Frequent Miler on the Air - Big United changes: Cardholders earn more, spend fewer miles | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep346 | 2-20-26

Episode Date: February 20, 2026

In this episode, we'll talk about how Chase wants you to stay Calm and give a WHOOP, we'll talk about how Bank of America wants you to be a millionaire, and how United wants you to get its credit cards.Giant Mailbag(00:45) - Doug: Parking at a Bilt Neighborhood Parking garage on Hyatt award stayCard News(03:15) - It may be possible to product change US Bank Altitude ReserveRead more about this here: https://frequentmiler.com/psa-it-may-be-possible-to-product-change-altitude-reserve-and-maybe-get-some-of-the-fee-back*NOTE* Shortly after we recorded, we learned that existing earning rates for Bank of America cards will last longer than we thought: Doctor of Credit has learned some positive news regarding changes for existing Preferred Rewards members: they will retain their current status until 3 months after their first anniversary date post-November 1, 2026. For example, if your anniversary date is 10/1, your 3-month clock won’t start until 10/1/27, and you will keep your current status level through 1/1/28 (provided you meet the current qualification requirements). That’s a bit of a band-aid on a broken leg, but it’s a much better timeframe than what we originally thought.(07:26) - Chase Sapphire Reserve® Card offers (MUST ACTIVATE OFFERS)Read more about this here: https://frequentmiler.com/chase-sapphire-reserve-cardholders-can-get-a-free-calm-premium-annual-subscription/(08:37) - WHOOP: Get $359 back after purchasing one year of WHOOP’s Life Membership (expires 5/12/2026.)Read more about this here: https://frequentmiler.com/chase-sapphire-reserve-cardholders-can-get-a-free-year-of-whoop-fitness-wearable/(10:45) - Bilt appears to be honoring 5x offer for manyRead more about this here: https://frequentmiler.com/bilt-cards-being-frozen-5x-not-being-honored-bilts-response-pound-sand-its-tpgs-fault/Bonvoyed(17:30) - Bank of America Preferred Rewards changesRead more about this here: https://frequentmiler.com/negative-bank-of-america-preferred-rewards-upcoming-changes-lower-bonus-rewards-higher-eligibility-requirements/Awards, Points, and More(24:56) - FYI: How to pay taxes by credit card (Video)Watch a video about this here: https://frequentmiler.com/how-to-pay-taxes-by-credit-card-video/(26:43) - United Travel Bank may no longer trigger airline incidental creditsRead more about this here: https://frequentmiler.com/united-travel-bank-may-no-longer-trigger-airline-incidental-credits-but-dont-panic-yet/(29:53) - 40%...

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world atvoyescape.com. On today's show, United wants you to get its credit cards. Bank of America wants you to be a millionaire. And Chase wants you to stay calm and give a whoop. Frequent miler on the air starts now. Today's main event, Big United changes. Cardholders earn more, spend fewer miles.

United has announced some big changes for their program. and we're going to get into the details of all of that in today's main event. And if you'd like to jump ahead to that or you'd like to come back to something later on, don't forget you'll always find the timestamps in the show notes. Just expand the description box to find all of that. Wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to like the video or leave us a review if you're listening in podcast form. We always love to hear from you, leave us a comment, et cetera. Thank you for that.

Now let's drag out this week's giant mail back. Today's giant mail comes from Doug. Doug wrote, on the October 24th, podcast. So this is going back a while. Nick was asking, what happens if you were signed up for built neighborhood parking are on a Hyatt Awards Day as a globalist, i.e., where you should get free parking, and the hotel valet parks in a metropolis garage. So as an aside, a little background here. So Built has this thing where you could sign up for neighborhood parking to earn points on parking, but also it's supposed to charge your built account, like, automatically for when you

drive into one of these garages. And so Doug says, and so Nick question, like, well, what if you're supposed to get free parking, but someone drives your car in? But it just recognizes, yeah, because it recognizes your plate number, presumably. That's how they charge you, right? So if your plate number gets driven in on a stay where you're supposed to have free parking, are you going to get charged? Yeah. Doug writes, I actually know the answer to this. Metropolis slash, built will charge you as if you're independently parking in that garage. A support ticket with documentation needs to be filled out with Metropolis for them to reverse the charge. We used a printout from the hotel showing that the fee that they build Hyatt Corporate,

showing the fee they build Hyatt Corporate for parking with our ticket, kind of a pain. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that stinks. I had a feeling that might happen. So, you know, that's a benefit that might be useful if you don't have, well, of course, if you don't have Hyatt globalist status don't anticipate having it or using a guest of honor stay but as somebody who travels to new york city by car a few times each year usually and stays at a hiate because i get free parking at many of them in manhattan i just don't even intend to sign up for the built neighborhood parking because yeah i figured that that was going to cause a problem at some point i'm not surprised it stinks it shouldn't be that way but at the same time i don't know how how you avoid that

unenroll in it before maybe I don't even know yeah yeah well yeah and I don't know what like as far as built is concerned or the built neighborhood parking like that's a situation that's probably hard for them to anticipate or or to avoid you know it just seems like such a pain i'm not apologizing for it for anybody but yeah so either unenroll or just don't even bother with it unless you're spending a lot of money on parking in those points well and convenience will really add up for you for some reason All right, let's move on to this week's card news. So in card news, we've got a bit of news on the altitude reserve card, the U.S. Bank Altitude Reserve card. Of course, U.S. Bank completely changed

that card back in December. They say completely made significant changes to the card back in December. That's probably a more accurate way to say it. And they promise that transfer partners would be coming at some point. And here we are months later and they still haven't come out yet. But there's some good news if you've been frustrated and you're not interested in keeping your altitude reserve card because we've had a number of reader reports now that it's possible to product change. And in fact, several readers have been successful product changing via chat without even having to call. Others said that they had to call in order to product change. But they were indeed able to product change to a different U.S. Bank card. And I think just about everybody whose product change has

reported that they also received a prorated refund of the annual fee. So if you paid your annual fee in recent months and you decide you don't want to keep the card anymore and your product change to a card with no fee. It sounds like you probably will get a pro rated of refund. Now, don't shoot the messenger if you don't. I'm not promising that. I'm just saying that we've had a number of successful data points in that regard. So it sounds like that's what will prop in. And what makes this, I think, interesting for people who value the priority pass visits on the altitude reserve, but not enough to keep paying the annual fee on this. You can downgrade to the U.S. Bank Altitude Connect.

A few people have done that already. That card has no annual fee. It offers four priority pass visits per year, and they can be restaurants. So if you want to get into priority pass restaurants, that's four visits a year where you're going to get, what, $28 a person. So that's a great deal for a no annual fee card already. It also has an enhanced version of the GigSky benefit. That's the free ESIM benefit I wrote about a few months ago.

A lot of Visa Signature and Visa Infinite. cards have like a one-time deal sort of thing where you can get an e-sim and some free data. But the altitude connect, you can do it repeatedly. So it gives you a five-gigabyte sim that you can redeem every 15 days. It's a 15-day, five-gigabyte sim, and after 15 days, you can redeem again for a new e-sim and it's free. So between those two benefits, the Altitude Connect is really a great no annual fee card. So I will probably downgrade my altitude reserve to that at some.

point. I don't know whether I'll do it now or wait until my next annual fee comes due just in case they launch transfer partners. But my hope and faith in that transfer partner program coming dwindle more and more each day. And we started at a pretty low amount of faith. So there's not much low. Do you know when your annual fee comes to? Do you have that? I think it's May. Oh, really? Mine is too. I was hoping ours would be offset because I was like, oh, if Nick's going to be product changing soon. I'm going to wait till May to do it to. But if you're going to, if you're going to keep it till May, I'll just product change now because I think one of us should hang on to it as research in case. Yeah, just in case, right? Mile transfers. Well, you know what?

I'll be the one to keep it then because I also have an altitude go that I don't really need or want. And so if I can product change that to an altitude connect, I'll be happy enough to have the connect. And I'll keep the altitude reserve around just in case something happens. But Yeah, I really have a low amount of faith at this point because they announced that like six months in advance and then weren't ready with the transfer partner program. There's been no news. They haven't relaunched the altitude reserve for applications. So I just can't see them launching a transferable points program out of nowhere at this point. So I feel like it's, I don't know, foolish to expect it.

But we can all hope. Yeah. I didn't think you were right about that guess. but as the days go by, it's looking more and more likely that they're not going to roll out anything or anything meaningful if they ever do. Yeah, I don't know. Hopefully we're wrong. I'd love to be wrong about that. Yeah, for sure.

Please make me wrong, US Bank, if you're listening. Launch something amazing. Do it before I probably change my altitude reserve. Right, right. All right. Let's move forward to the next piece of card news. We've got the Chase Sapphire Reserve is out with some cool new offers that you have to activate. Yeah. So you know how they have those like Chase offers when you log into your account and you click on a card? There's like these deals that's often like 10% off, high at place or whatever. There's different deals. There's a couple that are 100% back sort of that are worth noting. There's the Com app. You could get a premium subscription to Com and I don't know a lot about it, but I know a lot of people really like.

the app. And yeah, you could get 100% back on that. That offer expires at the end of March. And in Tim's post, he noted that when you sign up for a come premium subscription, you'll generally get something like a one week trial before they charge the card. So make sure you, if you're interested in this, make sure to activate it more than a week before this offer expires. Because you don't want to get. Yeah, that would stink. You don't want to get in charge right after the offer expires. That would be awful. The other one is a big whoop.

There's a fitness health monitor tracker thingy called WOOP, W-H-O-O-O-P. And it has the Chase is offering $359 back after purchasing a one-year membership to WOOP's life membership. And I find that confusing because they're lifemen. is not a lifetime membership. It's just the name of that tier. So anyway, so their premium membership, I guess, is a way to think about it. And you have until May 12th to do that. $359 is what they charge when there's no discounts applied to a one-year life membership. And one thing to note is that if you use a like a a refaunts, like a refurb, you're a, referral code. You might be able to save 10% or whatever. The problem with that is the terms of the

chase offer say they'll give you $359 back when you spend $359 or more. So you have to be very careful about how much you're spending. So like I tried applying a friend referral and even with Michigan sales tax, it came out to under 359. And so just something to be careful about when you're when you're looking at that. It comes with a band that you can put around your wrist to monitor your health and stuff and presumably software to tell you everything about your life, your sleep patterns and things like that. So it seems to get pretty good reviews. And hopefully not tell everybody else about all of those things. Hopefully not share that data. Yes. But yeah, I'd be 359 back. That seems like a great deal if you're interested in that.

I actually might buy that myself. We'll see. Yeah. I haven't done it yet, but I did add the offer. I asked my son if he wanted it and and he said yes. So I gave a whoop to him. I'm glad to hear that. Glad to hear that. Well done. Right.

All right. So finally in card news here, we have built doing the right thing, kind of. So we've talked a lot about everything that went wrong with the 5X offer through TPG that was available on the launch day of the new built cards where, If you signed up for the built palladium card through the link at the points guy within like the first 24 hours of the card being live, there was an offer for five points per dollar up to 50,000 bonus points over the first five days of having the card that was on top of the welcome offer. So it sounds like that's being offered or being honored for some people, right? Yeah. So a lot of people who click through that offer and applied did not get an email confirming that they had the offer attached.

account, a lot of those people who tried to get confirmation by going through built support, got nowhere with that. I was one of those people. So I did not get the email. I had click through while the 5x offer was in effect, got the palladium card. And I received the platoom card, no problem. I got it right away, unlike Nick who had to wait weeks. But never got the 5x. I went through Biltz chat support, and after talking with their AI for a while, I got bored with that and insisted on speaking to a human. And the human conversation wasn't much more helpful than the AI conversation, basically round and round of them saying, well, they can't add anyone new to that promotion. And I kept saying, I'm not asking you to add anyone new. I was in on that promotion, so you should be honoring it as is.

So it was very frustrating conversation, and I finally asked the person to escalate it, and then they agreed to escalate it through email to the next level support. And I didn't hear anything specific. I soon heard back from that same person via emails, just basically confirming that it was escalated. Didn't hear anything from the escalated department, whatever that is, for a while. But then I separately got an email, and I think a lot of people did, saying, hey, it looks like you signed up during the times and conditions that sort of match this offer. We don't have a record showing that you click through the offer. But if you believe you sign up through this offer, fill out this form, and we'll see what we can do. So I filled out the form. There's not much to fill out. And I soon, I can't remember a day or two later. or maybe got an email saying, hey, we are going to honor the 5X promotion for you. They didn't admit in the email that, like, I was definitely signed up, but they're basically,

like, since you signed up during the correct time period and you're remembering good standing, we're going to honor it for you. So that's the right thing to do. So I'm really glad they're doing that. And here's a kind of interesting thing. I don't know whether my escalating the issue through support had anything to do with getting that email. I don't know if they just sent it to everyone who appeared to have applied during that time period or it has something to do with support issues because I separately later got the escalated support message saying, saying, hey, there's good news.

We have a process now for you to follow up, fill out this form. And this was after it had already been confirmed. Right. Right. About recognizing that you'd already done it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So anyway, so that's the story.

And I had not been talking about my issues with this before because I did not want built to know that I was struggling with it, like through public posts or whatever, because they might have made an exception just for me. Now, it's possible, of course, that someone saw my name in the support ticket and connected of the dots, but since we've heard similar reports from lots of people who are not podcasters or bloggers, I don't think that's the case. So I think they are doing or trying to do the right thing for most people with respect to this 5X offer. So that's great. Yeah, it's still crazy that the tracking wasn't set up properly because, I mean, in your case, it didn't attach properly.

And like, I mean, Greg knows that he clicked through the right link, right? And it wasn't like it was you were like right before cutoff time and you did it on launch day right so i mean that's right it wasn't there's no question and gregg's not the only person that the two of us have known that has has run into that where like there's not a question it's not like did somebody do something wrong or click wrong it's just like they did everything right and somehow it didn't track and that to me it's just kind of nutty but good that they at least recognize that okay there's enough people it seems like you must recognize there's enough people that this can't all be like something something went wrong And so they were able to honor that at least in some way in some form.

So for that, you know, give them some credit there that at least people were getting that. And also it's worth mentioning the people that did get that follow up, I believe, if I understand correctly, tell me if I'm wrong because we did not do it during the 5X offer. So I don't have personal experience with this. But my understanding is that you had the choice, whether to have that retroactively honored to the purchases you made during the first five days or to start that new, that five-day period and new starting from like the 20th or something, right? So you can kind of have a do-over. That's right.

That's right. That was good. They gave you the choice. When you're filling out the survey, you had to make that choice. And you couldn't change it afterwards. So like when I got the confirmation saying, okay, we're going to honor it for you. I had picked to do it retroactively because I had purposely maxed out hoping that the 5X would be applied retroactively. and when it said, okay, hey, we're confirming that you're good for the 5X offer,

it specifically said you can't change your choice. It's going to be applied retroactively. Okay. Yeah. Great. So that's good that people had the option because some people had trouble using their card in the first five days or if it wasn't attached, they might have held off on making purchases so good that they got a chance to do it over or if you, like Greg had said, well,

I should be getting it. So I'm just going to go ahead and spend. You at least could get credit for that. That's great, right, right. And I'm curious what happened. A bunch of people got emails saying they had qualified for the 5X. Oh, yeah. Even though they hadn't clicked through.

So I'm curious whether they got 5X as well. That'd be fun for them. You got my 5X. That would be crazy. All right, yeah, funny to line up those numbers. Let's move forward, though, and let's talk about being Bonvoid. So Bank of America has Bonvoid us this week, or at least Bonvoid, those of us out there who have Bank of America premium rewards or platinum honors rewards in their,

what was called the Preferred Rewards Program. So what are the changes here? Well, to be clear, they've scheduled the bonvoying for the future. That's true. So starting in May of 2026, they're renaming the rewards program from it's currently Bank of America Preferred rewards. It's going to be called B of A rewards or BFA rewards. And they're changing, the more important thing is they're changing the tiers.

So today, their rewards program offers various perks like ATM fee, you know, no ATM fees and better, I don't know, interest rates or lower interest rates for loans and things like that. But the big thing, the reason that we ever talk about their rewards program on here is that there's a number of their credit cards that, with today's program, if you have $100,000 or more in savings with Bank of America and or Merrill, then you get a 75% bump in your credit card earning rate. So that turns a 1.5% cashback card into a 2.62% cashback card. And that's been, even though it's not like transferable points or whatever, it's still a remarkable return on spend. There's also cards that earn even more than that in different categories, but generally with caps on how much you can spend in those categories. What's happening is they're changing the tiers such that if you want to

keep that 2.62% or the 75% bump in your rewards, you're going to need to have a million dollars, not 100,000, but a million in savings. So that's a big difference. It is a big difference. And it affects the details also affect you at different levels as well. Like, So people who previously had platinum status, which is where you had to have at least $50,000, they were getting a 50% bonus. But now to get that 50% bonus, you need at least $100,000. So this will affect more than just the 75% or something. The good news is that they're saying that if you're negatively affected like that, the change won't go into effect for at least, six months after the after may when they when they when they start all this so so we do have time to

enjoy our current whatever current bonus rate is and so far the business side of their rewards program doesn't appear to have been affected so if you've earned your 75% bump on the business side which requires separate business savings accounts to earn it then at least as far as we know right now you'll still get that 75% bump. But that could change any minute. It could be that they just haven't announced those changes yet. Yeah. So probably it wouldn't be worth moving 100,

like jumping through a lot of hoops to get 100K on the business side. No. If you don't easily have that available to do, then it wouldn't be worth it. Yeah. I think a better idea is to start a business that easily earns millions of dollars. That's the idea. That's the idea.

And holds millions of dollars in cash. our investments. Yes, yes, yes. So just do that. Yeah. Just do that. That's it. That's it. That's all you got to do. And if you've done that, you're all set. Yeah, you know, this is disappointing. But a couple of things that I think are worth mentioning. If you do have the 100K, so you currently have platinum honors, you'll have 50% bonus on card earnings, which is still not bad. You're going to be looking at 2.25% cash back, which is still better than most cards on the market for a simple flat cash back rate. So it's, if you prefer cashback. Obviously, it's not 2.625 or whatever, but it's not bad. And the same is true for the bonus categories. And some of the cards that have bonus categories are 3.5% in general. You're

going to be looking at with 4 and change. So you're still, again, not bad, or 3% becomes 4.5 is what it is. Yeah. So 4.5% in some of those bonus categories, not necessarily the best return if you're comparing against transferable currencies. Same thing as the base rate. But pretty good. Alternatively, keep in mind that there are some cards like the Robin Hood Gold card, if you can get it, offers a flat 3% back everywhere. And so that's potentially a better card. Now I say potentially, you know, you might say, well, what do you mean? Potentially, that's three quarters of a percent better.

Yes, but A, it's not open to everybody. You've got to like join the wait list maybe in order to be able to get it. And B, it's not quite the same in the sense that like you won't earn rewards on tax payments. I don't even think it'll let you do a tax payment on the Robin Hood gold. card, whereas you obviously could on the Bank of America cards. And I'm sure that there are some other restrictions and perhaps volume restrictions on how much you could do on a Robin Hood gold card before they shut you down, whereas Bank of America has been on a bank that's been pretty easy to use their cards as much as you need to use them, whatever it is, you're using them on for the most

part. So anyway, it's a slightly different ball game, but if you're just looking for a flat good percentage on most average everyday purchases, the Robin Hood Gold card might be an alternative to consider if you're like, oh, man, I don't want to go down to 2.25. So I thought that was at least worth calling on. Also worth mentioning, you know, Merrill Edge has a self-directed, you know, investment accounts that, you know, there's very few fees involved. And so you can do just as well there as just about anywhere else. So if, if you do have a lot of money to park somewhere and you're interested in getting either this 2.25% rate, If you have 100K in investments or 2.62% if you have a million dollars investments, it's an

option that's worth considering. For sure, for sure. Although on the flip side, I will say that long-time readers who know that I moved my investments out a few years ago and Robin Hood offered a great bonus, I will probably understand when I say, I don't regret moving them now because now I feel much bad. I would not have used enough of the 2.62% to have made it worth it over having moved out. Though when we talk about moving, the other thing that's probably worth a mention here if you're not familiar is that once your tier is determined, then I think they go a year before they review your account again. So it's possible to move investments in in order to earn the tier.

And then if you would prefer to hold them elsewhere to potentially move them out and play the game of moving them back in again when you need to move back in again. Yeah. That's not something I would recommend for most people, but it's doable. Yeah, and some people like, you know, play the game of moving their investments around in order to earn those bonuses. There's often bonuses where you could earn, you know, $1,000 for putting $200,000 of new money into this account or that account, you know, that level thing. And if you don't mind the effort involved and you have that kind of money to move around, it could be a good way to do it. Yep, yep. All right, let's move forward to awards points and more.

Awards points and more. First up, we got a little FYI. For your information out there, we recently created a video about how to pay taxes by credit card. Yeah, I just wanted to make sure that our podcast audience was aware of this. If you're on YouTube, you probably saw it pop up, but if you're a listener, you probably didn't. And because these how-to videos we only publish in a video form because they're literally showing how to do things online. And I wanted to point out a couple things about this particular video of how to pay. pay taxes by credit card. One is that we do go through and show you how to tell how much the

payment processor is charging you, like what percentage they're charging you because the payment processors that allow paying by credit card, the primary ones have multiple tiers of charges depending on what kind of card you have, but they don't make it clear what kind of card necessarily fits into which bucket. So when you're going to pay with your Amex, you might be surprised. This is how it charges you, what it charges you, as an example. But more importantly, we also demonstrate a trick for sometimes being able to get the lower rate, even if the processor initially wants to charge the higher rate or wants to reject the card overall because it doesn't take business cards for paying personal taxes, for example.

There's a trick with paying through PayPal that we demonstrate on that video. There you go. So you want to check that out. out on our YouTube channel. So if you just go to the frequent miler YouTube or search frequent mile or YouTube how to pay taxes by credit card, you should find that. And we'll have a link in the show notes, of course, as well. All right. Next up in awards points in more, United Travel Bank may no longer be triggering airline incidental credits. So if you've got an MX platinum or business platinum card with airline incidental fee credits, we have a post about all of the various things that

work to trigger those credits. And one that has worked for years. is making a deposit to your United Travel Bank account. And so essentially this is like sort of like buying a United Gift card that adds to a cumulative balance and has a five-year expiration date. So you could say deposit $100 to your United Travel Bank this year and $100 next year and $100 the year after and have $300 that you could use all in one shot, so to speak. And it was, again, valid for five years from the day when you deposit it. It still is.

I mean, United Travel Bank is still United Travel Bank. in the past that has triggered airline incidental credits on Amex cards, even though it's something that really doesn't fit within the definition of incidental fees. However, it seems like that is no longer the case. Now, there have been times in the past where that's happened temporarily, where it stopped working, and then it started working again. So we don't know that this is going to be a permanent change, but something seems to have changed in the way that United is processing these charges. such that MX is no longer identifying them as incidental fees. When I published a post about this, initially I said, don't panic.

It hasn't been long enough yet. The failure reports had only come in 10 or 11 days before we were publishing. And that's typically not enough time. Almost every year we run into times where charges like that just delay in their processing. Oftentimes most airline incidental fee reimbursements happen within two or three days. But almost every year we hit a backlog where some of them start taking two, three weeks, four weeks even in some cases. So that to me, I was like 10 days. That's not enough time yet to say this is dead. However, the difference here readers have pointed out in comments is that

lots of other United charges are still reimbursing within just a few days as they normally would be expected to. It's just the travel bank charges that aren't. So it seems like that is at least for now dead. So if you didn't already load your travel bank, probably too late for now, or at least until you hear once again that it's back up and running. Yeah. Luckily, there's lots of other ways to trigger those credits. So with just a little creativity, you can do it. And we, of course, have a post about which types of techniques work to trigger those credits. And so it's worth checking that out. And the last thing to mention on that is, if you already chose United and you're like, oh man, now I'm stock. I've United and this doesn't work anymore. Keep in mind that as you'll

see in that post, even though AMX says you can only change your airline once a year in January, I've never been told no when trying to change it mid-year to a different airline. So if you picked United and you're like, oh, no, I don't want it United anymore now that this doesn't work, just chat with support and ask politely and nicely if you can change your airline to a different one and probably you'll be able to. Yeah. All right. Next up, we've got a transfer bonus. So 40% transfer bonus from Chase Ultimate Rewards to Virgin Atlantic, but you'll have to be fast because it's only through February 28th. So you don't have very much time left to do this. But if you're listening to this when we first publish it, you got about a week for a 40%

transfer bonus to Virgin Atlantic. What do you think about that? Yeah, I mean, it's excellent. Transferable points programs often have transfer bonuses to Virgin Atlantic, but they usually have around the 25% 30% area. And so a 40% transfer. for bonus is definitely worth looking at, especially if you have a good use for Virgin points. And so, you know, if you've got a lot of chase points, it's, again, it's worth considering it. I wouldn't do it just, you know, just because, hey, I've got a bunch of chase points and I'd like to have even more Virgin points. I wouldn't do that.

But if you know, you're going to be using your Virgin points to book Virgin Atlantic or to book one of Virgin's partners or to book, you could also book things like, you like Virgin cruises and things with Virgin points. If you know you're going to be doing that, then yeah, this is a great deal. Yeah, absolutely. I wouldn't speculatively transfer either. And that's because, for the record, Virgin has changed redemption rates and levels and sweet spots overnight without notice multiple times in the past. So you don't know when something's going to change.

So it's probably not worth speculatively transferring. But if you find a good use, yeah, by all means. Speaking of good uses, we've got a new use out of Virgin points. So on top of the many that we already have covered in resources that we have on the website, there's something new. Yeah. You can now use Virgin Points to book WestJet flights. So WestJet is a Canadian carrier.

They have a strong route network throughout Canada. And then they also have flights to other places in North America. They have a couple of flights to Asia, several flights to like Ireland and the UK. And with Virgin Points now, they've partnered up. So you can use your virgin points to book WestJet flights. It's distance-based, the pricing. So for economy flights, flights up to 500 miles are 6,000 virgin points, up to 1,000 miles, 9,000, up to 1,500 miles, 12,000. And it keeps going up in tiers of around a 3,000 to a 2,500 point jump for each tier.

they also have a word chart that shows what pricing is for booking WestJet premium economy or business class, and the pricing seems decent. But as far as I could tell, there's literally no award availability on WestJet in those cabin classes. So one mile of time, like tried, well, all right, I should back up. One of the things you need to know, you have to call to book these. You can't book them online. So you might be able to online chat as well. So one mile at a time, he called and tried all kinds of dates to try to find business class award availability and got nowhere.

I thought, oh, I can do this easily. I can do this much easier than him because Delta partners with WestJet. Let's use Delta miles to book WestJet. And I figured if Delta could see the business class flights, then Virgin probably can too. So I tried a bunch of routes through delta.com and I could not find any. I found lots of economy availability. I couldn't find any business class or premium economy availability at all. Doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but it's really hard to find.

So I think, at least as things stand today, this whole deal is best for booking WestJet economy. And it's of sort of questionable value because WestJet economy, it's often dirt cheap. Like, you know, their pricing. tends to compete with like low-cost carriers. And so I'll just give you an example. I noticed that there's a flight, a West Jet flight from Detroit to Halifax, which I think is cool. I've never been Halifax.

I'd love to take that route. I could now book that with 12,000 virgin points or 15,000 delta miles. But the cash price for regular economy, I'm not talking about basic economy, regular economy, for that same flight on a data looked at was $151. So using points to offset $151, it's like not great value for your points. And so it's not something in that case, I would just pay the cash or use a program where I get, where I can use points at good value to book with points. I would generally agree with that unless there's a 40% transfer bonus from Chase to Virgin Atlantic,

because then if you look at that specific example that Greg just gave. So 12,000 virgin points for a flight that's $151 with a 40% transfer bonus that requires about 8500, a little more than 8,500 chase points. So let's call it 9,000. So the 151 divided by 9,000. So that's giving you 1.68 cents per chase point with the 40% bonus. So, I mean, 1.68 cents per point. That's not a redemption I get excited about.

but it's also better than our reasonable redemption value for chase points. So there may be some situations where it'll come in handy for WestJet, but like Greg said, I think the upside is limited. That's not enough upside for me to get excited. That said, I have no doubt there are routes, especially to remote regions in Canada or Alaska that are always expensive. And so if you can get these deals, that could be actually a fantastic value. Yeah.

And if you want to just fly nonstop because Westjet does have some, I say nonstop, probably if you're listening to this, you don't live in Canada. So maybe you're not going to be nonstop going from Canada to places farther afield. But West Jet does operate some unique routes. Let's at least say that. So there may be some situations where you're like, oh, and not only is it a remote place, but here I can fly nonstop to Toronto from my city. And that's the only airline that offers a nonstop to Toronto. So there are some potentially good uses. We'll see.

We'll see. time will tell, but that is a new use anyway and kind of interesting for that. All right. We'll be right back after this with Big United Changes. We hope you're enjoying the Frequent Miler on the air podcast. Did you know that Frequent Miler is also a website? At frequentmiler.com, you'll find all the latest deals, news about points, miles, and rewarding credit cards, the single best best credit cards page on the web, guides to all popular rewards programs and many

other terrific resources. If you'd like to get our post sent to your email, go to frequent miler.com forward slash subscribe and sign up for free. And we're back with today's main event. Big United changes. Cardholders earn more and spend fewer miles. Starting April 2nd of 2026, United has announced that United credit cards are going to be the key to unlocking better mileage earning and redemptions. So we're going to get into details of what's changing for good and bad, and then we will sort of end up with recommendations for if you're interested in getting a united card, which one do we think is best for that purpose?

Yeah. So on the earning side, mileage plus members are going to earn, I guess, fewer miles per dollar spent on airfare in general. However, by having a card, a United card, primary card holders are going to get an additional three miles per dollar, and that's going to be on top of whatever you're earning from the credit card spend. We're just saying this is the increased earnings when you're flying with United if you also have a credit card, whether or not you bought the flight with that credit card. So you're an additional three miles per dollar. So that's going to make, for instance,

a general member with no credit card is now going to earn, starting April 2nd, three miles per dollar spent on the fare. If that general member has a United Credit Card, they'll earn double. They'll earn six miles per dollar on that airfare, which is more than what they would earn today. Yeah. So to summarize a little bit, and this for not basic economy, if you don't have a United Credit Card, your earning rate on United Flights is going to go down a little bit. But if you do have a credit card, it'll go up a little bit.

Is that right? Yep. Yeah, that's absolutely. And that's the case, generally speaking on all of the levels here, right? So even if you have top tier premier 1K status, it's going to go down a little bit to nine miles per dollar spent on your affairs now without a credit card. If you do get a credit card, it will go up very little bit, one mile to 12 miles per dollar spent. So essentially, they're pushing people to. get their credit cards. Yeah, yeah. It's worth noting there's a couple of cards, a couple of United

cards that require $10,000 of annual spend in order to unlock these better earning rates and also to unlock the better mileage redemption rates we'll talk about soon. And that is, one is the United Debit card, which we talked about in a previous episode. You have to spend $10,000 a year to unlock these features. And the other one is the no annual fee United Gateway credit card. And that one again, you have to spend 10,000 to unlock the features that we're talking about here. Yeah. So if you want to earn more miles per dollar spent and you have one of those two United cards, you'll need to spend on them in order to get those additional miles. I find that kind of interesting, actually, though, because with the debit card, then something like a tax payment

could potentially get you the benefit here of being able to earn some more miles per dollar spent. Though, of course, debit card does have a fee. So there's some complication there in terms of whether that's worth it to you or not. Now, basic economy is another story. So similar story, but slightly different, I suppose, in that general members will no longer earn any miles at all on basic economy fairs unless they have a United Credit Card. If they have a United Credit Card, they'll earn three miles per dollar,

no credit card. They won't earn anything at all on Basic Economy. And everybody else is going to earn fewer miles per dollar on Basic Economy Fares than they do. today. If they have the credit card, they will earn more miles per dollar spent, the additional three miles per dollar spent. So you go all the way up to Premier 1K will earn six miles per dollar spent as a base rate on basic economy. And if they have a united card, a qualifying United card, they'll earn nine miles per dollar. So it'll be that three mile per dollar difference

is consistent here. Yeah. Yeah. And that top rate of nine miles per dollar, that's what, two miles per less than you would earn today as a Premier 1K member. So that's gone down a bit for basic economy. I don't imagine, I could be wrong, but that too many Premier 1K members are spending a lot on basic economy anyway, so it might not matter to them. But for general members, you know, suddenly getting no miles, if you're not a card holder, that's going to hurt.

All right. Yeah, you know, that's an interesting statement. I don't know what the truth or not truth to that matter is either. but I know that as a Southwest person, now I look at now that they've made the different levels available as a cardholder, I feel like now I have license to choose the choice or the basic economy fair because I can get all of the benefits that like a choice fair, except I can pay less for basic economy. So I don't know what your elite status benefits come out to be with United. Maybe some of those folks are spending a bunch on basic economy.

But at any rate, you're going to earn less. But there are some other good news, right? Yeah, perhaps. So, you know, when we're talking about how you earn more as a card member, we were not yet talking about actually using the card to book flights. So let's talk about that now. There are three cards now, three United cards, where if you use them to book flights, starting, you know, when all this changes in April 2nd, you'll earn more points per dollar than you would before. So the three cards are the United Explorer, United Quest, and United Club Card, just the consumer versions of those. So the Explorer will be earning three miles per dollar on United purchases.

It was two. Quest will be earning four miles per dollar. It was three. And the club card will be earning five, and it was four. Surprisingly to me, all other United cards are going to have an unchanged earn rate. And so, you know, even like the United Club business card will continue to only earn two miles per dollar for United purchases, which that seems that seems bizarrely low even before all these changes. And the fact that they're not bumping that up is odd, but that's the way it is. Yeah.

And, you know, these earn rates seem decent on the surface. But when you consider the alternatives that you could be using, for instance, if you have a Sapphire Reserve card, you can already earn four transferable points per dollar spent on United States. fair is booked at united.com or eight points per dollar if you're booking them through chase travel and that's one of me the city travel's got their stuff and capital one as theirs so there's lots of other ways you could be earning transferable points at a similar or better clip right so these aren't terribly exciting yeah no i totally agree that it's like they're encouraging us to have the cards but not necessarily to spend on the cards which is right it's not rewarding enough yeah to encourage us to spend on them. Yeah. All right. More exciting. Let's talk about redeeming miles. How can cardholders

save, or as view from the wing put it, how is it that they're going to raise rates for everybody who doesn't isn't a cardholder? Well, you know, I think that Gary's cynicism here is perhaps correct. So United card members are going to save a minimum of 10% now on United operated award flights. And members with elite status will see a minimum of 50. 15% savings over what non-card holding elite members would pay for the same awards. And so this is similar to what Delta does with their credit card. They offer the 15% discount for Delta cardholders. And while that's a discount over what non-card holders will pay, it felt like in the beginning,

and I'm sure that it's shaken out this way, that that was basically just a way to increase the price for most people and keep the current price level for those who have the car. or the card in elite status. So I guess it'll be better than paying more. For sure. When Delta first did this, yeah, my initial analysis showed that they actually had, we're giving better pricing, but that didn't last very long. Pretty soon, the pricing seemed to match, the pricing as a cardholder seemed to match what

the pricing was before as a non-card holder. And so you really were just being charged more. and that's how it stands today for not being a cardholder. And in Delta's case, the fee free card does not give you that benefit. So at least United here is giving you the opportunity with $10,000 spend to get that benefit, even with the no annual fee card. Yeah. And if you're going to be redeeming United Miles, obviously paying fewer beats paying more.

So you're going to at least avoid the non-cardholder surcharge, if you will. So, you know, no, that's not a real surcharge if you're, listening to you're like, wait, wait, wait, is there you know what we're saying is that non-cardholders are going to be paying more. So you'll at least avoid paying that additional premium. Some people might wonder what this has to do with. We've talked before about United Cards unlocking better award rates. And that's a little bit different. That's where they give saver award rates to cardholders more of them than to non-cardholders. holders. And one mile of time published some good news about this, although he didn't write where he

got this news. So I'm not sure if that was where this came from. But he reports that United will offer additional saver-level award seats in United Polaris business class for credit card members. He wrote currently roughly one-third of flights that have saver-level awards have special availability for credit card members and premier elite members. That will be expected. band it even further, and we'll also see the 10% to 15% discount stackable with this. So that's great news. I think on maybe our last show, I talked about how I was looking at flights to Australia and as a cardholder, I saw a business class flight for 100,000 miles that would have been,

I think it was 200,000 or more as a non-cardholder. So theoretically, what this all means is as a cardholder, as a cardholder, I would not only see the 100,000 point, but I'll actually get that 10% discount, even if I have no elite status. So it should be a 90,000 point award if they don't raise prices to accommodate this. And if this is correct, I'm slightly, I'd be curious about the source of this info. One of the other times usually pretty reliable on stuff like this. But I would look at that and say, well, isn't United going to say you're already getting a 50% discount for being a card holder over what a regular, ordinary non-card-holding person would have.

So I don't want, I'm not sure that that does stack, but I guess we'll see. Time will tell. After April 2nd, we'll find out whether that's going to stack or not. If it does, great news. I mean, the ability to see additional award availability is potentially a really good benefit for having a card. The cynic in me looks at this and says, man, this is everything that's wrong in the industry right now because that means that there's less and less or fewer and fewer seats available

for partner award redemptions. because they're kind of saving them for their card holders. And then as they release less partner availability to their partners, how long before their partners get kind of sick of that and release fewer award seats to United members. And so it's kind of a domino effect there. Yeah, although the good news for you there is that United has already stopped releasing hardly any business class award seats to their partners for quite a while now.

No, I know. I know. I'm not sure I can get much worse. Yeah, well, that's true. But I think this is an indication it's not going to get better. Yeah, yeah. You know, the part that frustrates me the most is that award search tools have no access to knowing what the rate is for cardholders, at least today. Now, one mile of time did say that they're going to start showing at some point the cardholder rate in the search results.

Basically, you encourage you to become cardholder. So maybe at that point, maybe the search tools will have access to that and be able to show it. Yeah, good point. Good point. All right, for the family travelers out there, there's an important note here that starting on April 2nd, you'll be able to link your child's mileage plus account to yours to share your card member earn rate and your card member discount on award flights. That's important because otherwise, kids aren't old enough to have a card. So they wouldn't be able to earn the card member rate. They'd be stuck earning a lower mileage rate, even though they can't get one of the cards yet. So good news for card holders that they're going to be able to extend that to their kids and save on award flights for their kids as well. Bad news for anybody whose parents, any child out there whose parents aren't getting the card, I guess, or can't get the card or whatever the case may be, because then they're just going to earn less. They're going to earn fewer miles per dollar than they would today, kind of through no fault of their own in the sense that they don't have the ability to get the card even if they wanted it. So kind of a bummer there from one standpoint. but for folks that do have the card, that is obviously good news because I would have been frustrated right away saying, oh, man, I'm going to earn, we're going to collectively earn fewer miles overall because my kids are going to earn so much less than they were before.

So good news for cardholders. Yeah, yeah. All right. Now let's talk about the United Card lineup. And let's say, you know, you've seen this. You've got a big stash of, of Chase. United or built points. And I mentioned Chase and Built

because those both transfer one to one to United. And so you're interested in getting access to better award pricing, for example. Which card should you get in that case? And the reason I framed it that way is if you're interested in the earning rate side of things in increasing that,

you're probably already, you probably already have a United card that unlocks that feature. And if, because like, I don't know, It just seems very likely that you would. And your decision points about which card is best are going to be different if you're looking at the earnings side than the redemption side. So I'm saying just you're not big United Flyer, but you are interested in being able to unlock these better rates, which card is best for that. And so let's go over what's available here.

So you can get the United Gateway card that has no annual fee or the United Debit card, which does have some sort of. of a fee. I don't remember the details in terms of if there's an ability to waive that or not. Either way, with the debit card or the gateway card, you have to spend $10,000 per, is it, calendar year or card member year? I don't remember, but either way, you got to spend $10,000 per year. In order to unlock the features if you have one of those two cards. If you get the Explorer card, oh, go ahead. No, so I was just going to say, so, you know, I think that the debit card might makes sense if you have an easy way to spend with a debit card that doesn't work for a credit card. So, for example, you pay estimated taxes, and when you pay estimated taxes with a debit card,

it only costs like a couple dollars instead of charging a percentage. And so it's usually much cheaper that way. If I remember right, the gateway card, I mean, the debit card, I think has no annual fee if you keep at least something like $2,500. $1,500. dollars in the in your balance um and so you know i think for someone like that where where you know you're going to be spending ten thousand dollars a year anyway uh i think or or you could easily do it for very low cost i think that that can make a lot of sense the gateway card i have a hard

time with uh the idea of spending ten thousand dollars on a very low earning card just for the hopes of getting a lower award price yeah i mean i guess it's simpler than the debit card in the sense that you don't have to worry about keeping money in there in order to keep it fee free and the cost of that because you're not earning interest on that elsewhere. So I guess you're just looking for a very simple solution. I guess it's a similar idea. Personally, as somebody who's over 524 though, the United Debit card seems like my only option, right? Because I can't get one of these other United Cards right now. So the United Debit card would be the only way for me to do it. And I'm, I kind of fit in that bucket of somebody who, maybe I would redeem United Miles now.

then I've got chase points. I've got built points. I'm not a frequent United Flyer, but I'd like to be able to have access to this expanded availability. Debit card and a $10,000 tax payment seems like a really potentially easy way for me to get that. I wouldn't apply for the gateway card, even if I were eligible for it, because I would want to earn a new welcome bonus if I'm going to apply for a new credit card. So I don't disagree with you that I don't see the market for the gateway card, but I guess if you've downgraded and you don't want to pay an annual fee and you've got the card sitting around. You can make a similar argument on a tax payment being a cheap enough way, I guess, to potentially unlock this. That's true.

You're right. You're right, though. I am going to point out one thing, though, the gateway card, and I don't know what the limits are off the top of my head, but it has limits and how much you could spend per day. And so I don't think you could do a single, the debit card. I don't think you could do a single $10,000 tax payment, but you could probably do two, you know, one day and then the next day, something like that. Yep. Good point. The next up, there's $250 annual fee card options. The first is the consumer card, the Explorer card.

In that one, both of these $150 options will give you two United Club passes per year, and they both have various like coupons and things to potentially reduce your annual fee that we're not going to get into details about those. but I do want to point out that I think the business card, the $150 United Business Card is a much better bet if you're interested in this level. So as I said, both of these cards offer two United Club passes per year. So if you value that, if you fly United occasionally and like to get into the United Club when you're flying United, then either twice a year or with two people you can get in. So that's a really nice benefit. the business card also has a couple other benefits that the consumer card doesn't have.

So one thing is, if you have any other United Consumer Card, including the No Eni Gateway Card, you'll automatically get 5,000 bonus miles each year. So that's a reason to keep the Gateway Card. Don't spend on it. Just keep it around so that you get 5,000 bonus miles with the business card. The business card also, again, I said we weren't going to list the coupons, but it has better coupons than the consumer one. I'll just leave it at that.

But it also unlocks, if you have elite status with United, it unlocks the ability to get complimentary elite upgrades on award tickets. The personal card doesn't automatically do that. I think there's some hoops you can jump to make it do that or something. I can't remember details, but it doesn't automatically do that. So business card, if you get one and you're interested in the $150 price point, is a better pick. Very good. All right, so that's good.

How about the Quest card? Does the Quest card make sense for anybody? For some, I think so. So the Quest card is $350, which right there you should be like, wait a minute, why would I even consider this if I'm not big enough enough? Well, the reason is it gives you $200 in travel bank credits each anniversary. So that, you know, assuming you fly United enough to always use the $200, you could argue that that effectively brings the the effective annual fee down to $150 after that rebate. It doesn't give you those two lounge passes, though,

but it does give you a 10,000-mile award flight discount each anniversary year. So that's pretty darn valuable right there. So if you're going to fly at least one cash ticket on United and make at least one United Award redemption each year and you don't care too much about lounge access, then I think it's actually a pretty good pick, but obviously there's a lot of ifs there. A lot of ifs, but if those ifs me,

I mean, there are a lot of ifs, but I think it's not hard to imagine that there are a lot of people for whom those ifs would fit. So I would agree with you that the quest can certainly be appealing anyway. So that would be a good way to get in here.

And then finally, we mentioned when you're talking about the quest card that if you don't care about lounge access, the quest card, is a good pick because that one doesn't come with any lounge passes unlike the $150 cards. But if you really are mostly interested in United Club Access, then you should get. The United Club Card or the business card equivalent. $695 a year, though.

And, you know, I'm not sure why are you interested in United Club Access? You're not that into United. I mean, I think it will get you into, I believe, other Star Alliance clubs. So it could be that you do fly, you know, Star Alliance often enough that it matters to you, even if you're not big in the United, I guess. But that seems like a reach. So my guess is that most listeners who are trying to find a card just for the purpose of unlocking better award prices are not going to be getting the $695 year club card. Probably not.

So that one probably isn't a fit for anybody. So I think a lot of people will fit, though, in those first four levels. I think there's different crowds for each of those different. opportunities, those different ways in. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, Nick, you mentioned that the debit card might be the right pick for you, especially since you might not be able to qualify for a new chase card, or you might not have a card that you are, I don't know if they would even allow

product change from another co-brand or whatever to that. But even if they would, you might not want to. And for me, I have the business card and the gateway card. So I'm paying $150 a year in annual fees. And I have used those United Club passes every now and then. I don't use them every year. But it's sort of just barely makes sense for me, especially though, even if I just once a year do one of those big awards where I'm paying around $100,000 so $200,000, that kind of thing, it obviously is worth it for me. But it's close.

I mean, paying that to just for the hope of getting that is not great. It made more sense for me when I had United Silver status because it unlocked the ability to get upgrades on awards with United. Now that I don't have silver status, though, it's making less sense from that point of view. So overall, what do you think about these changes? I mean, what is this? Overall, are the changes good for us, bad for us? And what do you think about them, about United, essentially making it necessary to have a card in order to earn an increase in elevated number of miles per dollar when you're flying United?

Yeah. I mean, I think it's just smart business. I think, you know, these airline programs tend to make more from their credit card business than from flying passengers. And I don't know if United is, if that's true for United today, but clearly they want to be earning more on the credit card side. And this will definitely help. I mean, they set up some good carrots for wanting to get the card and some minor sticks for wanting to avoid not having a card. And I think that's smart business. I don't think it, my guess is that it's not going to make a huge deal. difference. As far as earning rates go, you know, you'll do a little bit better on most fares except for basic economy, as long as you're a cardholder. For redemptions, we have to wait

and see, you know, are they going to, you know, really keep prices around what they are today and lower them for cardholders? That would be great. Delta is not a good example of that, though. And United has a history of following Delta's lead on lots of things. They do, unfortunately, yeah. Yeah, you know, I think overall this is this smart business too. I question, and I've questioned this previously when another airline today. I question the wisdom in taking away mileage earning for general members on basic economy fairs. I feel like you want the newcomers to be interested in the program. And the best way to do that is not by taking away the ability of them to earn miles. And if you from the wing points out the fact that free Wi-Fi on

planes is more about getting people to sign up for the mileage program so that you can market credit cards to them than it is about anything else. And so maybe they figure, well, you know what, we don't need to give them miles on the flight. We'll just make them sign up for the program in order to be able to get their free Wi-Fi and that's enough. And maybe that's what the airline thinks is in their best interest. I think it would be in better, their better interest to give those newcomers a reason to be flying them to give them miles on those basic economy fairs because it's not going to cost them much for all the people that don't bother to redeem. them and the people that do bother to redeem them are probably the people that they hooked in to

come back again and again might be able to get a credit card for and everything. So I question the wisdom of that individual piece of it, but overall yet, obviously makes sense. I also, I find this interesting because we keep hearing every couple of years about this bill that one day may pass in order that would limit credit card earnings essentially. It comes up from time and time. people will email and ask our thoughts about do we think that this is going to pass through Congress and that there's going to become a limit on your credit card earnings or a reduction in the interchange fees or whatever. And this type of move from United tells me that that's so unlikely to ever happen because they're banking their business here on people getting the credit card and they're not

the only ones. Yeah. You know, not just United as there would be so much such heavy lobbying against it and I'm sure there has been already. Right. It's just not, yeah, that's not going to happen. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think so either. Our hobby for sure.

Right. It doesn't happen. Yeah. Right. Right. All right. That brings us to this week's question of the week, I think. So this week's question of the week comes in from Arthur.

Arthur says, I listen to all your podcasts. I don't think I've heard or read you mentioned about using AI to help with optimizing your points in miles game. I use a particular AI tool, which I, pay a subscription for, but I'm sure there are lots of others out there. Most recently, my AI friend helped me decipher through the confusing built 2.0 cards, which ones to get, or which one to get, given my spend, which one to choose, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then said, AI also helped Arthur to do some optimizing once he gave the AI tool, all of his credit cards is 50

or so that he and his wife have in his monthly spending categories and whatnot. AI helped him sort through which ones to keep and which ones to cancel. So he wants. to know what we think about that. He says he thinks it'd make a good show or a good topic to mention. So what are your thoughts about using AI to optimize specifically our hobby, whether that's earning, redemption, choosing which cards to keep and which cards to cancel? What do you think about AI in this field? From my experience so far with AI, you're going to be getting a lot of very bad advice, unfortunately. The, you know, AI is trained on data from a certain time period and the details about how all these things work changes almost daily.

Like, just think about United that we've been talking about. You know, if you ask them in, if you ask an AI in May, you know, something about how many miles are you going to get for flying this United flight, I bet it's going to give you the wrong answer because it doesn't know exactly what's happening at any given time. But, you know, someday they may get better, but I think the opportunity for getting even minor, even minor mistakes making a big difference in your earnings

and usage of points and miles, there's a lot of potential downside to that when there are errors that cause you to make bad decisions. That's... Yeah, you know, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I have a very similar take on that. My experiences so far, I use AI some in trip plan, with things that never change. Like when I'm asked, I'll ask it questions about the best areas to

visit for something or time of year or things that are consistent over many, many years that don't change. But things that are dynamic that change often, AI is not particularly good at because it doesn't know which reference point is the one that makes sense. And I think these United Changes are a fantastic example, like Greg said, because the vast majority of resources on the internet right now, as things exist today, will reference the old earning rates. Even the new posts about the changes are going to probably, in large part, reference those old earning rates. And so it wouldn't surprise me if AI for quite a while continues to reference the wrong

earning rates on United because that's what the majority of their resources have said. Now, maybe they'll update because they'll update with whatever is newest. But we've also seen AI make mistakes. For instance, when Jeff Blue ran their Dunkin flights last year for status, when they first launched that promotion, which was a promotion where if you flew on a specific plane, you'd get mosaic status for a few months. And so when they first launched it, they launched the dates that it was going to be eligible and the dates when the flight wasn't going to run.

And then later on, the schedule changed. But because the vast majority of the Internet published the original schedule, AI tools kept giving people the wrong information about what dates you could actually get on one of those Duncan flights and get status. So we kept getting comments from people that were referencing. incorrect information that I knew they got from the AI answer from Google. And so things like that, I think there's a lot of that stuff in this hobby that it's dynamic enough that I'd be pretty hesitant to just take AI's word for it. Now, does AI have a lot of, you know, upside? Yes, this hobby,

it's dangerous. Yeah. Yeah. And some stuff that's not even dynamic, it just gets wrong. So I was trying to use AI to help me analyze a bunch of benefit guides, credit card benefit guides. And I was asking specifically about warranty, extended warranty limits. And I gave it, I don't know, let's say 12 different guides to summarize the limits. And it listed the limits correctly for like three or four of them. And then said, the following ones don't have any limits, which was not true. And then I rephrased it to use the exact wording that was in some of those guides that it said didn't have any limits. So I used whatever that wording was and said, you know, summarized by the, you know, maximum whatever, blah, blah, blah, you know, exactly paraphrase.

It still got it wrong. It still said they had no limits. And so now that's just one example. But the point is like, you often get things where it seems to really know what it's doing and it often gets 95%, 99% of what it's telling you right. And that really sort of lulls you into believing everything it says. And if you don't double check it, you're doomed. So anyway, yeah, a long answer to now AI is not ready for that yet. Not ready for it yet. But I think that's an important, you know, qualifier there. And probably there are different quality levels of tools and some tools you can pay for and have different

specialties and expertise. But like any tool on the market, it's only as as good as the craftsman using it, right? I mean, you know, you can give me the, the finest, like, carving knife in the world, and I still don't have any skill for carving. So I'm going to need a little bit of knowledge about how to carve something before I can actually do it right. And so it's the same kind of thing, I think, with AI, you need to recognize its limitations. So good tool to supplement what you're doing, but I wouldn't use it to make your big decisions without a fair amount of underlying knowledge. And that's probably true no matter what you're using it for. So there's our take on AI for today. If you enjoyed that 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 frequent miler insiders Facebook group where you can ask and answer questions about this stuff all the time. And if you have a question that you'd like to be considered for a future question of the week or a piece of feedback that you'd like to be considered for the giant mailbag, you can send that to mailbag. You can send it to mailbag at frequentmiler.com. Bye everybody. Travel Tales with me, Mike Siegel, is full of funny, inspiring and wild adventures. Listen now at voyescape.com. If you love travel, you'll love Winging It Travel Podcast.

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