Frequent Miler on the Air - Chase Ultimate Rewards: More ultimate than before | Ep 77 | 12-19-20

Episode Date: December 19, 2020

00:27 Giant Mailbag gets lost in the mail 1:01 What crazy thing did IHG do this week? Extending free night certificates in the most confusing way possible. https://frequentmiler.com/rumor-ihg-to-extend-free-night-certs-but-too-late-for-most/ 8:24 Mattress Running the Numbers: Is it worth the time to do a survey to get 10K Hilton points? 13:13 Main Event: Chase Ultimate Rewards: More ultimate than before https://frequentmiler.com/chase-to-add-air-canada-aeroplan-as-transfer-partner/ https://frequentmiler.com/chases-secret-transfer-partners/ https://frequentmiler.com/resources/ https://frequentmiler.com/air-canada-aeroplan-guide/ https://frequentmiler.com/latam-pass-a-sweet-spot-to-south-america-hiding-in-chases-secret-transfer-partners/ 50:36 Post Roast: Nick roasts Greg for Marriott post https://frequentmiler.com/marriott-devalues-homes-villas-point-redemptions-bonvoyed/ 54:33 Greg roasts Nick on purchase protection https://frequentmiler.com/amex-purchase-protection-to-the-rescue/ 1:03:05 Question of the Week: How do I use the rest of my Amex airline fee credits? https://frequentmiler.com/amex-airline-fee-reimbursements-still-works/ Don't forget to like, subscribe, and comment below! Music credit: Annie Yoder

Frequent Mylar on the air starts now. Today's main event, Chase Ultimate Rewards. More ultimate than ever. It's intriguing, isn't it? It sure is. Or at least we're hoping it is. I mean, we think it's intriguing. It's a good topic.

I think so. I think you will. Of course, we always start with a giant mailbag. So this week, you know how the mail is kind of slow around the holidays? No. Say it ain't so. The mailbag did not arrive today. So we're going to go this week without any reader feedbacks ouch sorry about

that if that's what you were hoping for um if you've been waiting to see your feedback and reader feedback this week i apologize it's still it's still on its way so right yeah nothing we can do out of our control out of our hands exactly all right so then that brings us to what crazy thing did ihg do this week? So what's going on with IHG? And I ask you what's going on with IHG because I don't even get it. Like I'm confused. What's going on with IHG? It's so confusing.

So IHG was last to the party to extend free night certificates that were expiring this year. They waited until the end of the year, very close to the end of the year, to do anything about these. So to back up a little bit, here's what happened. Early April-ish, IHG announced that any certificates that were expiring in 2020, they were going to extend the expiration date to the end of 2020. So, you know, if you had one expiring in June, you had an extra six months or whatnot. And any new certificates issued from then on would have 18 months instead of the usual 12 months before they expired. So, okay. So now we're getting to December.

We're in December now where a lot of people have certificates that are expiring end of december most other major hotel chains have already extended again even if they first extended them to the end of this year most others had extended again i actually waited and waited and waited finally they're doing something but what it is is crazy confusing. I mean, I'm already confused and we haven't even gotten to the confusing. Like you're talking about 18 months and 12 months in December. And like, I'm already pretty confused as to when my certificate expires and we haven't even hit the confusing part. Right, right. The confusing thing is that instead of changing these certificates that expire at the end of December, they seem to have added

new ones to everyone's account. Anyone who had a certificate expiring at the end of December, they seem to have added new ones to everyone's account. Anyone who had a certificate expiring at the end of December. And so now, instead of one certificate, you'll see two. One of them will still expire end of December this year. Another one will expire end of August of 2021. And then it's anyone's guess as to what will happen if you use the December one, like did, will they then take away that later expiring one? Because they'll say, well, we didn't really mean to give you an extra one. You used it. I mean, because if you had used that that one that expires in December,

if you used it like two weeks ago, did you still get one of the new ones? I don't think so. I think it was two weeks ago did you still get one of the new ones i don't already i don't think so right i think it was just people that had those still yeah like if you use yeah i don't know what's gonna happen you know like if you used it two weeks ago i think you're out of luck right now if you use it after they've added another one like it's a separate thing isn't it or visit i mean yeah i i mean my bet is that it's just separate and that you could get away with it, that you could get away with a free stay in the next couple of weeks if you want to. But it's a gamble because, you know, obviously, unless you already have plans to do some traveling

and there was an IHE property that fit in those plans, you're risking a potentially much better stay in next year. My bet as to why this happened, or my guess, I guess, is that maybe IHG just does not have the technology to change the expiration dates on certs that have already been issued. So, you know, they changed in that April announcement, they changed the dates of ones that had not yet been issued. They said, okay, now they're gonna be valid for 18 months. But what about the ones that were already issued?

It seems like they just issued new ones. Okay, no, now you see, and now I'm confused. All right, so that makes sense because I had a certificate that was issued at the end of April and that certificate is valid for 18 months. So my certificate that was issued at the end of April this year is valid until October of next year. So that wasn't one that was scheduled to expire this month. That was a newly issued one after Chase made the announcement. However, IHG. Yeah. I'm sorry. Yes. IHG. However, if I remember correctly and correct me if I'm wrong,

but I think your wife had one that was scheduled to expire in January and is now scheduled to expire in like July. Right. Maybe I think I'm pretty sure that that one must have been already issued. That must have been reissued. You're right. Right. Because I mean, originally it would have been issued January of 2020. All right. So there goes that theory.

Yeah, there goes that theory. Yeah. And, and, and so the, and the reason I brought that up is because if you have one that was issued early this year,

then you kind of get the short end of the stick because, you know, I presumably Greg's wife originally, Mrs. Myler here originally had one that was scheduled to expire in january of 2021 and now it's going to expire in june or july or something like that of 2021 instead of august whereas the people that you know had one that was expiring sooner now are going to have a later expiration it's just like yeah yeah it's it's really nuts

a mess yeah yeah i mean they're trying to do the right thing, sort of. The right thing, IHG, would have been to take care of this like six months ago. That would have been the right thing. Right. This is the next best right-ish thing. And also, I sort of have this beef with most of the programs, like Marriott, same thing. By extending things into August, you're just making them available to right about the time when travel should hopefully be opening up again, but without really giving us much time to get all these in. So with Marriott, I have so many between my wife and I, we have so

many credit cards with certs. And so all all of last year's ones uh have rolled over which is oh yeah and then we have all new ones right and so so we've got like a billion i know like i thought about writing a post about how i don't think i'm going to redeem any hotel points next year because i have so many free night certificates right i don't know like i'm drowning in these things but they all expire in august right right and so you have to cram in all your travel between some unknown date when you know the covid is no longer a thing and and when uh these certs expire and are there enough days in between those two times yeah i mean there may very well not be with the number of certs that some of us are sitting on at that point.

You know, especially because like Greg said, I mean, you might have had some that had kind of already gotten rolled over. And with Marriott, they just re-extended ones that had been extended already. So you might have one that you've had for a couple of years already. You just keep getting a new one every year. You got several of them stacked up. And if you had travel package certificates, oh my goodness. It's just great. Again, I think it's great that they

keep rolling the dates forward. I just wish they had moved it to the end of 2021. End of 2021 would have been much more customer friendly all the way around. Which I think is what Hyatt did. Am I remembering that right? I don't know. They did that with some things. Yes, because I have a certificate that got extended to that. I don't know.

I don't remember what was what with Hyatt. But anyway, so yeah so hg extended some stuff yay good that they extended it but man just in a very confusing way december 31st of 2020 if everybody would just extend everything to that i think it'd be super simple that's right that's right but they didn't ask all right so no why not i don't know who knows who knows but so let's talk about a different hotel chain because we're going to do mattress running the numbers next. And so forget about IHG and Marianne Hyatt.

Let's talk about Hilton. So Hilton is out this week with an offer to do a survey. And it's not like a Hilton survey. It's one of these like, you know, they're looking for your opinion on all sorts of different consumer stuff. So the offer, you know, they have these offers all the time where, you know, they say, hey, give us your opinion on A, B, and C, totally unrelated from hotels or airlines or whatever. stuff so the offer you know they have these offers all the time where like you know they say hey give us your opinion on a b and c totally unrelated from hotels or airlines or whatever and you know

we'll give you 50 points or 150 points for giving us half your day or something like that it's you know is these little piddly amounts this week though hilton's out with an offer to get 10 000 points for doing your first survey is that worth it Is it still just a waste of time? Are you going to do it? What do you think? I mean, should anybody bother 10,000 points? So it took your wife, I think you wrote in the post, about 20 some minutes to do an eight minute survey. 22 minutes and 51 seconds, almost 23 minutes to do an eight minute survey. Okay. So let's say, let's round it off to 30 minutes. Let's say it's half hour to get 10,000 Hilton points. 10,000 Hilton points. So, you know, Hilton points often are on sale for half cent each.

And that's not far off from how much they're kind of worth for average redemption. Our reasonable redemption value for Hilton points is 0.45 instead of 0.5. But so even if you go with our 0.45, 10,000 Hilton points, that's worth 45 bucks. And so would I spend half an hour or less clicking around on a survey to get 10,000 Hilton points? Yeah, I would. Did you do it yet? I haven't done it yet. So you would, but- I will, I will, I would. Did you do it yet? I haven't done it yet. So you would. I will.

I will. I will. Yeah. No, I totally agree. This is going to be a two-thumbs-up week. And I'm going to agree because first of what Greg said there, totally right, $45 for not very much work. And in my case, I spent like 14 minutes trying to do four different surveys.

And each time it kept telling me, oh, I didn't meet the criteria for this survey or that survey. And it got kind of annoyed with it and gave up. I was like, oh, heck with this. I'm not going to put another hour into this after my 14 minutes trying to find a survey that fits me and then spend 20 minutes doing that survey. So I got kind of annoyed and walked away from it and then got an email later on saying, congratulations, you completed your first survey and got your 10,000 points. And I was like, all right, great. I guess all I had to do is the qualification stuff that said that I wasn't qualified. I could have stopped after the first one probably. But so I could have been out of that in under five minutes probably. And some people in fact that have commented have.

So it may be, like Greg said, even less time invested to get 45-ish dollars. And the thing that I really like about it is it's scalable. You know, if you've got multiple people in your household, Hilton lets you pull points with up to nine people. So if you've got multiple people in your household that are eligible for this, you could very easily pull off, you know, six, seven, eight of these and have a nice little chunk of Hilton points

for like, you know, you could have like a sign-up bonus. Right. You said up to nine people? Is that what you said? I think nine other people you can pull with. Yeah't have to be people i mean it counts nine other accounts okay yeah that's i don't i don't think it actually says people in there it's just yeah their members none of the members you know i don't know if any of our pets could have accounts or not who knows who knows somebody knows. But they might have trouble filling out the survey. I'm not sure if there are

paw options. If you have a touch screen, maybe. Click the mouse would be like a mouse on the screen and your cat would paw it. The one my wife did was all video advertisements for different products.

What they wanted you to do is during the video, press the up arrow whenever you liked something on the screen and the down arrow when you didn't like, so I mean, cat or dog could totally do that. Right. They could try. Right. Why not? Why not? With a little help from a friend. But no, I mean, 20 minutes, you know, I spend more than that, you know, trying to figure out if trying to save on razor blades at CVS, right? I mean, yeah, I do.

I do more than that. Like going to buy something, figure out which portal to use and, you know, clicking through and then checking whether there's any coupons available. Just that process alone is going to eat up that much amount of time. So if I know I could get 10,000 points just by clicking and answering some questions, you bet. Right. Right. I mean, even if you don't have a whole lot of pets in your household,

you only have like three or four people. So 40,000 points is like a $200 night somewhere. Probably. Yes. To be clear for, for the Hilton people listening, we are not advocating using your pets to sign up for this. No, definitely not. Okay. All right. That brings us to the main event, right? So the main event, talk to us, main event, ultimate rewards, more ultimate than ever, more ultimate than ever. Yeah. So, so some good news on the Ultima Awards front. One, well, it's all about transfer partners.

So one of the downsides to Chase Ultima Awards compared to some of its rivals is that the transfer partner list is meh. Meh. It's got some decent options in there, but that's super exciting. Yeah, I mean, but, you know, mainly, I think a lot of us agree that like, if it wasn't for Hyatt being on there, we just wouldn't pay much attention to it at all. So, but now we have the promise that Air Canada two one-to-one partners that are hidden away because they're not really transfer partners. What they are is we call them indirect transfer partners, where what you do is you transfer first to a different program and then from that other program to these things. And in this case, the hidden transfer partners are through Hyatt. So Hyatt has a way to – Hyatt is one-to-one from Chase. to these things and in this case the hidden transfer partners are through hyatt so hyatt

has a way to uh hyatt is one-to-one from chase you transfer your chase points to hyatt and then from hyatt you could transfer if you transfer 50 000 points at time you can transfer uh to 50 000 points to 50 000 latam i don't even know how to say it. Latam? I don't know. Latam points and 50,000 or 50,000 Aeromexico points. And so Aeromexico, I've already looked into that program before.

Not too excited about that, but Latamam or LaTom? Maybe. Tomato. Maybe. Possibly, yeah. So a couple of indirect parts. And this really reminds me of the Sears shop your way thing right now, right? I feel like thank you points to Sears. There's a few different levels there, but you can follow along 50,000 chase points to 50,000 Hyatt points.

And then from Hyatt, take those 50,000 points and move them to one of two different airlines. And there's a couple of other hidden transfer partners there that you can transfer at poor ratios to. And you shouldn't do that. You wouldn't probably, unless you just need a little bit for a specific or valuable redemption of some sort. You probably wouldn't do those other ones. But, I mean, always good to know that there are some other ones, I guess. Yeah. And it's worth pointing out, too, that we have transfer partner pages for all the transferable

points currencies. So for Chase, for Amex, for Citi, for Capital One, and even for Marriott. And on each of those pages, so if you just search for Frequent Miler, for example, Amex transfer partners, for each of those pages, there's a section called indirect transfer partners. And that's where we show all those kinds of tricks that we know about transfer to, you know, Hawaiian Airlines and then to Wyndham and then to Caesars or whatever. And so there are things like that you can do. It's hardly ever a good idea. It's very rare for it to be a good idea, but it's kind of fun and geeky that it's possible.

Always good to know what you can do, right? What's possible. So you know what your options are. And like Greg said, you can just Google FrequentMiler Amex Transfer Partners, or you can go to FrequentMiler.com. And right up in the top bar, there's that link that says resources. And you always find resources like this under the resources tab. So whenever you're looking for something, it's going to be information constantly updated with the latest stuff, dynamically updated, et cetera, et cetera. The stuff that you need access to in order to refer back when you're trying to make your plans and book your

awards, et cetera. So it's all going to be on the resources page. So that's a good place to go. So let's back up. Let's go to the beginning and then we'll get ourselves back to what Tom, what Tom, tomato, tomato, call the whole thing. Right. So let's, let's, let's, let's go. That later phrase might come into the conversation too. So, so, so let's back up to, uh, to, to AeroPlan. So AeroPlan, Chase is going to be adding AeroPlan as a transfer partner next year. They're also going to be issuing an Aeroplan MasterCard starting next year. So is this exciting news? Aeroplan, of course, was already an Amex transfer partner and a Capital One transfer partner. So now they're adding an additional program here with Chase Ultimate Rewards.

By some tokens, probably exciting. By other tokens, I mean, it was already an Amex transfer partner. So is this a big deal? And if it is, why? What do you think? Yeah. Well, I mean, I think it's a medium deal. So it's a great, I can't even say great. It's a good opportunity for people

who are tied to the Chase ecosystem that haven't been earning lots of membership rewards points. Capital One, I mean, doesn't transfer one-to-one, so this is better than that, I would argue. Although I guess you might say that Capital One, you could earn more points that way. Anyway, if you're in the ultimate rewards ecosystem which a lot of our listeners are i think you know there's a lot of good opportunities to earn points with chase and

and um people are a lot of people are very happy just sticking with earning chase points and i don't have any problem with that this this adds some really good point redemption options that you wouldn't have had before. Has some kind of neat things. So at a high level, Air Canada's Aeroplan is a star alliance carrier, just like United and just like Singapore Airlines. And the reason I mentioned those two is those two are also chase transfer partners. Like United, but not Singapore, Air Canada Aeroplan will not charge you fuel surcharges on award tickets. So you're not going to be paying, like if you book Lufthansa using Singapore miles, you're going to pay hundreds, maybe even over a1,000 in fuel surcharges, depending on what

you book. That's not going to be true with United or Air Canada. Air Canada is often going to have better award pricing than United. Not always, but often, I'd say. The other thing, and I think there's maybe two places, maybe you could think of other places, but where I think it's kind of exciting things like Etihad first class, uh, and mix, mix in flights on United or whatever star alliance partners all on one award ticket. So, um, you can book with Air Canada aeroplane miles, a flight to, uh, let's say Sydney, that, that where you fly first class, maybe to, you know, to Europe, and then onward to, to the Middle East, and then onward to, to Sydney. And, and if you want somewhere along there, a stopover, you know, so you can enjoy your time in Europe or the Middle East, you just add 5,000 points

to that flight. And if you want another stopover on the way back, maybe you go a different way back. Maybe you go either direct back to North America, or maybe you go through Asia. That's fine. And you can also build a stopover that way. And so it gives you a lot more flexibility than United would and allows you to book some really interesting trips. Yeah. I mean, I think that that is absolutely huge. I think the ability to build an award, for example, with both Lufthansa first and Etihad apartments, maybe like that going to Sydney where you fly first class to Europe and then

fly first class Etihad to Abu Dhabi. And then you get the apartments from Abu Dhabi to Sydney. I mean, that'd be a pretty incredible trip that you would never book with cash, right? I mean, never touch with cash. I mean, you'd be talking like $25,000 or somewhere in that range, probably. And if I remember correctly, and correct me if I'm wrong, if you know that I'm wrong, and check the resource page that we have on this.

But I think First Class from the United States to, to Australia was what, like 105,000 or something like that. One way it was like somewhere in that neighborhood, I think. Yeah. So it wasn't, it's,

it's, that's a very reasonable for what we're talking about right there. Right. Right. So, so, and then, you know,

you build in a stopover, like you said, 5,000 points. So that's amazing. And that, that stopover for 5,000 points is very interesting because Air Canada has redefined regions. And so for example, Europe and Africa are in the same region. So you could go to just to Europe, or you could go to Europe and

Africa for 5,000 miles more than what you would pay to go to Europe and get a two continent trip. And same is true with a number of other areas and regions the way they have things split up and i say the same price there's some variance there because air canada really dug in with a nerdy af geeky like frequent flyer program geeky program here where it's got a few layers of complexity so if you enjoy this stuff you'll really like it So if you enjoy this stuff, you'll really like it. And if you hate this stuff, you probably aren't going to really like it, but there's still some great values in there. So it's worth playing with their award charts, learning about it. They promise that next year, they're going to have an even better online booking tool than they have now. And I actually believe them because they made a few promises now and they seem to be coming through on those

promises. So I believe that they're going to have a pretty good booking tool next year where you're going to be able to pretty much pick and choose what you want, piece it together. As a parent of a young child, I'm hopefully excited if travel returns before my younger son is two years old, because Air Canada is now only charging 2,500 points each way for a lap infant. I mean, that's terrific if you're flying first class or something like that. So that's amazing compared to a lot of other programs. So there's some big benefits. Now, I know that both of us are a little bit lukewarm on it because they're not always going to have a better price than some of the other partners out there. And because they already were a membership rewards partner. However, like Greg said, I know not everybody's collecting

membership rewards points and you're not collecting membership rewards points in any kind of volume at 5x. Whereas with Chase Ultimate Rewards, you may have the Chase Inc cash. You may be earning 5x on quite a bit of spend at office supply stores. Maybe you have a Freedom card with the 5x rotating categories, Freedom Flex. Now there's a whole bunch of cards earning three points per dollar. You got Pharmacy, three points per dollar in the Freedom Unlimited and the Freedom Flex. Now there's a whole bunch of cards earning three points per dollar. You got Pharmacy, three points per dollar in the Freedom Unlimited and the Freedom Flex. And obviously you got restaurants. So there's a lot of ways to build up ultimate rewards really fast. So that makes those awards even more attainable. And when you can mix and match between membership rewards and ultimate rewards, that's awesome. And so I think in some regards, it makes ultimate

rewards better, not just because of ultimate rewards, but because you can mix and match your points from membership rewards and ultimate rewards to get one of those 105k first class amazing values much more easily, and probably for multiple passengers in your household, because you're able to do that. Another thing that's very interesting about the Air Canada program is that they will let you pool your points. So if you have family members that have points in separate buckets, you can pool them all together and use them for the same awards. So the reason I'm pointing that out, it's not so interesting maybe if we're talking about transferring, doing all the points or transfers, but if you're going to be flying um united on some paid tickets

uh or you know doing other things where you have to pick which airline you're going to earn miles on you might and oh and if multiple people in your family are doing this you might want to pick aeroplan just because uh you'll actually be able to pull all those points into one place and then you won't have to transfer over as many of your chase points in order to book the award you want. So that's a pretty cool feature. And I really, really wish the US airlines would copy that. Yeah. I mean, it's also a good point if you're the kind of person who travels with some sort of a group with other family members and you want to be able to pull your chase or or membership rewards points together your chase ultimate rewards or mx membership rewards points

together because obviously mx doesn't let you pull your points with anybody else but now you can transfer to airplane and then pull them together and chase only allows you to transfer to somebody else in your household so maybe if you're traveling with a parent or an uncle or an aunt or something, it's not in your household. This will give you the ability for the two of you to put your points together in one pile, get your tickets issued under one record locator, et cetera. So I think that that's a nice benefit of Aeroplan too. So I think that all really does strengthen ultimate rewards,

even though it's not all about ultimate rewards. I think it really does make it quite a bit stronger. So I was excited when I saw that. I thought this is exciting news because I'm already kind of an Aeroplan fan and especially with the new program. And I feel like I'm just going to be jealous at some point that I didn't transfer and pick up status like Greg did when they were offering free status with a transfer. Although I don't know, did you make out with that? Is that going to come into play at all with this as a chase transfer partners? Is there any advantage? Yeah, I'm not aware of any, you know, you're Nick's talking about,

there was a deal where if you transferred in something like 50,000 points, you would get what they call 25 K status. And, and so I did it because there's also some kind of transfer bonus going on at the time from amex i think and uh so i have elite status with an airline i never ever fly on um not that i'm opposed to flying on them it just you know doesn't happen often and obviously hasn't, I haven't done any or hardly any flying for the past year. So, no, I haven't seen any benefit from it. I think they've extended the status again, you know, because of COVID. So probably we'll have another year not to use it.

And you may not be the only person. So if other people out there had done that already, you may be all the more excited if Air Canada is going to come into your plans anyway with these new awards. Although, you know, another aspect of the program I am excited about is that the awards on their own flights are both extremely sort of wide open to booking because they do it. I mean, most people don't like this, that it's a dynamic award chart for their own flights, meaning they just price whatever they're going to price. But the good news is, at least so far, I'm seeing lots of very, very cheap awards. And, you know, anytime you want to go anywhere, you can, if Air Canada is flying it, you can probably find a points option. And in my limited experience with

looking for Air Canada flights, I had a lot of trouble in the past finding award availability, like out of Detroit, for example, we've got one flight to Toronto. I could never get an award on that. But now I have a way, like, let's say, for example, there's a very real scenario. Like if I want to fly, let's say Lufthansa out of Toronto to go to Europe. Now in one award, I could probably book Detroit to Toronto to Frankfurt. And that would be great. That'd be great. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So all right, so I'm going to pivot a little bit before we get to the hidden transfer partners with related news. So I mentioned in passing when we when I first talked about this aeroplane thing, that Chase is also going to issue an

aeroplane MasterCard. How surprised were you that Chase is issuing an Aeroplan card? Did that, I mean, that came out of left field on me. I didn't expect that at all. Did you find that surprising? Is it interesting at all? And if yes, what's interesting? Well, sure. I was a little bit surprised because, you know,

Amex is in play on the Canadian side. So I was expecting it to be Amex for sure. I was more surprised though, not that it was Chase, but that it was a MasterCard. Yeah. Chase has only one other MasterCard that I could think of, right?

It's the IHG brand. Do they have other things? Oh no, the Freedom Flex is now. Oh, now the Freedom Flex. That's right. They are moving that way. How could I forget that? So maybe that's their new thing.

They're moving more towards MasterCard. Maybe that? So maybe that's their new thing. They're, they're moving more, more towards MasterCard. Maybe I shouldn't have been so surprised at all. Well, yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think it is surprising. It's surprising a, because Chase mostly is known for having Visa cards, but also be when I was reading just a little bit about it, I read that obviously Amex issues, the Canadian aeroplane cards, and then Visa apparently financed Air Canada's purchase of the program because Air Canada used to have, Aeroplan was owned separately from Air Canada. And that's not

altogether uncommon. Sometimes the airline loyalty programs are actually a separate entity from the airline. But Air Canada bought it back. And I guess just last year, this past year, Air Canada bought it back. And I guess Visa financed that. So kind of surprising that Visa got cut out of the credit card conversation, I guess. I don't know how that all happened. It's just a weird combination of things. I didn't expect an announcement that it would be a Chase card. I would have figured on it being an American Express card because they issued the Canadian ones and that was the only major transfer partner program that they were partnered up with here.

But good news, probably, although on the flip side, maybe I would have rather it be an Amex so that it's not subject to the 524 rule, because obviously it's likely to be subject to 524, so that's going to mean a lot of people are going to be out of play on that, or the card's going to be out of play for them anyway. Right, right. What's your bet?

So I'm betting, even though they announced it as if it's just one card, I'm betting there's going to be at least two, that there's going to be a kind of, you know, $95-ish card that'll be the standard one and then another card that's more expensive that has options to spend your way to elite status and things like that. Well, it's mainly based on the card lineup on the Canadian side.

So they have that kind of tiered thing where they have multiple cards that the more you pay, you get more benefits. And I know that they have that a little bit on the Chase side. Chase is kind of all over the board with that, know they have that a little bit on the chase chase is kind of all over the board with that whether they have that or not like i guess they don't have that with british airways and iberia but they do have it with united um southwest i guess sort of they got a lot of different southwest cards i don't necessarily feel like it's all that tiered it's just confusing right right um but but but yeah they do cards. I don't necessarily feel like it's all that tiered. It's just confusing. Right, right. But yeah, they do with United. I don't know.

So where I hesitate on that, it makes some sense. My first thought was of the British Airways, Liberia, Aer Lingus. I was like, I don't know. They only have one for each airline. But then I realized you're right, that they do have multiples for at least a couple of the airlines. But when I thought about it, I was like,

but what would they add on the more premium one? Because so the United Club card, for instance, is one and a half miles everywhere, right? So they can offer a better multiple on the Aeroplan card than they do on the United card. I mean, United seems like Chase's big tie-in. Yeah. Well, I mean, if this was Ame amex i'd be more certain of this that i would think it would parallel somewhat what they do with the delta cards where the right where the delta gold card you you can't earn elite status through spend but the platinum card you can and with

the reserve card you can earn even more elite status with spending and so that's that's the type of thing i'm expecting is ways to get more elite like well both elite like benefits plus shortcuts to elite levels. I hope you're right I just can't see United being okay with Chase offering

that type of path to a direct competitor in the Star Alliance that actually direct competitor not really direct Alliance that, actually direct competitor, not really direct, I guess, because United is obviously servicing the U.S. flights, but I feel like offering an easy path to Star Alliance status with somebody else that kind of poaches United's customers, I feel like if it was United, I wouldn't like that very much.

But on the flip side, I mean, you're right. They do seem to have that multiple card lineup in Canada, and I would love to see that. So, Chase, if you're listening, go right ahead and make United a little angry. It's okay. I really doubt United's in the discussions about what's going to be in this card and what's not.

Well, no, but yeah, not directly, but I just feel like it'd be surprising that they would allow another, or they would want another airline to have better cards than they do. Yeah. Well, you could flip things around, like when United devalues their miles, everyone says it's surprising that Chase would stand by and allow that. But, you know, there's things they do independently.

So we'll see. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. So, all right. So that's that. Secret transfer partners. We've got to We'll see. We'll see. So, all right. So that, that's that secret transfer partners. We've got to talk about secret transfer partners.

I mentioned this back in the beginning that you can transfer indirectly to some programs. And we said that the two that you can transfer indirectly one-to-one where Aeromexico and LATAM, LATAM, LATAM, LATAM, whatever. Right. The South American airline, the one that used to be lan and used to be tom or tam uh now is latom but however let's just go with latom sure sounds good all right so uh so you can transfer one to one sort of by transferring 50 000 points to hyatt 50 000 points to latom

right or latom first of all can you do that so let's start there and then second of all why would you so so you you can certainly bring up the hyatt page that shows that you can do that and you can put in your latam uh rewards number and put in you know that you want to transfer 50 000 points and you could press the button that says go. At that point, I found I got an error. So right now, you know, the website now Latam. And, um, you know, it, my best guess is, is they just never updated their website to accommodate Latam properly. And that Latam has a different, you know, uh, rewards number structure so that whatever the Hyatt website is looking for to validate that my number is valid is stumbling on that issue. So hopefully Hyatt will fix that and it'll be doable,

but we don't know that for sure. It's possible, you know, I'll put it out there. It's possible that Hyatt will look at it and say, oh, this is an old transfer ratio. That doesn't apply anymore. And they'll fix it the way we don't want to, which is to take away the one-to-one. So we'll see. But assuming that they just fix it and it becomes possible, the question for you is, would we ever, ever want to do that? I mean, you might.

You certainly might. And a few instances. So a reader tipped us off to this this week, to this whole idea of transferring Hyatt to LATAM and why to do that. So Bruce Wayne, as he's come to be known, let us know that there were some interesting possibilities. And there are. So if you're looking to go to South America, you want to fly on LATAM,

which is not a bad way to go, it seems. They fly 787s. They look pretty nice. Flat business class looks good, I should say. I've always read good things about it in reviews. So you can fly from New York to Lima, Peru, which might not sound that far. But when you look at it, that's like a seven hour and 40 minute flight it's like flying to europe in a flatbed business class seat and it's 31 250 miles one way that's so i mean that's yeah that's terrific that'd be an amazing that was a flight to europe everybody

be like oh my goodness 31 000 miles in business class to europe so that's a terrific value also a terrific value new york to s, Chile, $46,750. And that's like an 11-hour flight almost. I mean, yeah. That's a long flight. Yeah, that's a long time in business class. So that's a great value. The problem is that it's just two or three routes.

So it's New York to Lima, New York to Santiago, and Miami to Lima. And that's it. That's pricing out at the amazing prices, so to speak. I mean, have you checked every route? I doubt it. Well, I didn't personally check every route. Bruce Wayne had said that he had checked every route and I checked all of the major routes. I checked Boston to Sao Paulo. I checked Los Angeles to both Lima and Sao Paulo. And I checked Orlando

to both Sao Paulo and Lima because those are the places they fly from Orlando. I think maybe they also fly to Washington, D.C. if I remember correctly, and I didn't check that. But I checked almost every route anyway. And the odd thing with LATAM is that, as Greg kind of alluded to before, it used to be several different airlines. So it was L'Anse Chilé, and there were L'Anse Chilé, however you want to pronounce it. And then also, there was another L'Anse, and I can't even remember which country it was based in. But there was another, there's like L'Anse Ecuador, L'Anse Chilé, and then there's, I think there was one more. And then on the Tom side, I think there were two separate ones there. Maybe there's a

Lawn Brazil is what it is, something. Or maybe Tom was a Brazilian airline. Whatever it is, when they merged them together, things were weird. Like if you use Alaska miles to book LATAM, I remember one of the issues, or maybe it was British Airways miles. One of the issues was your flight number had to start with a certain two letters, the two letter code from the old legacy carrier that was actually a partner. So they're like linked together in one airline. It's kind of like they redid the packaging and on the outside, it looks the same, but the nuts and bolts on the inside is still the old stuff. So that's created problems with other partners before and trying to book those flights

where you could book like the lawn chile ones with this kind of airline mile but not the old tom flights with that kind so that's probably why this is somehow pricing out differently as my guess because these seem to be old oh interesting interesting you know one form of line, the old route. So, so, so I don't know as though it's going to last. My other somewhat concern with this was that availability was like almost unlimited. I was looking at day after day after day at those prices. And like I put it up to seven passengers and I just like kept hitting next day after day and seeing seven pass availability on the direct flights for seven passengers in business class for like 31 or 47,000 miles.

That seemed hard to believe to me, but I did cross-reference it against Qantas and Qantas didn't see quite as many days with seven passengers, but a lot of days with seven passengers. So it's certainly possible that, yeah, it's certainly possible that LON is just, or LATAM is just offering more availability to their own members. So I think maybe it is bookable. So what about another exciting thing you wrote about is the wide open availability between Santiago and Easter Island, which is a notoriously difficult to get award. Yeah, I mean, I've always read in the past it was hard to get one seat on that flight. Like just getting it, if you're able to get there by yourself, that's an accomplishment.

So if you're able to get two seats, forget about it. That seemed to be like, you know, one of those unicorn type situations. And yeah, I found seven seats available day after day from Santiago to Easter Island also. Right. Right. So if that's not just a COVID artifact or a mistake, if it's a real thing that they make that much more award space available, then it almost doesn't matter that I'm more excited about that in a way than some super good sweet spot awards because you know the ability to fly when you want to where you want is with miles is is just not something that is uh true with most programs right right right right and this program seems to be making tons and tons of seats available even on routes like that that are notoriously difficult to find any availability. So, and that's pretty exciting because if you do want to go to South America for a bit, and then also building a trip to Easter Island, it's looking like it's very highly

possible. And I did see somebody commented on the post saying that they didn't see any availability in economy class, only in business class on that flight. That's still a pretty long flight. And it was 43,000 miles one way from Santiago to Easter Island, which is pretty reasonable in my opinion. So that was a pretty good value in there too. So there are some good options. I did not spend a lot of time searching other flights around South America, but there may certainly be some other decent values around South America too. So you got a few options there that may be worthwhile. Now, like Greg said, we're out on the front, you know, kind of at the leading edge of this. So at the moment, it seems that you can't, if you have a newer account anyway, you won't be able

to transfer points over. Now, if you have an old lot time account, it is at least theoretically possible that you have a different number of digits than what Greg was referring to. So maybe you're able to transfer from Hyatt. We don't yet know. So we're working on all of that stuff. And as that gets updated, like we said, you'll find any updates to that on the resources page. So you go to frequent miler.com resources, chase transfer partners, and see whatever the new news is on that. All right. Now, wait. Speaking of one other exciting thing that is broken

is the partner award chart that's online for LATAM. You know, it shows some really nice award prices for their partners, and Delta is now a partner. So you can use LATAM miles to fly Delta. The award chart looks super cheap. Super cheap. Right. I mean, it looks great.

Most places in Europe that Delta flies looks like it would be 37,500 miles one way in business class. Looks that way. That's so cheap. But looks can be deceiving. So that would be really cheap. It would be an incredible deal. But, of course course you ran a couple

searches i think and yeah didn't quite come out with a price that cheap no you know 30 what did you say 32 37 37 35 yeah i think i came up with 108 000 one way 108 yeah a little bit different a little bit a little bit of wiggle room it's, do I do that or do I use 50,000 Virgin Atlantic miles to fly Delta business class across the pond? Yeah. Well, you know, and LATAM has a calculator, a mileage calculator, where you put in where you're going and coming from for their own flights. And you put that in and the numbers that come back aren't anywhere near what we're seeing on these routes. It just doesn't seem to jive at all. Partner award chart doesn't seem to jive at all with what you find when you look at partner stuff. However, I do think it could be interesting because if you called and

talked to an agent, I mean, the award chart says 37.5, right? I don't know that you get an agent to manually price it at what the award chart says, but I mean, it's worth a phone call to see if you can get it right. Right. Now, let me, let me point out though, one more, I, you know, I was about to say, well, it can't hurt to experiment, but one more issue is that, um, you know, transferring miles is a one-way street. And if you transfer your, your, your points into, uh, these L Latam points, they're going to expire eventually. And based on the website, who knows if this is right, it used to be Latam kilometers was their unit of currency. Now though, according to their website, there are miles and there are points. And as far as I could tell, I'm pretty sure, at least if you register in the U.S. for this program,

you're going to be getting points. And the reason I'm pointing that out is that it doesn't appear there's any way to extend the validity of miles, and it looks like they expire 24 months after you get them full stop. Let me back up. There's no way to extend the validity of points points yeah points yeah so yeah so points it seems like we think that and again if you're registering from the united states at the very least it seems you're earning points points will expire two years from the day you earn them that's it right there's no way to extend it transferring more points isn't going to do you any good. Flying a flight and crediting the miles to LATAM is not going to do you any good.

We saw some reports on Flyer Talk of people who had recently, like in the last couple of months here, credited flights to LATAM and it didn't extend the expiration for people from the United States. So if you were earning miles, if you were from South America and you were earning miles, it seems that that is a three-year expiration and that earning activity does extend that, I think. Slight activity, but not other types of earnings. Slight activity. Yeah. So it's a little confusing to say the least, and definitely a bit of a gamble. If you're going to transfer over points from Chase to Hyatt to LATAM in order to book any of this, there's a bit of a gamble. The other thing we didn't mention

is we can't see the taxes and fees that go along with it. However, I have gotten some reports now from people who have booked these awards that say that there are no fuel surcharges. There's a $25 close-in booking fee if you book within 120 days of travel, I think. Wow, that's hardly close in, but okay.

Right, that's what I thought too. So they will charge you a little something, but nothing like the hundreds of dollars in fuel surcharge that you might otherwise be worried about. So cheap to book the awards when you book them. And the pricing that we found, people did say holds up with their experience. So that terrific pricing release that Bruce found and shared with us and we reported certainly looks like some great deals. Right. There's always also the possibility, there's a lot of other quirks to the program that are or can be beneficial to us. And, you know, I'm just thinking, I don't have anything in mind.

I don't know of any secrets. I'm just saying like, you know, I know that when we sort of became more aware of the Life Miles program, there were all kinds of like little hidden gems in there. And there could be things like that here. And I wouldn't be surprised. They've got a huge list of partners, right?

I mean, there's a whole bunch of partners that from different is that right oh yeah again there are the partners with kathy pacific their partners with botanza their partners with i it was like a whole bunch of different people from different both star alliance and one world they had a number of different partners and i was like oh wow they're still partners with british airways so there's a number of different possibilities where I didn't get into looking for flights from Frankfurt to somewhere else to piece together a bigger trip. So there is certainly a possibility that there are other pricing oddities. And the fact that you brought up Avianca makes a lot of sense there.

As I mentioned in the post, Avianca has all these weird pricing anomalies that make no sense, that don't follow their word chart at all. And we've at least got a few of those on hand now with LATAM and where there's smoke, there's fire. Maybe there are some other ones out there. So it would certainly be worth looking because again, with life miles, I found a while back, I wrote about like certain routes. It was like cheaper on one partner than on another from the same two airports. Just, just by picking the right partner,

you'd pay a nice significant chunk fewer miles. So it's certainly not impossible that there's some of those oddities out there. So I think the lot of time program is going to be worth a, you know, a continued dive to see what else is out there, but still a little, a little shaky as to how it's going to work. Right. Right. And, and, you know, it'll really, I think, be also dependent on Hyatt fixing their website because there's no other good transfer partner

to transfer into Latam. Correct, correct. All right. So that's, I mean, that's an interesting find this week. I think there's definitely some possible. Oh, very interesting. It's fun, you know, digging into this. It's not even new stuff. It it's like it's uncovering this old stuff so thanks to the reader

going by uh bruce wayne for for uh passing us along those gems yeah definitely fun time this week all right so that brings us to the post roasts so do you want to go first or second uh let me go second all right i i gave you the choice this week. Greg's choice. So next week I get to pick. So you wrote a post this week about Marriott Bonvoy and how they devalued their points when you use them for homes and villas. So if you want to book a Marriott homes and villas Airbnb type property with Marriott points, previously you got seven tenths of a cent per

point in value towards one of those days. And you said that that was reasonable because our reasonable redemption value is 0.72. So it's right about on par with the reasonable redemption value. So before you thought, not exciting, but it was a fine redemption. Now, they devalued it all the way down to six tenths of a point. So, of a cent, rather. Six tenths of a cent in value per point. So, they devalued it by a tenth of a cent. And your headline was Bonvoy. Is that really a big deal, Greg?

Like, at seven tenths of a cent, you were like, okay, this is fine. And at six tenths of a cent, you're like, oh, my goodness, I'd never do it. Is it really that big of a deal like was that like a big devalue was that bond did you get bond did we get bond void on that like we did we did i because it was right on the fence before it was it was like one that like i i personally probably wouldn't have ever used points even before at the 0.7 but but now because it's even lower it's like like, well, definitely won't. If you actually price out, yes, if you're looking one point at a time, you're only talking about

0.1, a tenth of a penny difference. But if you're actually looking at a real booking, you're not looking at one point at a time. You're looking at hundreds of thousands of points at a time probably. And it's going to make actually a big difference in how many points you're going to have to spend for that award. And you, and you know, if you believe our reasonable redemption values, what they mean is you are likely, it's going to be fairly, it should be fairly easy for you to get this much value or more for your points. So you should be able to get 0.7 or more for your Marriott points. If you're looking at it, you're only getting 0.6 value per point. You're just not getting all the value should be from your points.

And that's not to say that you shouldn't be looking at Marriott homes and villas because when I did, now, admittedly, I haven't done that recently, but when I last did a comparison shopping, where I looked up the same properties on other websites as what were advertised on Marriott homes and villas, there were times where through Marriott, it was cheaper than the other websites like VRBO. And so the reason booking through Marriott's interesting, when you find those deals, is that you're going to earn Marriott points

and you're going to earn Elite Knights. So if you're one chasing, for example, Platinum Elite's deaths, that'll be good. I'd say this is a case where you should be looking at getting a good deal for your money and earning points as opposed to spending your points. Spending your points at 60. So that was not really my roast, but rather a reader's roast. A reader was like, oh my goodness, like 10th of a penny, like it's all a drop. I didn't know. You're totally right. I was,

I threw that one out there because I felt like the reader who threw that out threw that out to kind of be like, oh, what are you talking about here? But I thought there's probably some other people too that looked at that and were like, it's not really any different. But it is. When you're scaling it up, that tenth of a cent adds up over time. You're talking about hundreds of thousands of points to book a $2,000, $3,000, $4,000 Marriott home and villa booking.

It's a big chunk of points. That's right. You're right. It was a friendly roast. It was a friendly roast. Okay. All right. All right. So, so flipping around now, you wrote a post about purchase protections. You broke your phone yet again. I sure did. I sure did. Luckily, this was a brand new one, and that's lucky because it was still under the purchase protection timeline of your platinum card that you had paid with, I believe. Yes.

And so you sang the praise, and it worked out well. You didn't have to pay any copay or anything. They gave you the full amount of the purchase price, right? Right. You didn't even have to look for, you know, how much would it cost to repair it or anything. Right. So that's all awesome. They just gave me the money back.

And you concluded that from now on, you want to use your Amex cards to for anything you're going to buy especially if they're if the kids are going to touch them that's right that's right the kids toys I mean as they get older here and destructive then purchase protection is suddenly an important benefit okay so Amex cards have a 90-day purchase protection from 90 days from when you buy it when I looked up um frequent milers page on best credit card purchase protections, I found that the chase cards all have 120 days. I mean, we all know that things break in the first three months. So, okay. So what's your point, Craig? What's your point well my point is you wrote a post talking about how great the amex travel protections were or purchase protections are and didn't look at frequent

milers recommendation under the i did link to it for what it's worth i did link to it so you could have read it if you were reading the post, you could have checked it out and seen that. No, so you're right. And it is, and actually I knew it was 120 days when I put it on the platinum card. I could have done the chasing cash for instance, and gotten 120 days and five X points per dollar. So maybe, maybe it was dumb of me not to have done that. But I, what I was doing was trying to match up two different insurers because I knew that I would have Amex to cover if I broke it in the first 90 days. And if I broke it after that, I could be paying with my chasing business preferred and claim cell phone insurance. So

give me the two different options there to deal with two different benefits administrators if I got turned down from one. And part of the reason I like the Amex one was because the experience was seamless and easy and didn't require very much from me. By contrast, my experience with the Chase cell phone insurance recently was fine, but it was slow. It dragged on and on, and they waited like a week, and then they asked me for more stuff,

and then they waited like a week, and they asked me for more, and I was like, come on, guys. This is just a screen repair. Like let's just get this. I don't want to have to keep going out to the store or that kind of thing. So I was a little annoyed and this was super easy by comparison.

So the MX system was- And I think that's a great data point. I would love to know though, like would Chase be easier for purchase protection than for cell phone protection. Yeah, me too. I'd love to hear that. I don't either.

It's your turn to break a phone. As long as it's within 120 days of buying it. Right, right. Yeah, because I was looking, like the Sapphire Reserve not only has equal purchase protection and warranty, extended warranty as Amex, but they also have better return protection, at least by the numbers as far as how much they allow. So I'd be interested in testing that out. Of course, I don't really want to buy something and break it on purpose, but. Nobody does. And that's, you know, people often ask about the various insurance benefits. And so it's like, I mean, I can tell you what the terms say, but in practice,

you have to have actually like done something wrong and had a problem in order to make a claim and, or you necessarily done something wrong. It's your fault, but something bad has to have happened for you to have direct experience with any of those types of benefits. So, so I was partly glad to be able to get that direct experience and so close in proximity to having done the screen. Now, the thing with me for Chase and the screen was that the phone that I was making the claim on was not terribly expensive to begin with. So like, had they just given me the original purchase price back on the cell phone insurance

claim, like, I feel like that would have been, it was almost the same as what they ended up paying out anyway. So did they really need me to go out and get an estimate for fixing the screen when the phone was so cheap to begin with? I wasn't anywhere near the limit as far as how much they cover for the cell phone insurance. So I felt like that was kind of chintzy when I was like, oh yeah, you're really gonna make me go out and get an estimate for that. Like, and it's not for me, it's not like right down the road. I got to drive like, you know, 30 miles away in order to get an estimate and COVID and all this, that like don't make me get an estimate for this.

It wasn't that expensive. And by comparison, Amex here didn't even ask me if it could be fixed. Like they didn't, they didn't say, can you fix it? They just said, how much was it? What happened to it? And then boom, gave me the 500 bucks back. You know, they said, Hey, can you give it? They just said, how much was it? What happened to it? And then boom, gave me the 500 bucks back. You know, they said, Hey, can you give us a receipt too? And that's it. That's fantastic. So, um, I like that. I would like that too. Um, I I'm under the impression,

but tell me if I'm wrong about this, that, that, uh, when you do cell phone protection, the actual like sort of handling of what's happening is, is handled by the insurer, whoever, whoever Chase is like contracted with, whereas I think, but maybe, maybe I'm wrong that that Amex is purchase protection is actually handled directly by Amex. Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. So I'm sorry, I thought you were gonna say so. Yeah, Chase has the same benefits provider, I think, for the purchase protection as they do for their cell phone insurance. So with Chase, it's like-

So that would be an issue then. Claim benefits. Or could be an issue. I thought I was going to be dealing with the same people either way with Chase anyway. Gotcha. All right. Yes. And yes, it is Amex that handles Amex purchase protections.

That's a benefit right there. Amex insurance program or something. Yeah. So it is direct. Yeah. So the difference to me is that like, so if it's Amex handling it, like they have an incentive to keep you happy as a customer. Whereas an insurer,

it's like it's their job to make it hard to file a claim because they want there to be breakage on their benefits. That's their goal, not to keep you happy. I mean, that's the business model. I mean, yeah, they gotta make money somehow, right? So yes, you would think that that's absolutely correct. So that could be a benefit. Now, I mean, we're speculating here as to whether that is really a benefit of them. I don't know. It certainly seemed to work out that way for me because,

you know, the truth is that it wasn't very expensive to fix. And once I get it done, getting it fixed, I'll write a quick post on my experience with that because I know a lot of people buy Pixel phones and I actually mailed it into Google to get it fixed and I was surprised. I called around some places to find out and a number of places told me that they couldn't work on that phone at all and I was like, well, thank goodness I got the full purchase price back because I thought I was going to have to buy it again and then I got a hold of a couple of places that would fix it. It was pretty expensive and I was like, oh man, this kind of stinks. And then I found that mailing it in Google was actually really reasonable

in order to get it fixed that way. Of course, now I'm at the phone for a while. So that's the downside. But yeah, I mean, again, I'm surprised that Amex didn't say, okay, well, you broke it. Can we fix it? They just said, okay, it was covered under purchase protection.

Here's your money back. Right, right. Well, cool. So if anyone listening has experience going for purchase protection through Chase or Citi or really any of the major banks besides Amex, let us know how it went. I'd love to hear if it was as easy as Nick's experience with Amex or was it as hard as his first experience with Chase? I'm definitely going to think about that though. Like when I buy toys here and I was just kind of joking about it in the post, but when I buy the more expensive toys, that is something I'm going

to think more about now than I would have even just a few weeks ago, even though I knew that that was a credit card benefit. I've known that that's been there a long time, I haven't really had the need to use it before. One time, I think maybe ever, I made a purchase where I consciously thought about that being one of the reasons to use card A or B. Now I think I'm going to be using that a little bit more. Not using it, hopefully, but I'll be thinking about it when I make my purchase. Yeah. Yeah. All right, cool. All right. So then that brings us to the question of the week. So question of the week, I think I'm going to give you a little double header here. So let's get the first one and see how that goes. And maybe I'll add a double header. So question of the week, the question that everybody is asking when I say everybody, we're getting this question on the blog, we're getting it in the Facebook group, getting it via email. People are curious. Everybody wants to know, Greg, 2020 is almost over and I'm not flying anywhere. And I got this Amex airline fee credit. Like, am I just out of luck? I'm not going to fly anywhere now. I don't think I'm going

to travel yet in 2021. Like gift cards are dead. Like what can I do? Is there anything, is there any way to get any value out of this and be able to use it for more than just 2021, et cetera? Like, what's up with my airline fee credits? Everybody's asking. Yeah. Tell me. Well, you know, you could go to the airport and just buy a day pass into the lounge and just enjoy. Enjoy sitting in the lounge.

Right. As enjoyable as that sounds right now. No, don't do that. So we've updated our resource page on that. And so, you know, Nick mentioned earlier that click on our resources tab and find all these good resources. In this case, what we're talking about is the post that's Amex airline fee credits, what works.

And so there are lots of things that work to, that get reimbursed by American Express when you spend these things on your card, even though they're not technically supposed to be reimbursed. So technically the airline fee credit is supposed to reimburse things like lounge access, things like a access things like um a uh seat

assignment fee i don't know in-flight food i think things like that yeah wi-fi maybe stuff like that and uh yeah wi-fi if it's charged by the airline but not airline it's true by gogo or whatever so um you know so the the truth is what works and what doesn't is very, very complicated because it varies tremendously by airline. There's very few things that work if you picked American Airlines as your selected airline. But there's lots of things that work with other airlines. And a common thing, like you'll find some airlines where if you buy a ticket that's less than a certain amount, it'll act like it's a fee. There are many where, in fact, I'd say most,

where if you book an award and pay fees, pay the award fees or booking fees, those will count as an airline fee and get reimbursed. And that's more exciting than usual or than before because more airlines now are making those cancellations of awards and changes to awards free, especially when they're within the United States. And so there's just lots of little things like that that you can do. And so, you know, I would definitely just look at the chart. If you've already picked your selected airline, look for your selected airline and see what works for that one. If you haven't picked one yet, go through all of them and see which one has things that you could likely use. For example,

let's say you have Southwest points and you see that award fees count with Southwest. Okay, so maybe book some trips for next year that you may or may not take that have award fees. And those will get reimbursed up to the max $200 or what have you that, that your card allows. And, uh, you know, if you don't end up taking those flights, you, you know, you, uh, maybe you change them, uh, make free changes to the flight you really want. If you do eventually cancel, now there are times where they might claw back your refund, but that doesn't always happen. And if you weren't going to use it anyway, then you haven't really lost anything.

You haven't really lost anything. You're going to let it expire, and then you haven't really lost anything. Yeah, you haven't really lost anything. Exactly. You're going to let it expire, and then you haven't really lost anything if they claw it back. Right, right. I haven't heard of widespread Amex shutdowns over people who got reimbursed for the wrong thing. And it's not your fault they got reimbursed for the wrong thing necessarily. I mean, it's Amex's system.

So they have it set up to automatically reimburse you for whatever they do. So, yeah, they may claw it back later if you cancel something, maybe. Not always, maybe. And if that's your worst case scenario, it's a lot better than just not trying and letting the credit expire. So as well, give something a shot. The other point I wanted to make on this

is that people are often looking for recent data points, which is smart because things change. And so you want to know what's the latest, what's the most recent stuff. And so we made some updates to that post this week. We're making more updates because we've got a whole bunch more data points from readers after we posted it.

So more updates continuously happening. On the flip side, if there has not been an update, generally that's because that thing has not changed. If I see a data point on something that is different, then I am definitely going to update that right away. Whereas if award fees work on Southwest, for instance, I'm not going to update that every single month with the latest data point. I mean, because it works. It still works. It hasn't stopped working.

So if it stopped working, believe me, we would hear about it. People would say, oh my goodness, this was work for years and years, and it stopped working and they'd be shouting it from the rooftops and then at that point we would very quickly update to make that clear just like we did when gift card stopped working on a lot of Airlines obviously updated that right away so we don't want anybody making a mistake and charging something that doesn't work anymore so so you can generally trust that what you see in there is working is still working to the

best of our knowledge. If it had changed, we would have changed it. So anyway, that's a point to keep in mind there. And like Greg said, you have to read through it, check it out, see a lot of different stuff with different airlines. It depends on which airline you have, but some of them can actually be pretty good. So you might have some good options there. All right, you know what? I'm going to leave it at that.

We're going to leave it at a single header. I'm off the hook. You're off the hook. You're off the hook. So if you guys enjoyed this week's podcast and you'd like to read more about what we've been talking about and get our posts in your email each day or each week or each month, you can go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe.

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I think it will. We have a catch-all, so probably will. Very good. All right. Well, thank you guys for being out there listening with us this week, and we will see you again soon. All right. Bye, everybody. Thank you.