Frequent Miler on the Air - Capital One: Get more for your Double Miles | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep293 | 2-7-25

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

On today's episode the fellas chat about how to get the Southwest Companion Pass with just one card, whether or not your Marriott points just became more valuable, and how to get great value out of Capital One miles. (01:17) - One of our younger readers talks about a huge award booking success, all achieved without pro award booking tools. (05:40) - Quick overview of the Million Mile Madness challenge Watch our Ask Us Anything, Live here. Rewatch the entire Million Mile Madness Challenge in one video here. (10:27) - Get Southwest Companion Pass through 2/28/26 Learn more about this here. (13:25) - Frontier Platinum status fast track: Earn 20k Elite Status Points by 4/30/25 Learn more here. (18:46) - Transfer bonuses (21:13) - Earn 20x Avios on hotel bookings & 15x on car hire (book by 2/24/25) Learn more about this here. (23:58) - Use JetBlue points to book TAP (25:04) - Refreshing posts about award booking tools (30:50) - Are Marriott points more valuable? Learn more about the value of Marriott points here. (33:54) - My experience applying for the UK’s electronic travel authorisation (ETA) Learn more about the UK ETA here. (36:15) - Capital One Miles usually worth exactly 1 cent each (37:21) - Get more than 1 cent per mile via transfer partners (38:49) - Real-life examples... (49:04) - Cardholder exclusives (51:00) - Capital One cash back can be converted to miles (53:08) - Which flight reward search tool is best if I need specific dates and locations?

On today's show, we're going to talk about how to get a Southwest Companion Pass with just a single card. We'll discuss whether your Marriott points just became more valuable. And we'll show you how to get great value out of your Capital One miles. Frequent Miler on the air starts now. Today's main event, Capital One. Get more for your double miles. Jennifer Garner loves to talk about how her Venture and Venture X cards get double miles everywhere. But by default, you might not be getting the most value you can from those double miles. We're going to talk about how to do that, how you get more than the default amount for your double miles.

Yeah, I mean, for years, we weren't particularly excited about Capital One miles because there weren't so many opportunities to get outsized value. But over these last several years, things have just really exploded and Capital One miles have become way more valuable than you may have previously thought. So we'll talk about that today.

Don't forget, if you wanna jump ahead to a specific segment where you wanna go back to something and listen to it again, you can find the timestamps in the show notes. Just expand those. And wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to like this. Give it a thumbs up if you're watching it on YouTube. If you're listening in podcast form, leave us a review and a comment. We always appreciate hearing from you. All right. It's time to drag out this week's giant mailbag. Today's giant mail comes from Will. Will says, My name is Will. I'm 16 years old and live in Eugene, Oregon. I started listening to your podcast when I was 15 and haven't missed a single one, except one.

Except one. Just that one. That one boring one. I understand. Now I'm really curious which one he missed. I just wanted to thank you for everything that you guys have taught me, especially on the redeeming side, because it's a little harder to earn points when you can't get credit cards. Today, I made my first big award booking. Of course, it wasn't for me because I'm too young. I did this for my grandparents with their small stash of ultimate rewards points. They are going on a Nile River cruise next November, and they challenged me to get the two of them to Tel Aviv and back from Amman in business class for under $8,000 because that was what the cruise line was charging. I don't have the pro version of any award search tool. Hopefully

I get it for my birthday, but I was able to find Turkish availability from Boston to Athens on Air Canada for 70,000 points. I also found Turkish availability from Amman to Istanbul and Istanbul to Vancouver the next day in business class for the way back, also through Air Canada, for 15,000 miles for the first segment and 70,000 for the second. A couple of positioning flights later, the trip was completely planned. Wow, that's awesome. Well, you did a great job with that. That's fantastic. I'm proud of you. I'm excited for you.

And I love that you did this actually as much as you probably want the pro version of some of the search tools. And it's going to be great when you get it. I'm actually really excited for you that you didn't use those. You know, when I was in high school, I had a math teacher who at the time, I'm not going to say that I disliked her, but I didn't appreciate or enjoy the fact that she would make us work out all the formulas. Instead of just like learning the formula and using it, she would make us do the proofs for the formulas in order to understand where they came from. And that drove me crazy because it was like, I don't really care where A squared plus B squared equals C squared or whatever it was that we were learning. But later now, you know, years later,

I realized that understanding where stuff comes from is what helps you understand the more advanced stuff later on. And so you really need those building blocks, you need that foundational stuff. And that way, you can understand when something's a mistake, because I'm familiar enough with the award charts that if a pro tool gives me a wrong number, I know, okay, that award can't possibly be right, or I'm going to look at it more closely because it seems like it's a mistake or something. So the fact that you're getting to learn how to do this without the tools, believe it or not, it's going to help make those tools even more useful for you in the long run. So I'm actually excited that you did it without that. Your grandparents are lucky to have you

out there searching for the awards. This is great. I love it. Love it, Will. 100% everything that Nick just said. Totally agree. Fantastic job. And I love that you had that specific target of the $8,000 thing that it would have cost $8,000 to book that. Instead, you were able to efficiently use points and get them there. So, so much cheaper, you know, so just off the top of my head, like if they had a Sapphire Reserve card, they would have been able to book, you know, the $8,000 business class flights for what? Help me with the math here, Nick. 600,000.

600,000. Oh, no, I'm sorry. 600 would be nine, so a little bit less than 600,000. Even if we said 500,000 chase points each, and you're looking at less than 150,000 points each, or no, a little bit over 150,000 points each, plus some taxes and fees. So that's fantastic. So much better than they could have done without you. So fantastic job. Well done. Well done. Exciting times. And thanks for listening. We appreciate having you here. You're creating a great foundation for the future. You're going to have an awesome future of redemptions. And you did mention that it is hard when you can't get credit cards. But of course, I'm sure you know there's shopping portals and maybe you're not doing a lot of shopping, but maybe you can help

the family do some shopping and pick up some miles along the way. You've got some other options out there. So I hope you're pursuing some of those too. Great job. All right, let's talk about an update here. So if you followed along like Will did, I'm sure, hopefully the one he skipped wasn't about our Million Mile Madness Challenge. And if you only skipped one, I guess you couldn't have skipped them all. We have an update, though, regarding our Million Mile Madness Challenge. So what do we have there? Really quick recap. SAS did that promotion where we could earn a million miles by flying 15 SkyTeam partners at the end of 2024. And so we did our Million Mile Madness Challenge where Nick, Stephen, and I competed to complete the SAS deal. And where we're at now, you probably already know, I've already earned the million miles from that. Stephen and Nick have both been waiting for their final miles to get credited and then to hopefully get an email saying,

you got the million and then actually get the million miles. Stephen has now cleared the first of those hurdles. So his final 15th flight finally got credited. He had to manually request that to be credited. So that's finally in his account. So it's looking, you know, there's no reason now why he won't definitely get the million miles. Nick, you're still waiting. I'm still waiting. So I still haven't had any update on the last two. So I have 14 airlines credited. There's been no update on the other two claims that I've made. But you know, I'm hopeful that one of these days it'll come through. Certainly they haven't been denied yet. They're still just sitting outstanding with no update. So that's good news. And as I mentioned on a live stream that we did just recently here, I'm pretty hopeful because if you had flown 10 airlines, you could earn 100,000 miles. And if you flew 15, you could earn a million miles. And they haven't credited me with 100,000 miles, which means to me that they know that I'm not done at 10. They know they're not

done processing the claims yet. So they're still working on it. So I got my fingers crossed. I have two more flights that I'm waiting to be credited for. And I only need one of them to credit successfully in order to earn the million miles. So I'm as hopeful as I can be. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure it's going to come through. So that's great. And last night we did a live Ask Us Anything on YouTube, which will come out probably next week as we're recording this as a podcast as well. And in that show, we announced who our audience winners were. If you remember, part of the challenge was our audience could help us. And

we would each pick someone who helped us the most. And the person who helped us the most that helped the person who helped the winner of the of our challenge the most would get the grand prize. And so that would be the person I picked who will get five Hilton free night certificates and 400,000 miles. And that award went to Forrest. Yeah, that was that was awesome. And then Stephen and I each picked the person that we found most helpful for us. And so those two people are each walking away with 100,000 miles, which is still enough for a roundtrip picked Beth B from his journal post. So those two, hopefully Beth B, you're sitting in good shape here now that Stephen has his 15th airline picked. Presumably the million miles will come through and you'll get your 100,000.

GH, you and I are still waiting with our fingers crossed. Like I said, I'm pretty hopeful, but assuming that I get the million miles, GH is going to get the hundred thousand for being the most helpful. We had a lot of helpful people. So, and I know we all wanted to shout out another person, Tony Glavinich, who, or Glavinich, I'm not sure how you pronounce it exactly. And I apologize if I mispronounce the name, but all of us had found a bunch of the tips that you gave really helpful. There were a bunch of other readers we mentioned during the live broadcast last night that were super helpful. So thank you to everybody who participated in that because that

made it that much more enjoyable. 100%. And maybe next time we do something similar, Will from the earlier mailbag can help one of us and earn a bunch of miles that way. That's right. Now, something else exciting about the challenge is that Carrie's sister, Annie, has helped us by she took all of the video footage that we had from the challenge, put it together in one coherent video story. And so now that's released on YouTube. And you really should check it out because it's a fun watch to see it all together. Very good. All right. That wraps that up. Let's talk about card news. So in card news, we've got a new offer out on the Southwest Consumer Cards. So the Southwest Rapid Rewards Premier, Rapid Rewards Plus, and Rapid Rewards Priority Cards each have a new offer out where you can earn 30,000 points and a companion pass that's

valid until the end of February 2026 after $4,000 in purchases in the first three months. So again, 4k in purchases in three months gets you 30,000 points and a companion pass that's valid for about a year until the end of February of next year. So depending on how soon you earn it, about a year's worth of companion pass. So what do you think? Oh, it's great. If you're someone who flies Southwest a reasonable amount or wants to and wants to fly with a companion, it's possible to do amazing things with this deal. Especially what if you fly to Hawaii a lot, for example, with this deal, there's so much value that could potentially be had. Of course, if you don't fly much with a companion, then this isn't that good of a deal at all. Right. And so I think maybe you'll see, if you go to our best offers page, you'll see a link to an offer that's better for a single person and then a link that's better for somebody who's traveling with a companion of some sort.

And so you'll have both those different offers that are better for different people. I want to mention that typically we advise people that the best path for a companion pass is to consider opening a consumer card and a business card late in the calendar year. So typically, we talk about Companion Pass after October 1, because if you strategize it right, and you open a consumer card and a business card, and you wait until after your December statement is cut, and so you can earn all the points in January, you can end up with a Companion Pass for about two years. However, that strategy relies on opening two cards and opening a business card. If you're open to that, and I think you should consider it if the companion pass would be highly valuable to you,

then you want to wait on this and wait until sometime after October and go after that strategy. However, if you're someone who says, I'm never going to open a business card, and I want the companion pass now, I've got a bunch of travel already booked this year. It doesn't matter if your travel is already booked. Once you have the companion pass, you can add your companion, as long as there's a seat for sale on the flight. So maybe you've got a big year of travel plan this year. You never intend to open the business card. Well, then this offer would be a great one to consider because it's not going to get easier than this in terms of running a companion pass. Absolutely. All right. Let's talk terms of running a companion pass. Absolutely.

All right. Let's talk about mattress running the numbers next. What do we have up for mattress running the numbers this week? All right. So Frontier Airlines came out with a, what they call a platinum status fast track. And the idea is that if you earn 20,000 elite status points by the end of April of 2025, you get platinum status for the rest of the year. And platinum status is actually pretty nice if you fly Frontier because it has a lot of

good stuff that comes with it. You get a free carry-on and free check bag, not just for yourself, but for everybody on your booking. You get, for just yourself, you get a premium seat at the time of booking and you get sort of an upgrade, a free upgrade to upfront plus seat 12 hours prior to departure if available. And companions get preferred seats at booking and a premium seat at check-in if available.

You get priority boarding zone one. You get half off the discount den membership. You can gift silver status to somebody else. If you travel with a pet, you get a pet in-cabin fee waiver. So that's instead of paying $99 per direction of, of travel, uh, with your pet and starting in mid 2025, Frontier is going to start offering platinum members, uh, free companion flights. So that'll be like, theoretically like the Southwest companion ticket, I guess. Um, but, but with frontier.

And, um, so you'll get all of that, um, with platinum status. So now, now when we say theoretically, I think because we do, we still don't quite have details about how their companion ticket is going to work. Am I right? I don't think. Yeah, I think that's right. I certainly don't know what those details are if they're're out there. And so I say theoretically, because I do wonder, you know, is the companion going to have to pay all those miscellaneous fees and things that, you know, well, I guess not, because a lot of the fees are covered. Well, yes, correct. My question is how far in advance are they going to let you add your companion? How many times per year are you going to be able to do it? Because when they do their go wild pass, you can only book travel within like three or four days of departure or something, right?

So are they going to be like, oh yeah, you can add a companion as many times as you want, as long as there's a seat eight minutes before departure. You know, I don't know. We'll see. We'll see what that looks like. Really good points. All right. So let's talk about how do you get 20,000 status points before we can talk about whether this is worth doing? And there's basically two major ways to do it. One is to basically spend about $2,000 on Frontier flights. And I'm saying about because so you earn 10 status points per dollar, but once you have elite status, you earn more. And so

you're going to earn elite status along the way. So it would come out to less than $2,000 worth of Frontier flights to get to 20,000 status points, potentially. Or if you get the credit card, you can spend $20,000 on the credit card because it gives you a status point for every dollar spent. Or of course, you could do any combination of, you know, credit card spend plus flights. And I think if you were seriously considering all of this, probably a combination makes more sense because if you're not flying Frontier often, I'm not sure why you'd go out of your way to get platinum status. The card has a $99 annual fee and the current offer is to get 50,000 miles after $500 in purchases in 90 days. So that's not bad. It also will give you instant gold status for a while.

And it'll let you keep that for 12 months with $3,000 in purchases. So actually, if you're thinking about getting the credit card to complete this challenge, you might want to look at the gold status benefits and say, is that good enough? Because then you could just get the card, spend $3,000 and you're done. Right.

Not have to worry about this platinum status fast track at all. If those benefits are enough for you. Yeah. I mean, I think this is potentially really interesting. I don't live near an airport that's well served by Frontier. So it's been more than a decade since the last time I flew Frontier just because they never fit into my plans. But if you live at an airport where they have good service, just earlier today I was doing some flight searches from various airports around the U.S. And the airports that were well served by Frontier, my goodness, some of the cheap prices that you have access to if you have an airport that's well served by Frontier.

If you're able to combine that with a bunch of fee waivers, then you could be flying around really cheaply potentially. So I could see the appeal in the right place. Right, right. Totally. And I almost think that you almost have to, because frontier flights tend to be so cheap, you almost have to do the credit card approach, at least partially, because how are you going to get $2,000 worth of flights done or close to it before the end of April? I don't know. Anyway, yeah, I think this is a good deal. Something those who fly Frontier or want to a decent amount should consider pursuing,

especially if you can easily spend up to $20,000 on the card. That could be a good combination. Yep, very good. Next up up we have awards points and more we got several different things for awards points and more first up we have some transfer bonuses so some new transfer bonuses came out this week we've got a 30 transfer bonus from chase ultimate rewards to virgin atlantic flying club through february 17th so it's relatively short span on that one. That one's just going to be valid for a really short time, which makes me think that we'll maybe see a transfer bonus from another transferable currency.

I feel like sometimes they'll stack these up one after another. And so then the dates won't overlap. So if I were betting, if this were Vegas, I would probably bet on seeing another transfer bonus from somebody else soon. What but i think it'll be i mean when was the last amex to virgin atlantic bonus i don't know i'm not sure i'd have to look at the history because i don't remember when when they all were but i mean it'll be one of the other major transferable currencies i bet uh yeah i don't know i don't know. Maybe it'll be a, well, built.

Built already. Maybe it'll be Capital One. Maybe. Hopefully. We can all hope. All right. So that's the 30% bonus from Chase to Virgin Atlantic Flying Club again through February 17th. There's also, separately, a 15% transfer bonus from Amex Membership Rewards to Avianca LifeMiles.

That one's good through the end of the month until February 28th. So 15% bonus, that's typically what we see from Amex when we see a transfer bonus to Avianca LifeMiles. That one's good through the end of the month until February 28th. So 15% bonus, that's typically what we see from Amex when we see a transfer bonus to Avianca LifeMiles. And if you have an award to book, that can certainly be a good deal. Though keep in mind, Avianca does sell their miles relatively cheaply quite often. Still, I end up transferring to LifeMiles several times a year usually. So I would take advantage of that if i had an award to book yeah what else we have also if you're with avianca if you're in a cycle of you have miles and they're expiring i can't remember if it's once every year or 18 yeah 12 months 12 months 12 months yeah uh you

know getting on a cycle of of renewing them by transferring another thousand points over during a transfer bonus is a good time to do it. That's really smart. Yeah, that's a great point. My wife has some life miles and that's exactly what I should do. We should transfer a thousand Amex points to Avianca Life Miles. But yeah, I think that expiration policy is really important to highlight because most programs are like 18 or 24 months and Avianca Life Miles, 12 months of inactivity. So if you go 12 months without activity, you're going to lose all your miles. So be careful and take advantage of this to keep them alive.

Yeah. Okay. Next up. Yeah. You can earn a lot of Avios on hotel bookings and car rentals. Yeah. So this Avios portal is offering incredible rates, 20 points per dollar if you book hotels through their portal

or 15 points per dollar for renting a car. I believe this goes through their version of Expedia. So I wouldn't book, for example, if you're looking to earn Marriott points or lead status or whatever from a hotel chain, if you go through here, you're not going to earn hotel points. You're not going to earn hotel status for that stay. But 20 points per dollar is pretty darn good. Yeah, I mean, especially when you consider that airline miles are typically worth more than hotel points and in many cases, depending on how you use them, significantly more than hotel points potentially. So, you know, this is pretty good.

It might be worth giving up the hotel points you would have earned if the price is close anyway to what you would have paid. But I mentioned that because you do have to shop around and see is the best price available through their booking platform or not. So if it is so or if it's close, 20x pretty good. 15x on car rentals, similar deal. I rarely find an online travel agency has the best price for a car rental. But again, if it's close, 15 points per dollar. I mean, at a base level, if you value that at one cent each, it's like 15%, which is pretty good on car rentals. We see rates like that from Capital One Shopping sometimes for car rental sites, but not many other portals.

We see quite that high. And if you value miles more like two cents per point, it's like a 30% return. Now we're getting into territory where that's a really strong return to consider. You know, I might be tempted to run through that yeah yeah um i still probably won't i don't know it's i i think i think for me like i tend to like to book direct with for example national so that i'm sure i'm gonna get be able to go pick up on the emerald aisle i I guess if you book even from a prepaid Expedia type thing, you can still do that.

If you had your number, and I don't know how to add your number after the fact, so maybe not. I think it would work. Yeah, yeah. I feel the same way in general, but then I have situations coming up where I'm going to rent a car where I need a particularly large vehicle,

and so I have to book something specific anyway. I can't count on the Emerald Isle or there isn't a National in one of the places I'm going to anyway. So anyway, I think there's situations where it could make sense. Sure, absolutely. All right, so that's that.

Next up, using JetBluePoints to book Tap Air Portugal. Is there an update here? Yeah, so we mentioned this on a previous show that we now haveBlue points to book Tap Air Portugal. Is there an update here? Yeah, so we mentioned this on a previous show that we now have the ability to book Tap Air Portugal flights with JetBlue, but we got lots of comments from listeners and viewers and readers of our posts about this saying, does this really matter?

I can't find any flights through JetBlue. And so especially business class is really hard to find. So we made a how-to video showing how to find economy flights that are bookable with JetBlue points. So you could fly tap air Portugal economy with your JetBlue points. But also specifically, we showed how to use two different tools, one on a paid tool and second, a free version of a tool to find business class availability. It is out there, but it can be really challenging to find if you don't know the tricks. Yeah. So check out our YouTube channel for that how to video. Speaking of how to do

different things, we have a number of posts out about how to use some popular tools that's pretty relevant to that and also other situations. And so we've refreshed some of those posts just lately, right? Yeah. I'm working my way through all of the flight award search tools to either refresh our posts about them or write posts if we didn't have like a singular post talking about that tool. And ultimately, my goal is I have a post called best award search tools, I think is what it's called. And it, you know, it compares all of these different tools to each other. So my ultimate goal here in a week or two is to have that completely refreshed and republished. But I'm working my way down.

So so far I've released a new post about PointMe, which was one of the first tools to offer like a-friendly way of searching across multiple programs for flight awards. And my conclusion, even though it's changed a bit over the years, my conclusion is the same as it's been for a long time, which is it's really good for beginners because it gives step-by-step instructions for how to book. But I wouldn't recommend it really for anyone else because there are better options for, for everybody else. Rome.travel is another one that, that, um, used to be, uh, amazing because it was sort of the first to come out after Point Me that, um, had a free version and it had a date range and, um, and it was fast. It had all these things that PointMe didn't have

and the free version had all of that. That's still true, but some other tools have eclipsed it. Rome has not been idle, though. They've made some really good advancements since then. I still don't see them as quite as good as PointEA and AwardTool, but they're getting close. And they do have one key feature, which is really, really specific.

If you have Singapore Chris Flyer miles and you want to fly Singapore First Class, this is the only tool I know of that's capable of searching for Singapore First class. Now that said, there's hardly ever any times where Singapore releases awards on their Singapore suites first class. So if that's your goal to fly Singapore suites, it might not help because awards might not just might not be available, but at least you could set alerts and be alerted if and when that ever happens. Or if you're good flying Singapore's regular first class, which is still a phenomenal

product, you could use it to find that. Finally, I updated a post about PointsPath. That's the plugin that lets you use Google Flights and also see right in your search results the point prices for the same flights. And Points Path now has a paid version which adds additional coverage for additional foreign airline programs. It also adds a calendar view of your points amounts, like how much the flight would cost across a whole week of time at once. So it has some nice additions to it. That's a tool that I love even if you like other tools, like for various reasons, PointsPath is so good because if you like using Google Flights, it just makes Google Flights better. Yeah, yeah. I use it all the time now. And in fact, even in just prepping some examples for today's show, I was using it because I could recognize I'm going back to the mailbag

segment with Will today. I could recognize when I saw, for example, United flight that was available for 15,000 miles. I know that usually means that's probably a safer award with United that I'm probably going to be able to find via other Star Alliance airlines because I'm familiar with the award chart and with the way the alliances work, which is exactly what you're getting, Will, by not having the search tools. And then Points Path becomes a powerful add-on for me because even though it doesn't show the price in Turkish miles and Smiles miles, for instance, I could recognize that that flight is probably going to be available via Turkish and go there and search next. So yeah, I find that particularly useful to me these days. And I'm also I want to add here, I'm working on

checking out a couple of other new tools that we haven't written about yet to and Greg, maybe as well. I'm looking at some hotel tools now. And so it's interesting looking at the progression of the tools, because I feel like in the beginning, the very beginning tools for this type of thing were like maybe what we would call uber nerdy. And they were like very specific. They did specific jobs and they looked like a tool that somebody who was advanced in creating the stuff, but not necessarily advanced in the graphic design was putting together. And I'm talking in the beginning of search tools in general, not about a specific one here. As time has gone on, these things have gotten like slicker and slicker. And so I feel like some of them are looking pretty cool and they're showing some different options and they keep adding things on. So it's an exciting time from a consumer's perspective. It's a little hard to know which one is the right one for you, I think. But hopefully, as we continue to cover them, that helps. Yeah.

Now, I have to say something about Will. Will did not say he didn't use tools. He said he didn't use a paid version of any tool. So he very well may have been using Points Path, a free version of points. Yeah. Or a word tool or Rome or whatever. We don't know. True, true, true.

Yeah, very good. Good point. I hope so. I hope so. All right, let's see. Speaking of refreshing things, we refreshed the reasonable redemption value for Marriott points this week. And, you know, as you might expect, the value of Marriott points went up a little bit. As you might expect.

A little bit of sarcasm there, maybe. A little bit of sarcasm. for Marriott. And we have a fixed approach for doing that that is more looking for, it's not looking for the tail end, like the highest, most expensive properties or the lowest and cheapest ones. It's just, it's trying to find the sort of most likely to book hotels in various cities around the United States at different periods of time. And the idea is to identify basically what's the average value that you're likely to get with Marriott points if you're not like extremely like saving them for the best of best possible value. And yeah, the value actually went up a tiny bit. So our previous RRV, reasonable redemption value, was 0.7, and it went up to 0.76. So

not enough to say, oh, wow, Marriott points are worth a lot more now. It's just a little bit, and that could just be just by chance that the hotels we looked at at this time were different, or it could be a slight bump up in the value. But anyway, that's good for anyone who has Marriott points and may have been disappointed to hear about the devaluation. Your points have not become worthless or worthless, except for certain high-end properties. Yeah, you know, and I think it's important to emphasize that this isn't like a finger in the wind kind of evaluation where we're picking something out in order to try to make the points look attractive. We're following, we can't call it a scientific process, but something that's

at least consistent over the years in terms of a methodology for looking at the points and with some thought behind it, not just like picking a number out of the sky and not looking for points to go up or down, just looking for what happened, observing what happened. And I think the additional piece to mention here is, it's not necessarily that redemption's got better. A bump from 0.7 to 0.76 might be heavily influenced by the fact that prices have gone up. I mean, prices have risen across the board on everything, you know, from eggs to milk to hotels. And so if the same hotel became a little bit more expensive but didn't change in points price,

well, then, yeah, your points became worth a little bit more as compared to the cash rate of the hotel. But I think the point here is that you can still get decent value out of Marriott points for most average normal everyday uses. All right, that's maybe not even most from average everyday uses. Let's put it that way. You wrote this week about something that drew a lot of interest from around the world. And that was that was what? Yeah. So if you want to travel to the United Kingdom these days from the United States and a number of other countries, you now need a thing that's not a visa, but like a visa called the ETA, the electronic travel authorization. And so I just wrote up my experience in applying for it. It cost me just under $13 to apply. It's no big deal. It's good for two years.

And the basic process is you download an app. They have an app for this purpose. You scan the chip in your passport if you have one and take a picture, selfie of yourself and all that goes in. And if it all works right away, you can be done in like two minutes and get your authorization. For me, I got snagged because where the app thinks the chip is in US passports is not where it in fact is. So I discovered that the chip is actually inside the back cover of the passport. And that was key to making the whole process work smoothly. Once I knew that, super easy to get through.

I have a question about that. Because I didn't look this up and you did. So hopefully you know the answer. Is that true with the newer passports also? Or is there a difference between it? Because I don't know which passport you have. I don't know when you renewed yours. Like my passport still has the picture page is like a paper page.

But the newer passports in our family, those of us who have renewed more recently, the picture page is like a hard, solid piece of plastic. So I had imagined that maybe the chip moved into that hard, solid piece of plastic. I don't know. Yeah, I don't have the answer to that. Okay. Okay. Wasn't sure. So look around.

It doesn't work where it tells you. Check around. Exactly. Try different spots. And you could always enter your password information manually as well. It just might take a little bit longer for them to process it. For me, I got the approval in seconds maybe if i put it in manually it might have taken uh you know longer as much as a day or two as possible there you go okay

that brings us to this week's main event main event time capital one get more for your double miles. So Capital One. So you know, the commercials where Jennifer Gardner is so happy that she gets double miles on all her purchases. Well, it used to be that those commercials really made me mad. And they made me mad because Capital One miles weren't really miles at all. They were just pennies that you could only use to reimburse travel. And so the way Capital One miles used to work exclusively was you use your credit card to pay for travel and then you erase that travel using your earned Capital One miles. And you erase them at the rate of one penny per mile. So if you spent a dollar on travel, that would be 100 miles to erase that dollar of travel. If you spent $1,000 on travel, you'd need 100,000 miles to erase that travel.

So that's how it used to work. Then finally, several years ago, Capital One made their miles transferable to real miles. So transferable to airline miles and hotel points. And suddenly it became possible to get more value, more than that one cent per point value from your Capital One miles. Yeah. So you have a variety of different ways to do that by transferring to airline and hotel partners. Sometimes they have transfer bonuses. That's what we talked about.

Transfer bonuses earlier in this show. Sometimes Capital One offers those and then you can get even more than one mile per dollar when you're transferring during a transfer bonus. But it's important to know what you're doing because it's also possible to get far less than one cent per point in value if you're not careful. So there's a couple of keys here. First trick is finding available awards because whereas the purchase eraser that Greg explained you could use on any flight because you could book any flight with cash and erase the

purchase with the miles. If you're going to transfer to a partner, you have to find one that's available as an award. And then you also have to make sure that your points are worth significantly more than one cent each, because if you're getting less than one cent each, you may as well just purchase the flight and erased it with the miles at one cent per Capital One mile rather than transferring them. So there is a little bit of finesse to this. And we'll talk about some examples today where you could get far more value by transferring to a partner rather than using the old classic Capital One purchase eraser. Yeah, yeah. So let's just jump into some examples. We kind of clicked around this morning before our show to pull out some real world examples of how

you could do better than that one cent per mile with your Capital One miles. So first one I looked up is, let's say you want to fly Delta from Atlanta to NASA Bahamas. For a date I looked at, the one-way cash rate was $222 for basic economy or $267 for main cabin economy. So the basic economy, $222, that would cost you 22,200 Capital One miles if you just use the purchase eraser. Or if you bought main cabin economy,

it would cost you 26,700 Capital One miles. But on that same day, that same flight, you could transfer your Capital One miles to Virgin Atlantic. And actually, Virgin Red and Virgin Atlantic share a rewards program. So I think through Capital One, maybe it looks like Virgin Red. I can't remember. But anyway, you transfer to Virgin. And that flight is available for 11,000 Virgin Atlantic miles because Virgin Atlantic partners with Delta. 11,000 Virgin Atlantic miles and $5.60 in cash. And that's for your main cabin flight, not basic economy.

So to book that would cost only 11,560 Capital One miles because you've transferred 11,000 to Virgin and you use a purchase register for the $5.60. So 11,560, remember that was compared to 22,000 Capital One miles for basic economy or almost 27,000 miles for regular economy. So that's a great deal. Huge savings there, huge savings. I looked up another example on United flying from Chicago to Savannah, Georgia. And so the date that I picked out, it was $199 in basic economy on United or $234 in full economy if you didn't want to fly basic economy. So again, if you use the Capital One Purchase Eraser and you just paid cash with your credit card and erase the purchase with miles, it would cost you 19,900 Capital One purchase eraser and you just paid cash with your credit card and erase the purchase with miles, it would cost you $19,900 Capital One miles for the basic economy flight or $23,400 for the full economy class fare.

But you've got a number of options because Capital One partners with a number of Star Alliance airlines, so you can book that same United flight using miles from different programs. For instance, you could transfer to Air Canada Aeroplan and it would cost you 10,000 miles and $33.49. So if you were to just erase the taxes with your Capital One miles, we're talking about 13,349 Capital One miles. So again, significantly less than the 19.9 or 23.4 that we were talking about a minute ago. But better yet, you could transfer to Avianca LifeMiles, another Capital One partner, and that same Chicago to Savannah flight would cost you 7,500 miles and $15.60. So again, if you just erase the purchase of the taxes with your Capital One miles, you're talking 9,060 Capital One miles, just over 9,000 Capital One miles, which is less than half of what you would have paid if you had booked with a purchase eraser to begin with. And you can join Life Miles

Plus and pay even fewer miles yet. So deal can get even better with a $20 a month subscription to Life Miles Plus. Yeah, that's a great deal. And now that wasn't the only United flight you looked at, right? No, yeah, I looked at one also from Newark to London in business class on United. And so the cash price for the particular date that I looked at, again, Newark to London in business class, United Polaris was $2,200 one way. So if you use Capital One Miles to erase that purchase, it would have been 220,000 Capital One miles. And I know people have done that. So that's a lot of miles for the one-way business flight. Now, obviously, it's paid fare in that case, but you could save a lot of miles by transferring to Air Canada

Aeroplan because they would charge you 60,000 miles and $56.53. So we're looking at a total of 65,630 Capital One miles instead of 220,000 Capital One miles. That's a huge, huge savings. Huge savings. But better yet, you could transfer to Avianca Life Miles and pay 45,000 miles plus tax. So if you erase the taxes with the Capital One Purchase Eraser, you're talking a total of 50,350 capital one miles. If you transferred Avianca Life miles and book that instead of 220,000, that's less than a quarter of the number of miles you'd need with the purchase eraser. Wow. Yeah, that's, that's amazing. I love that. I love that example. And I even like better in some ways, the next example that you have about JetBlue. Yeah. So New York to St. Martin is the example route that I picked out here.

And so I looked at Mint class in this one. If you wanted to fly up front in their Mint class, they fly that from New York JFK to St. Martin. And so the cash price on the data I looked at was $583 one way for JetBlue Mint New York to St. Martin. So if you used your Capital One miles to just erase that purchase, then we'd be talking 58,300 Capital One miles. So almost 60,000 Capital One miles. You could instead transfer to JetBlue, TrueBlue, and book that through JetBlue, and it would be 47,900 miles and I think $5.60 in tax. So about 49,000 Capital One miles. So you'd save a bit, you know, not quite 10,000 miles, but close to 10,000 miles by transferring to JetBlue. But better yet, you could transfer to Qatar Avios, because Qatar Avios will let you book the same flight for 26,000 Avios and $10.20 one way. So

that's a total of about 27,000 Capital One miles, which again is less than half in this case, the number of points you would need or the number of Capital One miles you would need for the purchase eraser. So you're much better off transferring to than the united exam than the united to london example where you know you saved you paid about a quarter of what um the purchase eraser would cost you um but what i like here is is it shows that you know you want to fly jet blue that you could actually transfer it to jet blue and sort of do the thing that would sort of make the most sense to most people which is i want to flyBlue, so let me transfer my miles to JetBlue and book that way. That still shows some savings. But if you get really advanced and you know about like these partnerships,

like the ability to book JetBlue with Qatar Avios, then you could save even more. And either way, you're getting some savings over just straight up doing it the Jennifer Garner way. Very good. You have a couple of examples, a couple more examples, right, of different ways to do this? Yeah. So Virgin Atlantic, let's say you want to fly Las Vegas to London in economy. I looked at That one-way cash rate on a certain date was $478. So that would be just under 48,000 capital one miles as a purchase eraser. But you could transfer to Virgin. Now, this is another example where it kind of just makes logical sense that if you want to fly Virgin, maybe transfer the miles to virgin and virgin for the day i was looking at was available for this economy flight for only 9 000 virgin miles plus 79 so that's a total like

if you uh pay the taxes with and use your purchase eraser total of just under 17 000 capital one miles versus remember about 48 000 so. So huge, huge savings there. Yeah. And, you know, remember all these examples we're giving are you are a per passenger example and whether or not there was multiple passenger availability, I don't know, but if you don't travel alone and you've got to remember to multiply these savings. So in that case, you're saving a 33,000 ish miles or 31,000 miles per passenger. So, I mean, if you're traveling with a family of four, you're talking about 120,000 miles saved by learning about the transfer partners. That's pretty significant. Right, right. Now, another one, let's talk

about lodging. So, I looked at a Vacasa vacation rental in Hawaii, in Kauai. There was a condo available for six nights, a two-bedroom condo, for $2,800 and change. So that would be, if you just paid for it in cash and used your purchase eraser, that would be slightly over 280,000, capital one miles, 280,000. But if you know that Wyndham has a partnership with Vacasa, and in this case, because the pricing works out right, it would have cost 30,000 points per night for this two bedroom for six nights, that's 180,000 points. So you'd now be spending 180,000 points instead of 280,000. So a savings of about 100,000. Yeah. That's a big savings for a vacation rental that could be really convenient for a lot of people, I think, in a place like Kauai to save $100,000. I mean, that's lots of great deals here if you hunt around. All right.

So those are some of the different ways you could transfer to partners and get tons of value. And those are just some examples. Let's emphasize that there's tons of other sweet spots that we didn't talk about at all. We just specifically wanted to look up some situations. Excuse me. We just specifically wanted to look up some situations where we took a look at cash prices, we took a look at award availability to show you how much you can save with some random examples that we put together in 30 or 40 minutes before this, before we recorded this show. So there's lots of other ways out there to save.

But as another thing entirely, that might be interesting to you is Capital One also offers some cardholder exclusives from time to time. So they offer some different experiences that can be had with miles. Now, it's a little confusing, because they offer some stuff that's at a really poor value of about eight tenths of a cent per point. But they have some exclusive things that are way more valuable. And so major, for instance, here that we've talked about a lot over the last couple of years is they have a partnership with Major League Baseball, where they end up releasing four tickets to every game that are cardholder exclusive tickets that are close to the field in most stadiums. It varies a little bit stadium to stadium,

but in most stadiums, there's just a few rows from the field, really good seats, and they're 5,000 miles each way or $40 in cash back rewards if you've got a cash back card. So 5,000 miles each. And these are, like I said, pretty good seats. I've gone to see the Yankees and the Mets in New York, and the seats that I've had at the games that I went to were selling on resale markets like StubHub for like $200 a seat or more in those cases. And Capital One is charging 5,000 miles per seat in those two sections. And again, I want to emphasize they'll sell you tickets anywhere in the stadium at 0.8 cents per point that are not a good value or a good use of your points and miles. But in the cardholder exclusive seats, and there's only four of them for every game, so they go pretty quickly.

But you could be looking at like 4 cents per point paying five thousand points for like a two hundred dollar ticket potentially you do have to keep your eye out on this and keep your eye on frequent miler because we post as soon as we find out that they're available which is either because we notice it or a reader notices it and lets us know they typically release two months of games at a time since the season starts you know. I expect that soon they will release the first couple of months. Probably the March, April, May games will get released sometime soon after this publishes. And then we post whenever we see them become available again. All right. So those are a whole bunch of great ways to use Capital One Miles.

But what if you weren't into Jennifer Garner and you went for a Capital One cashback card instead? And so now you're sitting on all this, these cashback rewards. Are you just stuck getting face value for those rewards? No, you're not. So the interesting thing about Capital One is they have a feature that they don't advertise or explain anywhere, but that you can find yourself in your online account if you click around. So if you have a bunch of Capital One cash back, let's start base level here. If you just get one of the cards that earns miles, so you have a cash back card and a miles card, you can actually convert your cash back to Capital One miles at a value of one cent is one mile. So if you have one

penny in cash back, you can gonna have one capital one mile. You just move it over. You move the rewards from your cash back card to your miles card. So let's say you've got a saver card right now that earns 3% back on groceries. And so you've been doing that. So you got a bunch of cash back there.

If you get a venture card or even a venture one card that has no annual fee, then you'll be able to move that cash back to the venture card or or Venture One card, and they become Capital One Miles that you can then transfer on to all of their transfer partners. So you could make your own miles transferable that way. Or if you have a family member, friend, somebody else that has a Capital One Miles card, you can call and move the cash back to miles on their card. If it's between your own two cards, you can do it online yourself. It's just, there's a button that says move rewards

in your online account. And we'll link to a post about how to do that. So if it's your own two cards, it's really easy self-service, do it yourself. If it's somebody else's card, you're going to have to call in order to do it, but it's doable that way too. Yeah, that's great. So, you know, for those of you that were big fans of Samuel L. Jackson and took his word for it about which card to get, you can still get outsized value by taking a little advice from Jennifer and making sure that you or someone in your family has a Miles card as well.

That's right. That's right. You can put them together. All right. I think that wraps us up for Capital One Miles. There's lots of other ways to get great value too, but I've been excited these last few years. I've been doing great with my Capital One Miles.

So those are some exciting potential uses of them. Let's talk about this week's question of the week next. So this week's question of the week kind of goes back to the award tools. I thought this was a good one for you, Greg. I'm hoping you can answer it because I can't, but it seems like it's right up your alley. So Diana from Chicago writes in and says, I know there are many flight reward search tools out there. You've done an amazing or done amazing podcasts about them, but I'm feeling overwhelmed. I know I need help finding flights from the UK to Chicago in July and from Chicago to Sydney in August. What tool is best for setting up these specific parameters? I've tried some tools and I'm not

getting much of anywhere. And so the subject line of the email is which flight reward search tool is best if I need specific dates and locations. We've talked a lot about the breadth of some tools in searching a variety of different city pairs or searching throughout the year. But if Diana knows exactly when she wants to go or not exactly, but months she gave us here, July, UK to Chicago, August, Chicago to Sydney, which tools should she be paying for? Which tools should she be using? Yeah. So, you know, when things are really specific like that, some free versions of tools can actually do what you want. So I would sign up for both the free version of points. Yeah. And the free version of award tool. And I would set up alerts in both of those each, each one, even the free version allows

a few, few alerts. So set up alerts and just see what comes back in both those cases. And you don't even need a paid version. Where you'd need a paid version is if you need a broader range of dates or you need more alerts than are available through the free version. And I've – I don't know. This is really tough to say. I slightly, PointyS seems a little bit more reliable to me as far as like more consistently bringing back results. But it's not true enough to, there are times where a Word tool brings back things that PointyS didn't.

So I have a really hard time picking just a single one and saying, just use that one. Okay. Yeah, I think that's really good advice. Now you mentioned number of parameters and things. And one thing that stuck out to me here was you said UK to Chicago. And I was like, oh, so I don't know if you're necessarily flying from London or if you're willing to position other places in the UK to fly from other places. So maybe you'll need a paid tool. If you want to search for multiple airports and set alerts for multiple airports. And that's where that comes in with Greg is saying in terms of it depends on how complex you want to get. But the other thing that I would tell you, it's like you need to get from Chicago to Sydney in August. So you can set up the alerts with the

free tools and have a couple of alerts, specifically Chicago to Sydney. But Australia is a really tough place to get to on points and miles. And so if you're particularly specific in dates and route, it's going to probably be tough. I mean, maybe you'll get lucky, but maybe you won't. And so what I would be thinking about if you're going to pay for one of those tools so that you have more alerts and more search parameters you can enter is not only looking from Chicago. I'd be looking from Chicago. I'd say, you know what, if I have to pay 200 bucks to get to San Francisco or Los Angeles or whatever in order to find an award, then I would be adding some other cities. Now, maybe you don't want to search from

New York or Washington, D.C. because you don't want to fly east to fly west. That's fine. But I would be setting up some alerts from other cities, not only Chicago, because that's going to be a tough need to fill if you have a very specific route like that, particularly because Australia and New Zealand can be quite difficult to get to. And I might consider, if you can't find availability on that, also becoming broader on the other end and saying, okay, well, if I fly into Melbourne, I can get a pretty cheap Virgin Australia flight from Melbourne to Sydney. And so maybe I can find Chicago to Melbourne and still get to Sydney pretty easily. It's not a terribly long flight. Those are absolutely great recommendations.

And finally, another thing, if you have a lot of miles, what a friend of mine did was she booked flight to Australia for the date she wanted using something like 200,000 United miles per person and then set up alerts. And sure enough, alerts came in where she was able to change to flights that cost like a hundred thousand per person business class. And so, um, that's another option because, um, uh, the, the, if you're flying in the summertime, which you are to Australia, that, that tends to actually be not that bad compared to trying to travel in our winter, their,. So I think the chance of something showing up as the dates get closer is actually pretty high. And so it's worth considering a strategy like that as well. Smart, very smart. All right, if you enjoyed this stuff

and you'd like to get more of all of it in your inbox each day or each week, you wanna go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. You can follow us on all the various social media, join our Frequent M insiders, Facebook group. So you can ask questions just like this one. Anytime you want.

If you have a piece of feedback that you'd like to be considered for a future episode or a question you'd like to be considered for a question of the week, you can send that to send it to mailbag at frequent miler.com. Bye everybody.