Frequent Miler on the Air - Best uses for Bilt points | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep297 | 3-14-25

Episode Date: March 14, 2025

Bilt Rewards is a program that became famous for giving you rewards for your rent payments, but these days there are many ways to earn Bilt rewards. In this episode, we'll pay special attention to how you might want to use your Bilt points. (01:15) - John writes in with a correction for Nick's statement that there's a "zero percent chance" the tax payment won't count toward the bonus. (06:57) - Andrew writes in about applying for an Amex card by opening up a Private Browser and searching for the card there can bring up a higher offer. (08:49) - Bilt 5x offers (targeted after asking for credit increase) Learn more about the Bilt offer here. Learn more about the Bilt spending offer for groceries, gas, and dining here. (10:38) - Amex coupon credits and bonuses posting slowly (relax / don’t panic) Learn more about Amex coupon credits and bonuses posting slowly here. (13:30) - Marriott cracking down on "additional guest" reservations, which you can read more about here. (20:47) - Southwest for the "win". Read about Southwest's disappointing updates here. (23:28) - Check out our recent podcast episode about these Southwest changes here. (23:38) - Nick finally gets his million (25:14) - Reader winner updates (28:38) - Excellent Virgin Atlantic business class availability as low as 29K points + $254 (31:26) - Aviator companion tickets for the win! Read more about this here. (35:56) - Up to 40% transfer bonus from Capital One Miles to Etihad Guest (41:25) - How not to use your Bilt points (43:46) - 1.25 cpp: book travel through their portal (44:41) - 1.5 cpp: Use points for house down payment (46:23) - Transfer to partners (1:16:55) - Here are the partners you shouldn't transfer to... (1:18:20) - Wait for great Rent Day transfer bonuses (1:20:26) - One reader asks about the Capital One pre-approval tool and whether or not it would cause a hard pull.

On today's show, a reader will assert that I was only 99.5% correct. We'll talk about our final million mile madness update. Marriott and Southwest are back resuming their Bonvoyed battle, and we'll discuss the best ways to use your build points. Frequent Miler on the Air starts now. Today's main event, best uses for built points. Built rewards is a program that became famous for rewarding you for paying rent with their built credit card.

But it's actually more than that. Built rewards are points you can earn by tying different credit cards that you use that doesn't have to be built credit cards to your built wallet. And then you could earn rewards at places like Walgreens and various restaurants and things. Anyway, lots of ways to earn built points, but we're going to be talking today about how to use them. How can you get great value from those points?

That's right. So if you've built up your build balance, you're going to want to listen to today's episode. If you want to skip ahead to a specific segment or you want to come back to something, by the way, don't forget that you can find the timestamps in the show notes so just expand the show description and wherever you're watching or listening don't forget to give us a thumbs up like this video leave us a comment or some feedback we always appreciate those things let's strike out this week's giant mailbag this week's

giant mail I've got a double header first one's from John John didn't like what Nick had to say last week oh gonna-oh. Uh-oh. Gonna take me to task, John. He's got a bone to pick. No, he says it in the nicest way. John says, I wanted to write in with something of a correction for last week's giant mailbag. Nick stated that there's a 0% chance that a tax payment, and as an aside, we're talking about making a tax payment with an Amex credit card in this context, there's 0% chance that the tax payment won't count towards a bonus.

We can all agree that there's 100% chance it should count, but I'd say there's only a 99.5% chance that it will. I agree that in almost all cases the bonus eventually posts without issue, and the first step is simply wait a few weeks. But there have been a few cases where an Amex bonus doesn't post automatically even after waiting months and months. While it's unclear if paying taxes is what causes that issue, it definitely makes the problem worse.

Because after waiting months for a missing bonus, your only recourse is to start chatting and calling. You hit rep after rep who say you didn't earn the bonus because tax payments don't count. We can all agree they are wrong, but that's cold comfort when they refuse to help or file a report on your behalf. So round and round you go, talking to different people, asking to speak to supervisors, and asking for reports to be filed, hoping that eventually someone more knowledgeable intervenes. This exact scenario has happened to me twice, as recently as 2023. Both times it took over nine months to get the bonus, and probably 30 plus hours of hassle and grief.

I know it's unusual, but it does happen. I've talked to a few others in the Facebook group who've had similar issues. So while tax payments count, I actually try to avoid using them to hit MX bonuses because of the trouble they can cause. It's a good point that John makes here that, and I can't remember exactly how he worded it.

I feel like the letter we read said there's a non-zero chance and somehow I don't think that what I meant was exactly that there's a zero percent chance that it won't count. Maybe I did. I don't know. Maybe that's what I said. At any rate, at any rate, you know, the thing here is, so I don't know about, John's situation sounds pretty clear, but there's, I mean, they obviously count for so many people that we know they count. And so John's agreeing with that. And I agree with John there. And in John's case, I don't it sounds like he's pretty on the ball and knows he has everything together. My thought would be that if there are counting in 99.5% of situations that those point 5% of situations where people think they aren't counting, my guess is that there's something else holding up the bonus and it's not the tax payment because if it were the tax payment there'd be more than 0.5% of people that would be not getting the bonus. Yeah, but John's not arguing against that. What he's saying is if anything causes the bonus not

to post, a tax payment makes it harder to get the bonus because you have to make your way through people. And that's where the problem is. So, uh, I agree with them. I totally understand there. You know, what this reminds me a little bit of is shopping portals. And so like, if you, if you go back way back to, well, go to like bank run shopping portals where, um, we told people, usually you don't actually have to use that bank's credit card to pay for an item when you click through the shopping portal in order to earn rewards from the bank. But if something goes wrong, good luck, you know, contesting it if you didn't use the

bank's credit card in that example. So this I don't think is as extreme as that, like because it really should count. Like in the bank portal example, usually they do have some terms somewhere that say, use this, use your Chase credit card or whatever to pay. And so they could stand on that as saying, this is why it didn't count.

In this case, there is no language written anywhere. A tax payment doesn't count because it does. But yet, for some reason, there are a bunch of MX reps who are convinced otherwise and that causes trouble in some cases. Yeah, I mean, it certainly would be like beating your head against a brick wall, I imagine, if you have met all of the requirements and need to follow up with somebody. I would have bet that in more cases, it was a situation, probably not John's, but where maybe somebody miscalculated and looked at the total spent on the card and were including the cost of the annual fee, for instance, and didn't realize that that didn't count

towards the spending bonus, or they made instance, and didn't realize that that didn't count towards the spending bonus, or they made a return and didn't subtract that. And because I think sometimes you'll cut it really close on meeting the spending requirements. I tend to try to overshoot the spending requirements by a little bit, just to be sure. And in some cases, if you just wait, it'll work. But yeah, if it doesn't, you're right.

You are in for a headache. So that point made, which was a good one, you're right, would you avoid making tax payments? No, I would still do it. It's such an easy way to make big spend all at once. So I'll still do it. I've never had problems. I mean, maybe once I experience.

Once you do spend 30 hours on the phone. Yeah, the first time I experience what John experienced, then maybe I'll have have sing a different tune. But for now, I'm going to keep doing it. I bet after the second time, you would be singing a different tune. And it sounds like it's happened to John twice. So I can understand the perspective there.

All right, but that's the end for the Giant Mailbag this week. No, we also have a giant mail from Andrew. Andrew says, I'm a new listener, so you may have already covered this. But applying for an Amex card by opening up a private browser and searching for the card there can bring up a higher offer. I've tried this on a few different devices and it has worked on all of them. Plus the fact that it is a private browser means they do not know who I am and thus it's not a targeted

offer, so I think others should be able to do the same thing. Opening in a private browser doesn't always give a higher offer but I have not yet seen it give a lower offer than what was on your site. It has always either been higher or the same. Good, very good Andrew. I'll let you take that one, Craig. Yeah I don't know that we've explicitly talked about this on our show or not, I can't remember, but Andrew's right, for some reason, Amex likes to target people sort of randomly for sometimes better than the best public offer

for various cards. And so going through, going in incognito in Chrome or in a private browser in Firefox or whatever, and clicking the exact same links can have a different effect at different times. And so that's a great thing to know. And it's definitely worth trying out when you're really interested in a particular card. And I should say it's not like predictable either whether, you know, clicking on someone's like a blog's affiliate link or someone's referral link, like, or just a random Google link that you find any of those can lead to that outcome at times.

And so, yeah, sometimes you can get some really good offers that way. There you go, very good. All right, let's talk about this week's card news. What's up for card news this week? We've got a built offer that somebody got via email. Well, sort of. So someone wrote in saying that they called Wells Fargo

to ask for a credit increase on their built card, and that appeared to trigger a 5X offer, meaning they got an offer via email, and this is where the email comes in, offering them to earn five points per dollar for five days on all spend, and the way the bonus was set up, it's limited to

$2,500 spent to get that 5X. And so we wrote that up. And then shortly after that, the same person finished that offer and then got an offer for five points per dollar for 30 days, but not on all spend, but on grocery stores, gas stations, and dining, but with the same max of $2,500 spend to earn 5X. So I thought that was just kind of interesting, especially since our main event today is about using built points. Here's a little bit of news about how you might be able to trigger a spend bonus on your built card. No guarantee, but several

people have have since written in saying that after they ask for credit limits, they credit increases, they also got offers like that. Yeah, that's great to know and interesting to see built targeting people with offers that they think might incentivize them to use the card more often. So that's kind of exciting because maybe we'll see some other good stuff like that. And if we do continue to see good targeted offers like that, there might be more opportunities to build your built balance. So good news there. All right.

But there's also some bad news in card news this week, or not bad news, but news worth talking about, I guess. And that is we were just talking about Amex welcome bonuses a few minutes ago. Amex coupon credits and welcome bonuses have been posting slowly lately and when I say slowly I think I don't know by the time you listen to this I don't know if this will be true but I think somewhere around middle late middle of February certain types of coupon credits have not been posting. People have reported different ones, the wireless credits, for instance, on Business Platinum cards or the office supply store credits on Business Gold cards. No, I got

mine on a Business Gold card and other people haven't. So it's variable. But bottom line is those things have been posting slowly and this happens this happens every now and then and And I've been in various different things whether it's airline fee credits or it's welcome bonuses Or it's these coupon credits every now and then it seems like there's just a bottleneck in the Amex computer system and everything slows Down and even though it always posted in three days for like months or years or whatever all of a sudden it all slows Down and people panic and they're like, oh no it's not working anymore because this and that and blah blah and it's almost always the case that if you just wait a few weeks they usually get it figured out usually so I think that they're gonna post it's

just there's a slowdown we we don't know when yeah I'm in this exact situation I actually did what I thought would trigger a bunch of airline fee credits right about the time when they stopped posting. And I was starting to sweat a little bit until I heard that this has been happening to everyone and that made me feel better. Because, you know, of course, there's always the possibility that the specific thing you did, in my case, it was a way of triggering them on Delta, you know, it's always possible that that specific thing has stopped working, but in this case,

knowing that it's happening so widely, I feel comforted by that, that, you know, the chance of it there being two different things happening here is very small, I just need to wait it out. Yep. Yep. Which is usually the moral of the story. I mean, the same thing happens every now and then I'll meet the spending requirement for a welcome bonus. I mean, sometimes that welcome bonus will post in just a few days and then sometimes it's like weeks before it posts. And so, you know, the same kind of thing often happens where people will panic

and this goes back to the tax payments because people will often panic that one thing or another didn't work or they'll say, oh, the pending charges showing up differently this time or there was different information and whatever went through and, and they'll worry about that stuff. And usually those small details for the most part, there's always a chance that something has changed. Like Greg said, but usually those small details are pretty meaningless and you just got to wait it out. So this is, I think I'll wait wait and see and and it will probably get fixed

Yep. All right. That's hard news Now next up we've got to ask a question who bonvoyed us this week So this was bonvoyed us Greg, you know, I'm pretty sure it's the same cast as last week Casting characters, huh? Everybody's ratcheted it up. You know, they realized they had a hit on their hands and so had to put it into overdrive. Let's talk about Marriott first. What do we have going on in Marriott land? Well, so Marriott, the word on the street, and I want to emphasize that this is like

word on the street that I pointed to something from reddit that view from the wing had had posted but I know somebody had shared a link somewhere else where I saw very similar stuff from a Marriott suppose a Marriott employee indicating that Marriott is intending to crack down on additional gas type reservations account sharing as they call it and so the idea here is that What they don't want is for me who's a platinum member to make a reservation for my friend Joe who never stays at marriott and uh, but make the the reservation in my name in my account and add Joe as an additional guest so that joe can show up and check in and enjoy my benefits without me being there they don't want you to do that and that's probably pretty up and check in and enjoy my benefits without me being there. They don't want you to do that.

And that's probably pretty reasonable, I think, in most cases. However, there are times and situations, of course, where not Joe will go to check in, but my wife and kids might go to check in because they're getting to the hotel before I do. And I'm going to get there later on. It's just that they're going to beat me to the hotel for one reason or another. Maybe I'm stuck with a work thing or coming from a different place. And so I want my wife and kids to be able to check in and get into the room, but I'm going

to be there. So I also want to get and enjoy my elite benefits and elite credit. The problem is that it sounds like Marriott is intending in those situations to say that the member under whose account the stay was booked has to be present or the additional guests showing up won't be allowed to check in and will be turned away if the member doesn't show up. So it sounds like there's at least a possibility that in that scenario I just painted where my wife and kids get there first that they're not going to be able to get in the room until I get there and that's a big inconvenience I think for a lot of members so that that kind of stinks. I mean,

there's plenty of times in the past where I've been arriving late and my wife's been there with the kids and she couldn't get into the room. I mean, how inconvenient would that be? She'd be annoyed, the kids would be annoyed. Maybe, you know, I just, I'd be annoyed because they're annoyed. It just, it doesn't seem like a good way to handle this. Wasn't there also something punitive where they would report the member too, or something like that? Yes, yes. So yes, Marriott is apparently asking hotels to report people who've done this,

where they've had an additional guest show up first, and the threat here is that once you've been reported, Marriott theoretically may close your account and zero out all of your points. Now, I don't know how likely it is that you would get your account closed and banned unless you're rude to the person at the desk. And going back to my example before, I could imagine a situation where a spouse might be a little annoyed that they can't get into their room.

And then I get that call, so I call the front desk and I start to lose my patience too. Hopefully not. I'm usually pretty good at staying level headed, but I can imagine that happening. And then a front desk agent says, OK, well, I'm just going to report this to Marriott. And perhaps a member's account gets shut down over something that's really

overall pretty silly if they're using it, if they're not trying to abuse the system. Yeah. Yeah. Man, it's awful that if we take sort of like a, you know, really wide angle look at this, it's just awful that like people who really abuse like reward systems, like points brokers, and there's probably people that are, you know, selling stays at, you know, Marriott hotels where they promise you'll get free breakfast or whatever it is, you know, and then that person who's selling it is also earning more elite credits for the stay, all that kind of stuff.

And, you know, it's just terrible that those kind of things lead to people who just want to enjoy the perks of the system as they're defined, getting like hosed because of, yeah, situations like this. What I really wish is that loyalty programs would spend more time trying to figure out how can we stop the abuse without harming the regular customer. That should be their top goal is to keep their, especially their elite customers, happy. If they had just thought through this, and now I should back up a little bit We don't know that this is a hundred percent true, right? This is like one right?

I mean, this is something that's been reported by a couple people who say they work for Marriott So yeah like there's no way to know and with like six or seven or eight or however many thousand properties around the world and however many Employees of each one who knows how many of them are to be aware of this at all care about it and force it. So it's very hard to say. Right. But anyway, assuming this is true, you know, like, what, Merritt could have come up with some way like to have like family stays or something like where you, because it's got

to be so common for people to, to to and why not like actually do something that's that makes the program better for members by saying you know you could have a family stay you list whoever's going to be there as long as they're registered as family members like have some way to verify that and then um don't even worry about whether the member shows up or not, actually give them the LEAP benefits and that would make everybody happier while avoiding the abuse situation that we were talking about. So, you know, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I agree.

It's very much like the some of the Asian airlines require you to name nominees, right, or family members who you're going to book awards for. And Marriott could so easily do that and require that everybody lives at the same address. And so if that person tries to sign up for a Bonvoy account with a different address or whatever, then, you know, then that's obviously a flag and they'll realize what's going on. But, but yeah, they could certainly set something like that up. And I think your point is exactly it, That this sounds like they're setting it up to weed out bad behavior by punishing the good behavior too.

It's throwing out the baby with the bath water and essentially annoying the customers who you have no reason to annoy, who are loyal to you and doing right by you in order to catch the relatively limited number of bad actors out there. Totally a great solution. Marriott, if you're listening, that sounds like a much better solution.

Even if you don't want to give the elite benefits without the members showing up, at least create a way to name family members who can check in before you arrive. That would be great. That'd be simple enough to do. You ought to do it, Marriott. Yeah, 100%. All right. But that's not all for- But, no. Who's, 100%. All right, but that's not all for who's bonvoyed us.

No, that's not all. No, if you thought that Marriott was the best at bonvoying, well, hold on. Southwest said hold my beer. And definitely, I mean, if they don't win bonvoyed of the year at the end of this year, I can't imagine what bad thing is going to come along that is going to be a less customer friendly change. So tell us about it, Greg. What's going on? Well, no, just to follow on what Nick just said, if Southwest doesn't win, then we'll

have had a really, really bad loyalty year. The irony here is that last week when I reported that, or when we reported that Southwest had overnight dropped the earning rate on paid stays, I said something like- Paid flights. Paid flights. Unpaid flights. They're going to take away your Marriott points when you stay at a Marriott too. I mean, maybe that's what we'll try to do next. In that conversation said that Southwest was already a forerunner for Bonvoit of the year,

but I had no idea what was coming. And so soon after that, yeah, no, Southwest decided, you know how they said that free check bags were a thing forever? Well, forever ends in end of May this year, and free check bags will not be free anymore. Then they'll introduce other popular things like basic economy fairs. And everybody loves when airfare credits expire, which is something they had done away with before, but due to, you know, popular demand, they brought back expiration dates on your credits. And they decided, you know, popular demand, they brought back expiration dates on your credits. And they decided, you know, we've had enough of points being worth a, you know, standard amount and instead we're going to, when you really want to fly during popular times, we're

going to make them worth a little bit less, we think. Actually, we don't know the full details of what's going to happen there, we just know that they left open the possibility of really tanking your points value. Yeah I mean and if you take anything else as a bit of foreshadowing it seems like a pretty slam-dog prediction that'll be the case. And when Greg says everybody loves these things, he means everybody in corporate accounting conferences. everybody who's counting the beans and trying to eke out every last bit of revenue, I guess, I guess likes it. But anybody who's ever loved Southwest Airlines, basically everything that you knew and loved and recognized about Southwest is gone.

Like basically it's just the color on the side of the plane that's going to make you recognize Southwest still. It's certainly nothing about the Southwest experience, right? Yeah. Anyway, we went into this in depth in a podcast, so check that out. Yeah. Next segment. Next up, we've got the final Million Mile Madness update. Drum roll, please, I hope.

Million Mile Madness, as you may recall, was the competition that Greg and Steven and I engaged in last fall. SAS EuroBonus, the loyalty program of SAS Airlines ran this promotion where if you flew 15 qualifying SkyTeam Airlines by the end of last year, 2024, you'd earn 1 million miles. And the three of us did it to see who could do it with the most speed, affordability, and style. and Greg won. But it's taken a long time for SAS to credit those folks who flew the 15 airlines with their million miles.

Greg was the first of us to get his million miles and it happened for you quite a while ago I guess. Yeah, I think. Yeah. Right? Early January I think so. Yeah. Yeah.

So Greg got it first, then Stephen was not too far behind, a few weeks behind, perhaps maybe a month. And finally now, the final update for me is I finally received my million miles about a week ago. So I was super excited. I got an email that the 15th airline had credited. And then boom, my million miles showed up about three days later.

So that's good news. If you're still hanging on waiting, it's not over there. They're still crediting the miles. And my miles are scheduled to expire, I don't know, five years, four years from now, I guess. So four years from when they credited to the account, somebody expressed some concern about, oh, are you losing months of validity? And no, that's not the case. They were set to expire in March of 2029 or whatever it was.

So that's good news. I got my million. But there's other updates here too, right? In terms of readers who won. Just to let you know, we announced earlier about which of our followers, which of the people who followed our challenge and helped out, which of those won, we each picked a winner. And the grand prize winner was the person that I picked named Forrest.

And he has now, so we're just going to get an update on where the prizes stand now. So Forrest now has his five Hilton certs, but due to a technical limitation with, so his other prize is 400,000 SaaS miles. And due to a technical limitation, I can't actually transfer SaaS miles to him till we've both had accounts open for a year. So it's going to be a while. I gave him the option of picking Alaska miles instead, because through Hawaiian, I could transfer miles to him for free because I have a Hawaiian credit card. But he decided to wait until we can transfer the SAS miles. So he'll be waiting for that until, I guess, fall of this year.

Very good. My winner, I gave the same option to wait a year to get the 100,000 SAS miles that the person who was most helpful to me earned, or I offered to send them 100,000 Hawaiian miles now that they can move over to Alaska. And so my person GH opted for the Hawaiian miles. So I was able to transfer points over from MX Members rewards to Hawaiian and then from my Hawaiian account to their Hawaiian account. And so that was simple and easy. I don't have a Hawaiian Airlines credit card, but they do. So that was a really easy process. That's the first time that I have transferred points to a Hawaiian Airlines credit card holder. And interesting for me was that I was able to do it from my side just by putting in the

Hawaiian miles number of a member who has the credit card. The system recognized that and didn't charge me a fee to transfer the hundred thousand miles and it was done instantly. Right, right. So I think it's worth talking about our plan in case GH didn't have a Hawaiian credit card. The plan was for Nick to transfer his 100,000 miles to me because I do have the credit card. And then I could transfer to GH again, because I have the credit card.

So sadly, this freedom of movement of points is probably gonna go away when Hawaiian and Alaska fully integrate their rewards program, but at least for now, that's a great feature. And I hope Alaska decides to move it forward in some way, but we'll see. I've gotten the impression that there's going to be something, but I don't know what it's going to be. So I wouldn't be surprised if there's some sort of limitation on how much you can do. And of course, it's going to change because you won't have any transferable points that

you can send over once they get rid of Hawaiian wave things anyway. Except built points. Except built points, true. Which we're going to talk about today. Yeah. And finally, on the update, Steven's winner was also given a choice of 100,000 SAS miles if they wait or 100,000 Hawaiian miles now, which can be converted to Alaska miles. And they chose Hawaiian miles and they will be getting them very soon. Very good. All right. Awards points and more. Let's talk about a couple of quick things here.

So Virgin Atlantic, you discovered, had some excellent business class availability for as low as 29,000 points one way. Yeah, I was actually investigating because I'd read about how poor Air France, KELOM Flying Blue award availability was right now. And it was when I looked that up. But then I was just curious about what about Virgin Atlantic. And I got on Seats.Aero and looked at North America to Europe and saw pages and pages of very low price results starting at only 29,000 points one way in business class from North America to England. And that's both to London and Manchester, I think are the two airport destinations that are possible. And so 29,000 points and about $250 in fees, which is pretty phenomenal.

But still, even beyond that, there were prices, there were just hundreds of results that were like 50,000 points or less. And so those are terrific, great prices. So that's great to see. Yeah, and the low surcharges was like, that's obviously a huge change from the way things used to be. So, and it varies, the surcharges was like, that's obviously a huge change from the way things used to be.

So, and it varies. The surcharges vary based on the flight. So they're not always that low, but there was a ton of, there were a ton of 29,000 point business class tickets with $254 in surcharges. And then I also was surprised that I found some connecting itineraries that went on beyond the UK that combined a leg with Air France or KLM to go beyond the UK and they weren't very much more. I found one that was I think was 37,000 miles in business class and just a little bit more in taxes and fees which was notable to me

because Virgin Atlantic doesn't fly anywhere else in Europe so usually it's good if you want to get to London or Manchester but not necessarily good if you want to go somewhere else I was pretty surprised and I say not necessarily good not necessarily good because Air France and KLM haven't been releasing very much Awardspace lately you can book their flights through Virgin Atlantic for a decent deal when they're available But anyway, so it's worth a worth a look if you're looking to go most of the availability in fairness was early It's worth a look if you're looking to go. Most of the availability in fairness was early 2026. Most of it was January, February. Not all of it though.

I found some 29K awards in October and November of this year and then plenty that were under 50K like Greg said. Yeah, and I found some in like for summer travel that were around 50K or less. I think there were some 40K ones. So it's definitely worth checking that out. Yep, good. All right. Also this week, I wrote a post about using my Aviator Silver companion tickets for the win. So my wife and I both have advantage Aviator Silver cards. Now the

Aviator Silver is a card that you have to get invited to upgrade to sort of from an Aviator Red card. Both the Aviator Red an aviator red card both the aviator red and the aviator silver card offer the opportunity to spend Your way to a companion certificate if you have the red card after 20,000 in purchases in a card member year you get a Companion certificate good for one companion at $99 plus taxes if you have the silver version of the card you get two companions For $99 each and in taxes and I wasn't sure that I would use this. I spent to it on both of our cards last year, mostly because I'm a blogger and I write about this stuff, not because I knew I would get good value.

I thought if I didn't get good value, it'd be worth telling people that. And so I did the spend, I wrote a post about first impressions several months ago when I got the certificates, and I was disappointed at the number of blackout dates in there. I thought it might end up being difficult to use, but lo and behold, I just ran into

a situation where we had to go somewhere and our availability was incredibly limited. Normally we enjoy a lot of flexibility. We'll go in a day earlier, come back a day later if it's cheaper. In this case, we had like the super tight window that you never want to end up being in where we had to leave within a couple of hours window to arrive at a certain time and get back at a peak travel time too. And so prices were just outrageous, but it was a situation. It was a must go situation where everybody in the family said, we're definitely going

to go. It doesn't matter how much it costs. And so we were looking at spending between five and $600 a person for six people to make a round trip. And luckily these companion certificates, my wife and I were each able to use ours and had two companions on. And in the end, it cost us about $280 a person round trip. We saved $250 at least per person times six people over what we were about to spend. And we were about to spend that. We were pretty close,

because my wife didn't really want to fly American, but she compromised at the last minute. And so we all saved a bunch of money with those companion starts. They turned out to be great. Why didn't your wife want to fly American? I think there's some sarcasm there, but it's actually not because American is so often delayed

and a poor in-flight experience, which is probably what Greg is hinting at. But more so because in this case, it's a very small plane. My wife loves to travel, hates to fly. I've said that lots of times before and just refuses to get on small planes usually. And this is a small like one, two seating layout. And so she was hard pass on that totally out. And the rest of the family understands that. So everybody was prepared to pay the five or $600 understanding that that's just a limitation and we got to go.

So we were all prepared to do it anyway. And at the last minute she decided that she'd be able to handle it for this trip. And so, you know, we all saved a little bit of money. So quite a bit of it. That's really nice. Yeah, yeah. It's that story made me take another look at like,

I had sort of dismissed those certificates altogether for my personal use, not that, you know, there's certainly a lot of people that it makes sense for, but I'm gonna, you know, use it as like another thing that like to consider like, is there a way to save money on an upcoming trip with that? If I'm okay, flying economy and American Airlines, which I've had just endless issues with American, with flights being delayed, cancelled. I had a

aborted flight to London where we actually took off and had to come back to the runway. So we would never fly American again if that happened. I got off that plane and we flew United. On American's dollar though, so that was not a bad outcome. True true. Well yeah, so there you have it. And don't jinx us here. We're hoping for no delays and cancellations.

Now, since I'm not going to be on that flight, you'll be fine. We'll be OK. All right, good to know. Yeah. So you can read more about it. We'll have a link in the show notes if you want to read more about the situation.

I'm sure some people will be like, oh, but would you have really spent that much? And yeah, in this case, we were going to. So it was definitely a real life savings. And I was pleasantly surprised. Would I spend $20,k to get them again? I don't know. I might, but not necessarily because I expect to get that much value again. I think it just, you know, the stars aligned and we were able to use it for great value.

All right. Then last thing for awards points and more up to a 40% transfer bonus right now from Capital One to everybody's favorite award program at DeHudcast. A little bit of sarcasm. So you can get up to a 40% transfer bonus. So tell me, Greg, how do I get the full 40%, when does it end, and should I be doing this with my Capital One miles? Yeah.

40% sounds big. So it's one of those tiered bonuses where you get more the more you transfer, but as long as you're transferring 50,000 points or more, you get the 40% bonus, but as long as you're transferring 50,000 points or more, you get the 40% bonus. It ends March 31st. You should definitely do this if you like the idea of being Bonvoid all the time when you're spending points or hoping to spend points. Let me give you some examples of the things you're, the great things you're in for here

with this transfer bonus. First, Etihad actually has some good partner award prices. So sometimes Etihad is like the cheapest way you could book like American Airlines or whatever, or one of the cheapest ones anyway, but they will randomly, maybe it's not random, but we don't know the reason behind this.

They will randomly show a price when you're searching for the ward and when you click through, but that's not really the price. So you have to actually have enough miles and then you get to the final checkout screen and then you get shown that it was actually more. And so it's if you if you transfer it over exactly what you needed with this 40% transfer bonus you might be short and then have to transfer some more maybe after the transfer bonus is over. So

that's one fun little way they like to bonvoy us. Another way is their point expiration policy. Let's say you transfer because you think, oh yeah, someday I'm definitely going to use these miles. Well, that someday better be within the next 18 months. Otherwise, they'll expire due to inactivity unless you've credited paid flights to Eddie Hutt, so you've earned Eddie Hutt miles that way, then that will keep them going. So that's pretty awful.

Wait, so we can't just transfer more miles in to keep them alive? Doesn't work, no. Ouch! That's not valid activity to keep your points alive. So yeah, ouch, ouch, and those two aren't even the worst, are they? No, they aren't. No, they aren't. The worst is the cancellation policy, because if you have to

cancel an award you've booked, your best case scenario, you've canceled far in advance of the flight, you're going to lose 25% of the miles. And so your 40% transfer bonus here is going to get eaten up pretty quickly by the cancellation penalty because again, far in advance, you lose 25% of the miles. Then as you get closer, that increases to 50% of the miles. And then within a week of departure, I think you lose 75% of the miles if you have to cancel like that's there's not a different choice. It's not like you could pay a fee or something to redeposit the miles.

You're just going to lose three quarters of the miles if you have to cancel within a week of departure. And even within two weeks, it's 50%. Half the miles you're going to lose. That's just the most punitive cancellation policy of any airline program in the world. I would never transfer to Etihad unless it was for a flight that I'm going to take like tomorrow. So I'm that confident that I'm gonna take it.

I just- I'll tell you who I think should, who should take advantage of this transfer bonus. First of all, you have to have a lot of capital one miles to make this work. But secondly, if your heart is set on a long distance, Eddie had first apartments flight. The award availability is virtually non-existent

between North America and Abu Dhabi, but I'm sorry, the partner award availability is virtually non-existent. But booking through Eddie had itself, the award availability is not that bad. So you should be able to snag like one of those flights. I think I read that they're moving that flight from JFK is actually moving to Toronto where it's going to go to and from.

So really as an aside, but anyway, so if your heart set on that, that, you know, and you know, you will be flying it. So you're not likely to cancel them. I think it makes sense, but anything else, you know, I would, I wouldn't even think about doing it if you saw like the, the point price is a bit cheaper for transferring to Eddie hot instead of transferring to, to, I don't know, Qantas or something else, um, go with the other program because Eddie had it's just gonna, you're gonna, you're gonna regret it.

Probably, probably. I will say one positive point going here is that Greg mentioned a lot of times the point price ends up being a little bit higher than what they show in the search results. I guess you can insure against that with Capital One a little bit because Capital One, I think allows transfers to everybody this way,

I think in increments of 500 miles. So if you think you need 60,000 miles, transfer over 60,500 or whatever the case might be to make up for that little buffer of the few extra miles you're inevitably going to need, though, of course you're gonna orphan some miles there and that won't feel good, but anyway, that's just a tip and idea.

All right, that's enough of that. Let's get into this week's main event. Main event time. Best uses for built points. Let's talk about how built rewards points can best be used. And first up, if you have built points, you probably have the built app, and you probably see that you can use your built points

to pay your rent, or you could link your built rewards account to Amazon and buy things from Amazon. And there's a bunch of options like that. So Nick, before we move on to the best uses, when should you do one of those things I just mentioned? Never, never. Those are the worst value uses.

If you're listening to this show, please don't use your bill points to pay your rent or pay for something on Amazon. Those are just, you're getting such low value for your points that collecting them in the first place becomes almost pointless because you're not gonna get enough of a discount unless you're in a cash crunch where you need the money, you need the stuff,

the way there's the rent or the stuff from Amazon in order to make ends meet. I mean, then obviously do what you gotta do. But if that's not your case, you don't wanna redeem points in those ways You need the stuff, whether it's the rent or the stuff from Amazon in order to make ends meet. I mean, then obviously do what you got to do. But if that's not your case, you don't want to redeem points in those ways because you're getting such atrocious value for points with those reactions. Yeah, you're getting well under a penny per point value, which is just awful. Now, the fact that they offer this type of thing is what offsets, it's what makes it possible for them to

offer more valuable uses of points because they know that enough people are going to be redeeming their points for rent and for Amazon and whatnot that that will offset the fact that they have to pay more when you do more valuable things with your points. So while you shouldn't use your built points for those ways, you should encourage that irritating neighbor down the hall to use their built points that way. Tell your friends to go ahead, get the chess set. It's redeem the points. Don't you want to get a bunch of free stuff on Amazon? Yeah. All right. But but since you're listening to this, let's tell you some of the better ways to use your points because well, let me ask you this before you even talk about the rest of this.

What would be like your floor level redemption for bill points? Like what's the minimum that you would be able or be willing to accept if you were to redeem bill points? Yeah, I mean, one point, 1.25 is the floor. So that's what they offer if you book through the built, if you book travel through the built portal, you're going to get, and if you pay with your built points, you're going to get 1.25 cents per point value. Because they have that and because if you're listening to the show, you either travel regularly

or intend to travel in the future. Save your built points at least at the minimum for that. I'd rather you use the points for even better value, but don't use your points for 0.6 cents or whatever it is for Amazon. I mean, please, or for paying your rent, don't do that points for point six cents or whatever it is for Amazon I mean, please or for paying your rent don't do that Said travel somewhere nice. Yeah, there you go. So totally agreed one point two five cents is the floor redeemed for travel But there's some better uses than that and that's why we say that's the floor because you can do better than that and The next one up is one that was news to me and that's that you can get one and a half cents per point value. How do you do that? Yeah this was news to me too until researching this for this show. You can get 1.5 cents per

point value using points for a down payment when buying a house. Wow. So yeah you know so if you have a lot of built points and you're buying a house. Wow. So yeah, you know, so if you have a lot of built points and you're buying a house, that could be a pretty nice way to instantly get good value for your points and not have to take so much money out of your bank account for that down payment. So that's pretty nice, nice feature. Yeah, I mean, if you live somewhere where rent is expensive and you've been earning one point per dollar on your rent for a few years, that would be a really nice way to reward yourself, I think,

if you're saying, okay, I'm moving on from renting, I'm buying a place, redeeming your points at one and a half cents each to have a bigger down payment, or like you said, to use less of your money. That to me seems like a really potentially reasonable use, and I'm somebody who likes to transfer points. I don't like to turn points into cash, but that is one where I say, I think I could see a lot of people doing well. And this is why you should not redeem your points

for rent. Because if you're redeeming them for rent, you're going to get 0.6 cents per point. So even if you don't intend to travel, hold off until you're ready to buy a place. Then redeem that big pile of points at one and a half cents each year and get more than double the value. So yeah, I think that's pretty good. I think that's a really good use. I'd be very, you know, I'll be proud of you if you're listening and use your points that way. That's terrific. The of course, the our favorite way to use points, transferable points, is to transfer them. Transfer them to hotel or airline partners

in situations where you can get outsized value for your points. Now, this is where you need to learn about the programs and understand what the value of the points are, or at least have a specific, or having a specific award in mind where you know you're gonna get great value if you transfer those points.

So I put together a list of what I consider the top partners to consider, and then second tier, and then a short list of don't even think about these. I'm gonna be interested to see what Nick thinks about my lists, yes. And perhaps more importantly, where we disagree. Yes, okay, well let's find out where we agree

and where we disagree. So Transfer Partners, let's talk about what the top partners are to consider. So out of the various built hotel and airline partners, what do you pick for number one? Yeah, Hyatt. Hyatt, you know, on average we see like you get like 1.7 cents per point value, but it's so common

to get much more than that with Hyatt hotels. Not, not if you use your points for like Mr. and Mrs. Smith hotels or for Hyatt experiences, but as long as you're using the points for Hyatt hotels, very, very common to get very high value. I mean, I often see like three cents per point kind of thing. And so transferring to Hyatt makes a ton of sense. Agreed.

Simple. Agreed. Most of the built points that I've used, I've transferred to Hyatt at times when I'm ready to book a Hyatt Property I don't transfer them speculatively to Hyatt Even though I assume I'm probably gonna use the most of them for Hyatt I hang on to them as long as I can because I do want to have them in case there turns out to be a good Transfer bonus at some point that I want to be able to take advantage of but I've transferred to Hyatt numerous times before and would again, yep at some point that I want to be able to take advantage of, but I've transferred to Hyatt numerous times before and would again.

Yep. Next up, I have Alaska mileage plan. So Alaska has a distance-based set of award charts, and they have some terrific values. Flying within the United States, if you could fly American airlines for as few as 400 points one way. And for some reason, at least on routes when I've done searches, there seems to be decent availability

of those awards as well. So it's not like this, you know, hypothetical thing, if only you could find it, it seems to be pretty common. and so I've seen tons of cases where a flight that might have cost like $600 is available for like $4,500 Alaska points, which is just insane. So also Alaska lets you add a stopover to a flight for free. So you can sort of make two trips out of one award with Alaska, great value is possible there. Yeah, and what I like about this one particularly is that if you rent, and this is similar with Hyatt,

but different with the rest of the programs we're gonna mention in a second, you don't need very many points. It's probably not very many months of rent to get a good travel redemption out of Hyatt or Alaska. Because like Greg said, I know from my home airport of Albany, New York, I can fly to Charlotte or Chicago very often on American for 4,500 miles one way.

Of course, not when I needed to book a flight just recently with that companion certificate I mentioned earlier. But many times I can book it for 4,500 Alaska miles when it would be much more expensive, like Greikshaven, maybe hundreds of dollars to buy a ticket. And 4,500 Alaska miles, that's probably just a couple of months of rent for a lot of people. And you could have, within three or four months, you might be able to have a round trip airline ticket and then another couple months beyond that, you might have a couple of nights at

a category one or category two hiatus. So I think that makes it pretty interesting because a lot of times when we talk about business class awards and foreign partners, the quantities of miles might seem out of reach for somebody who's getting started or somebody who doesn't have a lot of spend, but built as a program where I feel like

you can stack up an award by transferring to these partners in particular, you can stack up enough for a meaningful travel reward without that many months of rent. Yeah, 100%. So also it's worth mentioning that Alaska, or BILT is the only transferable points currency, at least currently, that has the ability to transfer to Alaska directly.

As we're recording this, you can transfer from Amex to Hawaiian Airlines and then from Hawaiian to Alaska. We expect that to go away at some point this year, but at least for now there are two ways to transfer to Alaska, but we expect that to drop down to one at some point this year. All right. Number three, I've got Air Canada Aeroplan. They have a very similar set of award charts to Alaska. In fact, Alaska seems to have, I think they copied off of Air Canada and made tweaks here and there is what I think happened. But where Alaska is a one world airline, Air Canada is Star Alliance, which is a bigger Alliance. And both Alaska and Air Canada have tons of other non-Alliance partners.

So they're both really good programs for booking like all kinds of partners. Air Canada Aeroplan is ahead, way ahead of Alaska in allowing you to mix many different partners onto a single award so you could build some amazing multi-partner awards out of Air Canada's program and because Star Alliance plus their partner in network is just so large and encompasses so many airlines the availability of awards is probably better through Air Canada than probably any other airline rewards program and so I like Air Canada than probably any other airline rewards program. And so I like Air Canada for all of those reasons.

Totally agree. Absolutely co-assign that. They have more partners than any airline program in the world. So it makes sense what you just said, that probably there's a better chance of you finding award availability at a good price through them than through anybody else,

simply because of the number of partners they have. So, and no surcharges on awards. and that's nice, which is similar with Alaska. They don't have surcharges on awards, but worth a mention because that makes them stand out versus some partners, like the next one we'll talk about. Yeah. So Air France KLM Flying Blue is my next one. And the first three almost should have been in a category of their own in a way. Those are the headline ones in my mind. Because the next one is like, you can get very good value from this program. Absolutely.

This is a Sky Team alliance airline, Air France NKLM, or part of, sorry are part of SkyTeam, which is a much smaller alliance. Delta, which is probably the biggest carrier, I would guess, of the SkyTeam airlines, hardly ever releases awards availability to their partners. So there's a limit to how much you can do as far as booking partner awards using Air France, KLM Flying Blue Miles. But they do usually a decent job of making their own flights available for awards. They have kind of a sliding scale of how much they charge. They don't really have a word chart. But like for flying from North America to Europe, it starts in business class as low as 60,000 points one way.

But you might find, oh, the flight I actually want is 90,000 points one way. That might be a good deal for your situation because maybe that's a nonstop flight exactly when you want. So I've had really good luck with this program. I did mention earlier in the show though that recently they seem to have like hardly any business class of workspace available between North America and Europe. I'm hoping that's a temporary glitch. Yeah, you know, one thing that is I think a common thread amongst the first four programs that we've talked about certainly a common thread between Air Canada and Air France

KLM flying blue well Okay So the common thread between the Air France KLM flying blue and Air Canada is that both programs are run by people? Who are like mileage nerds there are folks that that sure understand the the game so to speak and What people like us want out of a program because they also want to book the same awards. And so that's nice because they seem at least responsive to feedback and aware of the things that are exciting and interesting.

And so even though Air France KLM Flying Blue has had poor award availability lately, and maybe that'll be a permanent feature, I have more faith than I would in some other programs that that's not gonna be permanent, that there's going to be something that's going to be a positive surprise at some point because they're more aware and attuned to what their members want. And that's where I think they also kind of tie in with Alaska and Hyatt in that all four of those programs are more member centric than most loyalty programs. I think all four

of them are hyper aware of the customers that they serve and and and how to kind of do customer friendly things. These are not companies that frequently make the Bonfoy awards. So that's nice. Yeah actually very good points. Okay the last partner I have in this part of the list is one I'm wondering if Nick's gonna push back on but I have in this part of the list is what I'm wondering if Nick's going to push back on, but I have United. So United is a Star Alliance airline just like Air Canada is. United doesn't have as many non-Alliance partners as Air Canada does, so there's fewer places you could use your United miles. There are some things that I really like about United's program, despite the fact that United often has higher prices than Air Canada Aeroplan or Avianca LifeMiles, another Star Alliance carrier. I like that United has free changes and cancellations at any time. I've often taken advantage of that.

I like their, I don't love but I like their, something called an excursionist perk that under the right circumstances can really add value to an award. And I hate that United doesn't release much award space to their partners, but I like that if you have United miles, you have access to more United awards. And so when I've looked for like award flights to let's say Australia or something. I've seen, you know, a lot more availability because flying United itself to Australia or maybe New Zealand is what I'm actually thinking of, I don't know, because United keeps it for their own members. And so it becomes a very valuable program in that way, especially, of course, flying around within the United States, Air Canada is not going to have a lot of access to United's own flights. United obviously does. It won't always price those flights great, but sometimes it will. Yeah, you know, so Greg knew that I was going to maybe disagree with this

a little bit because I don't get nearly as excited about United's program, but his points are solid. You know, they do come in handy in the right situations. And in fact, I actually, just the other day, wanted to book, so I booked some family members for a trip later this year. And one family member said they didn't wanna come, and I don't totally believe it. And so I wanted to book one more seat,

because I think there's a chance that someone will change their mind later on. And so I wanted to book a refundable, an easily refundable seat. So I wanted to book it with my United miles and I realized I was a little short and I was like, I don't really want to transfer chase points right now. I need those badly for Hyatt right at the moment for some things that I've been working on there and stays that I need. So I didn't want to transfer them and I didn't even think to transfer from built. So just as you were saying that I looked to see, is that award still available? And it is. So after we're done here, I'm going to transfer from built. So just as you were saying that, I looked to see is that award still available?

And it is. So after we're done here, I'm gonna transfer a few built points to my United account so I can book that extra seat just in case. And is that flight not available through Avianca LifeMiles? And I'm asking, so Avianca LifeMiles allows free changes if you subscribe to a certain level

of their Subscription thingy, right? Yes, so you need the basic subscription level which is confusing because It's not the light version. The light version is the cheapest at $20 That does not give you free changes and cancellations the basic version Which is $50 a month does include free changes and cancellations and no the flight isn't available to Avianca LifeMiles because I am a light subscriber with the intention to upgrade to basic if and when I need to book an award so I can get free changes and cancellations but this one wasn't available via Avianca LifeMiles I have existing life miles and would book it that way if I could but but I can't. So I'm gonna book the United now.

All right, sounds good. All right, so those were my list of the top transfer partners to consider. But now I've got a list of second tier where all of these programs that we're about to list can get you great value, but I just feel like they're a little more special purpose. Like you have to know when you're gonna use them

more specifically than those first ones, which I think are a little more broad, general purpose programs. Yeah, I think you're probably right. And it's funny because the first one that we have in the second tier is one that I imagine Greg probably thought I would argue should be in the first tier and maybe have in the second tier is one that I imagine Greg probably thought I would argue should be in the first tier and maybe in place if United and that's Avianca LifeMiles.

I can't argue that they should be ahead of United here because of the cancellation policy. You have to subscribe for one of their LifeMiles Plus programs in order to get free changes and cancellations and otherwise those changes and cancellations are expensive and so that's the downside of Avianca Life Miles. However, if you do subscribe for $20 a month, you get some miles every month and you get 10% off of award redemptions and their award chart has some reasonable, decent use cases, though I hesitated a little bit when I said that because of course just recently they devalued and increased the price of many types of awards but not all of them. And so I wrote a post about that highlighting a bunch of the ones that hadn't devalued.

Now that's not because the majority didn't devalue, in fact the majority probably did devalue but I showed some places you can look to find good opportunities still because you can still find business class to Europe for around 60,000-ish, a little over 60,000 miles one way, and then if you've got the 10% discount, you're down into the 50s, which is a great price considering the fact that Aviaca doesn't charge any kind of surcharges. There's no, well, I shouldn't say that. They have a partner booking fee, but they don't pass on any of what other airlines will

call fuel surcharges or carrier imposed surcharges. Those don't get passed along. So that's very similar, of course, to both United and Air Canada, but you can get better pricing sometimes from Avianca, particularly if you're based somewhere farther from wherever it is you're looking to go because Air Canada Aeroplan has both a zone and distance based award chart, whereas Avianca's award chart is zone based and so you could be much farther west in North America and fly to Europe for instance for a good price, whereas with Air Canada Airplane you'll be paying more miles since you're farther

from Europe. So I like Avianca Life Miles. They can also sometimes be useful for domestic United Economy class awards, although since they recently increased award redemption rates, I think in a lot of cases you'll find as good, if not better pricing through our Canada Aero plan and a better cancellation policy. So they're less useful for United flights than they used to be. Yeah, yeah.

Also, we've been hearing about them blocking the ability to book certain types of awards, which also is what led me to put them down in second tier. But yeah, it's something I, six months ago even, I might have put them in that first tier, but you know, just because of the devaluation, because of the blocking awards and yeah, anyway, I moved them down to second tier. Second tier. Avios I have next. So, so there are a bunch of airlines that earn this currency called Avios, so British Airways, Iberia, Finir and a few others.

And you can transfer, you can transfer built points to any one of those separately, but I decided to lump them together here. They are sort of randomly really useful for certain situations. It's not often I find that an Avio's program necessarily has the best pricing for a particular flight, but it could be that maybe you don't have enough, you know, American Airlines miles might have been a better choice and you don't have enough of those miles, but you could transfer points to Avio's and book the same flight a little bit more. Or maybe they have availability like the British Airways, you can, and Finair, I don't know what all the programs, but you can book further out into the future than you can with American

Airlines. And so sometimes that gives you availability that wouldn't be available through other partners. So they can be very useful sort of strategically when you find good things going there. Yeah, we often see decent transfer bonuses to the various Avios programs, and so then that can make pricing a little bit better yet. So yeah, I think Avios is almost top tier adjacent to because of the breadth of uses because you can move them around to the different programs and take advantage of those transfer bonuses.

So I would put it pretty close sometimes. But That's a good one. Good pick there. What's our next second tier partner? Virgin Atlantic. I'm surprised you put this one in the second tier, but also not surprised. I mean Virgin Atlantic. Yeah, it used to be a great program for booking Delta flights, much less now they devalued that and as I said earlier Delta hardly ever releases awards space anymore to partners so but Virgin Atlantic has become kind of randomly very very good for booking its own flights as we we mentioned earlier in the show that we're seeing right now like 29 000 point business class flights to England. I mean, that's amazing.

It was less than premium economy on one day when I checked. Premium economy was like 37,000 and business was 29 in the same flight. Yeah. And they also sometimes have great pricing. Well, they have very good pricing when it's available for flying Air France or KLM, especially around Europe.

Their pricing for flying those airlines within Europe is really, really good. So the reason I put in the second tier is just it's not a broad program. If you're not going to be doing those specific types of things or ANA first class, Virgin Atlantic is not something you would turn to for just random like flights around the United States. Good luck with that. But for those you know it can be very very valuable. You're totally right but funny enough I was going to jump in with that and so funny that you said that because just last night a friend was asking me about a very specific route. The friend of theirs was going to have to travel this specific non-stop route that's only said that because just last night a friend was asking me about a very specific route

that the friend of theirs was going to have to travel this specific nonstop route that's only served nonstop by Delta and it's expensive and they were wondering if other friends could pull together wanted to help this friend out. Could they pull together their Delta miles to book the flights with Delta miles and I was explaining not really that's not Delta will let you transfer miles to somebody else, but it's not practical. It's too expensive, blah, blah, blah. And I said, you know, you might do better by looking at partner availability.

And so I used one of the partner award search tools and took a look and found a, like a whole week full of days over the next month when you could book that flight for, well, I think it was Delta one, something like 28,000 miles one way on that flight and Virgin Atlantic wanted 16,500 one way on the same flight, nonstop and economy class, main cabin. And so, sometimes you might do okay.

Don't get me wrong, it's not widely available, but it happens. So. It does happen. In fact, I'm so used to not seeing that that I was using Poinci the other day and I was about to reach out, not Poinci, Points Path which integrates with Google Flights and I had found a flight for like 7,500 points on Delta and I looked at Delta and I didn't see,

it was a different price than what Points Path said. And I was about to call Julian, the founder of Points Path, say there's a bug here. And then I realized, oh no, it said I had to transfer to Virgin Atlantic to get that price. I'm just so, I'm so not used to seeing that, that it didn't even like register

that it wasn't Delta for flying Delta. That's hilarious. Anyways, I should mention that same flight was also available via Air France, Canlion, and Flying Blue for the same number of miles, but I had advised that friend that if they were looking to book that to book through Virgin Atlantic

because of a better cancellation policy, Air France, Canlion, Flying Blue charges you, I think 70 bucks or something like that these days to cancel, whereas Virgin Atlantic, if your taxes and fees are less than $55, I think it is, you can just forfeit the taxes. So on a domestic US award, you'd be forfeiting the $5.60 that you paid in taxes in order to get your miles back. So that makes it potentially more useful. Again, don't expect to log in and see a bunch of Delta flights available via Virgin Atlantic. It's not going to happen all the time. But now and then, speaking of now and then. Yeah, Turkish.

Tell me what's left where you could get good value from Turkish because there is a couple of things, right? Yeah, I mean, so Turkish Miles and Smiles is a program that used to make me smile a lot because they have had really good pricing for domestic United award tickets and they still do. If you can find a domestic United flight that's available to partners, it should be available to Turkish for 10,000 miles one way. And that's anywhere domestic, whether you're flying a short United flight or you're flying all the way from Boston or New York to Hawaii or Alaska, it costs 10,000 miles each way if you can find

availability. So you can get a phenomenal deal, especially on those flights to places like Alaska and Hawaii that traditionally cost far more in miles. You can get a great deal, but the challenge is finding availability. And that's not, to be fair, Turkish's fault. It's really, well, I shouldn't say that. It's not entirely Turkish's fault. United just doesn't release very much availability to partners. fault. It's really well, I shouldn't say that. It's not entirely Turkish's fault. United

just doesn't release very much availability to partners. And then Turkish doesn't seem to see all of the availability that United releases to partners. So I don't know what's up with the fact that they see less. But if you're able to find a flight that works for you, that can be a good use of Turkish miles. Also, if you want to fly to Istanbul, the rate I think it's something like 65,000 miles one way now from the US to Istanbul plus around 300-ish in business class. Yes. Plus somewhere around 300-ish dollars in surcharges. And every now and then they throw economy class on sale for half off and you can get a really good deal on economy if you want to fly to Istanbul. It's not a great program anymore for booking other partner awards necessarily to Europe, but now and then you may find a comparable deal anyway.

So it's not an exciting transfer partner as it once was, but now and then there are some opportunities to get good value. Yeah, and I believe that they release more, kind of save rewards based for their own members than to partners. So like that, if it's 65,000 or 67,000, whatever it is to Istanbul, if you can find it in their program and not through Air Canada or United. Like, so Air Canada would probably charge,

well, it depends where in the US you're flying from, but let's say they might charge 70,000, depending on where you're flying from, United would charge you 88,000, but to card holders, they sometimes randomly decrease that to 80,000. I would, if it's available to those partners, I would probably transfer my points to one of those

to book it rather than to Turkish, just because if something goes wrong, I wanna cancel, I wanna, you know, I want the easier situation and I want one of those program's points back in my account, not Turkish points, which expire after three years, I think it is without any way of extending them. I think that the point Greg just made there is one that especially if you're not intricately familiar with miles and points programs, that is something probably you ought to keep in

mind that probably we ought to highlight more often and that is consider that if you have to cancel your trip, do you want to be stuck with these specific miles it might be a great deal for the particular flight but and this comes to mind it's fresh in mind because i've got a situation right now where i booked air france flights that i wanted through virgin atlantic and and then now there's been a schedule change and so i've been back and forth with virgin atlantic trying to get it figured out and they were quick to offer to cancel and i didn't want that outcome in part because I couldn't easily replace what is still intact and in part because I don't want to be stuck with all the Virgin Atlantic miles because I don't know when I'm going to use those again.

So I want to make sure that I use them for this trip. I don't want to be stuck with it. So you do need to consider that before you transfer to one of these programs. Even if you're getting a better deal, is that a program where you want to risk having miles stock if, if your trip gets canceled? Yeah. All right. The next three airlines on the list, I'm going to lump them together because the

reason I put all three here is that sometimes in order to book their own flights, that programs own flights. You want that programs miles because you have better award availability. Or in the case of Emirates, the first one, it's like the only way to book if you want to book first class. Well, it's not the only way, but it's the only practical way. So I've got Emirates, Cathay Pacific and Tap Air Portugal as the three that's like, I would only transfer to them if you're looking for a specific word flying on them and it's only available through them and not through a partner.

Yeah, yeah, no that's definitely fair. It was news to me when I saw a word wallet reported about a recent sale through Emirates and they mentioned that you can book some United flights for as few as 8,000 with this sale anyway that's currently on I think 8,000 Emirates miles one way for some, maybe even 6,000 for some of the really short, it is 6,000 for the shortest United flights. And that was news to me. I was like, oh, that could be a great deal compared to other programs. But we go back to what we just said.

Do I want to be stuck with the Emirates miles afterwards if I have to cancel the trip? And probably not, you know, because like you said the best use of Emirates Cathay or TAP miles is going to be to fly those specific airlines and they're not even usually great deals so so that's why it's second tier. For a specific use case it makes sense but none of them are ones I would use very often. Yeah, yeah. The last one, last program on the list in this section, I probably should have actually had higher on the list now that I think about it,

because Accor is a massive hotel chain. They just, they don't have a big footprint in the United States. So the biggest footprint I think that they probably have is with Fairmont hotels, which is mostly in Canada. I mean, there are some in the US but But internationally, there's a lot of Accor different brands from low-end to very high-end and Bill points transfer three to two to Accor and

Each point is worth two euro cents each and anyway the math works out with current exchange rates that you'd be getting about 1.45 cents per built point so it's better than booking the hotel through the built portal which would give you 1.25. It's almost as good as buying a house with a down payment. But often when transferring to partners, you can get much better than 1.45, 1.5 cents per point value. But this is a reliable value.

So that's why I'm thinking I probably should have put that higher on the second tier partners list And what's nice ish about programs like this one where your points have a cash value is that you're not limited to a standard award room, so, you know, if you want to book that presidential suite and Then you can get that same consistent one point four or five cents ish Per built point and value transferring to a core if they have what it is you're looking for. So that's kind of nice if you want a specific view or whatever it is that you want that

specific type of room. You normally don't get that with hotel programs. Normally you're just stuck with whatever the standard room is unless you have some sort of an upgrade instrument. So maybe this is useful if you have specific needs. You know, if I were going to Lake Louise or something, I think there's a fair amount there, right? Or somewhere out in that area. If I wanted a view of the lake, well, this would be a way to ensure that I got that and get reasonable value out of my points. Whereas if there were a Marriott there, I would be stuck

probably with a parking lot view, even if I used a nightly upgrade award. So yeah. So there you have that. Yeah. Yeah. So it's not exciting as far as value goes, but it's not that bad. All right. Then finally I have the don't transfer to list.

Don't transfer one to one to Hilton, IHG, or Marriott. All three of them frequently have sales in their points where they sell the points for less than a penny each. So, you know, at best, like so Marriott's sales are around 0.85, 0.9 cents per point. So you can think of it as like, if you transfer one to one to Marriott, getting, you know, 0.85 cents per point value,

0.9 cents for point value. Even if you redeem for more than that, I mean, it's just like, you could have bought those points for much less. Hilton and IHG are even worse in that respect because they have sales frequently for half a cent per point. And so you can think of it as like getting half a cent

per point value from your bill points. That's awful. Right. Yeah. And the point you made about, it doesn't really matter how well you redeem the points. It's like, how much cash did they save you? And you have to base that on like Hilton points are on sale for half a cent each, almost all the time. So, you know, if you transfer over a hundred thousand built points to Hilton one-to-one, you're like, oh yeah, but I used it for a room that cost $1,000 a night. Well, yeah, but you could have bought the points for 500 bucks, you know.

So it really only saved you $500, assuming that the points were on sale. So yeah, agreed with Greg, don't do that. And then finally, last thing, last piece of advice, go ahead. Yeah, wait for great rent day transfer bonuses. So every month of the first of the month, they have these rent day promotions. And every, I mean, it's every two or three months, they do a big transfer bonus

to one of their transfer partners. And we've seen transfer bonuses as high as 200%, but more commonly in the past couple of years, what we've been seeing is the transfer bonus to airline miles anyway, goes up to 100%, but that's usually for platinum elite members. So it's based on what your elite status is. And so if you don't have any status with built, it might be a 20% transfer bonus. If you have the first level, it might be

40% and so on. But the exact amount varies from one bonus to the next. Anyway, so for example, if you had 100,000 build points to transfer and there was 100% transfer bonus, you'd end up with 200,000 airline miles and that's incredible. Of course, you might not have platinum status, so you might not get that high, but even a much smaller transfer bonus can make your points go a lot further. But don't do that just because it's there. Do it because you know you're going to use those miles to good value. Ideally, you already have an award planned that you're going to use the points for.

Although with one of those top partners to consider that we talked about, Hyatt Alaska or Canada or France, United, if I saw a transfer bonus, a really big one to any of those I wouldn't feel bad about transferring my points Expecting that I'll get good value from those points eventually most of the others I would I would wait and see if I Actually have a good use for them. Yep Excellent good advice from Greg the frequent miler there. All right So if you got your built fortune and you're wondering what to do with it, we gave you a lot of good ideas today. I think that I think my friends brings us to this week's question of the week. This week's question of the week came in our Facebook group and it was a question about the so Capital One Venture Card right now has an offer out for some people that

they can get 100, thousand miles after a certain amount of spend and I can't remember off the top of my head what the spend was. So this week's question that we came in from our Facebook group we had a reader ask about the Capital One pre-approval tool because right now some people are seeing an increased offer on the Capital One venture card when going through the pre-approval tool in Capital One and so reader asked, if I go through the Capital One pre-approval tool, is that going to cause a hard pull on my credit report? Is there going to be an inquiry reported to the credit bureau?

So Greg, if you use the Capital One pre-approval tool, what do you think? Will that lead to a hard inquiry? I sure don't think so. Can you think of any pre-approval tool that causes a hard inquiry? Not off the top of my head, but you know. I don't think so.

I don't think so. I mean, a number of banks have some sort of a pre-approval tool. The pre-approval tools almost universally actually say, and the Capital One tool, I didn't actually look before doing this segment, but I've looked at it in the past, and it clearly says that they're not going to do a hard inquiry when you're going through the process. So you don't need to worry about that. I also just generally wouldn't

worry about it even if it were a hard inquiry necessarily. However, I brought this one up also to mention that every now and then this comes up the pre-approval tool and what it says people are pre-approved for or not. And I find, the pre-approval tool, and what it says people are pre-approved for or not. And I find that the pre-approval tool sometimes discourages people from applying for Capital One cards because it doesn't say you're pre-approved for something. And so I wanted to bring that up because

I really don't have much faith in that tool at all. I already had kind of questionable faith in it. And then years ago when the Venture X card launched, before my wife applied for it, we went through the Capital One pre-approval tool to see if she was pre-approved for that or anything else. Because Capital One can be fickle for people who have a lot of credit cards.

It's often hard to get approved for another one. And so I wanted to see, well, would they pre-approve her for this? And that maybe would give me more confidence in approving, or in applying the same as everybody else that's asking about this pre-approval tool, right? So I've been in those shoes before. And when she did the pre-approval tool, it came back and said the only thing she was

pre-approved for was a secure card, the type of card where you need to make a deposit and that's your credit limit. So typically that would be for somebody building credit, somebody with bad credit, which is not the case for my wife. So I was surprised that that was all she was pre-approved for, but we said, you know what? Let's just give it a shot and apply anyway. Instant approval of the $20,000 credit line. So to me, I look at that as an entertainment value only kind of a situation because we

also hear from people who it says they're pre-approved for something and then they get declined. So I don't put much stock at all in what it says. If you're looking for the increased offer, that might be the place to get the increase. I think in fact, I think it is a place to get the increased offer. So I'm not telling you not to use the pre-approval tool. Just don't put too much stock in what it says, whether it says you're pre-approved or not. It probably doesn't mean much with Capital One.

With some other issuers, it might mean something, but various issuers. But the flip side is it can't hurt to try it and see if you get, um, pre approved for a good offer. So, um, yeah, yes, yes. It just might not be very meaningful if you are because sometimes you'll do get still get declined, but, but there you have it. All right. That's the end of today's episode. Long episode today. If you enjoyed this stuff and you'd like to get more in your email inbox each day, go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list.

You can follow us on social media, join our frequentmiler insiders Facebook group, or you can ask questions like that one that I just rattled off there that was asked in our group this week. If you have a piece of feedback that you'd like to be considered for a future giant mailbag or a question that you'd like to be considered for a question of the week, you can send that too. Send it to mailbag at frequentmiler.com. Bye everybody.