Frequent Miler on the Air - Best Uses for Virgin Points | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep268 | 8-16-24

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

You can use these points for cruises, hotels and some really compelling deals on flights, of course. In this episode, we'll discuss some of our favorite uses for Virgin Points. (01:28) - Tips for using AutoSlash for car rentals... (06:50) - The Amex Gold card's Dunkin' benefits can apparently be used at Baskin Robbins! Read more about the Amex Gold Card here. (09:58) - Qatar devaluation impacts using Qatar Avios to book American & Alaska (14:06) - Read more about award ticket change and cancellation fees here. (16:02) - LifeMiles devaluation (not all bad news) (17:44) - Catch our Learning to Love LifeMiles episode 257 here. (19:03) - Air France/KLM is bookable again with Virgin Points Main Event: Best uses for Virgin points (21:56) - Virgin Red & Virgin Atlantic Flying Club share same points, just link your accounts (22:29) - It's easy to get Virgin Points (22:49) - Learn more about frequent transfer bonuses here. (23:10) - Learn more about the Virgin Red credit card here. (23:19) - Delta One to Europe is effectively dead (24:37) - Now, fly Air France / KLM short distances in/near Europe (29:36) - Fly Air France/KLM to/from Europe (33:11) - Economy to/from London (fly Delta or Virgin Atlantic) (35:50) - Learn more about Virgin Voyages here. (39:39) - Read Nick's post on getting free cruises from status matches here. (42:34) - More rare Virgin Point deals... (47:25) - What do you do when a Marriott nightly upgrade award would put you in a suite with a lower room occupancy than the lower, standard room (and a lower occupancy rate than you need)?

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did City do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event. Frequent Miler on the Air starts now. Today's main event, best uses for virgin points. Virgin Atlantic points, virgin red points, they're not just for breakfast anymore. They can be used for cruises and hotels and other stuff. But our favorite use of them, well, I shouldn't even say our favorite. One of the best uses that was like most compelling to fly cheaply on Delta One across the Atlantic is no longer a good value with Virgin. But luckily, there's quite a few really good deals that you can still get with your Virgin points. So that's what we'll get into in today's main event. Yeah, actually, I just flew an award a few days ago that was

booked with Virgin Atlantic points. And so we'll talk more about that in a little bit. But before we get into all this, don't forget, you can always find the timestamps in the show notes. So if you want to jump ahead to a specific segment or you want to come back and return to something later on after you listen to the whole show, you can always find those timestamps there wherever you're watching or listening. Don't forget to like this. Give us a thumbs up. Leave us a review.

Leave your feedback in the comments. We always love to hear from you. So thank you very much for doing all of those things. And don't forget to go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe. Join our email list. Anyway, all that out of the way, let don't forget to go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Anyway, all that out of the way, let's drag out this week's giant mailbag. All right. Today's giant mail comes from Benjamin.

Benjamin, his email is about AutoSlash. Now, AutoSlash is a service that we've talked about before for getting cheaper car rental rates. And just as background, you could use it in two different ways. One, you could just go to auto slash and ask it to find the best rates. That's a good way to do it. And then another good way is once you've booked a car with a refundable rate, you can use auto slash to monitor for rates to go down and it'll alert you when it's gone down, you can rebook. So I think Nick and I both use Auto Slash a lot.

But Benjamin has a nice tip for how to get even more out of it. Benjamin says, I've been an Auto Slash user since it was recommended here and I've saved a lot on rental cars, but I discovered a little tidbit that many Auto Slash users may be overlooking. First, it requires you to be a Priceline member. Second, when you rent via auto slash, like usual, make sure you are logged into

Priceline. When auto slash hands you off to Priceline. So a lot of times when auto slash gives you the best rates and you click through, it's to Priceline that it takes you. And it just includes special stuff in the URL to get you all the discounts that they found. So he says, when AutoSlash hands you off to Priceline to finish your reservation, that trip will count for your Priceline status. So again, you're already logged into Priceline

before that happens. So that's how it connects the two. This makes Priceline status very easy to get and once you get status the vip deals can be very good i just ran out of car for a day from newark and auto slash showed the best quote as about 130 but a vip price line deal for a kia suv was 40 total you give up loyalty rewards with hertz avis orvis, or National, etc., but with recent Hertz devaluations, I'm just laughing because I feel like Hertz is more than devaluations. I mean, they're like putting people in prison and stuff. But anyway, with recent Hertz devaluations, you might not be losing out as much as you thought. Worth a check before you book. There you go. We want to see it in a Kia. So that's a great tip. No, I so this one actually I found very interesting because I have not thought at all about Priceline's VIP status.

But I do think that I got an email at some point saying that I had some sort of status with Priceline and I kind of just ignored it thinking, yeah, whatever. But I bet it was from clicking through from auto slash for car rentals because I do usually log in during the flow. You don't have to log in in order to check out, but I do usually do that during the checkout flow on the Priceline site. But good tip to just log into Priceline first before you do it. It's kind of funny because I have a rental car right now that I booked through auto slash.

And in my case, it didn't actually take me to Priceline. I booked through auto slash, which is another option that you sometimes see to do a prepaid rental through auto slash. And then you pay right away and you can cancel up to 48 hours before arrival most of the time, it seems. And so I booked with a small, unknown sort of rental agency. And I'll say this, that when I got back in the car, when all was said and done, my wife said, never again. And I said, come on, we booked it through

auto slash. And she was not too happy with the process. They took us to some like random parking lot somewhere to do the paperwork. It was kind of a crazy experience, but that's not my usual experience. Of course, I usually click through from auto slash and I book with Hertz or Avis or a major company that's right there at the airport this time around. I didn't do that, but kind of wish I had. But now I'll check for those VIP Priceline deals because I've never even looked for one of those deals before on Priceline. I mean, have you? Did you know about Priceline Elite status? I didn't. I mean, probably if you asked me, like, does it exist? I've probably been like, yeah, I think so. But I've never, you know, gave it two seconds thought. You know, as I'm thinking about all this, I'm wondering, so if I book through Priceline and I'm booking, let's say, a national car, I always put in my national Emerald Club number in Priceline, and then it connects it all up and I get all my national elite perks and earnings. But would that, because I put that number in there, would that stop me from earning Priceline status, I guess? I don't know.

I'm not sure. I don't know for sure. Yeah, that's a great question. One that we'll have to explore now because I do typically do the same. I enter my whatever it is, whether it's national or if I decide to incur the pain of renting through Hertz, then I put that in there because they do have a field for that. You do have to expand it. I think it by default is not expanded. There's like a little box you have to click. You have to enter your loyalty program number. So yeah, you have to know that it's there somewhere and look for it.

But auto slash is pretty good too. I think they say somewhere they're like, hey, don't forget you can enter your number when you click through. So that's always nice. But yep, auto slash saved me a bunch over the years. I like that. And I like the fact that maybe I'll save even more with the IP status and price line at some point. Great tip, Benjamin. Thank you for that. All

right. This week's card news. We have some interesting card news for people who either don't have Duncan or don't like Duncan or want some other option because now the Amex Gold card, of course, one of the benefits, one of the new benefits on the Amex Gold Card is a $7 monthly credit for Dunkin' purchases. So that's up to $84 a year. But you're not really a Dunkin' drinker, I don't think, Greg, right? So is there something else that you might be able to get? Yeah, I haven't gone to Dunkin' in this century. So, yeah, it's not high on my list um uh yeah so so we got this

tip and now caution we haven't tested this yet but we got this tip that that baskin robbins uh also works like so if you use your card at a baskin rob Robbins. Yeah. Supposedly that $7 credit will work. Um, so, you know, I also probably haven't been to a Baskin Robbins this century, but I would be, I wouldn't be opposed to go into one. Whereas I I'm just not into donuts or, uh, or Dunkin coffee. So, uh, it's a little more interesting for me. Yeah. So the other thing, so like Greg said, he and I haven't tried this. This is a new tip that just came in like hours ago, basically. So we're new to this still. So Greg said, if you use your card at Baskin Robbins, it might trigger it. What I think might alternatively be the case,

or maybe also, I'm not sure which, is that I think you can use the Dunkin app to pay at Baskin Robbins. Because I think they're both like, it's one thing. So I think what I'm more confident about than what I just said, is that you could load the Dunkin app

because that works. I did that already. So you can load like a $7 that works. I did that already. So you can load like a $7 gift card in your Duncan app. So you get the little QR code you can use to pay at Duncan. And apparently you can pay with that at Baskin Robbins. That's what Google just told me as I looked it up to make sure that that's the case. So I think that would be a way to use it at Baskin Robbins anyway. So there you go. Thank you for correcting me. Cause that's a better way anyway, because then what you could do is every month, uh, if you're every month, you could just load $7 into your Duncan

app and you'll get reimbursed with your Amex gold card for that $7. And then when you're, uh, planning a big kid's birthday party, go get that ice cream cake at Baskin Robbins and pay up to $84. Yeah, 84. Yeah. Well, I mean, it depends on how long you stack them up. I mean, you could wait a couple of years for that big birthday party and go nuts. So yeah, that's a good tip though,

because that makes it more valuable, I think, for a greater number of people. Absolutely. And we all hate like the dribs and drabs, the $7 it more valuable, I think, for a greater number of people. Absolutely. And we all hate like the dribs and drabs, the $7 here and there, right? But this is pretty easy because you just load it in the app each month and then, yeah, use it all at once on a big thing. So great little tip there. Thank you for that, whoever was to pass that along to us.

All right, let's move on to award talk. What do we got up for award talk this week, Greg? Got a little bit of bad news today in award talk. First up, Qatar. I've been loving using my Qatar Avios for relatively short distance American Airlines flights. And you could also use them for Alaska flights. And overnight, without warning, they increased the award prices um in many cases economy is still a decent deal with uh qatar avios but uh business class it it's not that they're necessarily much more expensive uh than other options but before they were like dirt cheap in some cases, even for business

class, which is like regional first class. But now it's no longer like a no brainer to upgrade yourself to business class if you're booking one of these partner awards. So that was really disappointing. And so anyway, so now we're at a point where if you want to book American Airlines or Alaska flights, and the flights are available to book with Partner Miles, you kind of have to try a whole bunch of different programs to see which is best for your situation. And because in many cases, Qatar still is best, but in other cases, there's other programs that are best. And so you got to kind of shop around. And you might want to take a look at the cancellation and change fee policies before you book with other partners because they vary a lot. Should we talk about some of the...

Yeah. And that's something that really you do need to consider. When you say they vary a lot, they vary a lot both in terms of price and in terms of policy, like deadline, for instance. So I think that depending on how firm you are on your trip, that may influence which program you choose to use to book. So first up, British Airways, super easy. You cancel, you'll only lose the $5.60 TSA fee. Yeah, if you Google, you'll see that British Airways has like a $55 cancellation policy. But when the taxes and fees are less than $55, then you just forfeit the taxes. So that's pretty easy, though it's worth noting that I think you need to cancel 24 hours in advance. I know you do with Alaska Awards.

I'm pretty sure also American Airlines. Within 24 hours, it becomes nonrefundable. So if you need some flexibility up to the last minute, British Airways might not be for you. Otherwise, that's a pretty good cancellation policy. Yeah. Next up, Alaska will often now have the best point price, especially for short distance flights. They started only 4,500 miles one way. They're not as easy to earn, the Alaska miles, as some of these others we're going to talk about. But there's that. Now, Alaska has free cancellations and changes, but when you book

an Alaska award, there's this $12 and 50 cent partner booking fee. So if you're booking an American airlines flight with your Alaska miles and you decide later to cancel that flight, you're not going to get back the $12 and 50 cents. So, uh, that's not horrible. Uh, but you know, it's not as good as the $5 and 60 cents that you'd lose with British Airways. Very good. All right. Qatar has a decent policy, $25 cancellation fee. I say decent. It's not really decent comparatively, I guess. It's not terribly punitive, but the thing to know here, and actually Alaska, I don't know what the deadline is for canceling.

Qatar, it's $25 up until I think 24 hours in advance. And then if I remember correctly, it becomes $100 up until three hours in advance. So if you're going to need flexibility up to just like a couple of hours before departure, then Qatar might make sense. But $100 is kind of steep. So $25 again, up until 24 hours in advance. Yeah. Yeah. Now check out our post on award ticket change and cancellation fees. We'll put the link to it in the notes to look at all the other programs where it's possible to book American Airlines.

Real quickly, some that you should consider avoiding. So Etihad will often show up as one of the best price options for the number of points it takes to book an American Airlines flight. But if you're canceling, you will lose 25% of the points you paid. If you cancel three weeks in advance or more, within the three weeks, you'll lose 50% of the points.

But within one week, you'll lose 75% of the points. And with one day, you just lose all your points. So Etihad is not a great option if there's a chance you're going to cancel. But there's a program that's worse. Iberia. Believe it or not, it can get a program that's worse. Iberia. Believe it or not, it can get worse than that. Yeah. If you book with Iberia Avios, most partners, not all their partners, but most partners,

it's just completely non-refundable booking. So whatever you paid to book it, it's gone if you want to cancel that flight. Yeah. Almost every year I hear from a reader who is blindsided by that and just can't believe that there's not an amount of money they can pay to get their Avios back, like some sort of a fee. And there just isn't. It's just they're gone. It's nonrefundable. So, yeah, that that stinks. So I would almost never consider using Iberia Avios or Etihad for that matter. Maybe if it's like day of departure, day before departure, that kind of situation, okay. But otherwise, man, those are pretty rough cancellation policies. So anyway, those are some of the different options. Like Greg said, you can look

up a whole bunch of others, but that's all the bad news we have for today, right? Because Qatar is not the only devaluation, right? No no so we did a show about learning to love life miles which is the avianca life miles uh reward program um and uh because they have some great star alliance award pricing and they still do have some great award pricing uh but overnight they also change their pricing in most cases getting worse. Business class went up a bit, not horribly. First class went up a huge amount. Yeah, a lot, if I'm remembering correct. I went down to like 45K for business class one way. So that's a really good price and matches Alaska's award price. So that's pretty good because life miles are much easier to get than Alaska miles. Yeah. And believe it or not, United opens availability on the Newark to London route

sometimes. I mean, it's not like plentiful all the time, but I found that available more times than, than I would have expected anyway for such a big route. Uh, so that may come in handy for people who are East coast based. I think that's kind of exciting, especially when you consider that you could subscribe to the life miles plus things and get 10% back. And so 10% back drops that to 40,500 net. That's a pretty darn good deal for a business class to Europe. And the 70k on roots that went up to 70k gets at least somewhat mitigated by that 10% back if you're okay with subscribing to one of the Life Miles Plus subscriptions. And if you want to know more about those, I think that was

probably all covered in our learning to love Life Miles episode. And we'll leave a link in the show notes to that episode. If you want to listen to that one and hear all the reasons why Greg used to love life miles or was learning to love them and now has learned not to. Yeah. Well, you know, this is kind of encouraging me to learn to love Air Canada Aeroplan because they're a good alternative to LifeMiles. The award prices before were often not quite as good as LifeMiles, and now they're more often going to be similar, sometimes better than LifeMiles. And to me, it's just a much easier program to deal with. You could do a lot more online. You have the ability to book a stopover for only 5,000 more points. If you don't want to subscribe to something like Life Miles Plus, you can just book higher priced awards

and they're cancelable for free kind of thing. So there's more and more to love relatively, in my mind, to Aeroplan. And also right now, Aeroplan's first class award prices are much better than LifeMile's first class international award pricing. There you go. All right. And then finally, in award news, Air France and KLM are once Virgin, not awards nor paid tickets. You couldn't book those either for quite a while. And they were supposed to come back at the start of August, whatever that means. And the start of August came and went and you still couldn't book. But now, mid-August, you can once again book those. So that's good news. It is good news. Now, a issue that was always happening before was that when trying to book these flights with Virgin Points online, like you would find, you'd be able to find the flight, you'd

be able to go through all the booking steps and you get to the part where you're putting in your credit card and says there's an error and then says there's no longer seats available. And the solution to that was to call or to chat to get to push that booking through. Tim tried a booking. We thought maybe that was fixed, but Tim tried a booking and had the exact same problem. So ultimately he had to chat to push that booking through, but he was able to. So it's, you know, I guess it's not really better than it was before, but it's better than it was during the approximately four weeks or so that it was unbookable. Yeah. Well, and the tip to be able to book via chat, I don't know. Honestly, I feel like I almost would rather have it that way. I mean, there's definitely,

obviously, it's nice to be able to just click and book online. But when you add that slight layer of complexity that you have to chat with somebody to book, then it makes it a little bit harder. And so that's going to discourage a lot of people and probably leave a little bit more award availability for those of us willing to take the couple of extra steps to do the chat to book it. So maybe that'll be good in protecting award availability. Because I was really amazed just before the bookings went down that I was able to book eight seats, round trip, both directions on Air France to and from Europe during the summer. So if that holds up, then I'll take a little bit of headache in terms of chatting

to book it. Absolutely. And I should say too, we were a little nervous that the fix was going to be higher award prices or big surcharges on these flights. And that does not seem to be the case, at least so far that I did some searches and what it looked like normal amount of award availability and a normal amount of like taxes and fees and the award price was unchanged from before. So that's good news. Good news. All right. Well, speaking of Virgin Points, I think it's time to get into this week's main event. Main event time. Best uses for Virgin Points. So there are two types of Virgin Points. There's Virgin Red Points and Virgin Atlantic Flying Club Points.

But they're really the same thing. Both programs share the same points. As long as you link your accounts together, you don't have to move points from one to the other. As long as they're linked, you just can use your points and they're available to both programs. Excuse me. It's also easy to get these points because they transfer from almost anywhere. If you have transferable points from Amex, Chase, Citibank, Capital One, or Built, you can transfer one-to-one to Virgin, and there are frequent transfer bonuses. You can check out our current point transfer bonuses page to look at not just what's currently

there, if anything, but also historically, so you get an idea of how often they come, which is a lot. To my knowledge, Wells Fargo doesn't yet transfer to Virgin, but I'd be surprised if we don't see that sometime soon. You could also get Virgin points from the Virgin Red credit card. So there's lots of ways to get them. And once you get them, what do you do with them? Yeah. Well, you know, we used to say you use 50,000 points to fly Delta One business class from anywhere in North America to Europe, but that's dead.

Because they changed the pricing. The point pricing isn't horrible. They didn't change it that much, but they added ridiculous, ridiculous surcharges on top of the point pricing to where you're going to be paying like a thousand dollars or so extra on top of the points paid so that is at that point you might as well just buy yourself a cash ticket and earn miles in a lot of cases so yeah that that that kind of kills that deal so that's not really something that's going to appeal the most i mean

obviously in some random situations maybe it'll work out for someone who is going to buy a ticket anyway, in the same way that paying the surcharge on British Airways or Virgin Atlantic for Virgin flights that is sometimes works out to make sense for some people. But that's not going to be as widely applicable a sweet spot anymore as it once was. But but not all hope is lost because there are other good uses. There are. There's there's quite a few good, good and sometimes really good sweet spot uses for virgin points. It's conceptually an amazing deal, which is flying Air France or KLM short distances in or near Europe. Virgin has a very compelling award chart for using Virgin points to fly Air France or KLM for these short haul flights. The economy prices start at just 4,000 points one way. Business class starts at 8,000 points one way. And I find that award availability tends to be

very good, but not always in the class of service you want. So, for example, some routes like Air France has like wide open business class availability, but no economy or vice versa. So you can look at that. But luckily, even the business class for very short flights is really cheap. Yeah. In fact, I just booked one the other day. So I booked. Well, I shouldn't say I booked it the other day.

I flew in the other day. I flew from Venice to Paris for 9000 Virgin points in business class on Air France. So it was 9,000 points and $20 a passenger. So I was able to book all four members of my family. So we got lounge access in Venice, which in fairness, we would have had anyway, because it was just the same priority pass lounge that we would have gotten with priority pass. But we got free bags, which we wouldn't have gotten, I don't think on an economy award and Virgin, I mean, rather on Air France, or if I had paid for the cheapest economy tickets, certainly wouldn't have included check bags. So

that saved us some money there. Got a very nice meal in flight for like a two hour flight. I was pretty impressed with the quality of the meal and wine. And so all that stuff was really nice. So yeah, I was really happy for 9,000 points and 20 bucks a piece. I said, this was, this was worth it for us. So that's good, but you could like get that on some flights that maybe don't seem like you should be able to, right? Yeah. So, uh, so you were, your flight was, uh, if I'm looking at this, right, you booked economy and you're flying over 1,200. Oh, it was business class. It was. So it would have to have been a really short flight.

Yes. Less than 600 miles. Is it really that short from Venice? I mean, it must be. I didn't actually look it up, but it must be because it was 9,000 each. Okay. Anyway, where things get really interesting is that Virgin only looks at the distance between the starting point and the end point of your flight. close to another city, but far from Paris or Amsterdam and fly through Paris on Air France or through Amsterdam on KLM and then to the other city that's nearby. And then that'll price at the lowest price on this award chart because they're only like the distance from your starting point and your ending point.

And so that's where you could get as low as 4,000 points economy or 8,000 points business class. And sometimes you can go pretty far that way. You could even go between Africa and Europe. So for example, I found a flight from Algiers in Africa to Marseille in France and was able to price it. I didn't book this because I didn't actually need it, but price it at only 4,000 points in economy for flying through Paris to do that. So again, the total distance is much further, but the point-to-point distance between Algiers and Marseille was just under that 600-mile threshold in order to make that work. So it's possible to put together amazing deals. Theoretically, you could throw away the second leg and use it as a way to get to Paris or Amsterdam cheaply. But caution that if you've checked bags, you're kind of doomed. If you do it

too often, you might get in some kind of trouble with it. So I wouldn't recommend that for the beginner. Right, right. At least not to do it regularly, you know, one time probably isn't going to be noticed. But yeah, if you check bags, then that's going to be a problem for you probably. So your bag screen ended up in a place where you didn't want to be. So yeah, that can be a really good value, whether you're on one of those really short distance flights or you kind of game it the way that Greg described there to get a little bit more out of your points there. So that's one, but that's not it either. So you can also fly Air France or KLM to and from Europe.

And when we say to and from Europe, we mean from the United States to and from Europe, because oftentimes you'll find good deals through Virgin Atlantic. Now, be aware that you may be able to get better pricing through Flying Blue. It's always worth checking because Flying Blue starts a little bit less in some cases or maybe maybe a little bit less in some cases anyway. Certainly during what Virgin considers peak season, you may be able to do a little better through Flying Blue. But I booked again, I mentioned earlier that I booked eight seats in both directions to fly to and from Europe next year on flights where Flying Blue wanted way more miles than Virgin Atlantic did. So so you do just have to check and see because it's not consistent one way or the other. Right. Right. It's very odd. Even when Air France and KLM release award space to their partners like Virgin, they don't necessarily price their own points

at the sort of saver rate for those. So if you're looking to fly Air France or KLM between North America and Europe, always check both programs. Check the price on both programs to see which is better. But just some example pricing. From the East Coast, as far west as Chicago, you can fly to Europe for as few as 12,000 points in economy one way. That's the off-peak price. Or as few as 48,500 points in business class one way. Prices go up a bit. There are 10,000 points more one way in both cabins if it's peak pricing time. For the rest of North America, so yeah.

Those are very good prices and beat for sure what you would get booking directly through Flying Blue. For the rest of North America is where you're going to want to compare pricing. You have economy actually is still very good. You can fly all the way from the West Coast of the, of the U S to Europe for only 15,000 points off peak or 25,000 points peak one way, uh, business class, uh, it's 77,500 points peak. I mean, off peak and 87,500 peak. Um, what does that mean?

What is peak versus off peak? Yeah. Yeah. peak yeah yeah i'm so so uh virgin has a handful of dates on their calendar that where uh you have peak pricing otherwise it's it's standard pricing or what i've been calling off peak and in some cases they're very short like uh date ranges um uh but sometimes they're they're they're pretty long. So you have like the whole holiday season from like December 7th to January 5th is peak. You have sort of spring break-ish time,

like this past year, March 22nd to April 15th was peak. And you have most of the summer as peak is how it works. But again, prices are pretty good even for peak for most of these. Yeah. Yeah. Those are potentially very good deals. Now, expect in surcharges around 300 bucks or so each way for business class. Economy class, I'm not sure. I don't know off the top of my head. Do you know what the surcharges are like? I don't know off the top of my head, but yeah, they tend to be less for economy for sure. Okay, another good use of Virgin Points is to fly economy to and from London on Delta or Virgin Atlantic. And I'm specifically saying economy because the surcharges aren't so bad.

For flying business class to or from London, using Virgin points on Delta or Virgin Atlantic is ridiculously expensive, the surcharges when you're flying business. But economy is not bad at all. And there's some terrific pricing. So from the East Coast, this includes Boston, Newark, New York, Washington, D.C., you're only paying 10,000 points one way during standard pricing or 20,000 points peak season. From the Midwest and South, so like my home airport, Detroit, for example, you're talking about 12,500 points one way as standard. Again, this is economy or 22,500 peak. And from the West Coast, it's 15,000 points standard and 25,000 points peak. So again, those are good prices. And you'll see that the surcharges aren't too bad for economy, but it gets ridiculous when you get to business class.

Yep. Yeah. I mean, again, so for economy redemptions, decent. I mean, all the economy redemptions are decent. Then you're just going to have to compare, though, also against paid tickets, because you may be able to use points for paid tickets at similar-ish deals. Not 10K. I mean, 10K is pretty hard to beat. Although when you add in the surcharges, depending on what those are, I'm not sure off the top of my head, it may get to a point where you could potentially get an

equal deal, at least out of New York or Boston, in economy class using flexible points where if you have points that are able to be used at one and a half cents per point, then you're looking at, in some cases, maybe being able to do as well on a paid ticket. But again, you'll just have to check and see. You always want to compare what gives you the best value. And this may be the best value for a lot of cases. Yeah. Yeah. I just remember, so my friend Maisie had to book a KLM flight from LA and she had, like, it had to be on a specific date. KLM had economy availability. She booked it through Virgin for 15,000 points. I think it was less, it was less than $200. I don't remember the details of exactly how much in the surcharges. So that was a smoking deal for her. All right.

So next up, I think this is probably my favorite now of the virgin sweet spots in a way, even though I haven't done it, it's sort of conceptually. And Nick, you might be surprised by my saying that, right? I'm very surprised to hear you say that, yes, because I know what's coming next. And I'm surprised that this is your favorite. Okay, so tell us, what's your conceptually favorite use of Virgin Points now? All right. So you have Virgin Voyages. What? These are cruise ships. And so I'm not known to be a cruise ship lover, but I've heard really good things about these, and I'm definitely willing to try them out, especially when Virgin has voyages around the Mediterranean and stops at a lot of different ports. I would love to try that.

Some things you need to know. These are addled only, so that's why you haven't seen Nick on one of these yet. What's always included when you use points to book these, or cash, is all your food, soft drinks, tips, which I think that's a nice addition that tips are included, group fitness classes, entertainment, and Wi-Fi is also a very nice included perk. The point price usually includes all taxes and fees, but not always. So if you look at, I looked at a Caribbean cruise out of Miami and that one did not include the taxes and fees.

But the nice thing is when you go to the deal page where it shows the details of using your points to book this, it very clearly says on that example, taxes and fees are payable separately during the booking process. So you'll know ahead of time before you redeem that taxes and fees would be separate if they are. The other thing to know about this is there's no standard award chart here. So you just have to go to the Virgin Red website, go to the page that says spend your virgin points and search for these virgin voyages to see how much they cost. Again, there's no fixed price, but I wrote down some examples. And so one, a transatlantic journey from Rome to Miami, that's 16 nights long, 320,000 points. And again, these are just what's available at this time. This changes all the time.

So that's 20,000 points per night for a double occupancy. So this is two people, you're paying 20,000 points per night for an all-inclusive experience for 16 nights. Now, in this case, I wouldn't want to do this. Going across the ocean, there's no sights to see. You're just seeing ocean. But if you're really into the cruise experience, you'd get 16 nights of it relatively cheaply. Another transatlantic one, Barcelona to Miami, is 14 nights for 280K. That's also 20,000 points per night. If you're traveling out of England, there's a round trip from Portsmouth to Spain and France, which is six nights. So that seems a little more reasonable to me. And that's 170,000 points.

So that's just over 28,000 points per night for two people. So the reason I'm dividing it into nights like that is like i'm comparing it to a stay in an all-inclusive resort and you know i don't know any program where you could book uh many all-inclusives for these small uh rates uh greg you should read my post about how to how to get free cruises by gaming casino status matches then. Because they can cost you far less. There's even a free match to Virgin Voyages that I need to add to that post. But keep going.

Keep going. That's not it, right? There's more. Well, and then there's a round trip from Miami to the Caribbean. That's four nights for 95,000 points. So that's just under 24K per night. Yeah. And we've seen those. Nick's right.

Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead. I was just going to say there's ways to get these for free. That is true. But if you're not into doing all the details of status matching, this is a way to just use your points straight up. And sometimes they have promotions that are even better than what I just described. They have promotional rates that are really extraordinary.

Yeah, we've seen some of the seven-night European Mediterranean ones go for like 110, 130,000 points for two people. And then I think that similar pricing structure, I guess, in the sense of maybe just a little bit less than 20K per night. But we've seen that happen a few times. And so I think at that point, I mean, I'm teasing Greg a little bit less than 20k per night. But but we've seen that happen a few times. And so I think at that point, I mean, I'm teasing Greg a little bit 20k to less than 30k per night. These are a pretty good deal, probably, especially when you consider all the inclusions. So. So yeah, I think these are interesting. And they get even more interesting when you see a transfer bonus,

because if you're getting a 25 or 30% transfer bonus, then it's costing you even less than those numbers. And that's pretty good for food and entertainment and everything else. And having just finished another cruise in Europe, which I cruised with MSC, it was another one of the Ocean Prime offers. So totally different experience than cruising with Virgin Voyages, I'm sure. But having just done another one, man, I would not hesitate to do a Mediterranean cruise again, because it's just so much fun to get to see a bunch of different European places without having to pack up all your stuff and move a bunch of times. And for instance, on this last one that we did, we had a stop in Kotor Montenegro, and somebody commented on my post about the cruise and said that they stopped there on a Virgin Voyages cruise. So I know Virgin

Voyages has stopped there. And that's a great example of a place that was not at all on my radar, never, ever would have thought about going there. And now I'm like, oh, there's a Hyatt Regency and standard suites are 24,000 points. It's like 12,000 point per night. Hyatt Regency standard suites are a good deal. And I'm like, oh, maybe, maybe we should consider going back there next year or maybe the year after that. And that's a place that probably just never even would have hit my radar if not for the fact that I was able to reach it because it was only one day on a cruise ship. And now maybe I'd go back. And so I've really come to enjoy that because there's been a number of places that I never would have planned a whole trip around going to just that

one spot. But now maybe I will because I've had a little bit of a taste of it on one of these cruises. So I'm excited about the fact that this is a good redemption. I think you're right to be excited about Virgin Voyages as a potentially really good use of Virgin Points. Yeah. Now there's a couple more airline deals I want to talk about, but these are both really hard to find award availability. First up, you can book Air New Zealand business class for only 62,500 points. So less than 63,000 points one way between New Zealand and North

America or South America. That's a fantastic price to go all the way to New Zealand. But Air New Zealand doesn't make their business class widely available. Every now and then, they do release a lot of near-term, so within the next month or so, sometimes two months of award space if you're ready to go right away. So you could keep an eye on that and jump on that when that's available. But otherwise, it's pretty tough to pick and choose the dates you want to travel if you want to take advantage of that deal. Maybe even worse, I'm not really sure, but ANA business or first class to Japan between North America and Japan

is also a great deal. You're talking about less than 50K one-way in business class, which, I mean, that's a good deal to go to Europe, let alone to go to Asia. So that's a great deal. And first class is either 72,500 points one way or 85,000 points one way. Either way, that's a very good deal. But ANA's award space availability, especially especially to partners is very, very slim. So, uh, if you want to take advantage of that, it's the kind of thing where you'd almost have to like use a tool like seats.aero to just find any availability, like anytime in the future and

be willing to rearrange your schedule and position to whatever airport it is in order to take advantage of that. Cause you are not, if, if you're just, you know, saying, well, I'm going to travel over, over, you know, the winter holidays and I'm going to go ANA first class. So that's not going to work for you. Good luck. Good luck. Yeah. Yeah. Those are definitely unicorn deals in the sense that, yeah, they're really hard to find, but, to find. But if you're persistent with it, they're not impossible. And people do book those sometimes. So they're not totally impossible.

But yes, I think what Greg's point there was that you're really going to have to be flexible and be willing to build around when you find the availability rather than choosing your trip and then finding the spots that fit your trip. Those are not the particular awards that are likely to fit into your plan. Your plan needs to be to just go when the awards come. So, all right. I mean, there's a variety of good uses. I'm more excited. So Greg is most excited, it sounds like, about the Virgin Voyages cruises.

I'm a little bit more excited about the Air France KLM award pricing to and from Europe, which is interesting because I was never a huge fan of Air France and KLM either. So kind of like Greg was never a huge fan of cruising. I was never a huge fan of Air France KLM because of the surcharges. And that still doesn't particularly appeal to me because it makes the trip a little bit, quite a bit more expensive than with many other programs out there with the availability as of late has been pretty good. And I need four seats and now, you know, I'm planning a trip next year where I needed

eight. And so being able to find that kind of availability that makes that more appealing to me than in the past. So, so I think I'm pretty excited about that. And I probably won't get on a Virgin Voyages cruise anytime soon, but I look forward to Greg doing one of these because I want to see most for sure. Um, the, the flying short distance around Europe and near Europe is the one that I find most, uh, most interesting, uh, theoretically, uh, and, and especially when we're talking about doing that trick of, of flying from one nearby city to another, the chance of me

actually doing that trick is, is pretty slim, except maybe on a team challenge. And then the, the cruise boat thing, um, I don't know. I, you know, will I actually ever do that? I have no idea, but conceptually it seems like conceptually, it seems like a good deal unless you put it next to, uh, next tricks for, for taking cruises for free, then it doesn't look as good. It doesn't look as good. But it looks, I mean,

it looks better than a Hyatt All-Inclusive, for instance. Most of the Hyatt All-Inclusives would cost you more points per night than this does. And you're not just getting the hotel, you're getting a floating hotel that goes from place to place. So, you know,

you're getting transportation to different places too. So I think it does make it compelling through that lens. All right. I think that wraps us up for the main event this week and brings us to this week's question of the week. This week's question of the week comes in from me.

I almost asked this during our most recent ask us anything because I was just curious for about everybody's opinion, but I'm going to ask you a Greg Freak Mylar about a conundrum that I'm facing on a current booking. I don't know if conundrum is the right word, but that's the word I'm going to go with for now. So my conundrum that I'm facing on a current booking. I don't know if conundrum is the right word, but that's the word I'm going to go with for now. So my conundrum is this. I have a Marriott booking at a property in Asia for a room that accommodates four people.

So it's like two doubles. So we've got, of course, two adults and two kids in my family. And so, again, room currently accommodates four people. Now, I recently hit 50 nights with Marriott. And so I selected suite upgrades as my 50 night choice benefit. And we know I say suite upgrades, they're now called nightly upgrade awards with Marriott. And, and we know that those nightly upgrade awards can be kind of difficult to use. And I have this one night stay coming up. And there's a one bedroom suite,

that's one of the options for using a nightly upgrade award that comes up. So if I go into my booking in the app, then actually, this is an important tip. It used to show up somewhere like right on the reservation page. But now when I go into the reservation in the app, there's like a little bell in the top right corner. And you got to click the bell to get the notification that you can try to use one of your upgrade awards in there. It's much more hidden than it used to be.

I had a hard time figuring out how do I even apply one of these things? I must be able to. Yeah. It took me a while to even find that little bell. But anyway, so there is a one bedroom suite that I could try to upgrade to. But the one bedroom suite says it is a max occupancy of three people. And my reservations's for four, and it will let me put my nightly upgrade award on this and see if it'll search for the one-bedroom suite. But am I going

to get to the hotel and they're going to say, wait a second, this room only accommodates three people and you have four people? Would you try to use the nightly upgrade award in a situation like that, where the room occupancy doesn't match your needs for your reservation, would you chance that and see, well, what happens when you get there? Or would you say, ah, just stick with the room that you know accommodates your group size? I think what I would do is I would message the hotel and tell them that you have these nightly upgrade awards and tell them the exact situation and ask them what you should do because they ask them what, what you should do. Cause they might just offer to upgrade you without them. Um, or they might tell you it's fine, but

if they tell you, you know, no, we weren't, we're not going to let you, then you wouldn't want to, I mean, then you, you might've like burned the sweet upgrades, not get them back and not get that upgrade. So yeah. That's a good tip. That's a good tip. So how would you go about messaging the hotel with Marriott? Cause I know I've talked about messaging before, but, uh, but there's probably some people out there that are like, well, how do you even do that? Cause it's not like you just Google the email address of the hotel usually. Right. How do you figure that out? Yeah. Um, well, I mean, sometimes the, the hotel figure that out? Yeah. Well, I mean, sometimes the hotel will

reach out to you in advance, like the concierge team or whatever. And that's probably easiest because then you could just reply to that email. You have some tips that you've talked about before how to find a email for like the general manager, for example, to email. Why don't you talk about that? Yeah, I have. So oftentimes I find in the hotel apps, for example, to email. Why don't you talk about that? Yeah, I have. So oftentimes I find in the hotel apps, if you go to your reservation, they'll give you the phone number of the hotel, but oftentimes not an email address. Now, sometimes there's an email address in there

and then, okay, great, that's easy. You have an address to email and you probably weren't waiting for my tips about how to do this. But for instance, a specific hotel, I just brought it up and it only has the phone number. And that always annoys me because I don't want to make an international call for something like this. But but for instance, a specific hotel, I just brought it up, and it only has the phone number. And that always annoys me, because I don't want to make an international call for something like this, I just want to send an email. And so so what I will sometimes do, like Greg was

insinuating here is I'll Google for the name of the general manager, and general manager of X hotel and wherever. And oftentimes, there'll be an article or two that comes up mentions the name of the general manager. And if I've ever emailed anyone from that particular chain before, I can usually go back through my email and see what the format is. Cause most of the various hotel chains have a format of something like first name dot last name at hotel brand.com. Some of them are first initial last name and it varies a little bit, but, but if I've ever received an email from someone that worked at one of those hotels before, then I can usually deduce what the email address would be.

And so that usually works and I'll send an email and I won't usually get a response from the general manager of the hotel, but I'll get a response from whoever it is that they forward the email to. So, uh, so that's a way that I've, I've done that before when I'm looking for it also every now and then, if you go to like the, the hotel webpage and you go to the events, like you, like you're looking to plan a wedding or something, then oftentimes you can find email addresses in there somewhere. If you're looking for someone else, you don't want to actually send an email to the general manager for one reason or another, then you may find an email

address there. But that's a great tip. I hadn't actually thought about that. And I have received an email from the hotel from the concierge saying, prepare for your stay here, the different benefits of your Marriott Platinum status, blah, blah, blah. And so I will respond to that and mention the situation. And hopefully on next week's show, I'll let you know whether they told me I could use my suite upgrade award or not, or whether they upgraded me. So we'll have to come back to that in a mailbag segment or something like that next week. Yeah. One other way to find contact information for someone who might be able to help, and I don't know if this is still true, but in the past, it's been the case that sometimes when a hotel answers reviews, it's from somebody who says, oh, and please contact me at this number or this email

address. And that's typically going to be someone who actually has the power to do things like their job is to try to make the public perception of their hotel better than what it would be without them answering those reviews. So that's another approach you can take. That's a great tip. I've actually done that a bunch of times before too. I can't believe I didn't think of that. That's a great tip because like you said, that person has the power to, and then they know that you're reading the reviews, right?

If you're like, hey, I saw your email address and the reviews on TripAdvisor, that's important to them because then they know, well, maybe you're the kind of person that's gonna leave a review on TripAdvisor too. And so that does incentivize probably getting a better resolution to the situation. So we'll see what happens.

I will have to let you know, I was hemming and hawing a little bit over, ah, do I want to have a hassle when we get there? And they say, oh, but wait, you're four people in this room, only accommodates three. In some places, I wouldn't be worried about that. But in Asia, they tend to be a little stricter on room occupancy. So we'll see what happens there. All right. Well, that's the end of this week's episode. If you enjoyed this and you'd like to get more of this stuff in your email inbox each day or each week, go to frequent miler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on all the various

social media. Join our frequent miler insiders Facebook group where you can ask and answer questions like that one anytime you want. So thank you guys very much for being there with us today. If you have a question that you'd like to be considered for a future question of the week or a giant mailbag segment, you can send that to send us a mailbag at frequentmiler.com. Bye, everybody.