domestically. Whereas if you get gold elite status with united you don't get it free access to the united lounge i but you do internationally um so i don't know so that's a bunch of rambling to basically say in really big letters it depends i mean i cannot give you a single answer for uh for that yeah that's a that's a that's a really big question. And partially just because of what

you said, like the earning rates are so different, even within alliances, between how, like in terms of somebody may give you 25% of your miles flown, somebody may give you 50% of your miles flown, somebody may give you 100% of your miles flown all for the same flight with a different partner airline and so man there's just a ton of variables there there really are all that to say that all that bluster to say that greg's right it's a big question i mean there's no way for anybody to answer that for you because like you said i mean it depends like does elite status matter to you or does only mileage running matter to you do you like do you not want to redeem turkish miles and smiles miles because they're a big pain to redeem uh and their award chart they've just recently have destroyed so like but do you want the star alliance gold status would you rather have star alliance gold status with united because then i guess you probably get

extra lycrum seating whereas if you have star alliance gold status with turkish you won't get that you get the lounge access greg talked about but not the extra ligaments so like there's just way too many variables as to what matters yeah or do you want to credit to air canada because right those points are theoretically more valuable than than the other two you know it's so yeah just yeah you're gonna have to study like that's i think that's the bottom line like if you If you're traveling enough to care about that, then it's worth putting some time into studying to figure out what would be best for your needs, for what you value.

And if you're not traveling enough where it's going to make a significant difference, then just credit to the programs you tend to use the most. So next question, another Marriott-related one. So regarding Chase 524, should I tempt, fade, and try to apply for the Marriott Boundless free night offer while currently at 524? Got 12 months left before dropping below that. To Tim.

Well, I'm always a fan of tempting fate by and large. I would say that to go, and this is just my experience with the Marriott card program, almost more, I've seen a lot of data points over the years, especially over the last few months, really, even more importantly of people getting approved for especially co-branded chase cards when they're at or over 524 um and even actually now even the regular chase ultimate rewards uh chase points cards um that uh greg had his whole

family was like lol 24 and they all got approved for new ink cards and they were over they were like seven and eight and six 24 um so i would be less concerned about that and more concerned about what the matrix maybe the marion matrix of death tells you um because that i've never seen or actually i shouldn't say that until very recently I've rarely seen data points of people who are supposed to be ineligible based on the matrix of death actually getting approved. Now, we just saw a positive data point on the Bond Boy Brilliant, which is the first that I've seen in literally probably a couple of years. But so I would make I would go and double and triple check that chart that Greg made to make sure that you're eligible for that. And then if you are and you want the boundless, the worst that's going to happen is Chase is going to pull one credit bureau. You're going to get one hard inquiry.

Your credit rating is going to drop five or six points for probably, I don't know, three, six months. And it's going to be one point different maybe for the first year. So that one hard inquiry is really not going to make a huge difference. And so, I mean, yeah, why not? Give it a shot. Yeah. And I'll tell you what, Tim will teach you the secret to getting approved if you like this video. Ooh.

Ooh. I have a lot of sweet with Chase. The one secret tip the banks don't want you to know. Just email them after this. Tim at gmail.com. They'll get right back to you. Yeah, send all your responses to Tim at gmail.com.

Okay, so next question. any tips for booking one of the rarer hotel points redemptions if i book the hotel i probably won't be able to find business class flights for those dates and vice versa if i book the flights first um assign that one to nick positive mental attitude all right positive don't make it a self-fulfilling prophecy that you're not going to find the business class flights. You're going to try, you're going to try and try and try. I do this all the time.

I'll book. When I see a great hotel, I will usually book the hotel first and figure out the rest of it later on because I know that finding the hotel, like those really difficult to find rar rare point redemption hotels can be really hard. So when there's availability, I want to pounce on it. And then I can spend all my free time searching for hotel or for the rather for the flights, I can set up award alerts with the various award alert services. And I'm the kind of person that like if I'm standing in line at

a grocery store, I am searching for award flights for a hotel that I have booked, or I'm searching for another night of hotel availability. And so I'll literally almost every day run a search or two or three. And eventually, I usually find business class flights that fit, it may not be quite perfect, maybe you find one that gets you there the day before. And so you have to figure out something else for a hotel night, or, you know, or you may have to leave a day later than you wanted to. And again, figure out something else for that extra night. But I find that when I really like put my nose to the grindstone and commit to,

I'm going to hunt this down. I can usually eventually find business class flights because those happen to flow. Like, you know, there may be nothing today, but maybe later tonight or tomorrow, there might be or next week or next month. So I would book the hotel and pay attention to the cancellation policy. I'd put the cancellation policy into your calendar, whatever the cancellation deadline is, and then just commit to keep searching for the flights. I mean, you

can't wait till the perfect moment. It it's rare that you're going to have that perfect moment where all of the availability is going to line up at once. So that's why I booked the hotel. I booked one way flights and I'll use a program that has free or low cancellation fees so that that way there's a low risk. If I book the outbound, for instance, and I can't find the return, then I could always cancel it. And, you know, maybe it'll cost me a small fee, but depending on the right programs, anyway, it doesn't have to cost you a lot. So your risk is really low in that. And most hotels have reasonable cancellation policies. So the risk is really low, I say book it when you see it. And then don't wait for like round trip flights. As soon as you see

one direction, lock that in and keep looking for the other direction uh and you know i think more often than not it's possible to do it's doable i mean all of us do it all the time i feel like or maybe not all the time but pretty frequently we find these things and and just keep hunting what's your preferred method for and this can be an all play but i'm just curious as a follow-up to the first part of that what's your uh what's your do you have a preferred method for looking for the rarer hotel redemptions well you know greg probably can talk more about uh about the tool for finding those because we get those alerts you get the alerts from a ways right you've been using that for a while, I think, right? Not a ways. Not a ways. A lot of people do, but there's max my point and there you go. And I always forget the name of the other one.

What's that? Stay with points. That's the one I was trying to think of. Yes. They, they, they're both very useful tools for setting alerts so that when those rare hotels open up, you get alerted and you can book them right away. The main difference is I'd say MaxMyPoint is more user-friendly, has some features that I really like. But StayWithPoints has one killer feature that is needed for certain hotels. There's certain hotels that only show award availability if you look for more than some number of days at a time. Like, so if you, if you look for one day of award availability, it's going to show, no,

that day is not available. Or if you look at two, it's not available. But if you look three or more, then all of a sudden it's available. And if you're open to like any day of the month, stay with points. You can tell it, look for, alert me if three days in a row or five days in a row open up anytime in this month. Whereas maximize point is just going to show show you unless you do a very specific set of dates it's only going to show you uh when individual days that it's looked at are available and so yeah the the only hotel

um i know 100 sure uh often does that blocking is the Inn at Bay Harbor, the Marriott that I go to a lot in northern Michigan. In the summer, they seem to block it. So you have to stay, depending on the, it seems to change what the rule is, but you have to have at least two or three days most of the time to see summer availability. And both of those tools, Greg, if I'mve, I don't use to with points very often. Both of those allow you to look through a calendar of availability on a given hotel, correct? Like you can go through the page through by month. I know MaxMyPoints does, but I'm not sure about.

Yeah, they both do. Both of them pre-cache and sometimes the data is pretty out of date. So I find that of like sort of marginal use, but either one of them setting alerts will get you a refresh data right away. So that's a good way to do it. Okay. So next question comes from Jeffrey. Despite the usual recommendation not to speculatively transfer, are there levels of earning, either hundreds of thousands or millions of points,

and levels of spending that make it worthwhile? Give this one to Tim, just because the next one will be to Greg. Oh, quite a tease, Stephen. So I would actually, I would kind of go, and this is me personally, and I'm interested to hear everybody else's thoughts on this. To me, if you're earning so many points that you don't know what to do with them, that's when you start to look at cash back in my opinion or cashing out those points. And the reason why normally we look at speculative transfers as being not an ideal use of points is not necessarily because of the volume of points that you have and you may not use them later. It's that then you're locking those points into one specific program and you can only use them within that specific program. If you find availability somewhere else on another program, you can't use it. If that program decides to

devalue, you can't use it. If you decide, oh, I want my points back and to use them somewhere else, can't do it. They're locked into that program. So if you started to speculatively, let's say you decide, oh, well, I'm going to speculatively transfer 500,000 points to Aeroplan, then 500,000 points to Avianca, then 500,000 points to Flying Blue, then 500,000. Pretty soon you have all of these points and all of these fixed non-transferable locations that you're now trying to figure out. It actually creates almost more problems for you. Now, what I would say is that's why like leaving them as transferable points can create a lot of flexibility because then you can transfer them as needed to the program that fits your travel needs um what i would say and actually nick just

wrote a post about this uh to this for this morning wasn't it wasn't this morning yeah i published last night yeah yeah yep where he talks about how he's cashing. And actually, I've done a lot of it, too, of membership rewards over the years through the Schwab card into a Roth 401k. If you're getting so many points that you can't use them, that's a good that's a good that's a good initiative to be able to say, you know, I should do something with these because they're not going to get any more valuable. But I think the problem is that actually gets worse if you specularly transfer, whereas if you turn them into cash, you can invest them. They can then gain value. You can use them to pay for groceries, mortgage, whatever, like they can become immediately useful or gain value as you go forward. So I would say if you're getting if you're hitting that level of spend or that level of point acquisition that you just don't know what to do with them. To me, that's where I would start looking at cashback as opposed to speculative transfers.

But I'd love to hear if somebody else has a different opinion. Yeah, I do have a counterpoint. There's certain programs that I really like having like a few hundred thousand points available, you know, pretty much any time and in case something comes up and then I could book right away with those programs. Now, some of them are programs that you're not going to be able to transfer to, like at least with a transfer bonus like American Airlines. But, you know, I've come to sort of the position now where if I already have more transferable points than I'm likely to need anytime soon, and there's a transfer bonus to a program like Avios or Air Canada or Life Miles, and I don't have a few hundred thousand or Flying Blue is another one, and I don't have a few hundred thousand points in those programs, then yeah, I'm going to jump on those transfer bonuses

and get myself back up so that the next time something happens, there's like a great award price on a, you know, through Flying Blue, let's say, and then I can sort of congratulate myself and say, yeah, I transferred, you know, far fewer points than are needed for this redemption to Air France and I can book it right then and not have to worry about rushing to do a transfer the last minute and worrying if anything goes wrong with that transfer from the points program. So as a quick follow-up, I'm just curious, I'd be curious what your answer is. Based on the question, like what level of points, so just pick a currency, let's say Amex, what amount of Amex points would you need to have to reach that critical level where you're starting to speculatively transfer? And is there a

percentage bonus that you would need to see in order to be tempted to do that? Regardless of the program, let's say it's a program that you would want those points, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Nick, Nick talked a little bit about what's that threshold with transferable points. And it's, it's a very wishy-washy thing for, for anyone. And, and it's going to vary. Someone who travels with a larger family, I usually just travel with my wife, might need more. But I don't know, sort of pulling something out of there, I'd say over 600,000 in any given transferable program I consider extra. And I would like a transfer bonus to be 25% or more. I'm not too tempted by those 15% bonuses. I'm going to add to what Greg said. He said there's programs he likes to have a couple hundred thousand miles. And I don't necessarily feel that way. But there

are programs that I very frequently use. And maybe this is kind of the underlying thing that Greg was saying. Like, I use Avianca LifeMiles. Like, I don't think there's been a year I haven't used Avianca LifeMiles in the last several years. And so, and usually, like, I mean, I think last year I must have used, I don't know, half a million, three quarters of a million LifeMiles. So if there was a good transfer bonus to LifeMiles, I might consider speculatively transferring, only because I know, like, out of New York, there's tons of Star Alliance carriers I usually go to Europe at least once a year and Star Alliance gives me the most options Navianca doesn't have any surcharges so I know I'm likely to use those in like relatively short order within like the next year and so there's that risk still of devaluation and everything

that Tim said locking them into a single currency and it might not fit the travel needs the day that it comes up but if you got enough points to cover that situation anyway, I might consider it if, like I said, it was a program that I know I use like every year and I use a large quantity of them and I'd be more likely to consider it. What would your threshold be then? Just a number, a quick number. I mean, yeah, I feel like I got to have at least another 800,000 to a million, like the numbers that I was talking about in the post I wrote about the Schwab card, because I need to have enough for my whole family to get places if that speculative transfer doesn't get me where I want to go. Okay, so next question. What are your thoughts on the new Wells Fargo autographed journey card? This one's for Greg, specifically requested for Greg from Gwendolyn.

Oh, wow. You got a request. I didn't know. But yeah, Wells Fargo launched their new Autograph Journey card, or is about to launch it. They announced the upcoming launch. At first, it's going to be available through select branches and then eventually available online. And I was surprisingly impressed. So that's not to say that I would throw away my other cards for this,

but I was expecting not much from Wells Fargo, and I thought this was a decent offering. So first of all, for $95 annual fee, you're getting, one of the things that gives you is $50 back when you use the card to pay for airfare. So it's sort of an effective $45 annual fee and it's getting 4X for airfare anyway. So it's not a bad, it's a pretty good use of it for that.

And you also get 5X for hotels, 3X for dining, 3X for other travel. And one-to-one transfer partners to Air France, British Airways, Aer Lingus in Iberia, and Avianca. So since three of those are Avios programs, let's just say there are three airline transfer partners right now. There's Flying Blue, there's Avios, and there's LifeMiles. But they promise there's going to be more, and I expect that's probably true. We don't see Virgin Atlantic yet, for example, and I'm sure that's coming. But the other surprise in there is not just that they have some and that they're one-to-one, but they have choice privileges, and it's one-to-two, just like Citi.

So we now have another way to get double points when transferring to choice, which is having more choice is always good. That joke alert. Well, I do. I was really surprised. And Greg, you pointed this out that they actually not only are the points from the autograph card going to be transferable as well within this, but they even said that their cash back cards, if you hold the autograph journey, can kind of capital one style can be trans those points can be transferred over to and then transfer to partners or those points to cash back like the

fact that they're actually coming out in advance and saying that like that's pretty cool it is really cool so you can have the uh this card the uh fee-free autograph card, which would be the advantage of, I think that's free-free, right? Yeah. The advantage of that, that would also give you, in addition to the 3X categories of this card, it would also give you 3X on gas and phone plans. And you could have the fee-free, what is it called? That cash back card. Active cash. Active cash. And then you're essentially getting 2X everywhere else.

So they're in a way mimicking the Citi portfolio a little bit or starting to. They don't have all the categories that Citi has, because they don't have like grocery, but they're getting towards that. And so I think that's great. Cool. So one final quick question before we end. How do we manage Amex cards beyond year one to maintain good standing with Amex? For example, when would it be okay to close, downgrade, apply for cards, how many months apart, etc.?

Nobody really knows uh you know i think that generally speaking you know if you've got a card or two with an annual fee that you keep with amex that seems to you know be something maybe they like but like this is really kind of uh one of those things it's kind of like going to a fortune teller i mean i could i could guess some stuff and lay out the cards for you but does it really mean anything i don't know i i I don't worry about it too much. The things that you need to know are like, you can't close the card within 12 months, within the first 12 months.

Like you're going to keep it for a full year or after you've gotten a retention offer, you need to keep the card for, what is it, 12 or 13 months. You got to keep it open after you get a retention offer. Otherwise they might claw the retention offer back. So, you know, if you play by those rules,

I don't know, I've been able to close other cards and upgrade and apply for other cards. And I haven't hit pop-up problems until really recently. And even that has been pop-ups just on cards that I already have. So, which was always like a gamble as to whether I'd be able to get another one of those so yeah i don't know if does anybody disagree with me anybody have like the magic roadmap here or treasure map no yeah go ahead um i mean i was just gonna say yeah just so long as you're not

downgrading or canceling a card before your year's up or after you've earned a bonus or something like that then yeah there's no kind of like hard or fast thing it seems or certainly nothing that's ever been published or that we've been advised about basically so what were you going to say to him one asterisk that i would that i did want to put on the 12 months thing um that a lot of times i think people think that they get a little freaked out when they see the annual fee hit and they think they have to cancel it right at that second. But sometimes the annual fee actually shows up on your statement because of how statement cycles work before the 12 months is actually finished. And so, or it'll show up, even if the statement hasn't,

it'll show up on your account. So you have with Amex, you have 30 days until after the statement close date of the statement that the annual fee appears on to cancel the card and get it refunded. So the only thing would be don't jump that because that is one thing that can get you into trouble with both call, as Nick said, is to cancel either 12 months within an upgrade or a signup. They don't jump that because that is one thing that can get you into trouble with both callback as nick said is to cancel either 12 months within an upgrade or a sign up um they don't like

that oh well i think that brings us to a close so um if you've enjoyed this or even if you haven't we'd love it if you would like just just below on um on youtube. Especially if you haven't. In a future post or something like that. We would love if you'd click through to YouTube and then click like on there as well. That would be awesome. Good job.