Frequent Miler on the Air - Chase adds Air Canada as transfer partner! | Ep 110 | 8-7-21

Episode Date: August 7, 2021

Chase has added Air Canada as an Ultimate Rewards transfer partner. Having new options is always good news, but is the news "great"? 00:00:25 Giant mailbag (Airlines set award rates just above saver level) 00:04:55 Mattress Running the Numbers: Hilton Amex Offer (20% rebate) + Triple points promo + Aspire card $250 rebate 00:13:22 What Crazy Thing Did Southwest Airlines Do This Week? Southwest drops segments w/out notice. Many readers "enjoyed" the same treatment. 00:20:09 Main Event: Is the addition of Aeroplan to Chase Ultimate Rewards really great news? Greg and Nick debate. 00:45:44 New Chase Aeroplan credit cards expected in November 2021. Are we excited? What kind of welcome bonuses can we expect? 00:49:25 Post roast. Nick takes Greg to task for failing to discuss how to manage points and credit card cancellations when in "two player mode" (e.g. when managing cards and points for a significant other.) 00:55:55 Question of the week. A reader overpaid taxes (using a credit card, of course), but the IRS hasn't yet refunded the overpayment 6 months later. This is more of a caution than a question.

frequent miler on the air starts now today's main event air canada is added as a chase ultimate rewards transfer partner is that great news we'll see Nick and I are rubbing our chins. But first, let's get into the giant mailbag. Today's mail comes from Tony. Tony had a comment on my post, actually, about this topic. I wrote about how Chase added Air Canada as a transfer partner, and I compared the award rates of United versus Air Canada booking the same Star Alliance awards. And what Tony wrote was, with dynamic award pricing these days, comparison solely based on saver awards is no longer appropriate. Both of these airlines seem to purposely price most of their award tickets at prices just above the saver levels, making these redemptions unavailable to

their partners. Okay, so I mentioned this particular comment, not so much because of how it reflects on my post, but because my post was more about third-party partner awards, booking, you know, ANA and Turkish and other airlines. But I do want to point out that I think Tony's right, at least with United. When I've been doing award searches lately, one of the things I've noticed is that, you know, United domestically charges 25K one way for a business class award or first class domestic. Theoretically. Right. For a Saver Award, theoretically.

For the Saver Award, if a Saver Award's available. That's what you mean by theoretic, right? Well, I also mean that there's so many different, I mean, they don't call them web specials, but there's so many routes that price differently too. But yes, it's an economy and maybe not in business. Yeah. I haven't even looked at business. It seems to be fixed at the 25K, but at least for now. But what I did see is exactly what Tony says, which is tons of routes where there was no SAVOR award availability, meaning in business class, meaning other, their partners can't

book those flights. Only United can book them. But United priced all of them. Like almost every single flight I looked at, 25,500 miles. Ridiculous. That's crazy. That's crazy. You know, and it's true.

You can't really book. I've even, even looking for economy flights, I've had a lot of difficulty finding any economy class availability with partner miles for United domestic economy flights. Like, you know, there's obviously there's some, but yeah, but I've been looking for some of the routes that we're, we'll talk about in Southwest in a little bit. And man, I just like days and days with nothing at all. That's very interesting because in the work I did for this post, I had no trouble at all finding economy. That's interesting. Yeah. But I mean, maybe it depends on the routes. I was picking a random date for pretty far in the future just to try to ensure that there'd be availability. But totally right. I mean, if your primary goal is to fly United,

and you're right, I mean, these partner Star Alliance awards probably aren't going to be your bag. But to be honest with you, I think in a lot of cases, miles aren't necessarily a bag for you then either. Maybe cash back makes more sense because if you're going to pay the $50,000 that United wants to charge for an Anytime Award for a one-way business class award, you probably would do better just getting a good cash back card and buying those tickets and earning miles and elite credit and blah, blah, blah. So if those are the types of awards you want, then the miles game probably isn't right for that purpose. But like Greg was really pointing out there is I want to use United and Air Canada miles to fly lots of other airlines. I want to fly Lufthansa and Swiss and ANA and Turkish. And so that's how I look at using those miles. And that's the lens you were obviously looking at it through, right? That's right. Exactly. Exactly. And of course, I can't let this go by though, that you you know, we, you said,

if you want to fly United, then you should be looking at United miles, but, or at cash, but, but obviously as we've talked about before, there are situations where United releases save reward space and there are incredible deals by booking with partner miles. And that's why I'm searching every single day for the few routes that I need, because if I do find one of those, great. I'd love to be able to book it for not very many miles. Yeah. And I'm going to talk about one of those later when we get into the main event. Okay, good. I'm looking forward to a little sneak preview there. All right. So then let's look at mattress running the numbers. So this week for mattress running the numbers, we've got something from Hilton, right? There's some stacking Hilton opportunities. Yeah, yeah.

So this is interesting. So there's an Amex offer out that basically saves you 20%, up to 20% on a Hilton stay because the way it works is you get, you know, if you spend $250, you get back, I don't know, whatever, 20% of that is. And 50 bucks, 50 bucks. And there's a, there's a couple of variations on it at different Hilton

properties, but they all work out to, if you maximize it exactly, it's a 20% rebate. Okay. And the other thing is Steven found and posted that there's a link that lets you add these offers to your Hilton Aspire card. So most of these offers don't necessarily show up automatically on there, right? Because Hilton Aspire offers 14 points per dollar at Hilton properties, you know, so you get both that plus the Amex rebate. Plus if you still have your resort credit and you, and you stay at a resort property, you're getting up to $250 back a year with the Hilton Aspire card. So that combination is pretty awesome. And then all of the stacks, if you had enrolled in your Hilton double or triple points promo, that's still going on through, I think, September 5th or so, then as long as you book a three

nights stay or more, you get triple points, less than that you get double points. And so you could get up to 54 points per dollar. That's if you have the Aspire card and that's partly because you have diamond status. And so that gets you bonus points. You're paying with the Aspire card, getting the 14 points per dollar. And now you're getting this like triple points promo. So all these things stack up to 54 points per dollar, which is pretty spectacular. So the question on the table is, is all of this together mattress run worthy? Well, you know, when you first started talking about this, when I first looked at this, I was like, oh yeah, that, that actually sounds pretty interesting. Now I have a question to propose maybe at the end.

Maybe I should propose it now because it'll explain why I'm going to do the math the way I am. Do you know? Because I don't know the answer to this. If you have, let's say you have that Amex offer for 50 back on 250 and you spend exactly 250 at a Hilton resort, will you get $300 back? Will you get your $250 Aspire credit plus the $50 Amex offer? Now, yeah, the answer is yes, you would because it triggers the Amex offer. But the reason I'm asking is because in the past with Dell, Amex hasn't liked it when you came out profitable and has clawed back on people. Now, in my case, I have stacked those two things, but never on a stay that was that cheap. It was always on stays that were more expensive and just save some money. So I don't

know if Amex will claw back if you try to come out 50 bucks a head on that. So what I'm going to do for the purposes of the math is assume that you book a $300 stay at a Hilton resort. Okay. So you book a $300 stay, get 50 bucks back from the Amex offer, 250 back if you've got the Hilton Aspire Resort Credit. Worth noting that you need to go and look at the Hilton Resorts. There's a resorts page. If you go to our Aspire card page, you'll find a link to it somewhere. And you want to check because not every place that's called a resort is a resort and not every place that is a resort says that it's a resort or intuitively seems like a resort. So that's worth mentioning. Anyway, so you book a $300 stay at one of those places, get your $300 back. And if you're getting 54 points per dollar, then you end up with 16,200

Hilton points. And for a minute, I was like, if you're not planning to use your Aspire credit this year, you can effectively turn that credit into 16,200 points that you can use later, stack into a more valuable redemption, et cetera, et cetera. So I was going to say, well, yeah, if you're not going to use it, why not turn it into some points? Except that I did the math and I was like, okay, well, 16,200 points, that's worth like $81. So trading your $250 credit- And that's if you're very generously calling them half a cent each. Half a cent, right, right. And we really value what?

Right. Our current RRV is 0.4. So yeah, four tenths. So even less. Even less. 65, 70-ish, somewhere in there at the four tenths. Right. So not that much. It's not worth that much. So you're trading in $250 worth of credit for very little in points. And so that made me less excited when I actually thought about it, because as I've pointed out before, you can use that resort credit this year. If you book a resort for sometime next year, that requires a deposit. Yeah. All hotels that require a deposit are non-refundable. Some will charge a deposit, or even you may book a hotel that doesn't have a deposit. You may be able to reach out and ask them if they will take a deposit from you. And of course, if they do that, they will give it back if you later have to cancel your stay. So even if you're not planning a stay this

year, you can look way out into the future, book a stay way out for next year and try to get a full $250 in value out of that. I wouldn't trade it for $81 worth of points. Would you? Oh no, no, I wouldn't. Um, but, but let's talk about how good this is as a, as a rebate and how it's not as completely impractical as it sounds if you're in two player mode. So if you and your, your significant other both have the aspire card, um, then you, you could book a single three-night stay and at checkout, divide the spend across the two. And I'm bringing that up because remember to get the full 54 points per dollar needs to be a three-night stay at a resort that triggers the credit. So we're talking about trying to get a three-night stay for $300 after taxes is kind of silly, especially these days. And so getting one for $600 is probably also

pretty unlikely, but at least it's towards the realm of theoretically possible. And then- Particularly if you're traveling overseas. If you are traveling overseas this year, I'm finding more, I look at stuff that there are some really reasonable prices over. I was looking at a rental car in the US and I was looking at like $100 a day for like an intermediate car.

If I wanted a minivan, it's gonna be like $200 a day. Right. Right. And, and I, I are closer to that anyway. And then I was looking at one overseas and I was looking at like $20 a day. Right. Right. It's amazing. So, and the same kind of thing is happening in some cases. So you might, if you might be able to book a resort overseas somewhere for a reasonable price. Yeah. And actually probably in Mexico, there's probably plenty of availability for that type of rate. And so if you look at it, even without the Aspire credit, if you could do this, you're looking at 20% back from the Amex offer, plus depending on how you value the Hilton points, 22% at our valuation or 27% back at a half cent per point value.

So let's just call that 25% to be in between the two. And so we're looking at about a 45% rebate on that kind of stay. And then plus you get to use some amount of your credits if you haven't already. So it's a pretty, pretty nice deal. But yeah, I, I don't, I wouldn't see it as mattress run worthy, but a way to get a really nice rebate on a, on a resort stay. For sure. Yeah. A very nice rebate. So it's totally worth it if you are looking to stay at a resort and one that fits the price point, your needs, matches here, then yeah. I mean, of course, it's a great rebate. Nice to walk out with all those points and money in your pocket. So worth

looking at, not worth booking if you don't have any need for the stay. Right. Exactly. Okay. So then what crazy thing did Southwest airlines do this week? Oh man. You're all over this since you're the one who it happened to, but not the only one, are you? Oh no, I'm far from the only one. So if you're listening to this and you have any reservations on Southwest airlines, don't skip ahead to the next section yet. If you don't know what we're talking about, don't hear me say schedule change and be like, oh yeah, I got that email and skip ahead. You don't want to make that mistake. So Southwest is doing some crazy, crazy, crazy schedule changes, but it's not just the fact that they're changing schedules. So what happened to me, what kind of kicked this off

is that I had a flight booked from Albany to Seattle connecting in Chicago. So Albany, Chicago, Chicago, Seattle for this fall. And I was in my account changing some other reservations. And I saw that in my Southwest.com account, that trip was now originating in Chicago. It was only Chicago to Seattle. And I was like, but wait, I fly out of Albany. How is that? Did I make a mistake? And so I went back to my email because I know I've gotten a bunch of schedule change emails and I've kind of ignored them because those flights are far out in the future. And I don't know what I'm going to do yet. So I kind of ignored him. So I look back at the schedule change email and I was like, OK, the schedule change that Southwest sent me about this itinerary, the only change, and they highlight them in red so you can see exactly what's changed. The only change in the email that they sent me was that the flight to Seattle was going to arrive 10 minutes later and

change the flight number. So the schedule change email that I have still shows me flying Albany to Chicago to Seattle. But when I go to Southwest.com and pull up that confirmation, the Albany to Chicago leg is just gone, disappeared. Like I never booked it. It's not there. Like I would have shown up on my computer, so to speak, to check in 24 hours in advance or truthfully, I may not have even done that because I have kids. So we get to board right behind the A group. So I don't really care what boarding pass I get. So I may have waited until I got there to check in and found that I didn't have a flight from Albany to Chicago. Well, wait a minute. Let me just ask you something. Is it possible that just what you're

seeing online is the is the wrong thing and what you got in the email was right? I mean, is it possible? I would say it sounds possible, except lots of people commented to say that they had to call and get that fixed, that they called Southwest and Southwest was like, oh, wow, I don't know how this happened and help them fix their their itineraries. And one person said they had a flight from Honolulu back to the mainland where the Honolulu to the mainland leg was just mysteriously dropped off of the itinerary. They said, do they expect me to swim back from Hawaii? I mean, and I laughed and I said, you know, I'm laughing about this, but I bet you on departure day at the airport, there will be some people that are not

laughing because they'll have paid for early bird check-in or whatever and show up at the airport. And all of a sudden their first leg is just not there anymore. And the crazy thing is that in my case, it does look like they canceled my original Albany to Chicago flight. That flight isn't there anymore. But rather than rebooking us on the one that is still there, they just eliminated that altogether. But then when I looked at other schedule changes in my email, I found in other situations, again, they just dropped entire legs. I have a flight booked from Albany to Baltimore to Myrtle Beach with Myrtle Beach as my destination. Yeah. And then back two separate one ways. And in both cases, the flight between Baltimore and Myrtle beach is just gone.

Like it's just off my itinerary online. And, and, you know, I called a family member that's flying to Seattle with me and I said, Hey, you know, they've changed this. We're gonna have to get this fixed. And she said, no, I got a schedule change email. It still leaves out Albany. She's like, my flight leaves out Albany. And I was like, no, I don't think it does look it up online and on southwest.com. She's like, no, at least from Albany. And she video chats me and shows me her screen triumphantly. No, look at this email. It says I'm flying from Albany. And I said, yeah, I know go to southwest.com. And she did. And she was like, oh yeah. Wow. How would I know that? Who would know who would know Southwest? So, and this has happened to a lot of people. When you look at the comments on the post, lots and lots of people are having this where they had flights where legs are just gone or nonstops were changed to three stops, even though there's still a nonstop between their origin and destination. in a schedule change email from Southwest. Don't believe what's in the email. Go to Southwest.com,

look at the itinerary and then kick back and relax and get ready to wait on hold for two hours. Cause you're gonna have to call and get it sorted out. Is it, is it long holds? That's what, that's what people are saying. Yeah. And, and, and this might not be as big of an issue if your original itinerary is still available and it hasn't changed so much that, that Southwest is going to give you like the free change thing that they do. Cause you know how they do that these days where, you know, if there's been a significant change, sometimes you can change to any other flight for free between those two cities.

But the problem with that is that like my Chicago to Seattle flight, I could only change to another Chicago to Seattle flight online. I can't change that to Albany anymore. But with flights that haven't had a significant schedule change, you might be able to just fix it yourself online. You know what I think about this? I think that, Nick, you're just a big complainer. Your Southwest has proactively changed you from a one-stop itinerary to a non-stop itinerary, and you're complaining about it.

You're right. You're right. You're right. They did. They changed me to the non-stop, right? All I got to do is drive myself, you know, exactly 14 hours or whatever it is to Chicago from here. That's all I got to do. That's all I got to do. That's all you got to do. So yeah, thanks for that Southwest. So I actually haven't even gotten that sorted out yet. I saw lots of readers did, but I haven't actually fixed it for mine yet. So that's an adventure that I'm looking forward to. But yeah, crazy, crazy, crazy. Did you not do it yet because you're on vacation this week?

And so you're like, nah, I'll do it during freaking miler time when I'm back on the clock. Right, right, right. Exactly. That's my plan. Darn it. Discovered, discovered.

I understand your deviousness. But actually, I mean, actually, this kind of stuff is related to your job and always gets source material like what happened just here. Right? Exactly. Exactly. My wife is asking me, what are you doing? And I'm like, I'm just sending a quick email to Greg and Steve. And she's like, are you working on that list that I gave you of things that have to get done? And I was like, I'm getting there. Hang on just two seconds here. I know I'm on vacation, but this is too interesting. So your vacation is about doing your honeydew list.

Is that it? It is. That's the deal. Like it's literally printed out. I got a printout this week of stuff to do. So so I'm working my way through. And one of the things on that printout was not change the flights. But now, of course, it is. So I added that one. So,

so we'll get there. All right. That's the crazy thing. So then that brings us to the main event. Welcome to the main event. Yeah. Main event. So Chase added Air Canada as a transfer partner. And when they did so, I proudly declared that Air Canada's award prices are often better than united's uh which is another transfer partner from chase uh and i said especially on long haul

uh premium cabin routes so then they were they were often better than than united for a long time so then yes they they used to be um so then i i did some comparison to see was that thing i published sometimes i should do that in advance but in this case i didn't and you And the answer was kind of mixed. So first of all, that statement did say premium cabin. So let me first address economy awards. Even though I didn't say you should expect economy awards to be cheaper with Air Canada, I didn't expect them to be significantly worse than United, but in almost every route I checked, United had better award pricing in economy than Air Canada. Now, it's important to say every route I checked, because it's not like I checked all possible routes. I grabbed a handful of both domestic and international routes and looked at them.

I tried to pick sort of popular destinations. But yeah, United, both on domestic and international routes, economy was just better, cheaper. So there you go. You no doubt went back to the original post and sent a little update in there, right. To say, actually, maybe not off. I don't, I can't remember if I've updated that or not. I don't think you did. Oh boy.

I need to get back there. Just let me mini roast. I got a mini roast in there. Yeah, there you go. So, um, so now let's look at, at business class. I didn't actually look at, first class awards within domestic US because they're so hard to find where there's saver availability, where you can book United first class with Air Canada. The one where I did find was a very short route and Air Canada was cheaper,

but that's to be expected because Air Canada has a kind of hybrid distance-based award chart. So that wasn't a surprise. On longer routes, it probably wouldn't be cheaper. Internationally, though, I did expect to see Air Canada cheaper, and it was sometimes, but just as often, if not more often, United was cheaper for business class international routes. And the difference tended to be more significant when United was cheaper than when Air Canada was cheaper. So in all of those cases I looked at, I wouldn't feel that bad using United miles instead of Air Canada miles, because it was only like 10,000 points-ish, points ish more, whereas Air Canada was some often 20,000 points more than United as an example. Okay. And then, then we looked at first-class international awards there. It's, it's very clear, at least I only, I only found

and published two, but, but those two were, were very clear. Air Canada is better at that top level. They have a better award chart at that top first class level incorrect when I said you'll often find better pricing, but it suggested... It depends on what you're searching for. Yeah, it suggested, I think, that it was more likely than is true in fact. Well, okay. And I will give you that, that perhaps the choice of words or the situations that different people will find themselves in, it certainly may not be the case that Air Canada is priced better. But even with that said, I have a couple of feelings here. So first of all, when it comes to domestic economy class redemptions, United should have the best price on anything where they've got their weird variable pricing, and it's less than 7,500 miles each way.

And then anywhere where Air Canada can book it, I mean, let's be real. I could book that with Turkish miles, hopefully, if it works, for 7,500 miles one way in economy or 12,500 one way in business. So I don't really care about Air Canada's pricing on domestic flights because I got Turkish. So, and I got a life miles. So those are options that are better now, of course, Chase doesn't have those options. So, so it's not improving anything for Chase with that, but that doesn't mean it's bad news. I mean, that's not the strength of using your Canada miles. So, yeah, you're not going to get a better deal on economy, but that's not you're not going to get a better deal than Turkish for domestic

economy anyway. So so unless, you know, it happens to have, again, those 5000 mile flights or whatever. Right. Which they which they do sometimes, which they do sometimes. Yeah. All right. So is it good news, though? Overall, is it good news? Now, personally, I don't have a big problem with the fact that they don't always have better pricing than United. I found it interesting a moment ago that you said that if United costs 10,000 miles more, you don't feel that bad booking it through United. I mean, if United added $150 worth of fuel surcharges, would you then want to book through United or through Air Canada? Of course, you'd book through Air Canada and not pay the fuel surcharges, right? So you don't want to pay 10,000 miles more. And the good news is you

don't have to because they're both Chase partners. So you wouldn't pay 10,000 miles more and book it via United. You'd transfer to Air Canada instead. That's the value of having multiple transfer partners that you can pick the one that's best in each situation. So while Air Canada might not be better than United in all situations, they're better in at least some before we dig into it and at least some. So that adds value to the chase. Oh, it absolutely does. There's no question about that. But it goes from that investigation led me from sort of a excitement of like, oh, ultimate rewards, Chase Ultimate Awards points are worth, you know, a lot more than before, because now finally, there's a good transfer partner for booking international business and first class awards. And after doing

that research, the excitement about that, you know, came down quite a bit. So let me pump you back up then. So when we talked about transfer programs a few weeks ago on this show, we talked about how kind of simplifying things we said, Chase is really basically the best program for beginners who want to have easy ways to use points. And we said that Amex is better for people who are more intermediate or advanced because their transfer partners tend to involve more more complication, but also sweet spots for those looking for complicated stuff. And I think that this addition of Aeroplan adds a bit of that complex element that makes Chase Ultimate Rewards points more interesting to me because when you talk about routes where Air Canada was 10 or 20,000 miles more than United, 20,000, I think you said, the thing to keep in mind there is for anybody who's interested in complex itineraries, that means that for another 5,000,

for 25,000 on top, you could see two destinations. And in some of these regions, that's a really wide, wide range of places. So you left out the Pacific region altogether when you were making those comparisons. And the Pacific region is really where it's at. If you've got any interest in traveling to either Asia or Australia or both, then the Air Canada chart is really interesting because they charge at the top end, at the longest itineraries, 105,000 miles one way in business class to Australia or anywhere else in that whole Asia region. And they have so many partners that fly to Asia where you can get yourself a 5,000 mile stopover. So for 110,000 miles in business class, you could visit two places. You could fly EVA and visit Taipei plus somewhere else in Asia,

or you could fly ANA and visit Tokyo plus somewhere else in Asia or Australia by the way continue on to Australia right or New Zealand or whatever it might be or you could fly New Zealand if you actually found award space and stop in Auckland and then continue on or Asiana and go to Seoul and continue I mean and so we could continue

with this list but the key is there are lots and lots of partners that travel to Asia and the Pacific. So if you have any interest in that area, even though Air Canada probably does charge more than United for a very simple one-way business class itinerary, if you're looking for anything complex, this makes Ultimate Rewards much better. not better than an ANA around the world or some of the ANA sweet spots out there, but much better than what ultimate rewards offered before. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, let me go back to domestic flights. Um, this is, I'm now going to talk about Hawaii. So one of the things- I like hearing about Hawaii.

Talk to me about Hawaii. So we've talked about how United Awards, business class awards to Hawaii or first class awards to Hawaii are almost impossible to find. However, I found that on the day of the flight, they are very often available. And so just this morning, what I did is I logged into United to check whether Denver to the Big Island nonstop flight

was available in business class. And there were something like four or five seats available in first class. Because some people who are listening with an eagle ear, so to speak, I guess that's the equivalent of an eagle eye, might've caught something you just said. And I think you maybe misspoke. Did you log in at United or you just went to united.com? I just went to United. I didn't log in. You said you logged in to United and I was thinking, Ooh, if you log in, you might see space that's not available to partners, right? That's true. That's true in economy not available to partners right that's true that's true in economy i don't think it's true in business class but either way i didn't like it

okay good okay just wanted to clarify that for anybody who thought you were seeing something the next step will will uh put your mind at ease anyway okay so once i once i saw that i went over to air canada did the same search and what i and i did find the same search and what I, and I did find the same availability. And what I found is United who charges more on flights that are within, what is it? 21 days. They wanted something like 52,700, some weird, weird number of miles per person for this one way, uh, first-class flight Air Canada wanted 35,000. And so, yeah, the, the, uh, taxes are a little bit more like 30 bucks more, but you know, obviously it's worth it to save that many miles. And, um, that is really cool because, uh, you know, one, if, if you have chase points, you can,

you can do it too. If you have, uh, the ability to transfer to Turkish where, where Turkish would only charge 12,500 miles. And I verified that by looking online and Turkish is showing that 12,500 for these flights. Then, um, the problem is transfers to Turkish are nowhere near instant. So you can't fly same day if you wanted to. No, and you can't book it online right now. As far as I know, there's been no change. There's no button to pay. So you'd have to call and hold the phone agent. Yeah. I mean, you can't do that. No, that's not going to work out. That's not

going to work out. You need to be able to go a little farther in advance. Right, right. So anyway, the point is, you know, here's like a sort of sweet spot for Chase customers, Chase Ultimate Awards people who... If you have the flexibility to take off to Hawaii today. If you have the flexibility to take off, you know, last minute, or come back last minute.

And I mean, I'm seriously thinking about that for the future, doing the following. Booking, at least let's talk about the return. I like to book lie flat return flights from Hawaii because they tend to be overnight. You want to be able to lie flat and sleep. So, you know, what I'd love to do is, is because there's an ever award availability in first class is just book an economy flight coming back on an airline that would, I could easily change or cancel that flight for free when the time comes. Southwest, almost all of them now. American. I could just pick whoever has the best pricing pretty much.

And be prepared to fly that if the United, you know, board space doesn't show up on the morning that, that I'm going to be checking out. And, but if the word space does show up, you know, book it and, and then, you know, cancel the other one. So now that's, I think that's a really interesting way to go about it. I'm, I'm intrigued by that also because I happen to have a bunch of Turkish miles in my account from canceled stuff. So if I could magically, I mean, if the button never comes back or, or if, you know, a phone agent is magically able to see same day availability, I don't know. I mean,

it's intriguing to me anyway. I like that strategy. So, all right. So that may be a time when Aeroplan comes in handy for Chase Ultimate Rewards customers for last minute travel. I mean, you found that on the Hawaii route there, but probably that same type of logic applies on other routes as well, I would assume. I don't know what the premium transcon rates are. We're assuming that transfers to Air Canada are instant. They are with transfers to Air Canada are instant from Amex. So I'm sure it's true. I meant to bring that up actually. And I was going to say, check the show notes because surely when this show ends, when we finish recording it, one of us is going to make a transfer to Aeroplan just to check and make sure that it's instant. And I'll put it in the show notes,

whether or not it was. I'm sure it probably is. So we'll know anyway, by the time you listen to this, just check those notes. If you're on YouTube, you got to go to the video description. If you're on a podcast platform, it's in there somewhere if you go into the notes. Okay. So I think that's interesting as well. And then, you know, when I talk about these complex itineraries, you have to remember that, I mean, I mentioned how big the Asia and Australia, the Pacific region is, but most of the regions are really big. So the same thing is true with the Atlantic region. Pricing to Europe is now more expensive. And so, you know, you looked at some routes to Europe where generally speaking, United is going to have a cheaper price if what you're doing is looking to just fly from the U.S. to one city in Europe and back, then yeah, United is going to be a better option for that. But because that Atlantic region includes Africa and India, then, you know, if you're willing to

pay the higher distance rates at the higher end of the award chart, again, you can put together an itinerary that includes two totally different regions. And when I say different regions, I mean what we think of typically as regions, because most of us would not consider India and South Africa and Germany in the same region, but Aeroplan does. So if you're willing to, or if you're interested in, I should say, putting together some of those multi-stop itineraries, it's not just the Asia Pacific region where that's interesting. Though, as I say that, I guess you would have to check in

and see what the United pricing would be to book those flights separately, because I don't know in all cases that Aeroplan will still come out cheaper. Yeah, because the direct awards to Africa on United were a lot cheaper. This is business class I'm talking about, than with Aeroplan. So it is possible that booking them separately with United might be cheaper or might be very close anyway. And don't forget the extra 5,000 miles to book a stopover with Air Canada. Of course, yeah. That could definitely make them comparable, but I don't know. Yeah, and that'll probably somewhat depend on which things you're trying to combine.

All right, here's another reason why Aeroplan is a great addition for Chase Ultima Rewards. Anybody who's got very young kids, I'm talking about lap infants under two years old, Here's another reason why Aeroplan is a great addition for Chase Ultima Awards. Anybody who's got very young kids, I'm talking about lap infants under two years old, Aeroplan is a fantastic addition for you because Aeroplan charges now just 2,500 miles one way for a lap infant. Now compare that to United. United is going to charge you 10% of the revenue fare of however much the revenue fare costs, which if you're booking, for example, a one-way international business class award, 10% of the revenue fare can be a lot of money. And instead, Aeroplan will charge you just 2,500 miles. And that to me is fantastic. I still have a son who will be a lap infant for another year. So hopefully I'll be able to take

advantage of that. But you know, if that's your bag, then aeroplane is a great addition to ultimate rewards. Because I don't think ultimate rewards had any partners that had good lap infant policies on international itineraries. I think all of their Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Atlantic, I'm sorry, you're right, Virgin Atlantic, which does have excellent international award chart spots for infant awards also. So lap infants do fly cheaply with Virgin Atlantic in terms of using miles. And British Airways charges 10% of the adult mileage fare. So I mean, that may come in handy in the right situations, but I think 2,500 airplane miles is as good as it's going to get. That's a great deal. Now, one thing,

conversely, about this whole thing is United doesn't charge award change fees. And cancellation fees, as long as you cancel more than 30 days in advance, there's no cancellation fees, meaning you get back your miles, you get back any taxes and fees you paid. Air Canada currently, for flights booked now before the end of August 2021, is not charging any change or cancellation fees, but that ends at the end of August unless they extend it again, which they've done in the past. But the point is Air Canada's policy is temporary. United's is intended to be permanent or announced to be impermanent.

So that's a case where once Air Canada starts charging these things, if the prices are close, I'm going to want to go with United, especially if it's one that I'm not sure of. If I'm booking a same day flight, like the Hawaii thing, I don't mind getting locked in, obviously, because I know I'm going to fly. Right. Right. I mean, and that's, you know, that's why I would obviously prefer it if Aeroplan didn't have any change fees. But that's why I think overall, this is, even though there are some differences, it's not bad news for sure. And I think it is great news because it gives some variety. It gives you a new option that's going to save you miles in that situation. So I think Aeroplan is a pretty situational program. It's going to depend on each individual spot. Even though they have a better

award price on that route, it may not be worth it if you're booking something far, far in advance where it might change, but it certainly will be worth it if you're, like you said, booking that last minute flight. So, and, you know, I talked about the complex itineraries and not everybody can take the time to fly to Europe and India, you know, by way of Africa or whatever it might be, you know, not everybody's got the ability to do that. I understand that. So that's not going to be good news for someone who's not interested in that. But I think having the variety, the ability to do that, if that becomes something that you want to do, I think that's a really big addition for ultimate travel becomes available to us again, I think we've talked about you should be able to book a flight all the way to Australia with a stopover and then onward to, for example, South Africa and just pay one price with the 5,000 mile addition for that stopover, which would be drastically cheaper than United or probably just about any other currency. And that's a great point because that's something that I feel like hasn't been touched on very much because Air Canada hasn't made that feature live yet.

But they do. I mean, they have said a number of times already that they intend to unveil a totally new award booking system. And that is supposed to be one of the features that you can more or less choose the flights you want to choose. And we're a little skeptical, but if you're listening and you're like, but wait a second, Australia and Africa aren't in the same region, you're right. But the way Air Canada made this sound was that you would be able to book the itinerary you want to book. So if you want to book a flight to South Africa and pay the price to fly to the Atlantic region, but you want to do it really far at the farthest end of their distance band, it's okay if you connect in another region.

So you could fly to Australia in order to get there, like Greg is saying. So, again, amazing if and when that comes together for people who have the flexibility to do that. Again, not everybody, but not every transfer partner program has to be perfect for every person. I think it's great news to have that because, again, there was nothing like this in the Ultimate Rewards ecosystem. My gripe with Ultimate Rewards for a long time has been that very few of their partners turn out to be the best in any particular situation. And it just didn't seem like they had many of those types of strengths. And none of them really had much that was interesting to offer. But Aeroplan really does. Right, right.

So I'm just going to take exception to your decision to the, your decision that it's great news. All right. I'm putting it somewhere in between good and great. Okay. All right. I would, I would be okay with great if it was like, usually going to work out cheaper. But if it's like under these very unusual circumstances, it's going to be cheaper. I just can't quite get to great on that one.

You see, to me, that's better news than if every single award were 10,000 miles cheaper than what United charges. That wouldn't excite me as much. Because even if they're 10,000 miles cheaper than what United charges, they're not necessarily going to be the best deal if you collect multiple currencies anyway. And you yourself just said a few minutes ago that the 10,000 miles basically didn't make a big difference to you in the overall scheme of things. And I argued that it should. But I'll argue here now that if that's your perspective, then even if they were the cheapest in every single situation, that wouldn't necessarily be great news to me. Great news to me is having the ability

to eke out fantastic value from these weird sweet spots. I mean, that's the space where we thrive, right? I mean, we enjoy finding those crazy sweet spots. So to me, that's what I want. It's great news for us because we get to write about these crazy sweet spots. But most Chase customers aren't gonna be doing those. Okay, that is, I'm sure, true. but most, most chase customers aren't going to be doing this. Okay. That's that,

that is I'm sure true. So I guess, yes, if you're looking at it from that perspective, it's not great news. I think the ability to have that stuff, if, and when it comes together is worth more than these awards being a couple

thousand miles less, because you can already book probably for a couple thousand miles less. Just get yourself some membership rewards points. If's what you want if you want i mean you're looking at europe and you're saying oh united is better because they charge what 60,000 miles one way or whatever i mean i don't remember the details get yourself some some amex points and book those flights to europe for 40 or 50,000 miles one way yeah but amex points are so hard to get so hard to get this so many to get. There's just so many cards. It's hard to decide which one, right?

Because there's just too many cards. They're hard. Very difficult. Oh my gosh. All right. That was obviously a joke about it being hard to get. They're so easy to get these days. So easy.

In fact, I just published a post about my wife signing up for a few Amex cards and a couple other cards. And just on the Amex side alone, she's looking at many hundreds of thousands of points maybe close to half a million. If she gets approved for the the Schwab and Max's that out, but it's yeah, it's been raining Amex points for quite a while, but anyway,

so we're somewhere between good and great. We're like the positive. Well, we're between very good and great, which I think our audience has got to be tired of that debate. Right. So it's very good news. Great news. Who cares? It's positive. You agree it's positive news. I think it's a good addition.

So, all right. So thank you very much Chase for adding Arrowplan finally. Are you excited about the credit card, Greg? Because I mean, you wrote about the credit card this week and you said, hey, you can pre-register now for an extra 10,000 miles when it comes out. I know we don't have the details yet. Do you think that it's likely that it's going to be something you're going to be at all interested in?

Well, so no, I don't think it's likely, but, but that's not to say it won't be exciting for some, because I think it's likely that there will be a premium card that has, you know just don't know why. It would have to be someone who flies Air Canada a lot, not just Star Alliance, but Air Canada a lot for elite status to matter that much to you, I think. But anyway, if that matters to you, then I think we could have an exciting offering coming. Yeah, I'm not excited. Yes, you're right. That may be the case. The premium card may offer some interesting benefits or something. But yeah, I mean, especially with Amex points, so easy to come by right now.

I can't imagine how many points Chase would have to offer on the Aeroplan card to make that a blip on the radar these days. You know, to be worth giving up a 524 slot rather than having just opened up the Sapphire Preferred for 100,000. Because, I mean, are they going to give more than 100,000 aeroplane miles? Are you at 110 because you registered ahead of time? Is that going to move the needle? I don't know. I mean, I feel very skeptical that I'm going to be excited about it.

But, you know, Chase, if you're listening, change my mind. What's your guess of the best, uh, welcome offer they'll introduce when they are playing cards come out. I, you know, keep in mind first, keep in mind that, uh, uh, the recent new United card, uh, whatever that's called the quest or something. Um, it a hundred K came out with a 100K offer, right? But the United, I think it's a business card right now, has a 150K offer. Of course, 20K spend, but still. So with those two parameters and with all the obvious cards like British Airways all out at 100K, what do you think? I mean, you're leading me to say it's got to be 100K, right? But I did have that thought. It's got to be 100K.

So I guess it's going to be 110 if you register for the extra 10,000 miles now. I can't see them going any higher than United. I could have seen them going 75, except that, like you said, all of the Avios cards went 100. So I feel like in Air Canada, I got to say the Aeroplan people seem more in touch with what's going on and more interested in having a competitive program. I imagine that they are aware. I'm sure that there are some loyalty programs that don't pay that much attention to what everybody else is offering. Aeroplan, I expect, is an exception where I bet that they know. They're clearly aware that the Avios cards have been offering 100,000 and United cards, 100, 150.

So I can't imagine that they're going to want to go less than that. So I think 100 is likely it. And on the premium card, I don't think they're going to go 150. Maybe they will. I'm thinking maybe 125. Or maybe just better benefits and even a lesser sign-up bonus.

I don't know. Right, right. I'm going to go out on a limb and say 150 K with 20 K spend, you know, and then, and then you have the possibility of getting 10 K more. I don't think it's super likely, but I feel like I need to throw out a guess. Throw out a guess. All right. Let's see. We'll see. We'll find out probably in November. It sounds like so. That's right. That's right. Okay. Well then that brings us my friends to the post roast. And I gave Greg a lot of material this week for his post. Yeah. So Nick's been on vacation, so I don't have anything.

Okay. Well, that's fine. I'll make up for it. So. All right. All right. So let's see where to begin for this week's post roast. So many good weeks. So many, so many, I mean, I already got a little mini marshmallow roast in there before, but so yeah, there you go. So here's one for you. You wrote this post, like you said, about Player 2, about your wife earning some half a million points from recent applications as Player 2 in the household.

And that's great. That's exciting. But when I read through it, I was like, okay, so she got a hundred thousand points. Where's the $200 for converting her bank of America cash rewards to an unlimited rewards. Did you not get that option? Is there no, I mean, because if you haven't been paying attention, bank of America has been offering a lot of cash rewards customers, a $200 bonus to product change, not even open a new account to product change to the new cash unlimited card or the unlimited cash card or whatever it's called. Did you not add that in there, Craig? She didn't get that. Or at least if she did, I haven't found it. Bummer. It seems like

an easy $200. You don't even have to apply for a new account. It's like, you know, no, no, no, five. Yeah, no, that would be really nice. All right. So there's no roast then. If you, no roast in that anyway, if you didn't get that. Okay. So then let's move on. All right. No, no, no, no, no. We're not done.

We're not done. We're not done. So in your player two post, this isn't so much a roast. Maybe this is a suggestion or maybe this is a topic that we need to cover. So when I read your player two post, I thought of a conversation that I had on Twitter recently with another blogger who was saying that she needed to find a way to use the points from an Amex gold welcome bonus before closing the card. And so several of us were like, well, just get a blue business plus or an Amex every day. You don't need to spend those points right away. And she was like, well, no, player two is really reluctant and doesn't want to open any other cards. So we've got to find a way to use these points and use them now. And so I understand that a lot of people have a reluctant player two.

Greg and I are in the fortunate circumstance, I think, of each having a player two that is not reluctant. Perhaps your player two is less interested in manufactured spending than mine, but not certainly putting up a fight over a new card. Right. So my player two is happy to sign up for cards. It just doesn't want to actually do anything that involves going into stores, buying gift cards or buying money orders or even calling banks. So I, I try to avoid situations where I, you know, I can't, uh, secure message or, or do other ways of, of making changes for her accounts. Right. Right. And, and, you know, I, and I, I love the days where I have to write notes so that my player two can make one of those calls and be like, okay, these are the things you need to know.

So, so I totally can sympathize with a player two that's even less interested. Cause I mean, we're pretty fortunate in that regard, I feel like. And some people have a player two that's just totally disinterested in this. So I get that. But what I was thinking as I read it was, you know, there ought to be a post or maybe a section of the player two posts. That's like, okay, basic player two strategy. These are the fights you want to have in the beginning, right? If you're going to, if we're going to play the game, we've got to play it with some strategy, right? Like, you know, if you're, if you're going to open these cards and get these points, then we have to have a strategy for how we're going to keep those points alive

and how we're going to use them. So this isn't necessarily a roast of your post, but as I read through it, I was like, you know, it would be good in a player to post to tell people, OK, so this is what player two is doing. And this is how I'm making sure that this is going to work out long term without player two having to, you know, like add any more difficulty because you're going to pick up all those membership rewards points. And you're going to eventually probably cancel a bunch of those cards. And you're not going to have to worry about it because you already had the fight early on where you were. I say fight. I'm sure it wasn't a fight in your household, but to say, hey, listen, you need to have a Blue Business Plus earn every day because we want to be able to hang on to those points long-term, right? Right, right. So Nick's pointing out those

two cards because they're both fee-free and just by having one of them, it keeps your points alive, no matter what you do with your other Amex cards. So yes, she already has a Blue Business Plus. And so there's no fear there. I'm already a authorized user on, might be the Blue Business Plus, at least some of her cards. So that gives me the power to transfer her points, not to my membership rewards points, but to any of my loyalty programs. So if I want to add points to my ANA account or to Air Canada, I can do that from her program,

from her points dash. And that's a key piece of strategy that I feel like probably needs to get highlighted in. I don't know necessarily if it was missing from that post, but as I read it and I thought about that, I was like, you know what? Those are things that not everybody knows to do with their player too, because I mean, that makes those points more valuable because now you can transfer them to player one's loyalty accounts in that case with the Amex points, because it's not intuitive with Amex the way it is with Chase

to be able to combine points in a household or like the Wyndham points. They expire after a certain number of years. So, you know, what are you going to do to make sure that that doesn't happen? And obviously you've found some, some things on that recently, and maybe you have some plans for how you're going to use the points, but if you're going to play with player two, you got to have some long-term strategy, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. So I think that's a great idea for future posts, maybe, maybe sort of a summary of, of how to deal with these different programs in a player to kind of environment situation so that you can keep the points. Because it's great. It's great to get the 500,000 points, but yeah, but you got to be able to, you don't want to end up in a hurry to use them or something or, or without a plan as to how you're going to use them. Cause I often run into that too. The people ask questions and frequent miler insiders.

They're like, Hey, I opened this card and now I don't know what to do with the points. And so, you know, you want to, if you're going to help player to sign up for cards, you want to have a plan for what you're going to do with those points or

how you're going to keep them alive. One of the other. Great point. Okay. Great point. All right. So that's it. That's a,

that's where I'm going to finish my post roast. I really kind of want to see on me. Well, I kind of want to roast your Hyatt post too, but I feel like that's a conversation for another day because I'm more concerned about those destination residences than Greg is. So that's another conversation for another day. All right. So then that brings us to the question of the week. And this week's question is a fantastic question, I think. So I'm excited to bring it up here. I have it on my- I'd say it's a very good question, but not fantastic. No, no. We'll argue that afterwards. So Stephen in our Frequent Miler Insiders asked a question, and it's kind of long, but I think maybe it's worth reading it. So Stephen says, anyone else having trouble getting the IRS to refund money they overpaid, meeting the minimum spend

on a signup bonus. Stephen says, I filed in January and haven't received the balance back yet. And for those not looking at the calendar, we're now in August. So it's been a long time. He says the IRS doesn't view this as a refund. So any automated system about where's my refund doesn't work, but I can see online on my tax transcript that they received my payment and consider I have a credit. However, I can't get a hold of a human being to discuss getting the credit dispersed. I have called all the IRS and tax advocacy numbers, and they all literally lead to an automated voice saying they're too busy to answer questions at this time, blah, blah,

blah, hang up on him. It's going on two months of intermittent calling. He filed a paper request for tax advocacy a month ago and received no response. Anything else one can do? I guess you can consider this a warning about overpaying taxes when the IRS is so underfunded that there's no one to help get your money back. I don't know. At any rate, do you know of other people that have had this issue?

Because we've written, you've written many times about paying taxes via the IRS. And if you end up paying too much, you get a refund, blah, blah. Do you know about this situation and what can Stephen do? Yeah, just a little bit. So this happened to me last year. Something about the pandemic and how they're under-resourced and overworked. Yeah, my refund took forever to come back last year, and it doesn't surprise me at all to hear that it's happening again. Unfortunately, I don't know of any solution to speed it up. It's really unfortunate that it's become so difficult to both get a hold of them and that their that their, their processes are so slow. So yeah, unfortunately it's just didn't work out during pandemic time.

Yeah. So, I mean, that's, that's definitely something to keep in mind because, you know, if you do it just a little bit, maybe that's not such a big deal. If you can afford to float, however much you've overpaid, but you kind of need to be careful because I think some people have overpaid by hefty amounts before. And so you don't want to be out that money and waiting eight or nine months. So it's definitely something to keep in mind, but it's worth mentioning that you've probably not had this be a problem a number of times also, right? I mean, you've had this. Right. I mean, pre-pandemic, the refund would come back usually pretty quickly, certainly within a month or so of filing. So it's surprising that it's taking so long. And

again, unfortunately, I have no idea what to do about it because if it's impossible to get a hold of a person, I don't know how you could get help. So, but you did go through this last year and you did eventually get the money back, right? Yeah. I mean, luckily for me, it wasn't, you know, of guessing here because I don't remember the dates, but maybe about four or five months after filing. If you're going to do that as a means of meeting a welcome bonus, I mean, it can be a legit way and an easy way to meet a welcome bonus. But keep in mind that if something gets held up, it could be a long time. I would certainly go easy on that over this next year or two. That's a good warning from Stephen anyway as to what could happen. So, all right. Careful out there, everybody.

If you've enjoyed what you've been listening to and you would like to get on our email list so you can read about this stuff every day or every week, we've got lots of different options. You can go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to get on our email list and find all the ways to follow us on social media. You can join our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group so you can connect with other readers and listeners and get your questions answered and help other folks too. So thank you very much for being out there with us and we will see you guys again next week. Bye everybody.