Frequent Miler on the Air - Chase points: 10 Best and 5 Worst uses of Ultimate Rewards | Ep272 | 9-13-24

Starting point is 00:00:00 Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did City do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event, Frequent Miler on the Air, starts now. Today's main event, Chase Points, 10 Best and 5 Worst Uses of Ultimate Rewards. Last week we talked about how to amass chase ultimate rewards points. And this week, we're going to talk about some of our favorite ways to use them. And some of our least favorite ways, things that you should avoid. Yeah, and that's important, the things that you should avoid doing so you don't use your points at low value. You know, I find these two topics both interesting, because some people are all

Starting point is 00:00:43 about the thrill of the hunt, right? Some people just really want to amass lots of miles of points and like to see a huge balance growing but i think i am more i mean i like that but i think i'm more in the camp of it's more fun to use the points right to redeem them so i'm kind of excited about talking about redeeming them but i think that both sides have their dopamine hit and we'll talk more about some of the best uses today but don't forget we always have the timestamps in the show notes. So if you want to jump ahead to a specific section or you want to return to something again later on, you can find those timestamps in the show notes. Just expand the description box.

Starting point is 00:01:13 And wherever you're watching or listening, please give us a like. Give us five or six or 12 stars or whatever it is. Leave us a rating. Let us know what you think about everything that we have to say today. All right. Let's talk about this week's announcements. We got some announcements to start with, right? Yeah, we do. So we are introducing a new weekly series of videos on YouTube. So I'm sorry for those who just like to listen via podcast, but these are specifically visual. This is Nick and I walking you through how

Starting point is 00:01:46 to do stuff on a desktop. And so it doesn't translate well to podcast form. So please make sure to go over to our YouTube channel and follow it. So you'll be alerted when there's new stuff. So far, we released how to use Delta companion tickets. So I showed Nick how to book, for example, round trip to Hawaii and add a companion for free, where free means you pay a little in taxes and fees. Coming soon, we've recorded but haven't

Starting point is 00:02:18 yet published four ways to book Hyatt suites with your Hyatt rewards. And there's just many more coming soon. Cause we're going to be recording these every week. Yeah. We got a whole bunch more coming and hopefully it'll be useful. We've often found that people like the how-to videos and we decided, well, why don't we just record these together and show people how to do stuff.

Starting point is 00:02:37 So hopefully you'll find them useful. Like Greg said, don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel in order to get notified when we publish those, because we haven't, I don't think landed on an exact publication schedule for that yet. So, uh, so at any rate, you'll want to subscribe so that you can find out when those come out and we'll obviously probably publish stuff on the blog about them as well as we do them. So again, hopefully you find that useful. Let us know in the comments on this, what you would like to see a

Starting point is 00:03:00 how-to video about. We'd love to hear from you in terms of what you think we should be talking about how to do or showing people how to do. All right, but that's not it. We also this week have an updated resource to discuss. So Tim updated our post about using buying groups. So buying groups are a way to increase credit card spend and get most of your money back. And so, or sometimes even more than you spend. And this can be a really good way to increase credit card spend and get most of your money back. And so or sometimes even

Starting point is 00:03:25 more than you spend. And this can be a really good way to do that, right to increase your credit card spend. But but it's not without some potential caveats without some potential pitfalls and problems. So make sure you read the post for the cautions, but it's newly updated. So he's got lots of new information about buying groups in there. So if you're kind of interested in getting dipping your toes in that field, that pool, then this could be a good thing to read to get started. And again, for those who aren't familiar with buying groups, the basic idea is that you buy a product that let's say, I don't know, I'm going to pick Amazon as an example. And this is probably a bad example. But let's say Amazon puts a product on sale, but they limit it to one per person.

Starting point is 00:04:04 Well, buying group is a group that will say, okay, well, if you buy that and give it to us so that we can resell it, we'll pay you back your money or sometimes a little bit of profit or sometimes a little bit of loss, depending on the situation. But that's the general idea of a buying group. There are a lot of things to know though. So you'll want to check out that post. We'll have a link in the show notes. Yep. All right. Let's drag out this week's giant mailbag. All right. Today's giant mail comes from Amanda. Amanda says, I've heard y'all say you don't think very many people use the online grocery shopping bonus category of the Chase Sapphire preferred card. Perhaps you're wrong about that. Many, many, many moms, I like how Amanda counted them up, many moms buy the bulk of our weekly groceries online for pickup because it means that we don't

Starting point is 00:04:55 have to drag children into the grocery store. It's a miracle of modern grocery shopping and we love it. And it's usually cheaper because there are fewer impulse purchases. This 3x bonus category, which I use at Kroger and HEB in Texas, earns say she actually earns 36,000 points, but she's not counting the base number of 12,000 that she would have earned if she didn't get 3X for this category. So that was a little confusing. But anyway, she's basically, to sum up, she's getting 36,000 points from buying groceries. So that's pretty good. All this to say, online grocery shopping for pickup might be much more popular than you can see. What do you think, Nick? Did we undervalue this benefit? Maybe we did. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure that that exploded in popularity during the pandemic, and I'm sure tons of people have remained used to

Starting point is 00:06:02 doing it. So I think that's a great point. I appreciate the feedback on that one, Amanda. So thanks for putting us in our place on that one. Do you use online grocery pickup and why or why not? Is this something you do? I don't. Or in your household? I don't. I've used it a couple times over time, but... Just goes to show how out of touch we are. No, to go and see what, you know, see what's actually there, pick out because especially with things like fruit and meat, you want to see what you're actually getting and not let someone else pick it up for you. That's exactly why we don't, we did use it some during the pandemic, of course. And, uh, and that's exactly why we don't, because so many times we ended up getting produce or, you know, it's fruit or vegetables, essentially, that were not the ones we would have

Starting point is 00:06:49 picked. And our younger son is very particular, let's say it's almost exclusively fruit. And so, you know, if we buy a bunch of fruit, and a bunch of it's not good, that's like the wasted money there is probably more significant than the amount of time we might have saved by doing online. So we don't do online a lot. But if we shopped differently, where we were buying produce, or maybe a lot of people subscribe to some sort of a service to get fresh produce regularly, and then just go and buy the dry goods. And if you're in that kind of a situation, I could totally see it. And obviously, if you've got a grocery store that's good at giving you good produce, then, you know, I would,

Starting point is 00:07:26 I would enjoy the convenience of that. So and I bet that Amanda's right. I bet there are tons of people that would find a use in that. So thank you for mentioning that. Because hopefully, we'll plant a seed and some minds out there who are like, Oh, yeah, actually, we either do that or could do that and earn a lot of points that way. So thank you for that. Yeah. And I would bet that there's even some dads out there and maybe even some childless people who do online pickup as well. One or two, one or two out there could be. All right. Very good.

Starting point is 00:07:56 Thanks for that, Amanda. Let's talk about card news. Card news this week. The Wyndham cards are out with brand new offers, increased offers on each of the different Wyndham cards, both the consumer and the business cards. So that's pretty exciting, right? Yeah, I mean, the Wyndham cards are pretty solid. Just having any one of them means you get a 10% discount on any Wyndham award stays. That includes when you use your points to book the cost of vacation rentals.

Starting point is 00:08:31 So it can be valuable just to have the cards on their own, even if you aren't getting a big welcome bonus. But what we're seeing now is the no fee Wyndham earner card is offering a 45K bonus after 2K spend in six months. So you've got plenty of time to meet that um even better i think the earner plus card which it does cost 75 a year but you get 7500 points each year that you renew so that really makes up for that annual fee um that one is offering 75,000 points after the same 2K spend in six months. So I would definitely go for that over the earner if I could, like if I had to choose one. But we love the earner business card, which is the $95 card. And that one, though, requires a lot of spend to get the full bonus. So up to 80,000 points you can get with this one. The way it works is you get 40,000 points after 4K spend in 90 days.

Starting point is 00:09:30 And then another 40K points after $15,000 spend in the first year, 365 days. That's a lot of spend. It's a lot of spend. But if you can do it, maybe you've got some buying groups lined up, then I just want to remind people just very briefly some of the benefits that we love about this card. It gives you 15,000 points every anniversary, so that way more than makes up for the $95 annual fee. It gives you diamond status, which you can read Nick's posts about how to match to casino status and then get all kinds of free cruises and free dinners and whatever. Lots of stuff. You can earn eight points per dollar for gas or gas stations, anything you buy at gas stations, and 5x for

Starting point is 00:10:22 utilities. And that's just some of the benefits. So a lot of great benefits for a $95 card. And so if you meet the spend, that's a good deal. Yeah, I mean, that's a card to have and hold that I just think makes tons of sense to have for a lot of people. Because even if you're not going to use the points every year, even if you're not going to use Wyndham points every year,

Starting point is 00:10:42 I would buy, if they put them on sale once a year, 15,000 points for $95, I'd buy it. I mean, I'd be happy to pay that price and say, okay, well, someday I'm going to use those points at more value than that, probably. So, so I would be good just with that. And then also getting 8X gas stations, 5X utilities, and the ability to get Caesar's diamond so you can match around. I mean, that's just, I think it's a terrific deal. One of the best deals out there. And if we didn't mention it already, don't forget that all of these cards give you a 10% discount on Wyndham Redemptions. So whether you're redeeming for a Wyndham Hotel,

Starting point is 00:11:13 if it costs 15,000 points, then you're only going to spend 13,500 points. It's not a rebate. You don't need to have the 15K. You get a 10% discount on award redemptions. And that same discount also applies to their partner redemptions. And that same discount also applies to their partner redemptions. So if you're redeeming Wyndham points for a cost of vacation rentals, which we've talked about a lot before, you get that 10% discount there.

Starting point is 00:11:32 That makes points pretty easily worth about 1.3 cents per point, varies depending on the cost of the property you're gonna book. And then your cottages.com partnership in the UK also, again, you get the 10% discount. So certainly worth considering one of those cards. If you can meet the spend,

Starting point is 00:11:49 I would probably be considering one of those cards because those are nice offers. So speaking of Wyndham, what crazy thing did Wyndham do this week? So Wyndham got crazy with us this week. They really did. So why don't you talk us through this, Nick, because you posted, right, about how we all received an email from Wyndham.

Starting point is 00:12:11 Card holders received it. Yeah, card holders received an email. So Greg and I both have the Wyndham Earner business card, and so I know that people with that card at least received an email from Wyndham talking about all the great benefits of their Wyndham Earner business card, one of which is the fact that points never expire. And I didn't even notice that I didn't click on the email. To be honest, a reader had noticed that and sent us an email and said, Hey, they sent out this email saying points never expire. And I went to the Wyndham terms and conditions,

Starting point is 00:12:38 and it only mentions the fact that points earned from stays expire, not points earned from credit card spend. So I went and I took a look at it, and he was absolutely right. That's exactly what it says. In the Wyndham Rewards Terms and Conditions, it says that points earned from stays will expire four years from the date of checkout. And then it goes on to say all points will be forfeited if you have no activity for more than 18 months. And so it seems to differentiate between the points earned from stays and all of the points in your account, at least the way I read it,

Starting point is 00:13:09 that's what it sounded like to me. And that combined with the email to cardholders saying points never expire, led us to believe that points earned from credit card spend don't expire anymore, or that Wyndham perhaps had made a change, an unannounced change there. So we published that,

Starting point is 00:13:25 and I was pretty confident about the fact that they sent the email. I mean, Barclays is taking on, I would say, a good deal of responsibility for that after sending out an email saying that the points don't expire, right? Because if somebody were to file a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau complaint down the road that their points expired, I think Barclays would have a hard time winning that one after sending out an email saying the points never expire with their card. But regardless, we reached out to Wyndham and Wyndham informed us that, oh no, that's not correct. That was a mistake in the email. Points really do expire after four years. It doesn't matter how you earned them.

Starting point is 00:14:04 Yeah. Yeah. So something's wrong in Wyndhamville or Barclaysville, as you said. That was a big mess up. And I tried to prod them for more information about how the mess up happened and what, if anything, they're going to do about it. Because at the very, very minimum, there should be a broad announcement going out saying, oops, we made a mistake. But it'd be nice if they did something better than that, like change their dumb policy. Because I think it's worth, I know Nick sort of alluded to their dumb policy, but let me make it really clear. Like almost every program, points expire if there's no activity in your

Starting point is 00:14:47 account and they expire in in this case in 18 months but they call that having a fit instead of expire but yes that's essentially yeah uh right all right points are forfeit but um as long as you use points or earn points the the it resets clock, resets 18 months for all your points. The four-year thing though, there's nothing you can do to reset the clock. The four-year thing is based on when your points are earned and then you have four years. Now, there is a tricky workaround where you can move your point to Caesar's and then move them, and they come back as new points. But there's limits on how many you could do. It takes a long time. It's fraught with problems, where your points never reappear. So all kinds of things go wrong with that. So it's not an ideal solution. Also,

Starting point is 00:15:42 some people have had some luck with just booking award stays, waiting a while and then canceling them and having their points reset. I tried that and it didn't really work for me. So yeah, it's all kind of mushy. But this four-year thing, I don't think there's any other major hotel program that does that. No. And it's really irritating. Yeah. I mean, we complain about the fact that there are some airline programs that have that. Emirates and Singapore have three-year expiration policies, Turkish. So we've talked about those hard expiration policies where that's it, use it or lose it

Starting point is 00:16:19 in that amount of time after you've transferred. But it's just a couple of airline programs, foreign airline programs, never heard of a hotel program doing something like this. And in fact, in recent years, the push in general has been towards getting rid of expiration dates on points. I mean, we've seen the major US airline programs get rid of that for the most part. Right, right, right. And Choice used to have a hard expiry, if I remember right. And they eliminated that a few years back. so windham time to get rid of it i i tried to suggest that to them we'll see if anything happens the the uh the guy in charge that i i usually communicate with um is on vacation uh so hopefully when he gets back

Starting point is 00:16:59 we'll take a look at a position to do be in a position to do something. And if you're listening, please, please do. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely, please do. I think Barclays is probably going to hope that somebody does, too, after that mistake. So, all right. That's the crazy thing. That out of the way, let's talk about Mattress Running the Numbers. So, let's switch over to some airline stuff. Mattress Running the Numbers, well, sort of airline stuff.

Starting point is 00:17:21 Airline hotel stuff. Still in the hotel realm. So, we have some new capabilities for transferring points around we have some new partnerships here or not new partnerships but new transfer options so you can take your aeroplan points if you are an aeroplan elite member and you can convert those to marriott one-to-one you can take your aeroplan points and convert those right over to marriott one-to- deal bad deal what do you think craig uh bad deal uh aeroplane points can usually be used for uh better value than marriott points i mean if if you have aerial aeroplane points and don't know what to do with them then i'm not sure why you're an elite

Starting point is 00:17:56 member good point good point yeah not a good deal and we don't know how long it's going to take to transfer the points i'm gonna bet it's not instant just because Marriott's a little weird about transfer times, oftentimes from different programs. So, so yeah, I don't, I wouldn't have much confidence in that being a good option. I mean, if you just needed a few points to top off for a stay, maybe, except I don't know that they'll transfer instantly. So anyway, so airplane elite members could transfer to Marriott one-to-one, but shouldn't. And also, you can now transfer points between Marriott and MGM Rewards. So that's another transfer option nowadays. For every 1,000 Marriott points, you'll get 800 MGM Rewards points. So if you really wanted to, you could transfer Aeroplan to Marriott to MGM. And make your aeroplan points worth eight tenths of an mgm points per point which uh you know don't do it don't do it yeah this is an

Starting point is 00:18:54 easy match just writing the numbers in that we don't have to debate should you or shouldn't you just don't do it uh by the way uh just to complete the story, MGM rewards can transfer to Marriott at that same ratio of 1,000 points transferred become 800 of the resulting points. So if you transfer back and forth, back and forth, eventually you'll dwindle your points down to nothing. So that's a way of using your points. Totally reminded me of that video a while back. It was one of those things about the currency conversion, like currency exchange. Somebody took $100 to see how many trades it would take to end up with nothing by just converting between different currencies. I don't remember what it was, but it was a funny video. Anyway, at any rate, so yeah,

Starting point is 00:19:38 that's not a good deal to go back and forth. Now, the Marriott and MGM partnership, I want to just briefly touch on that. So 1,000 Marriott points, actually partnership, I want to just briefly touch on that. So 1000 Marriott points, actually, what it is, is 10 to 10 to eight is what they're calling it. But you need to transfer in increments of at least 1000. So 1000 Marriott points become 800 MGM rewards. MGM rewards are generally worth one cent each used towards room or you could charge spa treatments and restaurants and stuff like that to your room at an MGM property. So for every thousand Marriott points, you're getting $8 in MGM points. So it's about eight tenths of a cent per point, which actually is a little bit above our reasonable redemption value for Marriott points. So I guess if you're going to Vegas and you want to indulge in something,

Starting point is 00:20:20 then you could do that to cover those charges and get slightly better than reasonable redemption value. It's not exciting, but it's possible. However, only up to 30,000 points per year. So you're only going to be able to do that with 30,000 Marriott points, which means you'll get $240 worth of MGM rewards. So you get like one massage or dinner basically in Las Vegas. But you could do that if you wanted to. I think, and interestingly enough, when I read One Mile at a Time's post about this and they said that that's probably the direction most people will be excited about. And I could see where maybe, like I said, it's a little bit better than reasonable redemption value,

Starting point is 00:20:54 but not wildly exciting to me because of the 30,000 limit. He didn't see as much value in the other direction, going from MGM rewards points, which are worth one cent each, to Marriott points, which are worth less than that. So if you're going 10 to eight there, based on our reasonable redemption value, you're not doing well. Let's put it that way.

Starting point is 00:21:09 Because we value Marriott points at 7 tenths of a cent, and now you're only getting, you know, what, 8 tenths of that. So whatever that comes out to. Yeah, so a little over half a cent per point in value, theoretically. But I thought that might still be interesting because MGM has an awful points expiration policy. So if you don't have elite status with MGM, points expire with six months of inactivity. So yeah. So if you were to go to Vegas, like let's say you're going to Vegas for a big conference or a party or whatever it might be. And you're like, okay, well, I'm going to earn a bunch of MGM rewards points

Starting point is 00:21:45 and maybe I'll use them next year when I go to Las Vegas. Well, if you don't earn or redeem or whatever, you have activity within six months, you're gonna lose all those points. So I think this transfer to Marriott could be a good way to use it instead of losing it. If you were planning a trip

Starting point is 00:21:59 where you're gonna earn a bunch of, you know, you go to Las Vegas and you earn 30,000 MGM points, they're gonna expire if you don't earn or redeem within six months. So it might be worth transferring over to Marriott, where at least they'll be valid for a long time. But hold up. I don't know anything about their elite program, but if you earn 30,000 points, wouldn't you have elite status by then?

Starting point is 00:22:15 Oh, you might get pearl status with that, I guess. Yeah, I was thinking gold status because that's the one that really is valuable. But you're right. You might hit pearl status at that point. So maybe then you'll be okay. At any rate, I think that's potentially a that really is valuable. But you're right. You might hit Pearl status at that point. So maybe then you'll be okay. At any rate, I think that's potentially a use going in that direction, unless you want to use them for MGM also. I mean, the other thing is obviously Marriott has much broader applicability,

Starting point is 00:22:34 much broader use. So if you want to go somewhere else in the world where there's not an MGM property, then you have a better chance of getting decent value out of your points with Marriott. So good point, though. If you did earn enough, you would earn some elite status, probably. Right. Also, one other thing I want to say about Marriott point value is that while the average we observed in our analysis was 0.7 cents per point value, it's very easy to get higher than that. So the spread is very wide. Unlike, for example, IHG and Hilton both have much tighter spreads,

Starting point is 00:23:05 meaning that it's less common to find much higher value or much less value. The, in the case of Marriott, you know, getting like 0.9 cents per point value is actually really easy. Like you don't have to look very hard to find that and you can get even much better than that. So it's not as bad as it sounds. Yeah. Yeah. There's opportunities to get outsized value where there's not opportunities to get outsized value with your MGM rewards points. It's like one cent per point is it. And then only towards stuff that you can charge at MGM, which, you know,

Starting point is 00:23:39 if you want to go to France, then it's not going to do you any good. So you may as well move your points over to Marriott. If you think you might be able to use them for a property in France or whatever the case may be. So I think that there is some potential use there. All right, that's a long spiel that probably won't apply to a lot of people, but I figured I'd get it in there anyway. Let's move on to award talk.

Starting point is 00:23:57 So for award talk this week, we got some United news out, huh? Yeah, so first up, a number of years ago when Chase first added Aeroplan as a transfer partner, I had said, I think on this show, that I was excited because Aeroplan awards are going to be cheaper than United awards. And so I did some analysis after saying that, and I wrote a post called United versus Air Canada, which is the better chase transfer partner. And in that post, I found that it was actually mixed. United was usually better for economy awards, business class awards. It depended where you're going.

Starting point is 00:24:41 And first class awards, Air Canada was slightly cheaper, but not by a huge, huge margin. That was then in 2021, I think. So I revisited this because we've seen a number of United devaluations since then. So I thought, oh man, this is going to be a bloodbath. United's going to look really bad now when I rerun this analysis. But I was actually surprised to see that the big picture results were basically the same. United still usually cheaper for economy flights. And when I say usually, I mean I selected like, I don't know, six or seven or eight example, you know, routes. And so, you know, depending on where you go from where and to where, you could have very different situation.

Starting point is 00:25:35 But anyway, I found economy usually better with United. Business class, again, mixed, sometimes better with United, sometimes better with Air Canada. And first class, Air Canada was still better. The difference is that now Air Canada for first class, international first class awards, Air Canada is so much better. It's ridiculous. Before they were a little bit better. Now, just to pick out one example, flying first class from JFfk to mumbai uh air canada you'd spend 130 000 points one way uh united you'd spend 220 000 points this is for a partner saver award yeah so yeah way better with air can and that's without even mentioning that you could add a stopover for 5 000 miles too so yeah that's uh that's a pretty big difference so yeah that's without even mentioning that you could add a stopover for 5,000 miles too. So yeah, that's a pretty big difference.

Starting point is 00:26:27 So yeah, that's interesting. And I think that you will get people that fervently argue one side or the other on this because of what happens to fit their redemption patterns. But I think it's such an important thing to consider that it really will vary based on the scenario. So don't count one of them out because it's going to depend. You may have an upcoming trip and not have considered the other because you thought, oh, that one's always more expensive. And it's just, I don't know,

Starting point is 00:26:56 I think it's something that you do need to consider when you're taking a look at your trip planning because it will vary from time to time, place to place, wherever you're going. Yeah. One of the things that motivated me to look it up is I had seen for a friend, I had seen that flying Turkish Detroit to Istanbul to Doha was available when they needed it in business class. And it was cheaper through United for that route. And so that surprised me and that made me remember, oh, man, I need to go back and update this post. But anyway, regardless of who's cheaper or not, there's many other factors that may matter more to you. Things like, well, Nick mentioned Air Canada allows you to add a stop

Starting point is 00:27:46 over 5,000 more points. Air Canada also has many more partners. So if you want to fly internationally, there's going to be much more opportunity to find flights where and when you want because there's so many more possibilities. And they also have access to more space on some of those partners. Like Singapore Airlines, for instance, doesn't release much business class space at all to most of their partners, but Air Canada gets a bunch of it. Yeah, yeah. On the flip side, Air Canada seems to be blocked from certain partners. I couldn't find any ANA award space, but could booking through United.

Starting point is 00:28:28 And United has free changes and cancellations. Air Canada, you could get that by paying a lot more points, but then that removes a lot of the advantage Air Canada sometimes has. So anyway, so they both have pluses and minuses beyond what the pure award price is. Absolutely. Absolutely. One thing just to mention there, you mentioned the ANA thing, so it bears repeating because we talked about this, I think, several months back, but those ANA flights should be bookable via Air Canada over the phone if you find them available via United. They aren't showing up on the website. That is something that Air Canada has been working on, as I understand it. So hopefully we're going to see that come back at some point online. But at any rate, my understanding is you can book those flights over the phone. So there you have it. Yeah, actually very good to remind. That was a very good reminder.

Starting point is 00:29:16 And United, I can't stop talking about this. United also has some partners, not many that Air Canada doesn't have. But I think Aer Lingus is one that they still are partners with that you could book. And I think Aer Link, which is in South Africa, I think is available via United but not Air Canada, if I remember correctly. And that can be useful if you're trying to connect around in Southern Africa. Anyway. But for every one United example, there's like five Air Canada examples. Totally true. Totally true. so lots of interesting

Starting point is 00:29:46 stuff either way there i'll tell you the reason that i might lean towards air canada though is because you have the ability to transfer to air canada aeroplan from so many more different types of currencies whereas united it's only chase and well as we'll talk about later it's not my favorite of the chase transfer partner uses there are others that i prefer so i don't really like to transfer to united but uh but if you aren't a lot of united miles you'd feel differently like i said so all right that's good but that's not all the news you got some more united news that yeah even a little better here as i was doing award searches on united i just stumbled upon when i was logged in i I was seeing discounted awards on United's partners.

Starting point is 00:30:29 And it said on the screen because I had Premier status. So I have Premier Silver status, thanks to having Marriott Titanium status and Marriott and United have this partnership where that happens. And then we asked people through our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group, what if you just have the United Credit Card and not elite status? Are you also seeing these discounts? And they were. And the reason that's exciting, so they weren't big discounts. So the example that I first found was flying Detroit to Istanbul on Turkish. In economy, it would have cost me 44,000 points. That was the price when I wasn't logged in. But I saved 40,000 points by being logged in. In business class, you save 8,000

Starting point is 00:31:14 points because it's 88,000 points for someone who doesn't have a card or doesn't have elite status, or 80,000 points for someone who does have one of those. So small discount, but it's significant because when we've seen discounts before due to having the card or elite status, it's been specifically United flights and I believe specifically economy only. That part I'm a little less sure about, but that's what I remember.

Starting point is 00:31:45 That's what I remember, yeah. So now we're seeing both economy and business, and we're seeing it on partners too. After doing more searches, I see that this shows up also on UnitedFlights. And it's not all flights everywhere. It's just, I don't know what the magic is. Interesting.

Starting point is 00:32:05 So that was good news. It's not – yeah, it's not huge. You're not talking about a huge discount, but it does make a difference. Like in this case, what it's doing is United these days charges more for partner awards internationally than they do on their own flights, and what that's doing is bringing the price down. That example I gave with Turkish is bringing the partner price down to the United price. So you get to fly there for the same price you would if you flew that route. Yeah. And I wouldn't disregard a savings of 8,000 miles because Turkish sometimes has four seats available on their flights between the United States and Istanbul. And I have a family of four. So if I were saving 8,000 miles per person, that's 32,000 miles. That's not nothing. That's almost enough for another ticket and economy. So anyway, yeah, I think that's a really interesting find. Very cool. Also want to fact check myself very quickly, because I think I said before that transfers

Starting point is 00:32:59 to United are only from Chase. And I realized I left out built. You can also transfer from built rewards to United, but you can't earn as many built rewards as you can Amex points or whatever other currency of your choice is out there. That's why I didn't think of that the same way that I think of all the other options that are transferred to Air Canada, but did want to fact check myself because I realized I was wrong. All right. So United discounts there. We talked a lot about United. When it comes to on flights, I almost completely rewrote the thing because what's happened is over time, the tools for searching for flight awards have added capability that was important to include in the main post. And I couldn't really do that easily with the way the post was written before. And what that is, is I call that the ability to

Starting point is 00:34:13 discover awards. I call that a discovery function. That's where they've pre-stored all kinds of search results and let you just run a simple query to find awards that are out there that have previously been found in recent days or recent hours to be out there. And then you can ideally quickly refresh that data to see if it's still available at the time you're looking. But the reason that's important to include in this is because these tools now uh let you do things like say um i want to fly uh from detroit to europe uh this coming summer uh in business class for for four people show me what's available um now it'll show you what has been found up till then. It doesn't show you every possibility, but it will bring back results in most cases. Whereas if you just

Starting point is 00:35:14 tried to, if you try to do it the old-fashioned way, run live searches, you'd have to pick days one at a time or sometimes a span of a week at a time or whatever. But you would have to search like to each individual airport in Europe to do that type of thing. And that's like impossible. So by having tools that do this discovery function, it's really, really awesome. It makes it possible to do a lot, lot more than you could have before. But it's important also to have both functions, both that discovery function and a live search function so that you can then say, okay, I think that, you know, I see flights to Budapest. So now I'm going to rerun my search Detroit to Budapest over maybe a two-week span and just see what are the best options for that.

Starting point is 00:36:10 So that way it will both refresh and also may find things that were not cached that are maybe even better. So those are examples of things you can do. And so I laid out all of the current tools that I know of that can do that sort of thing and just gave all the information about them. And so you could check out that resource. Yeah, I think if you're new to award booking, you really ought to read this and try to soak it up and absorb it, because I think the award search tools have made it much easier to A, to find stuff, of course, but B, also to think about trips differently, because I think people that when they first get into award booking that we're used to booking with money in the past, look at things in a very sort of linear way, like, okay, I want to go to,

Starting point is 00:36:54 you know, Madrid, and so I need to find a round trip, flight to Madrid, for instance. And I think the award search tools make it a lot easier to say, Oh, well, actually, there's a flight to Barcelona and business class that is the same price as an economy flight to Madrid, maybe I'll fly to Barcelona and spend a day or two there and then head over to Madrid or whatever the case might be. That's just one, you know, random example. But the bottom line is, I think that those award search tools make it a lot easier to find and consider and look at trips differently and say, okay, well, maybe I could book one way this way and book the other way that way and put together my own round trip.

Starting point is 00:37:27 I recently took a big trip around the world for most of the, actually, entire month of August and a little bit of the end of July too. And a lot of people asked how I booked it and it wasn't a simple answer. So it took me a while to put together the answer to that question because I pieced together a lot of things.

Starting point is 00:37:41 I found this and I booked this and then I found that and I booked that. And I think the award search tools make it easier to do that because they give you so many more options to consider. So check that out. Be prepared, Nick. We're going to do a show where you're going to talk us through how you did that. Oh, I don't know. We'll see. We'll see. It'll be a long show. But speaking of long shows, we've got a long one going already today. So let's keep it moving here and go on to graduate hotels now are part of Hilton Honors. So you can earn points on your stays at graduate hotels and you can book with points and receive your elite status benefits.

Starting point is 00:38:14 We've heard from lots of readers that say that they like the graduate hotels. So this is good news. It gives you another option for earning and redeeming Hilton points. Sounds nice to me. Yeah, we knew this was coming, but now it's actually, you know, there, you can actually now do it. So that's all good news to have more choice. I did not realize by the way, the graduate hotels are not only in the United States, but also in the press release I saw in the UK, also in college towns in the UK, it said. So,

Starting point is 00:38:39 so interesting. I have no idea where I haven't looked that hard yet, but I thought, oh, I didn't even realize that they were. Yeah these tend to be in college towns and and apparently there are colleges in the uk as well apparently apparently who would have known it's not just oxford there's a couple of others too apparently so uh all right so let's talk about our main event main event time chase points here are the 10 best and five worst uses of your ultimate rewards points so let's just jump right into this because you know last week we talked about how to earn the points we won't get into that you know because you can you can listen to last week's episode but let's do the top 10 we're gonna we're gonna count down

Starting point is 00:39:22 so starting with the least of the top 10, meaning... Number 10. Starting with number 10. So go ahead. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3. Yeah. So use number 10 of our favorite uses. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:39:36 So 10th up is using the Chase Sapphire Reserve card and booking travel through the Chase travel portal in order to get 1.5 cents per point value for any travel you book that way. So you can book hotels, you can book flights, you can book other travel-ish things. Absolutely. And so it's a reasonable use. It's not the best use, not our favorite use, because there are ways to get even better than one and a half cents per point with transfer partners. But it's nonetheless a pretty good use for a lot of people. I mean, you can do pretty well. And so it's not one that I use all the time, but it's one that I think is incredibly popular because it's very easy. It's a very easy way to get solid value out of your chase points. So that's number 10 of the good uses. And it's a rare instance where it does make sense to do that

Starting point is 00:40:25 because with some credit card programs, Amex, I'm going to call you out here. If you try to use your points through Amex travel, for instance, for hotels, for the most part, you're getting less. You're getting more like 0.6 cents per point, I think, on average without finding themselves in resorts anyway. I think you get one cent there.

Starting point is 00:40:42 But at any rate, you're not going to get the same type of value that you can through chase this is a rare opportunity to get very good value using their travel portal all right that's number 10 of our favorite uses what's up for number nine number nine is really specific so this summer uh chase surprised us by having a 70% transfer bonus to Marriott. And I like that option. You can transfer to Marriott and book a high-valued Marriott stay, so where you'd be getting significantly better than average value for your points. And let me just give one real-world example. I've talked before about how I like to stay at the Inet Bay Harbor in northern Michigan. In the summertime, cash rates start usually around $700, $800 per night. Sometimes we see much more. These days are around 54,000 points. I mean, it varies a little bit, but that's a common amount that I remember seeing,

Starting point is 00:41:48 54,000 points per night. So with that 70% transfer bonus, that means 32,000 chase points per night to stay at this hotel. And that's giving you over 2 cents per point value for your chase points. There you go. So you can do pretty well with that transfer bonus.

Starting point is 00:42:06 So yeah, that's a good number nine, a little bit better or perhaps a good bit better than the one and a half cents per point. Given the right redemption, you do have to know what you're doing and have your redemption picked out to do that well, but it's a reasonable use. That's number nine.

Starting point is 00:42:22 Number eight is transferring to Emirates. You can transfer to Emirates now. Do keep in mind that three-year expiration policy, the hard expiration policy that we mentioned before. It is a use it or lose it with Emirates, so be aware of that. But you can do things like book Emirates first class from New York to Milan, to JFK to Milan,

Starting point is 00:42:40 or Newark, outside of New York City, to Athens. 102,000 points one way, plus a reasonable cost in terms of tax, $100 or so. Around $130 in taxes. There you go, something like that. So a reasonable amount of taxes. So Emirates first class, I mean, that's nice. You can do A380 between JFK and Milan, which would be my pick out of the two if you're just going for the experience because they fly a 777 to Athens,

Starting point is 00:43:03 so it's not quite the same. The seat is the same, but you don't have the shower and the onboard bar on the 777 that you do on the A380. So, so JFK to Milan, 102,000 plus 130 bucks or whatever it was that Greg said there, that could be a really good use because that would be way more if you were going to buy it in cash, then, you know, the, the, you'd get much better than one and a half cents per point in value. So nice for

Starting point is 00:43:25 that. I should also point out here. I like first class over business class, because business classes, I believe, if I remember correctly, 87,000 one way. So for only 15,000 more, you get a pretty cool experience. I think it's worth splurging for first if you can. However, if there if you have a larger group, then you're not going to get more than one seat at a time, usually in first class. However, in business class, I have found six seats when booking far in advance on the JFK to Milan route quite often. Again, booking far in advance, you can find four or five, six seats. So that might be something to keep in mind if you're traveling with a family or a group. That's the numbers. Oh, sorry. Let me just say, but if you're traveling with a family or a group that's the right numbers yeah oh sorry uh let me just say if you but if you can swing the first class i mean that's like a bucket list type of experience uh emirates does first class like like really nicely i mean it's it's really posh and

Starting point is 00:44:15 and uh the great experience uh in i think in either airplane but yeah um if you could do the the one from jfk yeah that'll be really nice. We do have a post, which we'll link to in the notes, about how to find and book these first-class awards, so look for that. Final thing worth mentioning there, too, Emirates is known for the fact that if they don't sell out the first-class cabin, you may well be able to upgrade to it at the airport using your miles. So that's something else to consider that you may book business class and hope that they don't sell many seats on your flight. You may be able to upgrade to first at the airport.

Starting point is 00:44:53 So keep that in mind too. All right, 1098, number seven is transferring to United to book freely cancelable positioning flights. We just talked about United, but why positioning flights? Why did you pick that for number seven here? that makes a great combination for booking positioning flights. And so what I mean is let's take the example of flying on Emirates. Most people don't live near New York City or Newark. And so the idea is if you book that Emirates flight,

Starting point is 00:45:41 you have to get to New York in order to take the flight. United is a good choice for that. And in fact, we've talked before, we have a whole show on booking positioning flights that you might want to book with two programs, book with American Airlines if you have those miles and United or Delta or Southwest, any of these ones, because they all allow free cancellations. And, and by booking two flights to get to New York, you can, you can, you can, you know, take the first one. And if everything goes fine, great, and cancel, cancel the later one. But if the first one turns out to have problems, and you're not able to uh you're not boarding on time then uh cancel it and and uh fly the other one that's if you're trying to meet a flight an important flight like

Starting point is 00:46:32 that same day if you fly in the day before you're probably good with just one one uh positioning flight true story true story positioning the jfk might be tough with united miles but oh don't forget pretty close yeah so you could could position laguardia or obviously to newark with with newark yeah yeah yeah that's a that's a problem when flying out of um uh jfk i i don't like uh we have very few options because delta can get you there um jet blue used to be able to get me there. It has very limited route network. There's not a lot of options for booking positioning flights to JFK. So personally, I prefer to position to Washington Dulles if that's an option, just because there are more flights for me to there.

Starting point is 00:47:25 That's a great point. Yeah. So that's a, I think an important use for a lot of people positioning flights, because if you live somewhere that doesn't have a whole ton of award seats available to get to where you're going, you're probably going to need a position somewhere. So having some points that you can use that you can easily cancel if you need to is good. And also we often talk about the flexibility of awards. Greg's talking here about the ability to cancel your United award, but I'll also use this because

Starting point is 00:47:49 if I find a great award from Washington Dulles, I'll book that. And then I'll need a positioning flight and I'll book that. But then if a different flight shows up, that's more convenient that leaves out of Newark, that's a pretty close drive for me. I can drive down to Newark. It's not close two hours and 45 minutes still, but, but more convenient for me than flying to and from Dulles probably. So, so I might cancel that whole route through Dulles entirely when I find the flight available via Newark or whatever the case might be. So, so it's nice to have these points to position for stuff so that you have flexibility to change your plans later on. All right. Number six of our top 10

Starting point is 00:48:26 favorite uses of Chase Ultimate Rewards points is transferring to BA Avios, but why? In this case, we're going to use them to book Qatar Q Suites for 70,000 points. So from North America to Doha, you can fly a Qatar business class for only 70,000 points one way. And that's just a great deal. If you get to fly in their Q-Suites product, it's a credible experience. So just a great way to use your points all around. Yeah. Yeah. So you can book that again through British Airways Avios, or you can book it through Qatar Avios also, I think. Is there can book that again through British Airways Avios, or you can book it through Qatar Avios also, I think. Is there an advantage to booking through British Airways Avios for that one? Not really. It's just Chase transfers directly to BA. I'm not sure they transfer directly to Qatar. However, it does make sense to Link your British Airways and Qatar accounts together,

Starting point is 00:49:25 and then even if your points are in, you can move your points from BA to Qatar then, but you don't have to because even if your points are in the British Airways system, you can book awards from Qatar's website, and they might sometimes see better award availability than the British Airways site does. I've seen that actually where a flight won't come up on ba.com, but it does show up on qatar.com. Yeah. And they will pull the obvious from your British Airways Executive Club balance, even though you're booking through Qatar. So that's a nice little workaround there for that.

Starting point is 00:50:01 Yeah. And Q-Suites is an amazing experience. I've only gotten a chance to fly it on a short haul flight. Greg's flown it on a longer flight or two and I'm jealous. So one of these days I'm going to take advantage of that. All right. So number five is to transfer to Iberia Avios. Now, why would we do that? Well, because Iberia Avios has some great sweet spots from the East Coast. So from East Coast cities like New York, Boston, I think DC, maybe Chicago, it's 34,000 Avios one way off peak to fly to Madrid or Barcelona, nonstop in business class. So 34,000 in business class off peak is pretty amazing. And you might hear off peak and think, I don't want to go to Madrid in January or whatever the case may be. But actually, if you look at the off-peak and peak calendar, oftentimes, there are times that I would consider probably peak times to travel that

Starting point is 00:50:51 are classified as off-peak. So that deal can be useful even in times that you might have thought of as peak, though, obviously, if you want to go in the middle of July, it's probably going to be peak. Even still, at 50,000 one way, that's still a good deal for a business class to Europe. Problem is, it's a little tough to find. They typically only release two seats on each flight, and those are often gone pretty quickly. So it's a little tougher to find. But if you can find it, that can be a slamming deal for a business class across the pond. Now, what about some people might remember us talking about, be careful with Iberia because awards are not cancelable at all. Where does that factor in with this? Yeah. So that's partner awards. Most of their partner awards are not cancelable at all.

Starting point is 00:51:36 So if you book an American Airlines flight, for instance, through British Air, or rather through Iberia Avios, which would be a different price, that wouldn't be the 34K that we're talking about here. But if you were to book an American airlines flight with your Iberia obvious, it's totally non-refundable. It doesn't matter. There's no fee to pay to get your obvious back. You just can't get anything back. That's it. So maybe you'll get the taxes back if you cancel, but you're not going to get any obvious back. So it's just a hard stop sort of a thing. It stinks. So you generally don't want to book most partner awards via Iberia, but if you're booking Iberia flights through Iberia, those are cancelable. So there is a small cancellation fee. I think it's $50 or so.

Starting point is 00:52:10 It's similar to- I think it's like 25. Or maybe it's 25. Yeah. And up to 24 hours ahead or something like that. That sounds right. Until it's too late to do it. Yeah. So you could cancel these and get your obvious back. Yeah. Not bad at all. So again, if you're booking travel on Iberia, you can do that. Also, I think if you're booking travel on British Airways, same thing applies, but I would hesitate to book travel on anybody but Iberia with Iberia Avias. And keep in mind also those prices that we're talking about, the 34K and the 50K, that's for just a single segment. If you have additional

Starting point is 00:52:39 segments, then it's going to cost more, but we sometimes see better availability on connecting itineraries. So for instance, if you were to fly New York to Milan via Madrid, you might have more lock finding award availability. And that combined flight is still, I want to say it was 44,000 avios maybe or something. It was reasonable still in business class. So it might be worth checking

Starting point is 00:53:00 connecting itineraries as well. Yeah. And going back to what we were talking about earlier in the show about award search tools, having the discovery function, that's where you might stumble across something like that, because how would you know to search every possible route? But these tools, you know, at least will have searched a lot of routes and would be able to surface to you, oh, hey, there's that flight to wherever past Madrid that has that availability. Whereas, as Nick said, the nonstop flight to Madrid might not have any award availability, but going onward does. And I know it's weird, but that happens actually a lot these days. Yep. Not just with Iberia. He's saying a lot across the board. Yes. Yes.

Starting point is 00:53:46 All right. That was number five. Number four, and our favorite uses of Chase Ultimate Rewards points is transferring to Hyatt for a specific reason, to book Hyatt suites. So what's this about? How can I book a suite with Hyatt points? Yeah. So Hyatt, it's really cool. Hyatt lets you book suites with points in a number of different ways. And the easiest to understand is that it's on their award chart. If you just want to pay more points for a standard suite or a premium suite, you look at their award chart. Premium suites generally cost twice what a standard room costs. And standard suites cost somewhere in between those two amounts. So that's awesome. But there's also multiple options for basically paying cash and then upgrading with points or booking a standard room and upgrading with points.

Starting point is 00:54:41 So those are all available. But even just the simple one, just booking straight out with points. So those are all available, but even just the simple one, just booking straight out with points can result in incredible value. Yeah. I mean, so in the standard suite, so the standard suites are around one and a half times the cost of a standard room. It varies a little bit based on category, but think about 50% more than the cost of a standard room. Now, you look up the difference in cash rates between a standard room and a suite. It's usually more than 50% more to book a suite. If it were only 50% more, I would be booking more suites. So, uh, so the, it can be a great value when you're using your points and those premium suites, some of the premium suites are out of

Starting point is 00:55:17 control. I mean, we stayed at the grand Hyatt Dubai a few years back and booked the Prince suite. And I mean, that was just an incredible, awesome suite for, again, double the cost of a standard room. So as someone who travels with a family, a lot of times abroad, standard rooms will not accommodate all four of us will need to get either two rooms, or if I can find a suite or a premium suite, oftentimes the suites can accommodate four people. And so for the cost of booking two regular rooms, we can get a much better suite in many cases. So of course, this relies on finding availability. So you got to be able to find the suites available,

Starting point is 00:55:54 and they're not always available. And sometimes they're available one way, but not another way. We have this video that we recently recorded about how to book Hyatt suites that we haven't published yet, but hopefully soon thereafter, hopefully when you're listening to this, you'll find this out there soon, if not yet, about how to do this, because there are, again, multiple different ways, and sometimes one way will show, but the other three won't, or vice versa, whatever the case might be. So that's one to keep an eye on, though, because there are sometimes some monster values to be had. Okay. All right. That was number four. So number three on our list, transfer to Air Canada Aeroplan and book a multi-partner award with a stopover for

Starting point is 00:56:33 only 5,000 extra points. So Nick, tell us, give us an example. Why is this useful? Well, you know, this can be useful if you're adventurous and you're looking to piece together something, you know, out of the ordinary, because Air Canada Aeroplan really caters to people who are kind of frequent flyer nerds and are with a bunch of stops on different airlines and also to people with a more average use case. But you can't get all the way to where you want to go on a single partner. And so you need to put together a couple of unique partnerships. I just recently this summer visited Mauritius. And Mauritius is a good example of a place that's pretty tough to get to because there aren't a lot of airlines that fly there. And so then finding award availability on those select number of airlines can be tough on the major alliance

Starting point is 00:57:29 carriers that fly there because again, there's only a couple. But Air Mauritius partners with Air Canada Aeroplan and they fly to Paris and London. And of course, Air Canada has other partners that can get you to Paris or London. So you can fly on United, for instance, to get to Paris and then fly Air Mauritius to get to Mauritius. And then you'd stop in Mauritius and pay an additional 5,000 miles to have that as a stopover and continue on from Mauritius. And then you have Air Mauritius, for instance, could take you on to Australia from there to Perth. And so those types of awards are kind of interesting. And I find Air Canada's additional partnerships like Air Mauritius interesting because those partners, Air Mauritius is a great example of one. There's very few ways to book Air Mauritius with miles. They do partner with Air France KLM Flying Blue, but that's it.

Starting point is 00:58:16 It's Air France or Air Canada for booking Air Mauritius with your miles, as far as I know anyway. So there's not nearly as much competition for those awards. So if you want to fly a family to Mauritius and onto Australia, you can do that with Air Canada. And it's not too hard because there's often four seats available or more sometimes on those flights from London and Paris to Mauritius, and then also onward from Mauritius to Australia or Kuala Lumpur. So, so it opens up some unique possibilities like that. And so I find that fun also because they partner with so many different airlines. There's a lot of opportunities for long stopovers. So on our Three Cards, Three Continents challenge several years back, it's actually pretty common that the flight times won't necessarily line up perfectly from a standpoint

Starting point is 00:59:07 of trying to get to where you're going as quickly as possible. But they work out really well for Air Canada Aeroplan because I flew, for instance, from Washington, DC to Cairo, Egypt, and I had an 18 hour layover in Egypt, which was plenty of time to go visit the pyramids and to go see the Sphinx and all the fun stuff there. And I take a guided tour around and then go back to the airport and fly onward to Istanbul. And then I had a long layover in Istanbul so I could stay overnight there. I could go see and do something in Istanbul. And then I continued on to Oman from there. And I had about a 16 hour layover in Oman. I flew those legs on Turkish airlines, but then the next leg was on Oman air. So again, I had like another 18

Starting point is 00:59:43 hour layover, something of that sort, where I was able to go snorkeling with whale sharks in Oman and then continue on. So I, and I continued on and I added some other partners on that award too. I ended up flying five different airlines and a one-way award over five days. So you can do some fun stuff like that. That was epic. And that was without using the 5k stopover. And so he could have done even more if you had time to actually stay somewhere for a while. But the nature of our challenges is that you often do not have much time. Right. But it creates some possibilities. It did.

Starting point is 01:00:18 And this summer we did a complicated award that you can read more about on the blog. But we did some of the long stop or long layover stuff, even with kids and it worked out fine. And there weren't any major meltdowns and we had some fun and got to see a couple of places. So I think that while it seems a little intimidating to say, oh, I'm going to do a 23 hour and 55 minute layover somewhere

Starting point is 01:00:39 and go see something and do something and get back to the airport. It's doable. It is doable if you kind of plan for it. Yeah, yeah. All right. That was what? That was number three.

Starting point is 01:00:51 So now we're down to number two, which is? Number two, transfer to Flying Blue. We did that because it rhymes, right? Number two, transfer to Flying Blue. Well done. And the reason we're going to transfer to Flying Blue is to book Air France or KLM business class from North America to Europe for only 50,000 points one way. What's so awesome about this is that both airlines have a pretty vast network. They fly to a lot of North American cities. And this 50k price point is

Starting point is 01:01:29 sometimes available at all of the North American destinations. So you could be flying all the way from the West Coast to Europe for that same 50k when available. That's a great deal. And for the latest challenge, I flew KLM over and over and over. It just happened that way that they were like the best, but I flew not for the 50K price, but I flew from Vancouver to Zagreb in Croatia. I can't remember how much I paid, but it was a little bit more than 50K. But someone who was on the flight with me recognized me. She had paid 50K for the flight to Amsterdam. So those awards do exist.

Starting point is 01:02:12 And the experience is really nice. You know, it's not like, you know, the best you're going to find in the sky kind of experience. But I found the experience really nice. And you just can't do much better than that price, especially from the West Coast. So that's great. One thing I do need to mention, right now as we're recording this, most of the award search tools do not have access to Air France KLM Flying Blue right now. They lost it recently. And so it's more important than ever to know how to bring up the calendar. If you're logging into Air France's website or KLM's website, we have a post that shows you how to bring up the monthly calendar of award availability. So when you're searching from Vancouver to Amsterdam or

Starting point is 01:03:07 wherever, then you can see a month at a time and when that 50K price is available. It's worth mentioning that Flying Blue has moderate surcharges. So you're going to pay around 200 to 250-ish, 230, I think maybe dollars in in taxes and fees on a one-way tour from europe that's right that's right unless you find availability on air europa which flies jfk or miami to madrid and there's none of the it's just ten dollars and change in taxes on the air europa flights but those are much tougher to find. So good luck with those. But and they do cost a little bit more than 50k. I think they cost 60 or 62 or something like that. So it's a slightly different price in terms of the number of miles you'll need. But this is a great deal,

Starting point is 01:03:53 I think, because it's often available, not like all the time. But if you're planning in advance, and you're willing to position a couple different airports, it's not impossible to find, it's easier to find than a lot of other programs. And even when you don't find the 50K price, like Greg said, you may still find a price that you're like, oh, 60K or 62K or 65 or whatever it might be. It's still pretty reasonable in a lot of cases. Of course, not all cases. If you want to go to Europe in the middle of July and you're looking to book in June, you're going to have a hard time with that. It's going to be expensive and tough. But if you plan in advance anyway and you're a little bit flexible, those are gettable, I think I would say. Yeah. Yeah. And, and this is another example

Starting point is 01:04:29 where often there's better availability or better pricing, I should say, when you go to smaller airports, um, you know, so, so, you know, check flying, you know, past Paris to Leon, for example, and maybe the price will come down uh just as one i mean there's just so many examples but i just wanted to uh be more concrete with what i meant there are tons and if you really just want to go to paris also keep in mind that they have some connections that are via train and so then i imagine you must have to pick up your bags and so if you miss your train probably nobody will ever know because i can't imagine they they tell their friends that you missed the train so if if you look up in a word, for instance,

Starting point is 01:05:07 to Brussels, that you're going to find an itinerary where you're connecting to a train from Paris to Brussels. And so there's tons of other opportunities like that and options like that too. So like Greg said, connecting itineraries often will have better availability and maybe better pricing. So keep that in yeah. Yeah. It's so funny that I didn't remember about the train to say that because Leon, which I mentioned a minute ago is one of the places you could go by train. So you can book, um, you know, from the U S to Leon and the way it shows up on Air France's website is, uh, flying to Paris and then taking the train from there to Leon. Yeah, there you go.

Starting point is 01:05:47 So lots of opportunity there. All right, that was number two. Number one, our number one fun use, I tried for the rhyme again, of Chase Ultimate Rewards points. So our number one favorite use, what is it, Craig? Let me give you the drum roll. I can't even hear it. But the number one is transfer to Hyatt. So, yeah, we talked about transferring to Hyatt before about booking suites, but just in general,

Starting point is 01:06:12 booking Hyatt hotels is such a great use of your chase points because on average, now this is on average, when we've looked across Hyatt hotels in the U.S., we've seen around 1.7 cents per point value. But it's so, so common to get a lot more than that at Hyatt hotels. And so it's just really, really easy to get great value. And one of the things that really helps too, is that Hyatt does not charge resort fees on awards days. So if you're staying at a resort or, or a place that has a destination fee, and you book it with points, you're not paying that fee, but you, you do get whatever the benefits are included with those, those destination or resort fees. So it's a win-win. Nick and I both use this all the time.

Starting point is 01:07:17 I pulled up, Nick, your recent re-review of the Grand Hyatt Kauai, where you said the normal resort fee, I think, was $55 plus tax. So you didn't have to pay that. Right. And of course, you had an amazing stay. Yeah, it's a fantastic property and often very expensive to book with cash. So you get a good value with your Hyatt points. And of course, it's not the only one. There's lots of Hyatt hotels out there. One of the things we well, we should back up and say one of the things we love about Hyatt is they still have an award chart, unlike the other major hotel programs. So you know what to expect at each category level. Now they do tend to shift properties around every year in March, but most of the year you can count on, okay, well, I know this property is a category three. So it's going to be between the off peak and peak price for a category three, whatever it is that I decided to book it, at least until the categories change

Starting point is 01:08:03 next March. So that's nice because it sets expectations and it also gives you opportunities for really outsized value at times when there are peak travel periods where a lot of people want to go, whether that's for a major event or because it's just a peak travel time when kids are out of school or when everybody wants to go to a particular place. So there are opportunities to get just really far outsized value for your Hyatt points in that way. And there's lots of little things like the no resort fee on award redemptions. If you're a globalist and you're booking an award, you get free parking, which can be really big in places where parking is expensive. So there are a lot of reasons to love

Starting point is 01:08:38 Hyatt. And it's very easy, both at the high end. We both like high end hotels. So Grand Hyatt is a good example of a place that's expensive in cash. It's also kind of expensive in points, but a good deal in points. But Hyatt offers great value at the other end, too. If you want to stay at a Hyatt place, you're booking a Hyatt category one or category two somewhere, you can get great value out of your points booking lower category hotels also. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's not unusual to see, you know, 5,000 points, 8,000 points, somewhere in that range per night for a hotel that, that might be, uh, charging $200 a night or, or more. Um, but because it's a category one or two, it's, it's really cheap. Um, yeah, uh, we

Starting point is 01:09:20 see that frequently. So yeah, that's what we love. We will get to our worst five in a moment. But first, we need to talk briefly about transfer bonuses. Every now and then, Chase offers a transfer bonus to one of its transfer partners, which means that instead of transferring one-to-one, you get more than one-to-one of the resulting thing. So for example, twice this year, there was a 20% transfer bonus to Air Canada Aeroplan. So that means if you transfer 10,000 points to Aeroplan, you end up with 12,000 Aeroplan points. And actually, if you have the Air Canada,

Starting point is 01:10:07 Chase Air Canada card, that gives you a 10% bonus when you transfer from Chase. So you'd really end up with 13,000 points in that example. They also did twice, a 30% transfer bonus to Virgin Atlantic, which I don't think we talked about Virgin Atlantic in our top 10, but they have some sweet spots as well that are worth considering.

Starting point is 01:10:31 They did a 25% transfer bonus to Air France Galem Flying Blue. So that's a nice way to get more, you know, flying blue points. They have never done a high transfer bonus transfer bonus they never will same with united we we don't expect transfer bonuses with to either of those so don't hold your breath for those we have seen transfer bonuses to both uh ihg and marriott but in general we don't recommend them unless they're as high as like 70 to to marriott yep very good you know in virgin atlantic you mentioned the 30% transfer bonus there and mentioned that we didn't include them in the top 10. And I think that it was good for

Starting point is 01:11:09 you to say that there are also uses of Virgin Atlantic miles that are, you know, are top 10 adjacent. So, you know, pretty close, you know, we mentioned the Air France flying blue for 50K to Europe in business class. It's about the same number of miles if you book via Virgin Atlantic, in fact, 48,500 miles during the off-pe number of miles if you book via Virgin Atlantic. In fact, 48,500 miles during the off-peak dates if you book via Virgin Atlantic. Isn't that just from the East Coast, though? That's true. Yes, from the East Coast. So that's why we picked the Air France one above it.

Starting point is 01:11:36 But yes, absolutely. There are times where Virgin is the right way to go, for sure. And it's just, the Air League didn't make our top 10. Right. The additional point I was going to make it's just, well, the additional point, right. Yeah. Right. Right. The additional point I was going to make about Virgin Atlantic though, is that sometimes they have access to more space at the better pricing than

Starting point is 01:11:51 Air France does. So sometimes the price will be lower through Virgin Atlantic. So it's worth looking at for those same flights. There are times when, when Air France doesn't have those 50 K seats available, but Virgin Atlantic does on the same flights. So it's worth taking a look. Okay.

Starting point is 01:12:11 Right. Right. And, and I'll also mention that flying economy can be actually a lot cheaper booking through Virgin. Flying Air France or KLM economy can be cheaper booking through Virgin Atlantic than booking through Flying Blue. Yep. Yep. So transfer bonuses are something to keep an eye on because you're getting a 20% or 30% transfer bonus, that can make any of those things we just talked about sweeter yet. Oh, absolutely. Okay, lastly, before we get to the worst five, there's the in-between use, which is don't forget that you can cash out your points

Starting point is 01:12:40 to your bank account for one cent each. So if you're doing anything, and that's where our worst five comes into play, if you're doing anything where you're getting less than one cent per point value, then it's not a good use. In fact, if you're doing anything where you're getting exactly one cent per point value

Starting point is 01:12:57 and it's an award type of thing, and so you're not earning points from the purchase, that's not great either because you could instead just buy the thing with your credit card and earn points for the spend. So what you're looking at for the best ways to use choice points is always to get better than one cent per point and use that one cent per point cash out as like the absolute worst. Yeah, that's a great point. So, you know, Greg, just alluded to it, but to put some math to it, let's say you're looking at a flight that costs

Starting point is 01:13:30 $1,000 or 100,000 points. So you say, Oh, well, okay, it's one cent per point, I'll just book it with the points. Well, if you cash out that $1,000, so you take your 100,000 points and cash it out for one cent a point, you have $1,000 and buy the flight. If you're using a card that earns three points per dollar on an airfare, then you could be earning 3000 miles on that flight. And the net cost to you is the same. It's the same 100,000 either way, but you'd be earning 3000, which would also then be earning towards elite status and other things potentially. So maybe there's other ways to stack it. If you're doing a hotel stay, you might have shopping portal rewards and various promotions you can take advantage of to earn even more points on the stay if you're booking with cash. So one cent per point is a good benchmark. But keep in mind that if you're only getting that much out of your points, it probably makes more sense to cash them out and pay for the thing using the money that you've cashed out. So all right. Then out of the way, what are our worst for the thing using the money that you've cashed out. So, all right. Then out of the way, what are our worst five?

Starting point is 01:14:27 What are the things that people should not consider doing with their Chase Ultimate Rewards points? All right. So these are roughly sorted again from best of the worst to worst of the worst. However, the first bullet point could be anywhere in that list, which is transferring to any program to book a low value award is a really bad use. And so with any of them, Flying Blue or, you know, a Hyatt, any of them, it's possible to transfer your points and use those points to book something where you're getting less than one cent per point value, potentially much less.

Starting point is 01:15:10 Now, for those who don't know how to figure that out, here's a simple way that will work in most cases. If you log into your Chase travel portal under your like Sapphire Preferred or Sapphire Reserve account, and you look up the price in Chase points by booking that way, and then compare it to the price in points when booking like through Hyatt or through Flying Blue or whatever the program is, if Chase is cheaper,

Starting point is 01:15:40 then transferring to the other program doesn't make sense. And it now it's not always as easy as that, because you the even if they're even if they're exactly the same, Chase is better, because usually, it depends on the situation. But like with airlines, you're usually also paying a fee on top of the points. Whereas, you know, going directly through Chase, you're not with hotels, that's not going to be the case. Yeah. And with hotels, you may prefer to earn elite nights and benefits and things like that. So there's, it gets a little bit more complicated, but that's a good benchmark. If you're not particularly handy with math, that's a good benchmark to test and see whether

Starting point is 01:16:18 that makes sense. But yeah, transferring to a program to book a low value award, you don't want to do that. So you want to figure out how to figure out what those low value awards are and avoid those. All right. So that's fifth out of our, our four uses the, our, our, our right. Best of the worst. That's our best of the worst uses. What's the number four worst, worst use buying gift cards, buying gift cards with your points generally is not going to make sense. And a lot of cases, you're going to get less than one cent per point in value. And so that is just a non-starter, as we said before. But even if you're getting one cent per point in value, it's still usually not a good deal to use your points for gift cards because

Starting point is 01:16:56 almost all types of gift cards can be bought somehow at a less than face value amount. So there's lots of different ways out there. Apps you can use, different third party gift card websites, where you can often get some sort of a discount or shopping portal rewards when you're buying gift cards or use things like, you know, an Amex offer to buy a gift card at a merchant, etc. So there's lots of ways to get your gift cards at less than face value. So using your points at one cent per point to get a gift card, just a bad deal. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Number three, worst way to use your points is to transfer to Marriott when there is no transfer bonus. So yes, it's possible to get better than one cent per point when you're redeeming your Marriott points.

Starting point is 01:17:47 So, you know, you might say, well, doesn't it make sense then if I'm looking at a hotel where I'm going to get, you know, 1.5 cents per point value booking my Marriott stay? Shouldn't I transfer then? And here's the thing. Marriott frequently runs sales on their points where points cost less than about 0.9 cents each. So you're better off watching for a sale like that and buying points that you need rather than booking that stay. Of course, if there's not a sale going on, the standard price for Marriott points is 1.25. So you could think of it as like, if you do end up doing this, make sure that the value of your stay is more than 1.25 cents per point, or else it doesn't make sense. But there are situations where you might want to top off

Starting point is 01:18:37 your account a little bit, I think. Yep. Agreed. Agreed. Because remember, you could cash out your points and buy Marriott points with that cash. So you could end up with potentially a better deal by buying the points if you really need them. But yeah, so you got to do the math and figure that out. But generally speaking, we would not transfer to Marriott without a transfer bonus. Right, right, right. Next up on our worst uses of Chase Ultimate Rewards points is shopping with points like at amazon.com. Don't do it. Don't do I know you look at it and you're like, Oh, but I can get my Amazon order for free. Yeah, but no, it's costing you a lot of value, you could get out of your Chase Ultimate Rewards points,

Starting point is 01:19:13 because you're only going to get eight tenths of a cent per point. That's less than one cent per point. Just buy the stuff on Amazon and then cash out your points at one cent per point. It's going to cost you fewer points. Yeah, yeah. It's that simple. You know, unless you want to kind of support the rest of us, because it's because people use their points this way that, that these programs can afford to give us more valuable rewards like the ability to transfer to Hyatt because it all kind of equals out that, that there's, they're saving money when you, when you spend, when you shop with points on Amazon and they're losing money when, when we transferred a Hyatt. And, uh, so if you are doing that, thank you, but we don't recommend

Starting point is 01:19:53 it. And also now, if you say, well, wait a second, I saw on frequent miler at some point that I could save money at Amazon when I use chase points to buy something because every now and then you'll see one of these deals like, I don't know, you know, say $15 off of 50 or save 10% off of this much or whatever when you use points to pay for your purchase. But if you read those posts carefully, you'll know that we'll always say that using one point is usually enough to trigger the discount. All you need to do is use at least one point in order to get the $15 off of 50. Let's say that they run sometimes the details on that vary, they change all the time. So that's not necessarily current, you would need to look up if there's even a current deal and what it is.

Starting point is 01:20:35 But usually you can use just one point in order to get that $15 off. And that's all you want to use. Because if you use more than one point, you're getting again, there's 0.8 cents per point in value. So it's a poor value, just use one point and get the discount. use because if you use more than one point you're getting again the 0.8 cents per point uh in value so it's a poor value just use one point get the discount and then if you really don't want to pay cash out of pocket for your amazon purchases then cash out your chase points at one cent each and use fewer points on that purchase so uh so don't don't use them to shop at amazon please or like greg said do so with our with our appreciation for supplementing the game for the rest of us all right but that's not the worst what's the worst of the worst the number one worst way to

Starting point is 01:21:11 use your chase points in our opinion is to transfer one to one to ihg one rewards why are you hitting on ihg greg yeah why am i picking on ihg Because the transfer ratio is only one to one and IHG points on average are only worth about like 0.6 or 0.7 cents each. But even worse, they frequently run sales or have other ways of buying points for half a cent each or sometimes as much as like 0.6 cents each, but either way, you're way better off, um, you know, redeeming your, your chase points for cash and then buying those IHG points when they're on sale or there's some, there's some way to get them for as low as, like I said, 0.5 or 0.6 cents each. And then, yes, there are occasions where you're going to get good value doing that but uh i i don't see any any time where it makes sense to uh transfer one-to-one to ihg from chase no yeah so to keep the math simple they do often sell points for half a cent per point so if you were to cash out your chase points at one cent for a statement credit or for a deposit to your checking account or whatever the case may be,

Starting point is 01:22:25 and then buy IHG points for every one chase point that you redeem for cash, you could buy two IHG points. So it's kind of like building your own 100% transfer bonus. And you can do it like almost any month of the year because IHG so frequently sells points for half a cent per point. I say almost any month. Maybe that's not quite as true now as it used to be. Hilton is more common with their cheap point sales than IHG is these days. But still, if you keep your eye out, you can kind of build your own transfer bonus there. So I would be looking for that to buy the IHG points. And if you want to cash out Chase points in order to pay for them, by all means do that, but don't transfer one-to-one to IHG. There's just no world in which that would make more sense.

Starting point is 01:23:09 Because even when they sell them with not as good of a discount, you'd still be better off buying them than transferring from Chase. So don't do that. Yeah, yeah. So our bottom line of each of these is do transfer to Hyatt and don't transfer to IHG. There you go. Just simplify the whole thing. easy very easy hyatt for your hotel stays and then otherwise use them for airlines don't transfer them to ihg and maybe marriott with a really big transfer bonus so that's a simple story i guess all right there are our favorite uses of chase ultimate rewards

Starting point is 01:23:42 points now let's be clear those are not the only uses of Chase Ultimate Rewards Points. There are some other good uses, like Greg piped in with the Virgin Atlantic bit there, and there are some others also. So this is not meant to be an all-inclusive list. These are just our favorites where you can certainly get some good value. And don't forget to look at the show notes for links with more information about a bunch of these. So if you're like, oh, that's interesting, but I don't know a lot about that, look to

Starting point is 01:24:04 the show notes for links to find out more about that or leave a comment, leave a question. And, and we'll always work to try and make sure we answer all of those. All right. I think that means it's time for this week's question of the week. This week's question of the week was a little long and complicated. So I'm going to try and truncate it down a little bit here. So we had a reader who I'm going to keep anonymous for their own good, who wrote in about getting their travel points accounts hacked. And so I'll tell a little bit of the story, and then ask the key part of the question. So this is the basic gist of the story. This person says two days ago, my choice privileges hotel program and my Wyndham hotel rewards were hacked on the same day by the same person. choice

Starting point is 01:24:46 sent me an email that someone changed my email on my account, I called right away. And they said someone called in and changed it. They had all my info. choice worked with me to get it back. Well, a day later, he hacked it again. Once again, I called and choice helped me get it back. Within 10 minutes, he hacked it again. For a third time. I was using different emails and passwords every time. I finally worked with rep and we had to use someone else's address and phone numbers because as fast as we get it back, they would call and switch it back again. The hacker kept

Starting point is 01:25:12 calling back in and getting it switched over the phone. So choice was good to work with so far, so good. And so, but apparently with very little information, you can call and get choice to switch, which is not good. That's too bad. There's no two-factor authentication on choice, he says. For the Wyndham account, it was hacked the same day. And they say, sorry, you've got to email the department for help. And they'll help you within three to five business days.

Starting point is 01:25:38 So they weren't even able to get back into their Wyndham account. They have to email and hope. So they were able to figure out that the Wyndham account got hacked by the same person with the same email address. But again, all they could do is email Wyndham in order to try to get that back. I think they're probably going to be successful and probably going to get that all worked out. But the core question comes back to what do you do and how do you protect your info and protect your points in different programs? Or how do different programs help you? If you know, how do you deal with this stuff, Greg? Because obviously they went on to say points are like money.

Starting point is 01:26:10 Hackers are going after them. They had a bunch of points in their choice account and their Wyndham account. Hackers went after him. What can you do to protect yourself from getting your miles and points hacked? How do you handle that? And, and what do you use or techniques or, you know, don't tell me all your pat. Well, do tell me all your, no, don't tell me all your passwords. What do you use in order to keep your miles and points safe? Because they are kind of like, I mean, we just talked the other day about how

Starting point is 01:26:33 the DOT and people to judge are going after loyalty programs to get more information about how those points and devaluations work, because more Americans are looking at them as like a savings account, get this huge savings account somebody can hack into. That doesn't sound good. How do you keep your points safe? Yeah, no, it's not good. And I had a similar thing happen with Hilton years ago where someone hacked it the same way. They changed, called in and changed my account. So I don't think there's any like 100% surefire safe, safe approach. But, but, you know, some things you can do use strong passwords for one. And the only way to do that in a good way is to use some sort of password manager.

Starting point is 01:27:22 Because otherwise, you're going to end up writing down these passwords or cheating and using a simple password or using the same password over and over. That's a no-no. Because if you end up using, here's an example why that's so bad. If you end up using it on an account where that software gets hacked, or maybe it's fraudulent site to begin with, then they're going to go try to use that password on a lot of other sites and you don't want them to be successful. So that's an example. Use two-factor authentication wherever you can. Ideally, some sort of device authentication more and more, like websites will let you use your laptops, like camera or

Starting point is 01:28:05 thumbprint reader or what have you to authenticate yourself and that's really ideal uh uh and the other thing is protect your email uh like crazy that that's me i feel like that's the number one thing because there's so many places where if someone could get into your email, then they can hack you easily because for one thing, they can find your account numbers in some email exchange. And even more, they can go into Choice or Wyndham or whatever, click the forgot password button, have a reset link sent to that email that they're in, click it and change the password to something you don't know and then they're in and they can change at that point like also change uh you know

Starting point is 01:28:52 they might be able to change the email address or whatever but um they can also do things like delete the emails that come in that say you've changed your password before you see them and you know so anyway they've got control of your life if they get into your main email. So, so make sure that's protected with more than anything else with strong password and two-factor authentication. Yeah. Yeah. And keep an eye on your email accounts because in this case, this reader found out about it because Choice sent them an email saying, Hey, you know, you changed the email address in your account. If this wasn't you let us know. And that kind of thing happens. I actually, just a couple of days ago, I got an email from one of the programs that told me that my account had been logged into from a location that I knew wasn't me. And so that gave me pause right away. And so I

Starting point is 01:29:38 went and changed my password immediately on that particular program and then questioned, okay, well, what else might've happened here? Although in that specific instance, I have a clue as to why it might've happened, but it wasn't me nonetheless. So at any rate, you do need to keep an eye on all that stuff and it is important. Now, in the past, I know you used a tool

Starting point is 01:29:59 to monitor your point balances. That's how you found about the Hilton hack, right? Because I think you, did you get a notification about them redeeming points? Is that an award wallet? In that case, it might've been an email. I can't remember how I got notified, but I do use award wallet to watch all the accounts that it works on,

Starting point is 01:30:18 which is a lot of different loyalty programs. There are a few that it doesn't. And yeah, I mean, that's a great option because if the program itself doesn't alert you that your points have been used, WordWallet will tell you that your points balance has changed and you can look and be like, what happened here? So that's good. It also actually adds a bit of complexity to the whole situation, though, because in some cases, WordWallet will be trying to check your balance, and that will launch a two-factor, like a text message with a code, and the WordWallet then won't be able to log in because you got the code,

Starting point is 01:30:59 and you don't know where it came from, and it looks like someone's trying to hack you, but it's just a WordWallet. So just keep that in mind that that happens. And that's some complexity there. Yeah. All right. Well, good luck, hopefully. And do keep us updated, by the way. I'd love to hear about the resolution as to what happened if you asked this question and just heard it and you're like, oh, yeah. So let us know. But that kind of thing is probably happening all the time and going to continue to happen. So I'm sure there are lots of other people that it has happened to. So do all the things that Greg said in order to try to keep your miles and points safe, because they do have value. And it can be a headache if they get hacked. So good luck with all of that. All right, that brings us to the end of this

Starting point is 01:31:37 week's episode. If you enjoyed this, and you'd like to get more of this stuff in your email inbox each day or each week, go to frequent miler.com slash subscribe. Again, that's frequent miler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media, you can find our frequent miler insiders Facebook group where you can join up and ask and answer questions like this all the time with lots of other folks who are highly knowledgeable about the topic. So that's all the good stuff. And if you have a piece of feedback for the giant mailbag or a question you'd like to be considered for a future question of the week, you can send that to you could send it to mailbag at frequent miler.com.

Frequent Miler on the Air - Chase points: 10 Best and 5 Worst uses of Ultimate Rewards | Ep272 | 9-13-24

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