Frequent Miler on the Air - Capital One steps up to bat | Ep95 | 4-25-21

Episode Date: April 24, 2021

00:48 Giant Mailbag: The IHG Rewards cards are great in the right circumstances https://frequentmiler.com/ihg-sweet-spot-dynamic-pricing-4th-night-free/ 5:30 What crazy thing......did Southwest do this week? https://frequentmiler.com/southwest-rapid-rewards-subscription/ 10:25 Mattress Running the Numbers: Radisson splits. Is it that bad and are we going to do? https://frequentmiler.com/bad-news-radisson-devaluation-announced-and-it-stinks/ https://frequentmiler.com/a-second-look-at-radisson-did-it-actually-get-much-better/ 20:22 Main Event: Capital One steps up to bat https://frequentmiler.com/capital-one-ups-their-game-adds-turkish-and-some-11-partners-airport-lounges/ https://frequentmiler.com/capital-one-miles-no-longer-make-me-mad-on-my-mind/ https://frequentmiler.com/transferable-points-programs-compared/ https://frequentmiler.com/huge-if-true-convert-capital-one-cash-back-to-miles-by-moving-rewards/ https://frequentmiler.com/vacasa-success-entire-cabin-booked-for-15k-wyndham-points-per-night-transferred-from-capital-one/ 52:02 Post Roast 1:00:25 Question of the Week: Why did my post get declined in Frequent Miler Insiders? Don't forget to like, subscribe, and ding the notification bell! To join our email list, go to: https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/. Music credit: Annie Yoder

frequent miler on the air starts now this week's main event capital one steps up to the plate does amex and chase have to watch out swinging for the fences here capital we are going to talk we're going to talk about what would it take for capital one to do more than they've already done to get us to say, you know what? We could live without Amex or Chase. Maybe you're being greedy, Craig. We want more out of Capital One. It's been a big week.

Well, think of it this way. This would have been a ridiculous topic of conversation last week. But now they've come far enough that we could actually say it with a straight face. Right. And so I think that's pretty exciting. We'll get into that after a few of our regular segments, including Giant Mailbag. All right.

And I finally got ink for my printer, so we actually have Giant Mail for the Giant Mailbag. Very good. By Giant Mail, I mean giant font, so I can actually read it with my old eyes. My elderly old eyes. Your elderly eyes, yeah. About to hop in with that.

You beat me to it. Sorry. Sorry about that. This is also giant mail in that it's one of the longer pieces of feedback I've read on here. But I think this one's fun because it demonstrates how we can't give one answer to what's best for everybody. You'll see what I mean in a minute. This is an email from a loyal fan from Texas. And hopefully I didn't just give away who that was. All right. Loyal fan from Texas says, I just want to say thank you for helping me maximize my spend to earn cash back in points.

This year, I was able to apply the knowledge I learned through reading your blog to earn 3% cash back with Discover It Miles card during my first year. Very good. And purchase IHG points on sale at 100% bonus. So just as an aside, so what he's talking about there is when IHG sells the points on sale like that, you get them for half cent each. And so by using your Discover at Miles 3% cash back, that's like getting six points per dollar for all that first year spent, which is pretty good. He says, I would not have thought of this strategy on my own. I just realized I'm assuming this is a he, but I don't know that. But let's roll with

that for now. Sounds good. I have both the old IHG card, which gives a 10% return on points, and the Premier IHG card, which gives the fourth night free. We have a four-month road trip plan starting this summer, and we'll be staying in quite a few IHG hotels using the fourth night free benefit. Although we normally stay in Hyatt and MarHG hotels using the fourth night free benefit. Although we normally stay in Hyatt and Marriott hotels, I've found for this trip IHG to be available in more areas we'll be visiting than the other changes. I'm shocked to say this, but right now the IHG cards are in the top five of the credit cards I have. I do not use them to earn points. I have them for their benefits, which provide great value. I've learned so much from you all and enjoy your blog, podcast, and YouTube videos. Thank you for

all you do. So what you're trying to say is I should stop slamming the IHG cards. Stop slamming the IHG cards, right? Because they work for people who are going to be able to leverage the benefits. That's awesome. And if you're going to take a four-month road trip, I definitely could see where IHG points would come in handy, especially in the United States. A lot of places, when you're out there on the highway in the middle of nowhere, it may very well be the only option. Yeah. And for someone who's flexible with their dates, you know, Steven Pepper wrote a great

post and refreshed it recently about using that fourth night free benefit. And it just it goes especially well with with the fact that IHG points now for their hotels are all over the map. Like you'll see twenty two thousand points one day so that that 60,000 point stay is on the fourth night of your stay and therefore free because you happen to have that credit card and then if you're lucky enough to also have gotten the game a few years ago and gotten that other IHG card that had 10% back on rewards you're not only getting fortnight free but an additional 10% back on your on your your point redemptions. And so obviously you can get fantastic value when totally doing that. Yeah. Yeah. And really at the end of

the day, if you're staying at a property like Holiday Inn Express or Hyatt Place or Hilton Garden Inn, probably, or Hampton Inn maybe is a better comparison point or the Marriott, Spring Hill Suites or whatever. It's all the same, right? I mean, it's basically all those properties. They kind of have the same stuff. They get free breakfast for everybody. They got a bed, they got a, you know, clean place to sleep and shower and everything else. So again, brand loyalty only makes sense to a certain extent. If you're going to stay at the limited service properties on an extended trip

like that, or the way Steven Pepper travels, then I think the IHG cards absolutely would make sense. I mean, that's totally, that's a great point, how you could save tons and tons of points with that fourth night free and especially stacking. I mean, that's a, that's, that's well done. And, and kudos to you for saving up that 3% on the discovery at miles and then leveraging it by using your money to buy the IHG points that are going to help you save on your stays. So nicely done. Good job. Yeah, absolutely. All right.

So that brings us to what crazy thing did Southwest do? Southwest is still getting crazy. Southwest is still getting crazy. They were with us last week and we said, they were, remind us what crazy thing they did last week. I can't even remember. It was so. That means so crazy. And remind us what crazy thing they did last week. I can't even remember. It was so crazy. Well, it's relevant.

They devalued their points. They devalued their points overnight with no notice, whereas in the past they had given months of notice, and then they kind of stopped that. And now, once again, they devalued their points in the middle of a pandemic this time, zero notice. And that leads us into this week's crazy thing. This week's crazy thing is following the

devaluation of their points they rolled out to great fanfare a subscription plan for buying their points and and by committing to buy a whole heck of a lot of points up front uh on the subscription, you could buy points for as little as 1.8 cents per point. So that'll, and so if you want to, and just for those listening, in case you don't know, the value of points when you redeem for awards is usually something less than 1.5 cents per point. And it depends on what the taxes are as compared to the overall price of the flight as to what the value works out to. But let's just, for the sake of argument, say it's 1.4 usually. So you're going to pay 1.8 cents for 1.4 cents, right? For 1.4 cents value. Yeah. I mean, you can also get the frequent miler subscription at the same, you know, in fact, I'll give you 1.5

cents for 1.8 cents. How's that? Everybody want to sign up and start buying a penny and a half from me at a time all day long guys. Anytime you want it. Yeah. Yeah. We should, we should start something like that, right? Subscription plan to frequent miler dollars. So if you, if you spend, if you spend a thousand dollars a year on frequent miler dollars, we'll send you $500 each year. There you go. That's all it takes guys. That's all it takes. What were you thinking with this? Like who's going to do this? People who don't understand it. The funny thing is we got an email from their one of their pr people who didn't like my posts saying like there's no reason to ever do this and uh the reason you should do this is so you can during these times continue to accrue

points at a steady rate so So in case you're worrying that you weren't flying enough to accrue points at a steady rate, you could travel from home by spending money without actually going anywhere. Right. And earn those points. If you'd like to make a donation,

like make it to an organization or something, get yourself a tax write-off. That's a good point. Tell somebody who needs the help. There's no need to donate it to Southwest organization or something. Get yourself a tax write-off. That's a good point. Help somebody who needs the help. There's no need to donate it to Southwest Airlines. This is ridiculous. Yeah. And just to be clear, like when other airlines like Alaska or American or, you know, whatever, have sales on miles.

And even if it costs more than 1.8 cents, sometimes it does make sense to buy those because it's possible to get far outsized value. Usually it's when doing something like booking an international business or first class award. Southwest doesn't have that. Their award value is based on the price of the ticket. So you can't get far outsized value. You can get slightly outsized value by buying really cheap fares that are mostly taxed, you know, mostly taxes. But good luck, you know, spending the 80,000 miles a year you're buying with this program on these really cheap little things where you're getting maybe 1.9 cents. And that's really rare. And the ridiculousness here is, you know, like you might you might sit there and for at least a half a second, there may have been something in your brain that said, oh, but, you know, if you're just a few thousand miles short of a of an award ticket and you want to be able to book the award ticket, you can't pay,000 points for the award you want or whatever, which is true, but there's no need to subscribe to buy that again. And again, just buy it one time, you know, overpay once for the miles that you need to top off. If you really need that, there's no need to

sign up to get ripped off month after month. Right. Right. Or better yet have, have a chase ultimate rewards card. Then you could transfer a few thousand miles to Southwest and you're done. For sure. For sure. Southwest boo, boo on you. You know, thanks for giving us more crazy things to talk about on this, on this segment. True. Keep up the good work Southwest. Right. All right. So then what that, that, well, I was going to say what crazy mattress runner something. I don't know what I was going to say, but that brings us to mattress running the numbers. So this week, who do we have for mattress running, Greg? Yeah, we don't have a real mattress running topic.

What we're going to talk about instead is Radisson. Radisson has come out with new award chart that's going to kick in in June, I think it is. June, yeah. And so it means some hotels go up in price, some hotels go down in price. It's kind of all over the map. And so we're going to discuss that. Is it a good idea? You can lock in current rates, I think,

by booking your awards days now. And as you wrote, they're doing us a great favor of acting just like every other program anywhere in letting you get the price that you booked. but aside from that joke, is it a good idea to do it? Because some of the, some of those ultra lux properties are going to be going up in price. Yeah. Well, I'll, I'll, did somebody just say ultra lux when talking about a Radisson property? Slow down, Craig, like the country in, in Sweden, it's going up to 75,000 points per night is not ultra lux. I meant that one. Okay.

Ultra lux property somewhere. Yeah. The one in the Maldives, which isn't even actually, it doesn't even show up in the, uh, in the category changes. So I saw you wrote that. That scares me. It makes me think it's, it's off the charts, like literally off the charts. It does kind of seem like that may be the case. I searched a whole bunch of individual dates. I searched longer stays in individual dates for like towards the end of the schedule next year. And I couldn't find any dates with availability. So I'm wondering what's going to

happen with that too. Like Marriott has that one property in the Seychelles. I think it is. That's also literally off the charts where they just price it however they want. I'm afraid that might happen here too. So if you want that one and if you can find availability, I think it's a no brainer to try to book it now. If, you know, it can line up with when you could go, right? Right, right. And that place is available in May and June of this year on some days, but I couldn't find availability for next year, at least for any of the dates that I tried. But at any rate, there are places in the United States also that are going to go up. Now,

I wrote a post that was pretty negative initially. And then I wrote a second post that was like, maybe it's not so bad in some ways. And it really kind of depends on where you sit on the fence in terms of what you want to redeem for. But if you want to lock in some properties now, there are a lot of properties that are going up pretty significantly. I mean, some properties will double. Some properties are going up 60%, 68%, 67%, something like that. So large, relatively large numbers of points. And so you want to kind of look for some of those gems now, if you can, before they increase. I know that actually there was a reader who mentioned one in particular somewhere in Montana.

And if you go to the post and you look through the comments, you'll find that, that they said there's one there that apparently the story is the owner didn't design it the way that Country Inn and Suites wants them all designed, decided to design it more individually. I looked at pictures online and it does look kind of neat. The lobby looks like a lodge you might anticipate staying in if you were going to Montana. And the rooms, they look like Country Inn and Suites rooms, but with a little bit more wood and, you know, a little bit nicer than a country and in suites. So I was like, oh, that's kind of interesting. Maybe I'll make a speculative booking for sometime next year because I could do that now and lock in the current rate before it goes up.

I think that one in particular is going from 44,000 points a night to either 60 or 75. I can't remember for sure, but going up quite a bit. So, you know, it's one of those things that's like, I catch 22, is it worth booking them now? But I guess you got nothing to lose because as long as you pay attention to the cancellation policy, you should be able to cancel. My one bit of nervousness is what happens

if you book something that's in the other program. And what I mean by that is the news lately out of Radisson has been, they are splitting the program. So if you've missed that, they're splitting into Radisson Americas, which is going to be North, South America, Caribbean and Radisson hotels, which means Radisson rest of the world, Europe, Africa, Asia, Pacific, whatever. All of that stuff is the rest of the world. Which is another flashback to one of our What Crazy Thing episodes, I believe. It is. It is. Making a recurrence here, Radisson. You enjoy making your appearances. So they're splitting up. And do you want to book

something in Europe, for instance, right now? And maybe what happens if you cancel that later? Do your points go into the Radisson Rest of the World program because the hotel was in Europe? Or do they go back to your Radisson Americas account because you booked it out of your Americas account? Or do they just disappear because you don't have an account in Radisson rest of the world yet and so there's no place for them to go? I don't know. What do you think? I think they'll be quarantined

for 14 days before they come back. At least. 14 days. Who knows? So yeah, I mean, do you have your... I don't have any opinion about that one. My guess is that'll be fine. That'll just transfer one-to-one. I don't think it...

It doesn't really matter too much whether it ends up on the Radisson program or the Radisson Americas program if they make it somewhat easy to move the points back to where you want them. If they do. I'm a little bit doubtful because of the way that they said it.

They didn't say, you know, using our easy online instant transfer tool or transfers will be instantly, you know, blah, blah, blah. They didn't say that. They said using our cool new transfer method or whatever, you know, whatever it was they said. So I'm skeptical and nervous about how slow that's going to be or how many steps it's going to involve. But I do have

my eyes set on a couple of places. Somebody mentioned a nice Radisson blue in Florida. That's 50,000 points per night right now. I didn't know there was one there. I can't remember where it was, but it's in the comments of the post. And then, uh, the country and in suites, Virginia beach I've looked at before. Now I haven't stayed there, but it's right on the beach. It's a country and in suites. It's right on the beach, believe it or not. So I maybe I'll lock that in for a couple of nights. Cause I have a whole bunch of Radisson points. So maybe I'll do that. What about you? You get your eyes on any particular properties? I don't, I, you know, I've, I've had this kind of problem with Radisson for a long time of, of having all these points and not being too excited about any of the properties.

There is, of course, I mentioned before the Maldives property. I just don't see myself going to the Maldives for quite a while. And so I'm not ready to try to lock that in. I like the Radisson Blue Chicago. It's a very nice property, but I don't have immediate plans to go. I don't have a guess as to when I'll go to Chicago again. And if I do, there's so many other good chain properties and I've got all these certs flowing out of my ears from, from all of them that get rolled over year after year. So it's not a great time for me to try to figure out where to... So I don't think I will. I don't think I'll book any speculatively. So there's not a lot of Radisson properties within the United States that at least I've been aware of that are sort of higher end. Yeah, no, it's typically, for the most part, it's like country and in suites.

So they're generally going to be your, you know, roadside or just outside of the city or a little bit out of the way, kind of, you know, limited service properties. Basically what we were talking about before with Holiday Inn Express or, you know, Hampton Inn or whatever else. Same kind of stuff usually. Right. So you have a few Radisson Blues that are nice. You have a couple Radissons that are like, I don't know if they're even nice, but they're very expensive. I stayed at the Radisson JFK and I was like,

do we want to get under the covers on this property? I don't know. Maybe just sleep on top of the comforter. I don't know who this is. It's a little dicey. Yeah. I don't know who it is. A little dicey, dicey. Yeah. Yeah. And it's exactly that.

It's those New York properties that are expensive. And so, you know, you could theoretically get good value from, for example, those free night certificates that you can earn with the credit card. So I guess we don't really have any other than the Radisson Blue. Oh no, you mentioned before, I think, the Radisson Blue in Minneapolis you liked?

Yeah, the one at the Mall of America I do like, but that's already top tier. So it's going to go up 5,000 points a night. I'm not going to look to book anything speculative there. I do like that. It's fun because it's connected to the mall. So you come down the elevator and you're in the mall. So that's kind of fun if you enjoy going to malls. And I don't spend a lot of money in malls, but for some reason, I enjoy going to

the mall and walking around. So that has been kind of fun. We've stayed there a couple of times. And there's a Radisson Blue in Crete that's actually dropping in price that Travel with Grant had written about that I was interested in, didn't get a chance to stay in. So I'm kind of excited about that. So maybe I'll make some speculative bookings for properties in the US, but if none of them work out, I'll be happy to pay a little bit less and maybe check out that Radisson and Crete at some point. You said that's dropping in price. It's dropping, yeah. We should wait.

We should wait. Because they're not going to give you an automatic refund, right? Yeah, I mean, of course they would. You're in luck. You can get the cheaper price, but they're not going to give it to you automatically. You're going to have to see. And if there is availability, they say, then you can just cancel and rebook yourself. You can do all the work yourself to get your refund. It's very nice of them. If there isn't availability, then you can call them and ask them for a refund. So, oh, well, actually, I mean, not all chains would necessarily even do that so that's that's

good that that's that's possible yep yeah all right all right so yeah so yeah yeah that's i mean it basically sums it up for us doesn't it it's not all bad but it's beats good beats good all right so all right time for the main event i I think. It is. All right. Main event once again is that Capital One steps up to bat. They've surprised us last week or no, this week. This week, they surprised us with some really positive changes. Do you want to quickly summarize what those are? Yeah, big time changes from Capital One. So Capital One this week announced that,

number one, they were adding some transfer partners and they added some pretty cool transfer partners. They added Turkish Miles and Smiles at two to one and a half. So two Capital One Miles to one and a half Turkish Miles. That's been the typical transfer ratio in the past. So they added Turkish. They added British Airways Avios. They announced that they will be adding choice privileges. They added Tap Air Portugal miles and go. No big excitement there. But at least it's another transfer partner if it ever works out to be worthwhile. But then the bigger

piece of the news is that they also introduced a one-to-one transfer tier. So now some of their most valuable transfer partners transfer one-to-one, which means that if you're using the Venture Card or the Spark Miles card, you're earning two airline miles or hotel points per dollar spent. And that's good for Avianca Life Miles and Cathay Pacific Asia Miles, Wyndham, uh, Qantas, probably somebody else. Uh, obvious, I believe was the two to one to one. I have double checked now. Uh, so they added a bunch of valuable one-to-one partners. And the thing is here,

like Avianca life miles is one of their best partners. Asia miles is also a very strong partner and Wyndham for the Vacasa vacation rentals is huge. I transferred points this week already and booked a Vacasa property and I'm thrilled about it so far. We'll see after I stay if I'm still thrilled. Awesome. Thrilled about it so far. Yeah, that's so awesome. And for anyone who hasn't been following along, what that is, is Wyndham has introduced a new way to book vacation rental properties for only 15,000 points per night per bedroom. And the cool thing is

there's a lot of properties that have just one bedroom. So they only cost 15,000 points per night, but they're pretty big and luxurious. And like, we've seen a lot of them that have, for example, a whole loft space that is for all intents and purposes, another bedroom. It's got a whole bed up there and sometimes even another bathroom. And, but they don't charge more for that because it's not technically considered another bedroom. Right. And in some cases I've seen a loft area with like three beds in it. I've seen some of these that are one bedroom up to 12 adults, they say, and they've got like, you know, one bedroom, but then they also have a pullout sofa and a loft with a couple of beds in it.

So some of them are really, you know, pretty, pretty nice. And actually the one that I booked is a cabin in the mountains, looks beautiful. And it has, again, that loft space with beds in the, or bed in the loft space, but also it's got like two full bathrooms. And then obviously the one bedroom and a kitchen and it's got two porches with views overlooking the mountains i

mean for 15 000 windham points a night 15 000 capital one points per night because of course they transfer now one to one to windham so i was able to transfer over and for 15 000 points tonight i got a whole house i got a cabin like it's got a cabin. It's got a pool table. It's got a video game system. Some of these had foosball tables and air hockey tables. They're houses. And if you had used those same Capital One points a couple of years ago before they added transfer partners, it would have been $150 of value per 15,000 points, right?

That's all you would have gotten. There's no way to get more. There. There's no way to get more. There was back then no way to get more. So now you're getting, I don't know, $100 a night? Yeah, well, the place that I booked would have worked out to have been $400 and change a night. Yeah, actually, I was... Yeah, so the place that I booked would have been $1,400 and change with fees for three nights. And instead, I paid $45,000 capital one point. So the equivalent of $450 worth of points for a $1,400 stay.

That's terrific. That's really good. I'll take it. Yeah, for sure. So Capital One now, there's another thing that's changed, we think, which is they used to be impossible for those of us who signed up for a bunch of cards in the past, impossible to get approved. But not that long ago, I started hearing about some people who got approved and were surprised about it. So I went, stepped up to kick this football again, which I've done year after year with Capital One. Every time they have these offers, I go apply for the thing and I get denied. And so I'm like, I wasn't planning on applying again for this 100K venture rewards offer that's out right now. But I heard about

these data points. I was like, I'm going to give it a try. And I was instantly approved with a huge credit line. Right. Right. I mean, like, you know, drinks and pizza on Greg, cause he got plenty of, plenty of room to earn himself some points. Let's put it that way. Right. I mean, there's going to be an issue of, can I put that on my venture card? No, you can't, you can't. Definitely can't. So yeah, I mean, that's great. And by the way, I miss i misspoke obvious is not a one-to-one partner it's etihad that's a one-to-one partner is the other one that i miss the other major one it's also aero mexico and some other stuff but at you had another good one don't transfer to aero mexico right right right don't do it but so yeah i mean so greg got approved and he got

approved with a monster credit limit which shows me that capital one is a interested in approving people perhaps anyway and be interested in competing because they gave him a credit line that'll compete with his other credit lines. So, I mean, I would have expected that if he got approved, I would have expected like, you know, some puny little credit limit that he couldn't use, like Discover would give you, but that wasn't the case. And there were a couple of readers who commented right away.

There was one who commented and said that, you know, they had been declined last year also, but inspired by the post and Greg's recent success. They tried that morning when we wrote about these changes from Capital One and much to their surprise, they were instantly approved. Now, we also had somebody who had declined, so I'm not going to be like willy nilly. I don't think they're going to approve everyone, but it seems like they may be more amenable to people who were not able to be approved in the past. Yeah, it does seem that way. That's great. And what we don't know is whether that's only during these like promotional offers. Because I mean, we heard something similar with Chase. And again,

we don't know this for sure, but it sounds like for their Sapphire Preferred Enhanced Offer, the ADK offer that's out now, that they're more lenient on approvals with that. And in Chase's case, we heard that it was like during the promotion. Don't know yet with Capital One if this is a sort of permanent change that they decided to actually have more rational approval process than before. I don't know. I mean, are they trying to compete? Because, you know, I look at this and I say, it sure does look like they're trying to compete, right? I mean, and the thing is, what

really struck me, and I said this, you know, when we first heard that they were going to do this, I said, wow, I couldn't believe it when they told us they were going to introduce Turkish as a transfer partner. I said, wow, that's amazing. That shows me that Capital One is paying attention. Because before we wrote about Turkish with the 7,500 point transfers, you can't tell me that Turkish was on their radar as a potential transfer partner. When they debuted the program with transfer partners in 2018,

they said that they would continue to add transfer partners. And at that point, you cannot tell me that Turkish was on the list, right? They obviously are paying attention to what's going on. And they were like, oh, wow, this Turkish thing. All right, let's call them up. Let's ring them up and get them as a transfer partner. And oh, you know, Wyndham, let's make that a one-to-one. And who else should we make a one-to-one transfer partner? And clearly they put some thought into that and knew that these were good one-to-one transfer partners to add. So there, I mean, I I've,

I've actually met and talked with a number of the capital one folks who, who designed these things and, and at, you know, who pick out which transfer partners to have and all that kind of stuff. And they do, they read the blog. Some of them are actually enthusiasts in the miles and points game. So I would bet you that there're as excited about this for themselves, you know, so they can start using these features as we are. So that's a great combination because, you know, as you're saying, I'm sure that they've

been reading about all these Turkish sweet spots and we're like, we want in on that. So, right. all these Turkish sweet spots. And we're like, we want in on that. So. Right. And what a differentiator that is, because, you know, the, the thing is the venture card is a very different product. And so Capital One is competing in some ways for a different type of customer. At least that's what I had said earlier this week anyway, and saying that, you know, they're producing a card now that earns good return on everyday spend if you want to erase your travel purchases and also earns good return if you want to transfer to partners for outsized value. I mean, it's a pretty incredible one card solution. Now, I mean, I'm not going to have one credit card and settle for one, but there are people who will. And for

people who will, this is a darn good solution because with one car, it's the best of both worlds. I mean, you could cover an entire vacation, your hotel, which are your vacation rental, maybe via Vacasa. You could cover your taxi or your car rental or your ferry boat or whatever it might be.

For a limited time, you can even cover restaurant charges with a venture card or Spark Miles card, I believe. So that's going to end here at the end of this month, I think, but who knows, maybe that'll come back again. You could darn near cover an entire vacation with a single card and get good return for it. You could, you could. And the best part of all, my TV is now safe for me throwing bricks at it. I used to get so mad at those Jennifer Garner commercials where she would saying she would act all smug and

say you get two miles per dollar everywhere and and you know and it used to be I was mad because oh well they weren't real airline miles but then when they added the transfer partners and it was like well for each two capital one points you're only getting one and a half or one airline mile i was throwing more bricks but now and then now you could actually get two airline miles per dollar spent on your venture rewards cards so i'm gonna stop throwing bricks well i mean they were clearly upset at all of the bricks you've been throwing because they were like you know what if we announce this one-to-one thing and we still keep declining him he's just going to continue to throw bricks at poor jenn. So they said, you know what, we're going to approve him. That's probably what happened. Let him have the card that way. He doesn't get even angrier when it comes out next

week that they're going to have their little one-to-one transfer partners. So I mean, pretty big news. It did. It did work out well. So let me ask you a question. So what would it take? Are they at, this would be it. I would give up. There's not a single one card. If there was one card, if I had to pick one card, then I would give up the others. That's not really what I mean. Right. That's not what you mean. Are they at the point now where I can say, OK, I don't need the other issuers because

all I need is Capital One? Well, in order to get to that, no, they're not there yet. To get to that point, the first thing they would need to do is have some bonus categories, right? Because, I mean, 2X is great and wonderful, but it's not going to help me build up points very quickly. So I would need some bonus categories, and I would need the ability to earn more than one welcome bonus, probably, on a card that becomes Miles.

But of course, Capital One heard me calling on that, I guess. They heard you like years ago, it turns out. It turns out. It turns out they heard me like two and a half years ago. And little did I know, they have had cards that are in bonus categories in terms of miles. So as we wrote about this week, you can actually convert Capital One cashback rewards to miles. And I have no idea how this has flown under the radar for like more than two years, at least that you can, you can take the point. So if you have like a saver card, please don't email us saying, Oh, you knew about it all along. I know some people did. Right. It wasn't generally known in the blogosphere. Let's put it that way. Right.

Some people knew about it. Some people knew about it, obviously. Yeah, but not widely known. And so if you have a Saver card or a Saver One card, we'll start with Saver. If you have the Saver card, that's 4% back on dining and entertainment, which you can convert to the Venture card to miles and end up with four airline miles per dollar spent on dining and on entertainment. And that's pretty big because some people probably still have an old saver card that has no annual fee. And so maybe you're earning 4X in those categories with no annual fee. That's terrific. Or maybe you just want to get a saver one card and get three points per dollar dining and entertainment with no annual fee because that card has no annual fee. And in fact, you could even if you just want to go no annual fee at all, you could have a venture one card and a saver one card and presumably move your three acts earned on

dining and entertainment to your venture one and transfer on to airline partners and have zero annual fee and be earning a transferable currency at three points per dollar in dining and entertainment. That's pretty amazing. Right. And you also can get more welcome bonuses because you can sign up for when there's a big $500 cashback offer or even the 200 or 250 offer for a cashback card. You sign up, you get that, let's call it $500 cashback, move it over to your venture, suddenly it's 50,000 miles. Right, right. And the Spark Cash Card sometimes comes with a bonus of a thousand. Sometimes there's a targeted mailer offer, comes with a bonus of a thousand

after 10,000 spend. 100,000 miles. 100,000 miles. And every now and then we see an offer for $2,000 cashback, the public offer every now and then goes up to that. That usually requires massive spend, like 50K spend. But I mean, you're talking about 200,000 bonus miles at that point. That's fantastic, right? It really is. So what you're saying is they do have more signup bonuses. They do have some category bonuses.

So you're saying you could give up Amex and chase right now. Let's not get crazy, Greg. Let's not put me on a segment next week. You'd be like, what crazy thing did Nick do? He said, he's dumping all his cards for capital one.

I'm sorry. I'm not breaking up with them all yet. Capital one, because you're not giving me any lounge access. There's no, there's no lounge, right? Well, there One, because you're not giving me any lounge access. There's no lounge, right? Well, yeah, there's like two Capital One specific lounges coming. We don't know yet if they're going to let you in for free, but let's just pretend they're going to let you in

for free. Is that good enough? Well, probably not, because you probably need some sort of priority pass if you're going to... Now, Prior priority pass did just lose one of its good partners in Asia, or at least it seems it's kind of like a follow up email on that that I still need to look into. Yeah, but it sounds like the follow up email from them. It sounds like there's a net gain in number of lounges they have. They lost some over there, but they're gaining others elsewhere. So if they're telling the truth about that, then let's pretend they are, that Priority Pass is actually expanding. Okay. So if Priority Pass is, and let's pretend Priority Pass has been decent, that's what everybody else offers. I think Capital One's got to offer something like that, right? I mean, in order for me to give up the other cards, I would need something like that.

If it's not Priority Pass, then feel free to surprise me, Capital One, because at this point, you're doing a pretty good job of it. So if you got a different idea that's Priority Pass-like, I'm all ears. All right. So if now Capital One just throws in a Priority Pass membership, and ideally it would be more like the Chase one and less like the Amex one, meaning it would give you the restaurant benefit that Priority Pass does, then you'd be ready to give up Amex and Chase, right? Not quite so fast, Greg. Why not? Because I'd have to give up Hyatt.

And I just got globalist status. So, I mean, I like Hyatt. And that's what everybody loves about Chase, ultimate rewards, right? You can earn your ultimate rewards at a good category bonus, 5X office supply stores with the ink cash card or the 5X categories rotating on the freedom card, and then transfer those over to Hyatt for great value redemptions. So Capital One has to make up for that somehow. We got to have something to replace Hyatt. Now, I would say that Wyndham goes a long way right now in doing that. Whether or not this Vacasa thing will last forever, because that's on the Wyndham side, that's not Capital One's doing. That's just, it turns out. Yeah. It's also almost entirely in the United States. They know, there's, there's, they have a few properties in Canada and Mexico and a couple other places. Yeah. But, but so it's way more limited than, than Hyatt is. Yeah. Um,

I think I have a solution to that. Okay. And so Capital One, you're listening, I know you're listening out there. Here's my solution that we love the, uh, points, I'm sorry, miles eraser feature where when, when you book travel, you can erase for one cent per mile. Um, what if when we, when we pay for hotels, we can erase for 1.5. I w I would be pretty darn happy with that. I mean, yes, there's a few Hyatt's where that still wouldn't be a good, you know, way to go, but there's a lot, a lot of my Hyatt bookings. I would do pretty darn well, you know, with that. Plus I'd be earning Hyatt points for my stay. I'd be getting all the elite benefits because I'm booking directly with Hyatt and I'm just paying with my venture card. That's what they should do. There you go, Kyle. Look at that. See, Greg is a solutions guy. That's what I like about Greg. Greg's a guy

with a solution. He's like, you know what? You got a problem here. You're still a little bit behind. I can help you fix that. And it's totally reasonable, right? I mean, it's not like you're not asking for eight cents a point or something. You're not asking for something outlandish, just something that would probably work for both sides. You know, I'm basically saying replicate what Chase did with their pay yourself back feature. But you can just lock in hotels as the category because that's what you're kind of short on is that aspect, I think. And that gives us all hotels. It's not just Hyatt. You'd be competing on all the fronts, Marriott and Hilton

and all the unchained hotels, all the little guys and everything in between. So that would be pretty awesome. I think that would be a killer feature. That would be. Now, let me make sure, Capital that you're listening closely because Greg is not saying to make the points worth a penny and a half each when booking through capital one travel. Cause that's not what I want that. That's not what we're looking for. And you know why, you know,

why you I'm saying capital one, you know why I'm saying that because we don't want to lose our elite benefits. We don't want to lose our point earnings on our stays. If you were going to make us book through your portal, it would have to end up the way Amex's fine hotels and resorts does where somehow you magically still earn points and have elite status when you book that way. You'd have to figure out a way to do that. I think that's improbable. The erase at 1.5 is the way to go i think um that's you know what else that's that i think that that that would be the solution because it's not only hyatt i mean we're talking we talked about hyatt but i mean that would provide good value for booking marriott's and

hilton's and like every other hotel chain you would be getting good value at one and a half cents each especially if you're able to get your points and elite status benefits, that would make me say, you know what? I don't need Chase and Emma. I can take them if I can have them, but I wouldn't need them anymore if we did everything else we just talked about and that. Yeah, so I'm gonna be greedy and say, I kind of agree.

I still think they're a little behind on the point earning side because yes yes, you could get 3 or 4X dining and entertainment, but there's no other common categories where you can get better than 2X. So I would like to see maybe 3X grocery or drugstore or something along those lines, or I mean, 4x would be even better, but just something like that happening. And, you know, even if it was part of a new, like ultra premium card that would make that more attractive. So. So is this ultra premium card going to materialize? Is this going to happen? Because I looked at this and as I was writing about the fact that Capital One has really stepped it up and I wrote a post this week about how Capital One, when you compare their transfer partners against the other major currencies,

Capital One is competing. I mean, if you haven't been paying attention, you've been sleeping, wake up because when you look at the list now, they are competing hard with everybody else because they've got pieces of each program. Whereas Amex has their stuff that's unique to them and Chase has their stuff that's unique to them and Citi has their stuff that's unique to them. Capital One has taken pieces of everybody's lunch and put it all together.

And so they don't have everything, but they have the best stuff from almost everyone. There's three of my favorites are missing. Hyatt, which we've already talked about. ANA, which is Amex and is the only one, right, that transfers them. And they have just incredible pricing. And Virgin Atlantic, which I just don't understand why they don't have that because most others do have a Virgin Atlantic. And I know you said, well, they're not as valuable now, but getting to Europe on Delta cheaply is still a big deal to me.

And I think to a lot of people and there are a number of sweet spots. You know, I wrote a post about the best uses of Virgin Atlantic models. There's still a lot there and there's a lot of value to be had. So if I was going to abandon the others, I could probably do with, it'd be a little hard to do without like three or four X, you know, grocery, but maybe I could, but it'd be really hard for me to go without without virgin atlantic and uh yeah if i had to pick i would pick ana hands down well the reason i'm not saying ana is that um is sort of two things one is i'm i'm kind of assuming if i if i

put my you know stick in the sand there i'm kind of assuming the reason ANA isn't available through any others is that they're like either have an exclusive or incredibly expensive or something. And that's why the others haven't picked them up. But the other thing is ANA, as attractive as the word pricing is, it's problematic. It's a problematic transfer partner because two big deals. One is that they don't transfer instantly. And so you find a word space and you want to book it. And then you initiate the transfer and then it's several days. And then maybe the word space there, maybe it's not. That's one thing. Next thing is the stupid miles expire after three years, no matter what.

And so you can't just say upfront, well, I know I'll use them eventually. So I'll just transfer a bunch of miles in and I'll keep them until I find those great deals. Because then you might end up in Greg's spot. You might end up having to travel around the world for no reason. Right, right. I mean, bummer there, right? Wouldn't that, wouldn't that be terrible to have to travel around the world in business class to use up your money? Awful. Right. Awful. So anyway, so, so there's a thing. It's,

it's, it's, it's, it's a fantastic program, but it, but it has those, those two really big weaknesses that make it, um, kind of user unfriendly. And you see, I would say that Virgin Atlantic has a couple of big weaknesses. One being that they devalued almost all Delta awards except for flying to Europe overnight. So I don't know when that flying to Europe is going to go away, but I don't imagine it's going to stay forever because initially it looked like that was devalued too.

And then they went back on that. So that tells me that they had some plans or they've written something up. They got an idea about devaluing that. So I don't know how long that's going to last to begin with. And then they get rid of that. And it's like ANA first class. Yeah, they have a great deal for ANA first class.

That thing, I think everybody has expected to devalue at some point. It hasn't. That's great. But again, I'm not going to hang my hopes on Virgin Atlantic keeping that around when I know that they may very well devalue it overnight at the drop of a hat. So there are some sweet spots in Virgin Atlantic, no doubt, but ANA has got a ton of sweet spots. And, and I, I tend to find Star Alliance more convenient for me. Now I know Greg finds Delta more convenient for him. So there's a big difference there too. I find Star Alliance to be much more convenient or Alliance for me. So that's part of my preference for ANA.

But at any rate, so Capital One, pick up one of those. And then Greg and I can re-debate which one is the better transfer partner. Yeah. Yeah. But don't forget, too, if you're willing to deal with Turkish, I mean, you could get pretty close on some of those award prices and do book one ways. That's true. Using Turkish.

That's true. And they do have them. That's true. All right. Okay. Greg's going to ask me. Not one-to-one. I'd like to see. All right. Okay. Great. One to one. One to one would also be huge. And the thing with one to one versus their current system. So they have a few one to one partners, like we said, a couple of really useful ones. Avianca Life Miles. Terrific. I'm happy with that at one to one. Asia Miles. Happy with that. I'm happy with that at one to one. So they do have some good ones. And Wyndham,

we already said is huge. But what I don't like about the different tiers is especially this two to one and a half tier. I have so many award chart sweet spots memorized in my mind. I know how many miles it requires to fly from here to there. And I got to bust out a freaking calculator to figure out how many capital one miles do I need in order to redeem for that award? It's ridiculous. I should use a calculator. Come on. So they can make it easier on you by switching those to two to one. And then you just have to double it. Careful what I wish for, huh?

All right, Capital One. Keep it simple. Make it one to one. One to one. Do you hear me? One to one. But man, I think Capital One is so close to having a killer combo.

And like you said in the beginning of this episode, that we think right now it's already a card where if you only want one card, you could actually do really well with just the Venture. And yes, you'd be missing out on some category bonuses, and yes, you'd be missing out on some transfer partners, but you would keep things really simple and, and still be able to take advantage of a lot of those award sweet spots that are out there. And that's a pretty killer combination. And if we haven't, we haven't mentioned this and I haven't really mentioned it in post particularly,

but if you're a business person, if you have a business and you have high spend, high business spend and unbonused categories, hello, spark miles at two per dollar without a cap, right? So unlike the blue business plus it's capped at 50,000 a year. If you're someone who's buying a lot of inventory, something like that, two miles per dollar all day long, all year long, that could be huge. And now I'm going to take it a step further. And if you want to get a little creative, something I mentioned in the post today was assuming that these conversions from cash back to miles are going to continue working. We wrote about that. That was, again, something that some people obviously knew I didn't know until this week. But if that continues to work, then having the Spark Cash card and either Spark Miles or Venture One, having a card with transferable

miles along with your Spark Cash would mean spending on your Spark Cash all day long because then you have your choice between two pennies, two actual pennies, not a purchase eraser, but two actual pennies or the ability to convert those to miles. I mean, both those Spark Cards become really compelling for people that are in any kind of a business with high business spend. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Great point. Great point. So Capital One, I mean, you're competing.

I'd like to see a little bit more. There's a couple of wishlist items, but overall, wow. Big week for Capital One. Big week. It sure is. It sure is. And I feel great about my venture card and having had it for all these years and probably people thought I was crazy for hanging on to it.

And I probably was crazy for hanging on to it, but I'm glad I have it now because it's certainly coming in handy. Oh yeah. Now I'm glad you have the, uh, that, that, that weird gift card feature from, from a legacy card that no one else has. Cause when I need a fair mind gift card, I'm coming for you now that I'll have capital one miles to transfer to you. That's another killer feature they have.

No other program lets you just transfer freely to anyone in the world that, you know, the miles. Citi sort of does, but then they put them on a clock and say they have to be used in a certain amount of time or they'll just disappear. And they limit you. Oh, and there's a limit, that's true. You're right, yep.

Whereas Capital One, no limit. I've done more than a hundred thousand a year no limit in transferring person to person and and also then you know again no expiration so and i believe you can do it with cash back rewards also so you know if you had somebody else in the family or friends or whatever that is during cash back i believe they can at the very least transfer that to a cash back account you have, but I think it's probably possible for them to convert that to your miles card too. I think it seems likely I will hopefully find out as soon as the next cash back lands in, in my wife's spark account, because I, I, of course the day before all this happened, she had redeemed her spark cash back. And then a day later, I was like, oh my goodness, I wish I still had that there so that we could try and transfer that around and see

how this stuff works a little bit more. But at any rate, yeah, the ability to combine with anybody else, you could put everything together into one account with you and a spouse or family member, friend, whatever the case may be. And so that's obviously huge from Capital One also, whereas you can't do that with Amex at all. I mean, you can't combine your membership rewards points with anybody. You could put them down as an authorized user and potentially transfer their loyalty program. But you're not going to be able to put your points together in one membership rewards pile. And with Chase, you're limited to somebody who lives in your household and only one person at that, Capital One.

I mean, Capital One's got a lot of strength going for them now. I know I'm talking about them like a big fanboy. But the bottom line is- But it's true. Yeah, they have really come out of the gate here and said, you know what? Like, we're sick of being that other credit card. We are going to be one of the major players. And I think they're awfully close to coming out on top here. It was just a few more tweaks.

And I'm really looking forward to this 1.5 purchase eraser thing for hotels. I mean, that was a great idea. Capital One. I'm glad you thought of it. Nicely done, Capital One. You did it. So we can't wait till you roll it out. Okay.

All right. So, so does that, I think that wraps this up in Capital One. Capital One, big news. Great stuff this week. Excited to find out more and to use these points a little bit more. I think it's time for Post Roast. It sure is. So post roast. Now we're talking about Capital One and Greg wrote a post about how he's,

you know, no longer has to throw bricks at the TV. By the way, if you're if you're hearing this right now and you're like, wait a second, post Greg was on vacation, wasn't he? He's written like one, two posts, right? Don't worry. Don't worry. There's something to roast. Don't worry. Next, next, Scott. I got this. I got you. I got you. All right. So he wrote about how he doesn't have to throw the bricks at the TV anymore because, you know, blah, yada, yada, yada.

I talked about that. You did. In this episode. You sure did. And so in that, you gave a reaction to each of the transfer partners. You gave like your take on each of the one-to-one transfer partners. All right. And so you're going to say why I was wrong about Aeromexico.

No, I'm not. Let's hear it. to say why I was wrong about Aeromexico. No, I'm not. Let's hear it. I'm not. I'm leaving Aeromexico. Leave poor Aeromexico alone. What do they do to you, Greg? Leave them alone. Okay.

All right. You talked about Avianca LifeMiles, and you said that LifeMiles is a strong program for booking Star Alliance awards. Totally agree. No roast there. But then you said, unfortunately, their online booking award, or excuse me, their online award booking tool is severely limited.

And then you went on to say customer service stinks and they have high change fees. What are you talking about? Their online booking tool is severely limited. Severely limited how? What do you mean? It doesn't pull up the flights you want to find. When was the last time you looked for a flight and you couldn't find it via the Avianca life? So I do. Have they changed it? I mean, I mean, I just haven't run into a situation. I know, I know that. Well, no, I'm not, I'm not saying that necessarily every single flight is there every single time. Cause I know that that's not true. But the reason I'm sitting on hundreds and hundreds of thousands of United miles is because when I was booking a trip to Europe two years ago now, I guess,

I could not find a one-stop flight on Lufthansa that United easily found. And yes, I could have gone through that whole email process that you've written about. So I'm sure it would have been possible to book it. I could not get it to come up online. It was so frustrating. And I've had other times where there've been things that I couldn't get to come up, but that's the simplest example. Well, it was literally just a one-stop route. Maybe it's still the case, but I haven't had much issue looking stuff up via LifeMiles because I've cross-referenced stuff

for writing posts about Turkish miles and smiles and looked at things. And I have seen the availability I was looking for most of the time. I think you were lucky. Maybe I was lucky. Maybe you were unlucky two years ago. I don't know, but I have not noticed a severe limitation. I'll say that like I've mostly found the flights available. Well, I was looking for that. I thought, yeah, you also

can't, you can't kind of force things like you can't do it. There's no, like the multi-city thing is like only for round trip, I think. And so you can't say tool at all, but Delta doesn't have a multi-city tool. So what are you complaining about? You don't need a multi-city tool. You're a Delta guy. Delta. Yes. Delta does.

Do they have, I've never seen a city tool unless they took, unless they took it away. It's been a while since I've used it, but yeah, they do. I haven't been able to find it, but okay.

All right. So, so I, I would, I would maybe somewhat limited severely sounded to me like, like you're working with Turkish. Turkish is online. Oh, yeah.

All right. So this is an adjective roast. I got it. It's an adjective roast. All right. I'll take it. I'll take it. I deserve that adjective roast.

Bad adjective. Too far. Bad on me. You can use that with Turkish, not with Avianca. Go ahead. Now that we're done with the adjective roast, let's go on to the post roast.

Uh-oh. Uh-oh nick nick wrote a post titled bad news radisson devaluation announced and it stinks he went on to talk about how it just was awful on every level and then a few hours to write, oh, maybe not so bad everywhere. It actually, there's actually some good things about that. It could be good for some people. For some people. I mean, it's still, in my opinion, it still sticks. I can see the perspective that, you know, it wasn't so bad in some ways. But I think, you know, so the follow-up post was to say, you know what, there's another perspective on this, kind of like you had said earlier with the IHG card. You know, if I asked an average reader,

I shouldn't say an average, there's a large segment of readers that I asked, if I asked them if the IHG card is any good, would say absolutely not. But then there's also a large segment of readers like the person at the beginning of this episode that would say, yeah, it's perfect for my needs. So Radisson, the news in the Radisson Award chart is similar. There are some people who will be in that boat that will say, you know what, this is good for me. I still think overall it's bad. And maybe I didn't make that

clear enough in my follow-up post, because you're looking at some 60% of hotels are increasing in price. So there is a chunk of hotels that are decreasing and it might be good for some of those people. But one of the points that someone made in my follow-up post where I said, ah, maybe it's not so bad. If you like category one and two properties, it might actually be good news for you. Someone in the comments said something about, yeah, but you're talking about a lot of properties here that are places nobody wants to stay at anyway. So what if they drop? So what? Like, yeah, okay, great. They're going from 44 to 30 and you're still not going to use your points either way. So who cares? So, you know, I think we're from 30 or 28 to 15.

Again, if it's a place that nobody's going to stay anyway, then, you know, who cares about that? Yeah. Yeah. No, that's a good point. But you left out the really good news about the free night certificates that you get for spending $10,000 on the credit card. I'm all ears for the good news. The good news is where before they were good for up to 70,000 points. Now they're good for up to 75,000 points. One free night up to 75,000 points. Yeah. So serious question. Those right now are only valid in the United States, but since they're splitting the program is Radisson Americas. Do you think they're going to be valued any valid anywhere in the Americas? It'd be totally crazy for them not to make that. So, right. But I wouldn't put it past them at all.

I was going to say, I bet you they're going to make it. What crazy thing did Radisson do this week? They split the programs and then said, yeah, but you can't even use your free nights. Yeah. At what point though, do we decide that that's happened? Like they, I feel like that's going to be more like a non-event. Like they're not going to say anything about it until people go to ask. And then we'll say, Oh, that hasn't changed. And we're evaluating it or something. And I don't know.

I don't know that there'll be an event, but maybe there will. Maybe when the new award chart rolls out, they'll have an FAQ that'll go on to say that you're still stuck in, you know, just the U.S. Well, I think probably in the benefit terms and the credit card, it'll say 30,000 spend gets you to stay anywhere in the raddest Americas or it'll stay within the United States as it does today. So I guess we'll see if that updates or changes at all. Right.

So that'll be a little bit of good news if they do change that. And they ought to. I mean, it was always crazy that they didn't allow it to be worldwide. But, you know. Yeah, that craziness isn't going to change clearly. So you're not going to be able to use it anywhere outside of the Americas for sure. And, you know, it stinks that they're splitting the program.

And now if you happen to go to Europe on business or vacation or whatever, you're not going to get elite credit for those nights in your Radisson Americas program. You can get elite credit in the Radisson rest of the world program. But, you know, if you're not staying there enough nights for elite status, Radisson Americas program. You can get elite credit in the Radisson Rest of the World program, but if you're not staying there enough nights for elite status,

Radisson, you're crazy. I'm not even gonna tell you. Maybe you could use their special process for moving points to also move your elite nights over. That would be nice, wouldn't it? Maybe. I mean, do you really care about elite earnings anyway?

I don't, but just like, I don't care about the IHG card either, Greg. If you have the card, you have gold status. I don't care. Right, right, no. And your gold status, by the way, can match to the rest of the world program, but you can't do that online.

You can't do that yourself. You're going to have to call. They're not going to automatically match you over. You have to call to get matched over to the rest of the world status. All right. So that's a fun thing to look forward to. Yeah, yeah.

All right. So that, my friends, brings us, I think, to the question of the week. Right. This week's question of the week comes in from a member of our Frequent Miler Insiders group who wrote to me to say, hello, I posted something in the Facebook group and my post got declined. I'm wondering, is there a policy for why and when it gets declined? Because I have no idea why it got declined. And I'd like to know moving forward what I can or can't post about if there are rules. Good question. Yeah. And so this is a question I got a couple of weeks

ago, but I got it again today. So it's happened a couple of times I've gotten that question. So I wanted to be able to answer it. So why would somebody's post ever get declined and how come he doesn't know about why Greg? Yeah. So there's a few reasons there. First, let me address that last question, which is Facebook. Yeah. Yeah. As moderators, when we see a comment that we want to delete, or if we see a post that we want to decline from getting published, if we're using our cell phone to decline it, it doesn't give us the option to show the poster why it's declined, which just makes no sense to me. It's ridiculous. I am so often going through notifications on my phone while I'm in the middle of doing something else, you know, I'm not sitting at my computer. And then if I if I don't address it, then on my phone,

I'll forget to go back to it on the laptop. And yeah, it's it's craziness. If we're on our laptop, we can check a box saying share the reasons with the poster. And we can write a little sentence there. And and I think we always do. Right. If I'm at the computer, I do. And also, you know, because you're using your phone, it might just be scrolling and happen to accidentally hit decline or something. So there's even that possibility too. It's, you know, I apologize. It's the way Facebook is. They got a poor interface for this on the app, in my opinion. Right. Right. So we, we have some posted rules for the group and they're things like, uh, no political messages.

If there's anything political in your post, we are not. We're going to decline it. Be nice. If you're saying something mean, offensive, you know, we're going to decline it. Now, to be clear, you can say Capital One's transfer partners stink. I don't like the Capital One card because blah, blah, blah. That's fine. You just can't be rude to people. Right. Don't say anything about Capital One's mom. That's not okay. Not okay. I appreciate that. No referrals. People want to post, and we totally get it. People want to post their referral links for credit cards so they get their, you know, 15,000 points or they want to their post their, you know, whatever, their DASH app referral, things like that.

If we allowed it, it would just explode into a useless group of advertisements, basically. Right. That's all you'd see. And we don't want that. It would be, it'd be terrible. So instead what we do is sometimes we invite referrals. We sometimes we'll post and say, um, you know, we're looking for referrals for this type of thing, post them in the comments below. And, and that's great. But if it's not, if it's not invited, we're going to, we're going to, um, deny it. Um, am I missing any rules? No, I think that's it. And the same goes for if you reply to somebody's post and say, oh, I can message you a referral, send me a

message for more. When somebody reports that, we end up deleting it when we see it. So that might be a similar kind of a thing there. And again, it's the same thing. It's that if you get 13,000 or 14,000 people in the group all doing that activity, all posting their referral links, then that's all you would ever see in the group. You'd never see any valuable discussion. Right, so there's the rules. Then there's one other thing that might get your post declined,

which is simply if it happens to be pretty much a duplicate of something we know is already there. So it's common for big news to hit. So several people post the same thing. We don't, we don't want different threads of the same thing. So, so we'll decline some of them and hopefully we'll give you the reason. Sometimes we probably will be on our phone and, and unfortunately don't have a way to do it. And, and once we fit decline, I mean,

then we don't even remember who, who sent it. If, you know, if you didn't have it in your head and, and there's no way to find out that I can tell. Well, there, there is on the computer I've, I've since found, but it's not intuitive. So yeah, I've, I've had the same thing where I declined something and then thought, oh, I should send that person a message, but right. Who was it? A bunch of times. Yeah. was it? So yeah, it's not easy to do that. And so don't be offended if your comment gets deleted or your post doesn't get approved. It wasn't anything personal and we weren't trying to mute your conversation or whatever it was. If you're curious, you don't understand why, feel free to post a follow-up post or tag one of us

and ask or reach out and send us a message to contact us on the Frequent Miler site, something like that. If there's something you're particularly concerned about otherwise, there's a good chance that either it was just because we were on our phone or could have even been a mistake. Maybe if you go to post it again, it'll go through the next time. Yeah. And if you're not on our Frequent Miler Insiders group, please join us. And you will be asked some questions in order to join. And let me tell you that we're not intending to keep out people.

We put in those questions really just to stop. There's a bunch of bots and things that try to join all these groups and spam everything. And so we found that by asking a simple question like, where are that, that try to join all these groups and spam everything. And, and so we found that by asking a simple question, like, where are you hoping to travel to? We can easily weed out the bots that write. Okay. Hopefully it's not a bunch of people that want to go to Oklahoma. Cause I mean, that's fine. If you want to go to oklahoma that's fine just write it out you might have trouble getting into our group spell it out if you want to go to oklahoma spell it out the whole word yeah yeah so yeah just make sure that you're a human being you and then ideally you you also check there's a box um to that you agree to our rules. I don't think it shows up in all situations.

So, so we will usually approve you anyway, as long as you answered the travel question, but it makes us feel good. If you also said that you will adhere to the, to the rules. So check that box. Yeah. Check that. Yeah. It's not, you know, pretty easy. All right, my friends. All right. Brings us to the end for today. Oh man. That's that's sad. I know it's not, you know, pretty easy stuff. It's not that hard. All right, my friends. Well, that brings us to the end for today. Oh man, that's sad.

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we will see you guys again next week. All right. Thanks, everyone. Goodbye.