Frequent Miler on the Air - Beyond 100K: Earn more points, save money, get great value | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep302 | 4-18-25

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

If you just got 100K points from a brand new travel rewards card, you should know a few things to help make sure you're earning even more points, saving money, and getting great value. Plus we'll also look at "Amex referral reformatory rescinded" and how to earn points on RENT with any credit card. (01:30) - One reader shares a success story using the "email the GM" strategy... (03:37) - Capital One Venture X Business Card: Up to 350K Miles Read our review of the Capital One Venture X Business Card here. (06:55) - Amex referrals back for many (referral reformatory rescinded) (09:48) - Two Hawaiian cards in one day (my quick experience) (17:23) - Synchrony reintroduces Cathay Pacific card (21:06) - Bilt now offers rewards when you pay your rent with non-Bilt credit cards (26:48) - Virgin jacked up fees on KLM/ Air France then backed off (31:03) - Frontier Elite Gold status for $40 (35:22) - 30% transfer bonus from Citi to Virgin Atlantic thru May 17 Main Event (36:39) - Read our FAQ about this card here. (38:45) - Earn more points (59:09) - Save money (1:09:49) - Redeem points for great value (1:17:33) - DON'T TRANSFER TO... (1:20:50) - World of Hyatt credit card gives an additional Hyatt category 1-4 free night certificate with 15K spend in a calendar year. But with recent Hyatt category changes, is it still worth spending towards that goal? Visit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media. Music Credit – “Ocean Deep” by Annie Yoder

On today's show, we'll talk about how Amex referral reformatory has been rescinded. We'll discuss how to earn points on rent with any credit card, and we'll talk all about the Sapphire Preferred, how you can earn more points, save more money, and redeem points for great value. Frequent Mylar on the air starts now. Today's main event, mastering your Sapphire Preferred card. You may have signed up for the Sapphire Preferred card recently because at least as we're recording this there's a hundred thousand point welcome bonus offer available and so that is mighty tempting. And so if you signed up for the card, you got approved, got the card at home, now you might be wondering what do I do with

this thing? We're gonna walk you through how to master the card, how to earn more points, how to save money with the card, and how to redeem your points for great value. Yeah, I mean, there's good reason why it has long been lauded as probably the best beginner card. I mean, I think it's pretty widely regarded to be, if not the best, at least among the best couple of beginner Travel cards and even if you're not a beginner this offer is so enticing that it certainly might be worthwhile

So we'll talk all about that today Don't forget that if you want to jump ahead to something or we want to go back and review something you can find the time Stamps in the show notes just expand the description box so you can read those and wherever you you're watching or listening, don't forget to give us a thumbs up, leave us some feedback. We always appreciate hearing from you. All right, Greg, drag out this week's giant mailbag. Today's giant mail comes from Ian. Ian wrote, while in Vietnam, I had a last minute flight change that got me to Tokyo 16 hours early. My hi-hat reservation had no award availability for an extra night, the cash rate was too high, my phone wouldn't let me dial Japan, and the chat team couldn't help. They actually refused to provide me with the hotel's email.

I remembered your advice. Find the GM's email, the general manager. After some quick research, I emailed the GM, who responded in five minutes with the front desk's email. They booked me an extra night with points. Problem solved. Thanks again for sharing such valuable tips. Fantastic. That's great news. I'm glad that that worked so fast. I wouldn't always expect it to work so fast, although in Japan, you probably have a higher likelihood of that working quickly than in other places. But I think it was luck, the five minutes there. I'm not gonna take any credit for that part of it. But yeah, I think that that's a good tip.

We've talked about it before, how Google for the name of the general manager and usually once you have the name, you can figure out the email address just based on patterns from any particular hotel chain. A lot of them are firstname.lastname.hiat.com type of a thing or maybe and as dot com depending on which property brand it is maybe one or the

other. But anyway, yeah, a lot of them you can figure that out and I always say that I email the general manager because I figure they're going to pass it on to somebody else who can help and in this case, they at least passed on the email address. I think the right approach here. I don't know how the how in this particular instance, Ian handle it, but the right approach probably for Ian would have been to just email the general manager and say, hey, listen, I'm trying to get in touch with somebody at the hotel because this is my quick situation without getting into all the details and say I tried to get the email address. I can't get ahold of anybody. Do you have an email address where I can connect with someone at the desk and and that's you know, we got that's probably how I got the five minute response by not diving into too much detail keeping it short and sweet probably would help in that case. Totally yeah good advice alright but yeah very well done let's talk about card news next in card news this week can't ignore the huge new ventureurex business card offer because the Capital One Venturex business credit card is out with an offer to earn up to 350,000 miles with

a single credit card, but you'll have to get spendy, right? You sure do. Yeah, I mean that headline number 350,000 bonus points from the welcome bonus is extraordinary, but so is the spend required to get all of that. So the way it's done is the first part of the welcome bonus is 150,000 points after $30,000 spend in the first three months. And that part is like the Capital One Venturex business cards usual welcome offer, at least

has been in recent times. Then the second part is to complete two hundred thousand dollars of spend in the first six months. Now that first thirty thousand dollars spend counts towards that. So it's only another one seventy is what you're telling me. Only one hundred seventy thousand more. And that's that's how you get the extra two hundred thousand points. You know, yeah, it's. You know, it's big.

And actually, if you consider the fact that this card earns two miles per dollar, once you do all that spend and if you got both bonuses, you did all the spend, you'd have 750,000 miles altogether. And you know, I can sit here and say, wow, that's a lot of spend and make it sound impossible. But there are people with small businesses that are surely spending that much in that time period. And really, from a single card, that's a pretty incredible bonus.

If you have a small business and you're not interested in opening a bunch of different cards and learning a bunch of different ecosystems or even not interested in opening at least two or three. You just wanna do one and you spend that much, then this is good because I mean, the Venturing Business Card is a perfectly acceptable card to put all of your purchases on it, two miles per dollar spent.

That's a decent return, two transferable points per mile spent with no need for another credit card. So it's not a bad card to be using for all of your spend if you do have a small business. So I mean, that is a huge haul. So if you're going to be spending that much and you're only an open one card, yeah, I mean, this mic job, this is it probably, right? Oh, totally. You know, I think this is one of the best business cards for people who

just want one business card anyway, you know, regardless of the welcome bonus. Right. And so yeah, if your business spends big and you can can you know meet that spend then that's a terrific bonus So a good deal for those who are big spenders on the flip side if you're not a huge spender I mean the business platinum card the MX business platinum card has pretty regularly featured an offer of around 150,000 points for 15 or 20 thousand dollars in. So you can get the same number of transferable miles for even less spend probably often with the Amex Business Platinum card anyway, and no carrot for the extra, you know,

100 and whatever thousand dollars you got to spend here. So if you're not a huge spender, this offer is not necessarily, especially 30K for 150, it's like, eh. Right, right. And for those willing to sign up for to sign up for several cards, you could do much, much better for much less spend. You could. Yes. Yep. Absolutely. Okay. Next up, Amex referrals. There's news on that front. Yes, there is. So a number of us over time kind of lose our ability to refer friends from certain MX cards that we might have.

And pretty much everybody on the Freak and Mylar team I think has been has fallen into that situation where you know suddenly our platinum cards or gold cards whatever are no longer able to refer to other people because you know we want to get those bonuses for referring someone else and we can't but all of a sudden the other day it seems like I think it was you Nick who messaged us and said hey my referrals are back and we all checked our accounts and ours were too. Yeah yeah so this was affecting I think Amex consumer membership rewards earning cards.

So like Greg said, Amex Gold, Amex Platinum, Amex Green cards. I haven't been able to generate referrals from any of those on the consumer side for years. Now to be clear, all of us have been able to generate referrals from all of our business cards. So we haven't had problems with that. And with other consumer cards like the co-brand and ones they've been fine, it's just

been those couple of cards that we haven't been able to for a long time. So yeah, I just I logged in to grab a referral link, other consumer cards like the co-brand and ones they've been fine. It's just been those couple of cards that we haven't been able to for a long time. So yeah, I just I logged in to grab a referral link actually. And I noticed when I logged in, I was like, Oh, wait, whoa, whoa, I got all these all these other cards are eligible for referrals again. And, and it sounds like that was the case for a lot of people because we had heard from other folks to have the same situation. And we

didn't understand why that was happening. And I still don't understand why that was happening, but I'm happy to see that they're back Alright, and I have to give a shout out to our Steven Pepper. So as you know When when MX has a pop-up when you're trying to apply for a new card and there's a pop-up saying you're not eligible and you Always get that pop-up. We call that pop-up prison. And I once went on a little rant about people calling it pop-up jail. I'm like, how can you waste that alliteration opportunity? That's crazy. So Stephen has stepped up a notch to, he's labeled the lack of, the inability to refer other people, he calls that the referral reformatory.

And so the occasion when that is, when that problem goes away, he calls, he said the referral reformatory rescinded. Ooh. Very good. Ooh, well done, well done. Stephen Pepper's never wanted to miss a good opportunity for alliteration.

I'm simultaneously impressed and unsurprised that he came up with a good one there. Well done. Very good. I'm imagining if he has any kids, he's going to name them like Peter Piper or something to get some good alliteration just in their names. We will see, I suppose. All right, one more piece of card news. And that is we recently talked about how there are two

Hawaiian consumer cards. So Hawaiian Airlines, there are two Hawaiian Airlines consumer credit cards. Now I'm sure that many of you have known for a long time that there was a business version and a consumer version of the Hawaiian Airlines MasterCards, but it turns out that there are two consumer versions. They're both issued by Barclays but we talked recently about how they're both issued by Barclays but one is branded as a Barclays Hawaiian Airlines MasterCard and one is branded as a Bank of Hawaii Hawaiian Airlines

MasterCard and I had written a post about how I had learned from pouring through the comments of Dr. Credit that they are treated as separate products so you could get the welcome bonus on both of them. So I wrote about it and I said I was thinking about this because I just want to collect some additional Hawaiian miles while I can of course because Alaska and Hawaiian are merging and we're expecting the Hawaiian and Alaska programs to come together sometime this summer this fall and we think the credit cards on the Hawaiian side will probably go away so these are like collectibles essentially that we expect will probably go away we don't know exactly what's gonna happen to them so anyway I wanted to update and say that I did this and I got both cards

so yesterday as we're recording this anyway I first applied for the Barclays version of the Hawaiian Airlines MasterCard And that was instantly approved and right away I had both applications kind of filled out and ready to go and right away hit submit on a Bank of Hawaii Hawaiian Airlines MasterCard application now as expected the Bank of Hawaii version went into review It said that it was, you know, they would need to review and get back to me, which is what I expected from what others had reported. They said that the system identifies it as a duplicate application, but when you call and speak with a reconsideration representative, the recon representative is

usually familiar with the fact that it's a separate product. And my experience matched almost exactly with that. So it went to review, and within an hour or two, I called the reconsideration department. So again, backing up, the Barclays application was instantly approved. The Bank of Hawaii one went to review. So I called the reconsideration number, provided my information, and the representative

looked at my file and said I see you the application for the Bank of Hawaii version was I can't shouldn't say denied but whatever it was held up because the system identified it as duplicate because she said you had just applied for the Bank of Hawaii. Oh no actually you applied for the Barclays Hawaiian Airlines MasterCard and I see this is a request for the Bank of Hawaii MasterCard. So she just needed to ask my permission to rerun the information and run that application separately.

So she recognized mid-sentence before I said anything about it being a separate product that it was and sure enough she rerun the application. She came back and like others had reported gave me the opportunity to reduce the credit line on my newly Acquired Bank of Hawaii or rather Barclays version of the Hawaiian card or one of my other Barclays cards if I wanted in order To open the Bank of Hawaii one which was fine with me. I didn't need any additional credit I just wanted that card open for the bonus So I was able to do that on the phone and one call she then gave me a phone number to call Because I was calling later in the evening,

recon's open until midnight. She said that someone in the department that verifies your information, verifies your identity was gonna need to speak with me too and I'd have to call back the next day. But overnight, a few hours later, I got emails saying that it was approved and it's now showing up in my online login.

I haven't yet even had a chance to call and make sure that there's no further identity verification but I don't expect there is because I have a card, the last four digits of a card number and all that in my account already. So it's very easy, is the moral of the story. That's awesome. Now, is there any reason why you would want to do it at the same time like that? Could you do it like if I signed up for the Barclays version

a month ago, can I now sign up for the YN-1? Yeah. So yes is the concisified version of the answer to that. But the reason I didn't do it that way is because we had some readers who reported that they were existing Barclays Hawaiian MasterCard holders and they applied for the Bank of Hawaii one. And when hitting submit it said, we recognize you already have a Hawaiian Airlines MasterCard and basically like you're not eligible and Some people had quit at that step But a few readers called in after that step and I think what actually happens is that the application does get submitted

Similar to the one that I did and identified as you already are a card holder, but they will process your application manually over the phone still because we had a couple of readers who reported that situation who were able to call in and get approved. So you will still be able to do it. I just figured I'll skip that whole step and just get it all done in one shot. The other thing is that if you apply for both on the same day, the inquiries get combined and you only end up with one inquiry, which I can verify is exactly what happened in my case. I did double check that to be sure.

So, you know, that's, I guess, the other benefit. I don't worry too much about that. I don't lose sleep over inquiries at all. I think they're overblown. But at the same time, why not? If I was gonna apply for both of them anyway, why not get it all out of the way? Okay, so that's great.

So that's great. So the main downside, you're adding two more personal cards to your credit report that are gonna put you over the 524 limit, so it's gonna be harder to sign up for Chase cards going forward until those are off. Yeah, and that's a bummer because it is gonna push me back on that by a few months, although I'll still be eligible again at about the right time of year to apply for a Southwest card for a companion pass as long as I don't apply for anything else. Although I might

ruin that for myself too yet. We'll see. We'll see. But yes, that is the downside that you will get two new accounts added to your report in the long run. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And how many points are on the table for those right now? Not as much. Unfortunately, not as many as there had been. So both of the applications were 60,000 miles, one after 1,000 in purchases, the other after 2,000.

They were recently 70,000. I didn't want to wait around for them to get back to 70. Again, I had some stuff going on and before I started using my other Barclays cards heavily again, I wanted to just get these applications out of the way and done. But I, so I, it's unfortunate. I definitely applied for not the best offer on these ever at the same time. I'm not super confident that these are going to increase again. I think it's more likely that they'll disappear rather than increase again.

So I didn't think it was worth waiting around. But you might. The one thing I'll note is some people did report recently getting targeted for an 85,000 point offer via email. So I was hoping maybe I would get that. I updated my email address with Hawaiian Airlines and I've been checking every day to see if I'd get an email offer for that 85k offer and logging into my Hawaiian Airlines and I've been checking every day to see if I'd get an email offer for that 85k offer and logging into my Hawaiian Airlines account just in case something would pop up there and tried some dummy bookings.

The dummy booking offer was worse. It was like 25,000 miles and $300 statement credit. I wasn't interested in that. I want the miles. So I settled for 120,000, pretty easy miles. I have plenty of spend coming up where I'll knock out the welcome bonus and one purchase on each card.

And so that will be easy. So it'll be 120,000 miles. And those are really valuable to me. I love my Alaska miles right now and want as many of them as I can get. So happy to pick up the Hawaiian miles and move them over to Alaska. Yeah, sounds great.

All right, that brings us to what crazy thing and this week, what crazy thing did Synchrony Bank do this week? Okay, so Synchrony Bank is the bank that issues the Cathay Pacific Asia Miles card. And to everybody's horror, it stopped accepting applications some time ago. Laughing of course, because the card was never wildly popular.

It was never particularly interesting or exciting. But true, they stopped taking applications. And it is always a bummer to see a card go away. Right, right. But recently, or this week, it's back. It's back, baby, with a new exciting offer. Tell me about this. You can get 38,000 miles after spending $3,000 in three months.

So 38,000. What? Who came up with that? What meeting? This is just so funny in so many ways. But how did that happen? So 40,000 is like a bad welcome bonus for an airline card, right? But they couldn't even throw in 2000 more points.

I mean, who let the accountant in the meeting to decide the welcome offer? I don't I don't understand this at all. 38,000 What a weird number. I mean, I guess it sounds better than 30,000. And it is. But yeah, no, I mean, this is a horrible airline credit card offer. They're taking a page out of like the Japan Airlines and ANA credit card bucks. I mean, those credit cards offer truly horrible

welcome bonuses for airline cards. And I guess Cathay Pacific is looking at them as the competition? Yeah, I don't know. And then, you know, sort of to make things worse, the one sort of vaguely interesting benefit of the card before was that it earned one and a half points per dollar for foreign transactions.

Now it's only vaguely interesting because you could get a venture card and get two miles per dollar everywhere. And I, and you know, transfer to Asia miles. Transfer to Asia miles. Probably, I can't remember who all transfers to Asia miles with several programs too. And, but transfer to more valuable programs as well. Anyway, but now they don't even do that anymore.

So now it earns, you know, three X for Cathay Pacific, two X for dining and one X everywhere else. So this card is officially a stinker. Wow, that is surprisingly bad. Yeah, when it went away and then it was rumored that it was going to come back, I was like, oh, okay, maybe the Cathay Pacific is going to make a splash. They just relaunched JFK to Hong Kong, right? I mean, the first class, I know we reported recently in first class award availability on that route.

I'm sure it's gone now. Maybe they're looking to get back into the market in the US and Synchrony was ready to rev things up. My goodness, they were revving up a classic car on this one. One that was like a Flintstones pedal drive because 38,000 miles. I don't know who wasstones pedal drive because 38,000 miles, I don't know who's gonna be enticed there, but anyway. That is not gonna get you very far on Cathay Pacific

or their partners. No, no, and I guess that's the even bigger thing, right? I mean, that doesn't get you far at all in Cathay Pacific. They had increased the cost of their awards. They have some awards. It's a good way to fly Cathay first class if you want to, but my goodness, just get a card like the Blue Business Plus that offers two points per dollar everywhere and up to 50k per year or a venture card and earn your miles that way.

Forget about this one. Okay. And when Asia Miles is what you need, then you transfer from the transferable points. Yeah, come on. Okay. All right. We've spilled enough digital discussion on that one, so let's move on to this week's mattress running the numbers mattress running the numbers get some news out from built what's up there? Yeah, so, you know built they've long let you pay

rent with the built credit card with no fee and you would earn built points for paying your rent and your landlord didn't even have to accept credit cards in any way because built would like send them a check or a digital payment, a CH payment. But now they've opened it up to virtually all credit cards. So you don't have to have a built card anymore to pay your rent and earn built points as well as whatever points your card naturally earns. The catch is that you do have to pay a 3% fee to pay your rent through this.

But you know, if you pay that 3% fee, you'll earn whatever rewards your credit card earns. You'll earn one point per dollar from built itself in addition to your credit card points. At least that's for Visa, MasterCard or Discover. If you're using an Amex card, you only earn half a built point per dollar to do that. And, you know, so it's giving everybody who doesn't have a built card now an opportunity to earn points when paying rent. Little more information, if you have the built MasterCard you can continue using it as is. No fee, you just get the 1x for the rent. And if you have the Alaska personal visa card, you still have the deal where you can earn three Alaska miles per dollar but pay that 3% fee, but you don't earn built points when you're using that particular

card. But all other cards besides the built mastercard and the Alaska Visa will earn one built point per dollar plus whatever the card naturally earns. That's really interesting. So like if you're using a Capital One Venture or a city double cash card, for instance, you can be earning two points per dollar plus the one built point per dollar on your rent. So for a 3% fee, I mean, that ain't bad. You're, you're buying transferable points for a penny each. And you know, if you're not going to get more than one cent per point value from transferable points, you're not doing that right.

So yeah, it's pretty compelling, especially I think for meeting welcome bonus spend because it's like, you could think of it as like 3% fee with a over 1% rebate depending on how much you value the built points at. If you value them at one and a half cents each to make a nice round number, then it's like paying a 3% fee but getting 1.5% rebate in the form of built points. Yeah, exactly.

On top of whatever you're earning from the card. So that's a pretty worthwhile way to Yeah, welcome bonus spend I think. That's pretty good and I think even like we said for people that have a two points per dollar card, I think this is pretty reasonable because you know of course you could just get the built master card and earn the one point per dollar spent but at the three percent fee, so essentially you're going to earn the same one point without having to get the built card and And then two more points for the three percent fee. So I mean, this is I don't know I think this is a pretty interesting deal

It's not like something for everyone But if you rent and you're able to leverage the points like Greg said to much more than one cent per point in value Which if you're collecting transferable points, hopefully you are I think this is pretty interesting. Yeah, I think it's really interesting. So, you know, there's lots of Capital One cards that earn two transferable points per dollar. There's the Citi Double Cash that, when paired with like a Strata Premier card, becomes, the points become transferable that way,

earns two points per dollar. I don't know that I would want to do it with the mx blue business plus because you only get half a built point per dollar with that um but i think those are the main ones where you could get two transferable points per dollar with this deal yeah and i mean you're right i that would be the downside of using the mx losing half a built point though at the same time if you really like like Amex transfer partners, you're essentially getting two and a half points per dollar spent. I mean, it's a half point less. It's not a terrible price to pay for the points for sure.

Right, right, right. Not a slam dunk. So you're going to have to do the math. I forgot one of the transferable options. Wells Fargo has a 2% cash back card, which when paired with a journey, autograph, journey, autograph, or that's right, autograph card. It doesn't have to be the autograph journey. It can be either autograph card, the autograph or the autograph journey.

When paired with one of those, the cash back can be changed into points, which become transferable. Not very many transfer partners though so far. Very good. All right, that's all well and good. I think that's interesting news. So would you, you would recommend doing this then for somebody who rents? Yeah, I think if you value the, you know,

it just really comes down to the math. It's like, are you willing to spend this much for that many points? If you are, great. It's a good deal. And I think if you're struggling to find ways to meet minimum spend for new welcome bonuses, I think this is a really good option.

And don't forget that they say mortgage payments are coming. So I don't know when that's gonna happen, but that should open up this opportunity to a lot more people, assuming it's the same deal for mortgage, which I don't know to be the case, but I'm guessing it will be. Hopefully. Hopefully we can help. All right. Let's talk about being Bonvoyed this week. We've been Bonvoyed by Virgin Atlantic, unfortunately, but then

weren't we on Bonvoyed too? Yeah, we were. So this might just be a sign of things to come, but be a sign of things to come. But this past week, what happened is when trying to book KLM or Air France using Virgin Atlantic miles, people discovered that the award fees had gone through the roof. Just like how Virgin charges over $1,000 to book Delta one to Europe. We were seeing those same kind of numbers for booking like Air France or KLM business class to Europe. So one example on Tuesday this week I saw LA to Amsterdam flying KLM business class. They wanted over a thousand dollars in fees, a thousand seventy nine for one ticket. So we were all ready to declare this a big bonvoy moment, but then I double checked today as I was preparing the show and that particular flight wasn't real, but every other flight I looked at

the fees were much more reasonable. So I found one, LA to Paris on Air France and $160. Wow. $160. Yeah, so it dropped by over $900 in one day. That's a huge difference. Is there any chance it's variable that the taxes and fees now vary? Cause we see that on Virgin Atlantic Awards on Virgin Atlantic Medal, right? Where the mountain taxes and fees now vary because we see that on Virgin

Atlantic Awards on Virgin Atlantic Medal right where the mountain taxes and fees is variable. Right I wondered that too it's it's possible but there aren't so there aren't so many business class awards available to partners that I can like do a wide you know surge but all the ones I found today were at lower rates. They varied from, you know, 160 to 200 and some. And more going the other way, coming from Europe. And I think that's because they add on also, the departure taxes for the particular country. The reason that that really hit me is because your example at $160, I've never seen it that low before. I've booked and looked at Air France KLM flights,

and I've never seen one with only $160 in taxes before. So it made me wonder is that variable. You know, it really could be because the other thing I noticed of the examples I had, the example I had from Tuesday seemed to be maybe peak priced or you know how Virgin has peak and standard and off peak pricing or something and the one today was lower priced for a similar award as far as points price. So could it be that they're charging outrageous taxes for peak price times? I don't know, I don't think so because I looked at a bunch of data points,

but I don't know that I saw any data points that were peak priced when I looked today. Well, that much is good news. I'll take some heart in that. That's a positive piece, but keep your eye on that. That's why we've said before, I would not consider speculatively transferring to Virgin Atlantic. I almost don't care what the transfer bonus is because I have no faith that they won't

do something like that. I mean, I wasn't shocked when I heard the reports that they jacked up the taxes and fees to a thousand dollars one way. Now I was very displeased. I think it's ridiculous, but I wasn't shocked because that's the type of thing Virgin Atlantic has shown that they might do at any time. Yeah, over and over they've changed their pricing

and everything without notice. The one exception is when they went sort of dynamic on their own flights, but as far as partner award pricing and how they do the taxes and fees just changes overnight as we saw twice this week. Twice this week. All right, so watch out for that one. Make sure you double check before you start transferring any miles and points. Speaking of miles and points, let's talk about awards points and more. First up Frontier Elite Gold Status for $40. Now I've been on vacation this week so I have not read all of the posts this week.

I have no idea what's up with this, but I'm intrigued. Gold status for just 40 bucks? Yeah, Frontier Elite Status. That'll give you elite status through the end of this year. The funny thing is to be allowed to buy that gold status for $40, you have to be a Southwest Rapid Rewards member, not a Frontier.

I think you have to be a Frontier member as well. Well, most likely, most likely. Okay, but all right, that's interesting. This is, so clearly this is a way for them to try to attract Southwest customers over to Frontier. It's a limited time offer. We don't know how long it'll last. And I mean, we know that once you buy it,

you'll have it through the end of December. We just don't know if you wait to buy it, how long you can wait. They do have a restriction that like, let's say you already paid for carry-on bags for an upcoming flight, you can't then buy the gold status and then ask them to waive the,

carry-on bags that you already paid for. That seems reasonable, but anyway, if you get gold status, you'll get free carry-on bag, you get a preferred seated booking, a premium seated check-in, and chance to upgrade to their new upfront plus first-classy type of thing as early as four hours before departure. So those are the benefits. And

you know, it seems to me like if you're going to fly Frontier this year anyway, it's probably going to save you more than $40 to have gold status would be my guess. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's a pretty good guess. I mean, the carry-on bag alone, one way, has got to be, I would assume, close to 40-ish bucks anyway. Certainly round trip, I would think you'd be saving by the time you've paid for it round trip. And then if you value anything else there, then yeah. So that does seem like a good deal if you think you're going to fly Frontier.

What about if I'm not sure if I'm going to fly Frontier? Is this worth? I mean, I've been a Southwest member for a long time. Should I spend 40 bucks and get my Frontier gold status? Can I parlay that into something else interesting? Oh, that's interesting. You might be able to. You might be able to then do a Delta status match

or one of the other ones that are out there from this. That seems possible But I don't know if the top my head would you spend $40 on this Greg? Are you going to? I'm not going to because I never fly frontier, but if you know, sometimes I book flights for different family members who fly frontier and certainly, you know if if one of those flights was coming up and you know, I would gladly pay the $40 instead of the, as you said, instead of paying for carry-on bags in both directions. Yeah, yeah, same. I don't think I'll probably do this, but at the same time, you never know what might come up. Frontier doesn't have good service out of my home airport, so

it's not a big draw for me there. If they did have a lot of service out of my home airport, so it's not a big draw for me there. If they did have a lot of service out of my airport, then I would be pretty intrigued and pretty interested in doing this. I think this is a really smart move for Frontier because in the markets where they are strong, this will give people a reason to try them out. I mean, I think a lot of people have been loyal to Southwest for many years for all of the reasons that Southwest is all of the things that Southwest is about to cut in the near future here in May 2025. So I think it's a great time for other companies to pounce on some of those loyal customers and say, Hey, check out flying with us because it's not any worse than flying Southwest anymore, at least come sometime soon. We're not any worse anymore.

Right, right. Not anymore. And that's not a knock on frontierier. Frontier might be fine. I haven't flown Frontier in like 20 years because they just never line up with my needs. So maybe flying Frontier is great, but I do think that that's an opportunity for them. So anyway, interesting there, nonetheless. All right. So that was our first piece of awards points and more, but we also have a transfer bonus going on from Citi to Virgin Atlantic. So here's that transfer bonus kind of thing

I was talking about, a 30% transfer bonus from Citi Thank You Awards to Virgin Atlantic through May 17th. So that's great news, right? Yeah, I mean, if you have a good opportunity to use Virgin Points and it's a good deal for you, then yes, it's very good news. You can do, and you can do really well with Virgin

Points. We were complaining more about the sudden changes in in their program that can make things worse unexpectedly. So that's why we would not recommend doing this without specific plan for how you're going to use the points. Yeah, you know, I and I'm going to interject with one other piece here is also be aware of the consequences if you have to cancel your trip because I've been dealing with the schedule change for a while. I've mentioned several times and and one of the things that really burns me the most is if this ends up having to get canceled entirely, I'm going to be stuck with half

a million or so or whatever it is Virgin Atlantic miles that then I got a hope I can use for good value in the future because you know hopefully they don't jack up those surcharges on the Air France KLM flights in the future and I saw I'm Kind of currency to book my flights because I don't really want to get stuck with that many virgin Atlantic miles If it was one or two passengers be a different story But since I had like eight passengers on the itinerary I'm running into I'm much less excited About the prospect getting stuck with a ton of these things So so I'll think about that more in the future when I'm booking big family trips about which miles Do I want to be stuck with if something goes wrong? Right, right. Although the good thing is they don't expire the way, you know, that's true. Some foreign programs have, you know, the points expire and there's sometimes there's nothing you can do about it and that's really bad. So I'll

be able to gripe about the surcharges forever. Since you can fly out of New York, I mean, there's so often these days anyway, these great deals on Virgin. That's true. Maybe you'll be able to take advantage of actually flying Virgin itself with those miles if you get them back. That's right.

It'd be more fun to grab though. I'm just kidding. You're right. You're right. It might be a great opportunity, but speaking of great opportunities, it's time for this week's main event. Main event time, Mastering Your Sapphire Preferred Card.

We're going to talk about how to earn more points, save money, and redeem your points for great value. All things that we enjoy doing. I mean, those are some of our favorite things to do, the things that we obsess over and think about day and night, night and day. So let's talk about how to do it. When you talk about earning more points, how can we earn more points? Yeah. And now we're going to go into a whole slew of things. So I just recommend listen to this for sort of the ideas at a high level. You don't have to take notes because we'll have a link in the

show notes to a post that has all of this detail and You can go back there for your kind of homework to now What am I really gonna do now that now that I have it in front of me at the computer? That's a great point because there's a lot that's gonna be here. It's not gonna be all stuff. You're gonna remember That's a really good point go to the show notes for those links to find a link to more information, right? Right. All right, earning points. So first of all, one of the bonus categories for this card is it earns three points per dollar for dining and food delivery.

And there's no foreign transaction fees. So it's a decent card to use internationally as well for all your food purchases. Yeah, I mean, I have a lot of restaurant purchases over the course of the year, so great to have a good dining card. So if you don't have a card that earns better than three points per dollar, then certainly this would be great.

And even if you do have a card that earns three points per dollar, this is potentially better, since it is depending on which kind of points they are, since these are really valuable points. I mean, we love Chase Ultimate Rewards points so that's very good so easy one there use your card to pay for your dining and food delivery stuff all right what else can we use our card for? All right use it to

pay for Netflix YouTube Hulu all those kind of things because it gives you three points per dollar for streaming services and And so, and this is like, I love this because it's said and forget. So my wife has a Sapphire preferred card. We set up our, we have YouTube TV, because we don't, we don't get like cable TV. We just, we just pay the cable company for internet. We use YouTube TV for like all the TV channels. We have Netflix. We have a whole bunch of them.

All the ones that are not paid for by our platinum cards are paid for on the Sapphire Preferred Card and get automatic three points per dollar. So it's not huge, but it's a nice little win that just happens automatically every month because they're set to auto pay. Nice. Oh, that's good.

I don't feel like I spend enough on streaming services for me to get too excited about a streaming bonus category, but if you do, there certainly are enough things in YouTube TV. If you're paying for that and any other streaming services, I can see that adding up to a decent chunk of points each year. So that could be a good opportunity for some folks. Yep. Finally, you can get groceries at 3X, sort of. So grocery deliveries, like Instacart,

will give you three points per dollar. But so will grocery store apps. So like the Kroger app, Publix app, those kind of grocery stores that have their own app. If you can pay for the groceries within the app, with this FR Preferred card, you get three points per dollar. Many people have told us that they do this all the time at the checkout counter.

They pay in the app and get three points per dollar even at the store. I recently even noticed some data points from people reporting that this works sometimes at Walmart using the Walmart app if you use the Scan and Go. So if you have Walmart Plus, I read that people have said that it's not consistent, that it might not work every single time. I don't know if there's a way to figure out what makes it work and what doesn't, but numerous people did report that with a Scan and Go in the Walmart app, which of course is a Walmart Plus feature, which if you have

an MX Platinum card or an MX Business Gold card, you've got credits for a Walmart Plus subscription. That's one of the many benefits on those cards. And yeah, so a number of people reported that the Sapphire Preferred was earning three X at their Walmart. And I'm not talking Walmart neighborhood market, I'm talking people that sat at Walmart super stores using the Scan and Go and paying in the Walmart app was working for three X.

So that intrigued me and kind of perked my ears up. I don't have a Sapphire Preferred in my house right now, but I'm kind of interested in seeing if we can figure out a way to test that out. That would be really cool. Yeah, maybe we should test it out with my wife's card somehow. There you go. There you go.

Very good. All right. Next up, you can use your card to pay for travel, and you can earn five points per dollar if you book travel through Chase Travel, which is Chase's travel portal, or earn two points per dollar book, using it to pay for travel almost anywhere else. You know they have a very wide definition of what travel means so that's really good. Now 2x not super exciting there are cards that earn quite a bit more than that for travel purchases, but it's not that bad.

And the card does have very good travel protections. It has primary car rental coverage, gives you trip cancellation and interruption coverage, 12 hour trip delay, lost luggage, baggage delay, travel accident insurance. So it's got all those not as good as the, its big sister, the Sapphire Reserve card, but but still pretty good compared to a lot of other cards. I think so let's go back now. 5x or chase travel that sounds really compelling. But I've never or have I never I don't tend to use it. And I think it's worth taking a moment to say

why we don't love booking through portals. Way to speak for me, Craig. You said we don't like it. I didn't even ask if I, no. No, Craig knows that. We've been doing this show for what, seven years now or something like that. I think we started in-

Six. No, six years. Started in 2019, I think. I think so. I think we started in six six years. It started in 2019. I think I feel like I know you pretty well You do know me reasonably well So that was a fair assumption that yes I have never booked through chase travel for five acts if I have ever booked through chase travel Which I'm not sure that I have but if I have it wasn't for the five acts

There was probably some other reason if I ever did, not for the 5X. And the reason is we don't like to book through travel portals, two things. If you're booking a hotel through a travel portal, well, three things I guess, I should say, well, three different things. So if you're booking a hotel through a travel portal,

number one, generally speaking, if you're booking through something like Chase Travel, you're usually not gonna earn any elite night credit with the hotel chain You're not gonna earn hotel points You might not get elite benefits Even if you have elite status with the hotel chain all of those are big negatives for me and then further you're not gonna have access to other discounts that you might otherwise have like a Triple-a member and the triple-a rate is better than whatever the rate is through chase travel. Well too bad

So sad you're not gonna get the triple-a is better than whatever the rate is through Chase Travel, well, too bad, so sad, you're not gonna get the triple A rate by clicking through Chase, there's no way to do that. And then finally, you miss the chance to use shopping portals, so you can't click through from the shopping portal, and sometimes you might earn 10 or 15 or 20% or even as much as 30% in targeted offers from Capital One Shopping and a bunch of the major hotel chains lately. So, hotel booking is just a total non-starter for me.

I'm generally not gonna even consider doing that through Chase Travel. Exception might be some sort of small boutique property where the price is the same as where I can get elsewhere, but that's pretty rare. So, that's number one. Flights, number two, generally we don't wanna book flights through a portal like this because if there's some sort

of irregular operations, if your flight gets canceled or something, then probably the airline is gonna tell you, call Chase and have them deal with it rather than the airline being able to help you directly. So we generally all prefer to book directly with the airline so that we can get the help that we want from the airline. Also, if you have to cancel, you end up with a credit that's with Chase

instead of a credit with the airline, much more of a pain in the butt to use. So that's no good. And then rental cars, very, very rare is the day when I can find a price for a rental car through a credit card travel portal that's even close to competitive with the best rates that I can get elsewhere.

It's usually way more expensive. So I don't, again, another thing I rarely ever even remotely consider doing is booking a car rental through a travel portal Yeah, for all of those reasons we we don't like doing it but I have friends who book their travel portals all the time and You know if that's you then you might as well earn five points per dollar doing that. Why not? Right, right. So did do is that a do as I say no no that's a don't you're gonna not do as we do I crazy out there booking through that no you're not crazy I think a lot

of people do you're right and so yeah five x is good return the the travel protections by the way though I think those should not go understated those can be really valuable I know if you only remember recently you had a big delay on an international trip coming back and messaged me to say, hey, what can I do? What options do I have? And I asked about the card they use. I knew they had a Sapphire Preferred. And I was like, oh, if you paid for your flights

with the Sapphire Preferred, then you can get this and that and the other thing. And they were like, oh no, I used my AA card to my American Airlines card, Barclays Aviator card in order to earn points towards status. And I was like, swing a miss. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, and I've heard so many stories of people

who have collected big on the coverage through the Sapphire Preferred card. Not that it's like easy. So, you know, people often have some problems going back and forth till it gets paid, but I haven't, I don't think I could, I can't think of a story where people haven't been successful eventually

and then gotten the big payout to cover their losses for problems on a trip. Yep, yep, very good. Okay, what else? Except for where it really wasn't covered, whatever happened, which can happen, of course. All right, the next one, next way to earn more points requires no work at all.

Just sit back and every year, you're gonna collect a 10% point bonus. That sounds awesome. 10%, hey, I love 10%. Yeah, this one, I mean, it's better than nothing, but it's unfortunately very, very close to nothing. How is that? 10% extra. I mean, so if I earn a hundred thousand points,

I get another 10,000 points, right? Except you don't. The amount you get with the 10% is based on your spend, not how many points you earn. So, you know, if all your spend was, let's say you spent $10,000 over the year and all your spend was in three X categories. So you earn 30,000 points.

You don't get 10% of 30,000, which would be 3000. You get 10% of the $10,000 spend. So you're getting a thousand points. So with a thousand points, that's like 10, 15 bucks worth of points kind of, you know. So it's, we're not talking big, big deal here, but you know, it's better than nothing. Here's a way to think about it is whenever you see

that the card earns 2X or 3X or 5X, it's really earning 2.1X or 3.1x or 5.1x. You know, that's because of that 10% bump. Yeah. Yeah. Which you get at the end of the year, right? So that's a vehicle. End of your card membership year, I believe.

Yeah. Yep. All right. Next up, you could refer family and friends and that can be a way to stack up some extra points. Yeah. You know, so, uh, as things stand right now, each refer who, uh, uses your link and gets approved for either the Sapphire preferred or Sapphire

reserve card, they'll get the regular welcome bonus, whatever that is, but, um, you'll get 10,000 points for each of them up to a limit. Um, I can't remember what time I had with the limit. It's 50,000,000 a year I think. Yeah so you think you can only get a few of these but still 50,000 points I mean when there's a great offer like this you might find you've got a few friends and family who are interested at 10,000 points a piece so easy way to pick up some points anyway it doesn't cost you anything to do it doesn't cost them anything to do so you may as well, if they're considering opening up the card,

get yourself a little bonus. I will note that these can be really slow in posting. So don't be wildly concerned if it doesn't post right away. I often find that these don't, well, it varies. Sometimes now they'll show up pending sooner than they used to, but oftentimes I find that I won't get these until

The next statement period after the referral goes through So if I referred somebody today and my statement ends on I don't know may 5th Then it's probably not going to come until my June 5th statement that I'll get the the and I said today as we record This is in April and mid- mid April. So it takes a while. Yeah, I will say though that if you're listening to this while the Sapphire preferred 100K offer is still available, this should be a really easy sell to your friends and family members because it's just a fantastic offer.

It's not like you're trying to twist their arm to do something bad. I mean, even if all they did with the bonus was cash it out for a thousand dollars That's a big win for a single card. So So you have a good chance to you know to get some referrals that way I just looked it up the the limits a hundred thousand points a hundred nice Each year it resets each year. Very good. we go. Thank you for looking it up. Each year, it resets each year. Very good.

Very good. All right. So those are a bunch of ways to earn more points, but you're not done, are you? There's more ways to earn more points. I'm not done. There's more. So add on to your collection some no annual fee Chase Ultimate Rewards cards. So Chase has several cards that have no annual fee.

They pretend all their advertising says it's a cash back card. So take the Freedom Unlimited card, for example. You'll see it advertised as it gets 3% cash back for dining and drug stores and 1.5% back everywhere else. But in reality, it's earning chase ultimate rewards points, which is the same points that your Sapphire Preferred card earns. But when they're in your Freedom Unlimited account,

all you can really do with them is cash them out for the cash. And that's why it's considered a cash back card. However, the better thing to do is you can online simply move those points from your Freedom Unlimited card to your Sapphire Preferred card, and now they become more valuable in ways that we'll talk about later on the show. And so the Freedom Unlimited in particular, I think, is a really good companion to the Sapphire Preferred because you could use the Sapphire Preferred in all of its 3X and 5X categories

and use the Freedom Unlimited for 3X at drugstores, and then use the Freedom Unlimited everywhere else for one and a half points per dollar, which is better than the Sapphire Preferred, which is getting one point per dollar in the non-bonus categories. Yeah, yeah, that's one, that's a technique that we use in my household. We use that for its categories because we do like our ultimate rewards points. So sometimes for our un-bonus purchases, we'll put it on that for one and a half, even though there are other cards we have

in other currencies that earn two points per dollar. I really like transferring to Hyatt and this is one of the only ways to earn Hyatt points at a good clip. Obviously the built card also can earn points that transfer to Hyatt, but this is a better return at one and a half points per dollar. So we like having that in my household. The Freedom Unlimited is one of the Freedom cards.

It's not the only Freedom card. No, you could also get the Freedom Flex card, which has gives you five points per dollar up to fifteen hundred dollars and spend every quarter. And what they do is they change which categories earn five X every quarter. Right now, I think it's Amazon and something else. I forget. Right now I think it's Amazon and something else I forget. But that's a nice little way to earn, you know, some extra points each quarter if you have that card as well. But our favorite of all is the Ink Business Cash card

for two reasons. One, it always has a great welcome bonus. So might as well get another big chunk of points from a welcome bonus for signing up for the Ink Business Cash Card. But it also, it earns five points per dollar in certain categories up to $25,000 in spent. Those categories are office supply stores,

cell phone, landline, cable. So for those later three, in most cases, if the providers allow you to use a credit card to pay it without an extra fee, you could just set up the ink cash to auto pay those bills and getting five points per dollar automatically every month from those things. I do that with my internet at home.

And the 5X office supply is great because you can go into Staples and buy anything from Staples and earn five points per dollar. And there's a lot of different things. There's a lot of different things they have that can help you get a lot of other things. That's right. five points per dollar. And there's some things that- There's a lot of different things they have. They can help you get a lot of other things. That's right. There's a lot of things, especially near the

near the checkout register, like little things that are really good, useful for lots of other things. There you go. So there you have it. It's a useful card for lots of things. The business cash card for sure. Backing up real quick, you mentioned the Freedom Flex. The current category is as we speak,

the second quarter of 2025. We said we're Amazon and something else. So something else with streaming services for anybody who's curious about what the other Freedom Flex category is for this quarter. All right, yeah, so that's great. I mean, those are really popular. The Ink cards are super popular

because they do make great companions if you're open to a small business card and you probably should be. So that's a great deal. Okay, all right. So we've talked about lots of good stuff so far, but we're still not done. Not done.

This is gonna be a long show. Okay, the last category of things to do that I'm suggesting for earning more points is to add your Sapphire Preferred Card and really all your credit cards to your BILT wallet. So BILT Rewards, we talked about BILT for other reasons earlier in the show, but BILT has this program called Neighborhood Rewards, where if you have your credit card just loaded into Bilt's wallet, then at different merchants, you can just kind of automagically earn Bilt points

on top of what your credit card earns. So for example, at Walgreens, you earn extra points for any of your spend there. So imagine you have the Freedom Unlimited that's getting three points per dollar at drug stores and then you use it at Walgreens. If that card was in your built wallet, you're also getting built points on top of the Chase Ultimate Rewards points. There are restaurants that participate, Lyft, you get extra points with Lyft rides and so on.

What's cool about earning built points and Chase points is that they share a number of the same transfer partners. Like, so our favorite Chase transfer partner is Hyatt. And again, we're gonna talk about that more later. Bilt also transfers to Hyatt. And again, we're going to talk about that more later. BILT also transfers to Hyatt. BILT, they both transfer United. They both transfer to British Airways. They both transfer to Air France KLM.

They both transfer to Air Canada. So some of our favorite transfer opportunities are available in both programs. And so that's great, because if you're earning points in both programs, you could transfer the same loyalty program, same airline, or Hyatt, and book your awards that way.

I really got to do this. This is something I've dragged my feet on. And I live near a Walgreens, and so it's a place we end up going to pick up little things all the time. And I haven't done this. And in fact, I haven't even made a great habit of using my freedomlimited at Walgreens as ridiculous as that sounds. That's something I need to fix. So now I'm making that commitment

live on the air or recorded on the air however you want to say it because one of my favorite ways to earn points is automagically and Greg told me I could earn them automagically so I'm gonna have to get that set up. So all right tons of ways to earn lots of points we're talking about a whole bunch of them now and you should be earning lots and lots of points so that's good but this card not only can help you earn a lot of points it can also help you save money. It can it can and let's talk about some of the perks it has that can help you save money. First up Door Dash you can save money with DoorDash. You'll get free DashPass. Now the way they word this benefit is kind of weird because it has to do with that they don't have an endless contract with DoorDash to give you DashPass forever.

But what they say is you'll have a minimum of one year of free Dash Pass when you activate by December 31st of 2027. So probably if you sign up for DoorDash and get your free Dash Pass now, I think that means you would probably have it till the end of 2028, I'm guessing. But it's a little unclear. You'll have it for a while What is that what a dash pass was that do so so dash pass, you know door dashes for like ordering food delivery and and convenience store delivery and stuff and

Dash pass will give you zero dollar delivery fees and lower service fees You will also get in addition to dash bash, you'll get $10 off per month for non-restaurant DoorDash orders. Okay, so I haven't actually made one of these orders yet, but I checked it for a specific thing. Here's what I was looking for, is sometimes in order to get free delivery the order has to be over a certain amount.

And I was worried that this $10 off would put you under that amount and then you'd have to order more, right? It doesn't do that. The $10 comes off after they calculate the delivery fee. So that's good. So the way they implemented this is pretty good. And if you're not familiar with dash pass, you can get delivery dash passes essentially, like Uber Eats in the sense that it's

just contracted drivers who are out doing deliveries. And so you can order from a variety of different stores, like, for instance, if you're looking for non restaurant deliveries, you get stuff from like, CVS or 7-Eleven or, you instance, if you're looking for non-restaurant deliveries, you can get stuff from like CVS or 7-Eleven or Walgreens, stuff like that through DoorDash. Last weekend, we were- Sometimes some grocery stores. There might even be, you know, Lowe's and stuff on there.

Yep. Depending on your area, there's- Tractor supply is on there in my area. Yeah, so there are all sorts of different things we were visiting a friend last weekend realized we had forgotten to bring a toothbrush i don't know if it was one of us or one of the kids or whatever but but we ordered through door dash we ordered a toothbrush for delivery rather than having to go out and find one so all right so stuff like that this could come in handy yeah all right now you can save 10% off all your spend at Amazon.com, actually almost anywhere

with your Sapphire Preferred card indirectly because DashPass members now have this ability through the app to buy digital gift cards at 10% off. And among those gift cards available at 10% off are these gift cards called Zift Zillions of Gifts, which are those gift cards that are for tons of different merchants. And at least one of them, if not more of them, have Amazon as one of those tons of different merchants. And then there's some way to take that gift card and convert it into Amazon credit, basically, if you have one of those.

So 10% off Amazon, that's pretty darn good. Zip gifts sound pretty nifty to me. I like it. I'm not even gonna laugh at that. I am. I'll laugh for both of us, Grog. I can't help it. It's just, it was so bad.

All right. Next up, next up, moving along, moving along. You can save for both of us, Greg. I can't help it. It's just, it was so bad. All right. Next up, next up, moving along, moving along. You can save on your Zip gifts, but what else? You can also save it on your Lyft gifts. Your Lyft rides, L-Y-F-T. I think I mentioned earlier, maybe, I actually, I don't know if I did. The Sefer Preferred card will give you five points per dollar

for Lyft rides through September 30th of 2027. And no, I remember I mentioned Lyft before in context of Bilt. So these two things would stack, you'd get five points per dollar from Lyft plus whatever Bilt is giving you, which I can't remember if Tom had a few more points from Bilt, I think. So that's, that's pretty darn good. from built I think so that's that's pretty darn good wait I have a question though but but could you get a lift gift card through zeph and save 10% I bet you could I haven't looked but all right all right all right but there's more so the door dash thing keeps on giving because door dash and lift have a partnership where you could link your doorDash and Lyft accounts

and that gives you 10% off scheduled airport rides, up to four of those per month, 5% off other types of rides, up to four of those per month, and two free priority pickup upgrades per month. And that's when you're looking at your Lyft rides, like there's usually like one that'll come sooner and they'll charge a bit more for it and they call it a priority pickup so you'll be able to get that for no without paying more for that nice all right so that's good and save a little bit of left lift has become my go-to for domestic ride share i had long been an uber

person just out of habit and i've really reformed that habit to take Lyft specifically for the built points. And so nice to get some additional benefits here. Unfortunately, there was previously possible to get even more points with Sapphire reserved on Lyft rides. And unfortunately, those benefits recently changed, but on the flip side, that makes this card as compelling as anything else for earning well on left.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, and then another thing you can do to save money with the Cephora Preferred card is to book a hotel stay through Chase Travel once a year, once per membership year, I think it is, you get a $50 rebate. And so this is the one and only time I can remember actually buying travel through Chase Travels

in order to get that $50 rebate. Turned out I ended up not even using that stay, but they never, even though I canceled it and got my money back, they never clawed back that rebate, which was nice. Nice, nice. Yeah, well, I was gonna say, even though we said that we don't usually book through Chase,

that through Chase Travel, through a credit card portal in general There's the one situation where you may I could certainly see using that for like an overnight by an airport in an expensive night Or perhaps a boutique hotel where I couldn't yeah I might as well get that and I think it's worth it's worth Sort of stressing that that like Nick mentioned before a whole bunch of ways where you can usually save more money than going through Chase portal. Because if you go through shopping portals, you could probably get cash back.

And there's probably discounts if you use AAA codes or whatever, and that you're not gonna be able to use through Chase Travel. So for a more expensive stay, chances are you're gonna be paying $50 more or more than that, just to book your chase travel. And so this $50 rebate is really nothing. Whereas if you're booking a really cheap stay, maybe you could have gotten it five bucks cheaper

and then this is saving you $45 net. That's more like why a cheap stay is more important for using that. Right, right, but at least once a year, I end up with a stay where it's like, it would have been $100 and so, like that's a perfect example of exactly what you're saying where it's like, ah, maybe I would have saved $5

doing it differently, but whatever, this still comes out ahead. So it certainly can be useful in the right situations. That could be one that could save you money And then also finally you got chase offers chase offers can sometimes offer Opportunities to save money on various different things similar concept to MX offers if you're familiar with that and that you log in to Your chase account and then you can kind of peruse through and see offers for various merchants that you can sync to the card And then when you use your card at checkout with whatever merchant that is then you'll save some money.

Sometimes they're small, sometimes they're big, they vary in usefulness. However, there are tools on the market that can help you add all of these to your various cards because oftentimes we'll see offers that pop up on numerous of your cards or and with chase you can sync those up on each one of your cards without a problem but keeping track of that can be kind of a pain and knowing when there's new offers and which ones you might use or might not use and did I sync it to this card or that card that can be a pain so with a tool like card pointers or save wise you can automatically or not exactly automatically but with it the tap of a button add those to all of your cards and so that could be a great way to

sync up those offers with all your various eligible cards including your Sapphire Preferred card and then that way whenever you use your card and you at a place that happens to be eligible you'll just also save money. Yeah I had that happen pretty soon after I installed card pointers. I went and stayed at a Hyatt hotel and there just happened to be a Hyatt chase offer on my account that I used to pay for that stay and boom I got, I don't remember what it was, but it was, you know, I got $25 or $50 back or something. I forget what. So that was nice.

That was a very nice unexpected, unexpected little win. My caution on the automatically adding them ahead of time is that many Chase offers are valid only one time, only single use, up to a specific amount of money. And so if you use it on a cheap stay, you might not be able to maximize it, get a more expensive stay later on. No, that's a stay later on and so yeah That's that's a potential caveat there to using the tools to automatically add them

Of course on the flip side if Greg wouldn't have added that offer anyway, then I bet maybe he wouldn't have Yeah, I'm too lazy to go through and try to find those offers and right, you know So having it ever worked work for anything is a win. I mean, it's a little disappointing when I use a toolbar, a portal toolbar, and buy something tiny, and I get like one penny in rewards. But email saying congratulations. You saved a penny.

Oh, one more penny than you had the day before. All right, so those are a bunch of different ways to save money. We talked about ways to earn a lot of points right. So those are a bunch of different ways to save money. We talked about ways to earn a lot of points. We've now talked about a lot of ways to save money. But we're not done. Now we're going to talk about how you can redeem your points and get great value.

Yeah. So this is really what it's all about. So your points, let's talk about that 100,000 point offer. If you have those 100,000 points, you could cash them out for $1,000. That's better than doing things like using your points to buy gift cards because you're going to get one cent per point value and not earn any rewards for buying those gift cards.

You're much better off cashing out the $1, dollars and then actually buy discount gift cards through door-dash and your points will go even further indirectly that way. But anyway, cashing out ultimate rewards points is not what we recommend because they can be worth so much more than a penny each. At the minimum, if you book travel through Chase Travel, you'll get $0.125 per point value with your Sapphire Preferred card. Now we talked about all the reasons we don't love booking things through portals. The one place where you'll usually, not always, but usually get the same price as anywhere else as with airfare and you'll still earn your

airline rewards booking through the portal, even if you pay with points through chase travel. So it can make sense at some point and sometimes for sure. Now it gets better if someone in your household has a Sapphire Reserve card that's a more expensive card, you can move your points to their account and then the points are worth one and a half cents each through chase travel. Yeah, better deal then you're getting even more. And then at that point when you're earning one and a half

or you're getting one and a half cents per point, I think both of us are probably willing to put up with potentially even a little bit more hassle. That's a pretty good return. It's pretty reasonable use of your points Yeah, it is and and you know another thing even if there's no one in your household You could save your points and someday upgrade to the Sapphire Reserve If that card suits you and then redeem points for one and a half cents each through chase travel now while we both agree that one and a half cents per point is decent,

and it's a fine way to use your points, I mean, then that 100,000 points becomes worth $1,500 in travel. That's pretty darn good. It's not how we would normally use our points, right? No, of course not, because you can get even better value than that by learning how to master the various transfer partners. Chase has a whole plethora of great transfer partners and if you spend some time learning how to master those you can get far more than one and a half cents per point in value. I think our reasonable redemption value for Chase points is set at one and a half cents. We say okay it's reasonable that you would get one and a half cents or better and we tend to get much

better right? I mean I would say I tend to avoid transferring points unless I'm getting at least two cents per point in value. Yeah you know like so Hyatt is I think both of our favorite transfer partner from Chase and on average if you're booking a Hyatt stay with Hyatt itself, as opposed to using Hyatt points to book with one of their partners, you'll get on average around 1.7 cents per point value, which is again beating the Chase travel option. But that's on average. If you do just a little bit of looking for good value opportunities, it's very easy to get over two cents per point value with Hyatt.

And so suddenly you're looking at 100,000 points being over $2,000 worth of actual travel value with Hyatt. Even United, which is another transfer partner of Chasis. United doesn't have a have a award chart. So you don't know how much things are gonna cost until you do a search. But they, and sometimes you get terrible value from your United points, But sometimes you get terrible value from your United points,

but sometimes you get really good value. And just in preparation for this, I just did one search. I looked for Detroit to San Francisco on one particular day because I knew United had a nonstop on that route. And for the time period, for the time of day I looked at, economy, the cash price $324, the point price 15,000 points. So that's over two cents per point value right there without doing any work at all. Right. To find search, single search. Yeah, single. Yeah. So I mean, their

airline and hotel partners are quite good overall a couple of which back up and give you a couple of just General tips when it comes to this when you hear these you're like we transferring to airline and hotel partners Yeah, because of course you if you have the Sapphire preferred They've got a whole bunch of different airline and hotel partners and you can transfer your points one-to-one to each of those But there's a couple things you want to think about and first is that you don't want to transfer points until you see an award that you want that is bookable. You know, you want to make sure that an award exists. You don't want to just say, oh, I want to go from New York to Paris on July 24th.

And I see that there are partners with Air France and Air France flies that route. And so I'm going to transfer to Air France right now. Well, first you want to go to Air France and check and make sure, is there an award available that fits my dates? Is it a good value to book it that way, et cetera? So wait until you've got an award to book before you transfer and don't transfer again, unless you've made sure that you're going to get better value than you would booking through Chase Travel or booking with cash because maybe that ticket is cheap with cash.

Maybe you could book it at one point two five cents per point and do even better booking through chase travel. So you don't want to just kind of willy nilly wing it and start transferring points over. You do have to spend some time doing the math and looking at your options. There's a bunch of different award search tools out there that can help you kind of evaluate when points are a good deal or not a good deal. But there are numerous instances. I mean, Greg pointed a high and he pointed to United. You could transfer to Southwest if you're booking their off or kind of low demand flights. Now that they've gone to a sort of dynamic pricing model, sometimes

their low demand flights can yield one and a half cents per point or more in value. So that could be another good way to potentially transfer your chase points. I've never really considered transferring to Southwest in the past, but nowadays in the right situation, it might be a good use of chase points. And then lots of other transfer partners can yield all sorts of interesting values. I mean, talk about 100,000, and between all of the various transfer partners that Chase has, you could probably get a business class ticket to almost anywhere in the world, just about, if you find availability, with one of their transfer partners.

So with that 100,000 points, and maybe you'll even be able to fly around Tripp depending on where you're going and which sweet spots you're able to take advantage of. So there are some really good options out there. There really are. And you know, whether that's transferring to Air Canada to book Air Canada itself or to book Air Canada's many partners or transfer to JetBlue or Air France or it goes on and on all the opportunities that are out there. We obviously don't have time in this show to, you know, go through how to do that. We've talked about how to find awards and many other shows and which,

you know, we've talked about sweet spots in different programs on other shows. The one thing I do want to tell you on this show, though, is what not to transfer to. Do not transfer your chase points to IHG because they transfer one to one and IHG points can often be bought for half a cent each. That's like, that's like, you know, way worse than just cashing out your points for a penny each to cash them out for it's like cashing them out for half a cent each. Marriott same thing. They I mean, they often sell their points for around point eight point nine cents per point when they're on sale. So you're just wasting your points by transferring to either of those programs.

So sometimes you get good value from those programs, but in most cases, even if you saw an opportunity to get great value, you'd be better off cashing out your points and using those points to buy the buy IHT or Marriott points when they're on sale. Yeah yeah absolutely and while we're at it telling you what not to do with your points don't use your points to pay for Amazon purchases because again you're gonna get poor value there surely if you have your accounts synced up it's gonna give you the opportunity at some point say hey do you want to use your points you use your chase points at Amazon every now and then they'll run a promotion where you can use one chase point,

get some sort of a discount at Amazon. And in that case, okay, use one point. Don't use any more than one in order to get the qualify for whatever the discount is. But generally speaking, you don't want to use that to cover your purchases because you're going to get even worse value less than one cent per point when you're redeeming points for Amazon purchases. Again, like Greg said, better off just cashing out the points at one cent per point and using a credit card to make your Amazon purchase and the kind of paying yourself back out of

the money you cashed out. So you want to be careful to avoid those types of things. But if you learn how to master the transfer partners, there are plenty of good opportunities. Now for regular listeners, I want to say I tend to prefer Amex Transfer Partners for international awards. However, even though I've said that many times in the past, I recognize that Chase has some awesome transfer partners and many of my favorite Amex Transfer Partners are also transfer partners with Chase. So the hundred thousand points here are incredibly valuable to me and I think are an incredibly valuable

Starting block because if you're just getting started, you're like, okay Well, I don't know where to start start with this get a whole bunch of points here And then if you want to add on other cards from capital one and Amex and whatnot later on It's very easily possible to combine forces because you know Greg mentioned some great programs in there like Air Canada Because you know Greg mentioned some great programs in there like Air Canada Aeroplan and Air France KLM flying blue that at least has been very good many times in the past and and those are transfer partners with lots of different transferable currencies so if you start with this big pile even if you don't have your trip in mind yet where you want to use these gives you the

opportunity to get a nice big chunk of points that are valuable and that will play nicely with other points if you decide to get deeper into the game. So it's very hard to overstate the value of getting into this, particularly if you're new. And so if you've listened to all this and you've been like, Oh wow, this is, this is deep. There's a lot of levels to this, then definitely check out the post to read more about it. You don't feel overwhelmed.

You take your time, do some reading, and this gives you a good baseline to get started and to get a big influx of points really easily. Well said. Okay, all right, my friends, that brings us to this week's question of the week. This week's question of the week is a Hyatt question. So Darlene asked a question

in our Frequent Miler Insiders group that just refreshed and went off my screen. And so I'm not gonna be able to read Darlene's Question word-for-word, but I can give you the summary of Darlene's question. So Darlene asked she said, you know in the past I've done spend on my world of Hyatt credit card world of Hyatt credit card offers an annual free night Certificate valid for a category one to four night at a Hyatt But on top of that if you spend $15,000 in the calendar year you earn an additional Hyatt category one to four

free night certificate but Darlene said with Hyatt category changes the recent category changes with many valuable hotels moving up in category from four to five and so thus the certificates not being valid at all the same places that they were before is it still worth Spending toward the free night certificate on the world of Hyatt credit card. What do you think Greg? I mean, yeah, it's Two things that happen. Yeah Every year Hyatt changes Categories for some hotels and usually what happens is more hotels go up than down.

And yeah, we lost some good opportunities because a number of hotels move from category four to five. And so those category one through four certificates are no longer usable at those hotels. That is a bummer. On the other hand, I recently redid our post on the best hotels to use your category one through four certs at. And while a lot of hotels went away,

there are a ton of really good hotels on that post still. And all of those hotels, like most of them anyway, the cash rates are pretty high most of the time. And so you can still save a lot of money from each of those certs. So I do think it's still valuable. Oh, I forgot what I was going to say before. The other thing that made these certs less valuable than they used to be is, is when Hyatt broke up with SLH, Small Luxury Hotels of the World, there used to be a lot of SLH properties that were category four below that you could use your certificates at.

Hyatt added Mr. and Mrs. Smith as a partner. They did not put those hotels into categories so you can't use your certificates at those hotels. So there are far fewer hotels because of that that are available. So what I would say is like, look at your travel patterns, look at the hotels that are available and decide from that. If you like going to, I'm gonna pick one that Nick and I

both have been to and enjoy. If you like to go to Orlando, there's the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress is a wonderful hotel that is a category three or four, I forget. And so it is bookable with the certificate. And so that alone would easily make it worth it. But if you're in Hawaii, there's probably nothing worth doing

with the certificates anymore. If you're planning to mostly travel in Hawaii anyway, and if you're gonna travel outside of Hawaii, then maybe, I think really, so this comes down to me, this comes down to the value of Hyatt in general. Are there fewer places where you can use the certificates today than there used to be? Yes.

Did they lose some ground with the SLH debacle? Yeah, absolutely. However, I have not yet struggled to use a Hyatt free night certificate for really good value. When I say really good value, I'm sure I haven't used one for a night that would have cost me less than $200. And most of the time I'm using it for a hotel where the cash rate is $300 a night or more. And so if I look at that and I say, okay, well, if I can get $300 a room that would have cost me $300 out of that then what? $300 divided by $15,000 and spend that's 2% return on top of the one point per dollar that you earn

On that card. So that's a total of essentially like a 3% return. That's good So even though it's worse than before, it's still good if you know you'll use the certificate. And I would add on top of that, that despite all of the negatives that we just mentioned about the Hyatt category one to four free night certificates, we failed to mention the positive, which is that now those are transferable. You can give those to somebody else. So now I know that even if I somehow get into the situation where I haven't found a great use of a free night

certificate, the worst case scenario is I can probably find a friend or a family member who's really going to appreciate that. It's going to make a great gift that didn't cost me a ton, because I still got a decent return, not a great return on my spend at one point per dollar spent. But at least I'll get also the goodwill of a pretty good gift that could save them a bunch of money.

So that's nice. And the fact that they are gift good gift that could save them a bunch of money So, you know That's nice and the fact that they are giftable means that like my wife could do the spend on her card and then give the Certificate to me and i'll reserve the room and we'll get my globalist benefits So yeah, I still think it's worth spending towards those if you're a hiat fan And I think there's a lot of reasons to still be a hiat fan. Hiat points continue to be worth quite a bit I continue to do really well In fact, i'm going to mention i'm using a category one to four free night certificate soon at a category three Hyatt property. So I'm not even maxing out the value, but still it was a

night that would have cost $300. So if I was going to spend my option was literally to spend $300 or use one of those free nights certificates. And so yeah, of course they used a free night certificate and I'm glad even though it's only what only would have been 12 or 15 thousand points can't remember if it was standard or peak but that's still a good value to me yeah, and I totally agree with all that but you know, I I Do want to stress out that despite all that? There are lots of places in the world where yeah, you not going to find any places where you could use the certificate.

So, it really depends on your travel patterns. Yeah, yeah. No, I absolutely, 100% agree with you there. All right, my friends, that brings us to the end of today's episode. If you've enjoyed this and you'd like to get more of this stuff in your email inbox each day or each week, you want to go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media Join our frequentmiler insiders Facebook group where you can ask and answer questions about this stuff all the time

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