Frequent Miler on the Air - Chase's Hyatt gut punch & refreshed Sapphire Preferred® | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep362 | 6-12-26

Episode Date: June 12, 2026

In today's podcast episode, we'll talk about how the New Sapphire Preferred® card wows, but the new Chase to Hyatt transfer rate breaks our hearts. Giant Mailbag(01:18) - Read more about stacking Chase Instacart deals here or learning to love Instacart credits here(04:33) - Elliot talks about getting into the Instacart game(05:58) - Christine found a great Instacart stackCrazy Thing(07:47) - IHG Targeted offer: 0K points every 0 nightsBonvoyed(08:53) - Wells Fargo ends point sharing (Sep 25)Read more about Wells Fargo changes here(12:30) - Greg rants about points brokersAwards, Points, and More(18:28) - United Pooling apparently now allows partner awards(20:22) - Alaska Airlines CFO hints at BOA point transfers(23:31) - Gondola: flight autosave(27:49) - Learn more about the Chase / Paze Promo hereMain Event(35:15) - Transfer ratio to Hyatt dropping to 4:3 (except for Sapphire Reserve® cards)Read more about this change in Hyatt transfer ratio here(52:50) - Is there any upside?(54:45) - Possible to-dos (if you care about Hyatt 1-1 transfers)Find our "Which Premium Cards are Keepers?" resource hereLearn more about Hyatt milestone spending here(1:08:02) - Learn more about the refreshed Sapphire Preferred® card here(01:09:53) - Lots of good stuff (effective 6/15)(01:15:42) - And some bad stuff (effective 10/1 for pre 6/15 cardholders)Subscribe and FollowVisit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media.Music Credit – “Ocean Deep” by Annie YoderMentioned in this episode:Frequent Miler's Best Offers Pagehttps://frequentmiler.com/best-credit-card-offers/Check out all of our other travel podcasts from around the worldThis podcast is part of Voyascape, a podcast network that brings together the world's best travel podcasts. You can find all of our podcasts from around the world at Voyascape.com. If you are interested in advertising or sponsored content on any of our shows you can find out more at the link below.Voyascape Podcast Network

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world atvoyascape.com. On today's episode, Wells Fargo Bonvoys multiplayer households. We'll discuss a pays promo super stack. The new Sapphire preferred card wowes, but the new chase-to-hiant transfer ratio breaks our hearts. Frequent Milo on the air starts now. Today's main event,

Chase's Hyatt, Gut Punch, and refreshed Sapphire preferred. Today we have a double header of sorts with two big topics out from Chase. Chase has surprised us like crazy on both of these topics, one in a really bad way and one in a good way. So we'll talk through all of that in today's main event. Yeah, and it really is sort of a double header because it's sort of like a two-headed monster here. there's a lot to say about this with very different kind of implications. But if you want to jump ahead to that and you want to check it out or you want to come back to something later on, don't forget, you can expand the show description. Just go to the description box and you'll find all the timestamps and links to post that we've written about this stuff.

Wherever you're watching or listening to this, don't forget to give us a like, a thumbs up. Subscribe, please. I know you're listening. Some of you out there haven't subscribed yet. So make sure you do that. And I guess that brings us into the next segment here. Let's drag out this week's Giant Mailback. All right. Today's Giant Mail is a double header too. Let's keep to the theme. Both pieces of Giant Mail have to do with Instacart. So it's a little background first. A bunch of Chase cards offer $10 or $20 monthly Instacart credits. And they also offer three months free of Instacart Plus. At least this is all true while we're recording this. And you can buy if you have multiple qualifying cards,

You can sign up, you know, each of these cards, register each of these cards. And that extends your Instacart Plus, like, free, you know, time longer instead of, so it's not, like, overlapping three months that are the same three months. So that's all good. And Nick and I have both separately written about how we personally are using these Instacart credits, how we're stacking them. Because it's not obvious how you can do it, but you can in different ways. I want to jump in with one quick point of clarification. I apologize to interrupt you. And that's because I talk about these the same way as Instacart credits.

And I realized just today as we record this, I got a comment on Facebook where I realized somebody was confused about how this works. I think we should probably call these moving forward Instacart coupons because they're not a statement credit. It's not like you spend your money and get a statement credit. You need to register for this promotion for that three, three months. and then you get a coupon loaded to your Instacart account. So somebody just commented today on Facebook and they were like, oh, I did a bunch of pickup orders. When am I going to get the statement credits?

And I was like, oh, I realized through the rest of the comment that they hadn't registered for this. They were like, oh, I just learned you need Instacart Plus in order to get this. Ouch. How is that worthwhile? And I was like, oh, no, you missed like steps, you know, one through six before jumping into step seven. So, so as Greg just explained, they do have this promotion where you get the free

three months and you get these coupons, but you do need to register for the promotion. So make sure that you check out not just the two posts that we've written about it, but sort of the original, I think, Instacart posts that has links to register your cards because you do that first. Lots of good points here. And you might be wondering, is it worth it? Read the two posts that Nick, the post that Nick and I wrote and decide for yourself whether it's worth the effort.

And it probably largely depends on how many. any qualifying chase cards you have. Because if you have a bunch, it can be pretty lucrative. All right. With that out of the way, a tiny bit more background. The best credits are with the ink, two of the Chase Inc. business fee-free cards, the Inc. Business Cash and the Inc. Business Unlimited, both offer a $20 monthly coupon.

So those are great. But some people have a challenge when trying to register those where Instacart tries to get you to set up a business account with those like coupons loaded separately to a business account. So in my case, when I did it, I just click like no or something like that somewhere on the screen and it went to my personal account. But that hasn't worked for everyone. So now I can read the message from Elliott. Elliot writes, I've been getting into the Instacart game thanks to your posts. When activating my ink cards, Instacart kept trying to put them on a separate business Instacart account. There is some reported workarounds to get everything on your personal

Instacart account, such as clicking a nevermind button when prompted, but I never saw any of those options. The solution I figured out is changing the URL, which ends in ACC type equals business. If you change this to ACC type equals personal, it will open the activation process on your personal Instacart account. Yeah, that's interesting. So I just recently added another card, And so I did do this. And I wish I had screenshoted or recorded how I did it because similar to what you, I don't even think I clicked a never mind. I think it gave a pop up saying, do you want to create a business account and do this?

And I just clicked some empty space on the screen somewhere to make that pop up go away. It wasn't even like, I don't even think I clicked a nevermind button in order to get past that. But I can't remember exactly now. But this is a great tip because if you do this on desktop anyway, it should be pretty easy. On mobile, I imagine you can probably also figure out how to change. the URL easily enough. And that's, that is even easier probably than what we've talked about. But yeah, all of, I think probably the same for you, right? All of our business cards are synced up with our personal account. I didn't create a separate business account. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Next up,

Christine has a tip about Instacart. And Christine writes, regarding next use of Instacart credits, wanted to add that a great stack is to use an eligible Chase personal card to purchase Instacart gift cards at New Egg with Pays checkout to get 11x points. And as an aside, we're going to explain that later in the show what the Pays deal is, but just sort of roll with this here. And then Christine goes on to say, then any additional spend at Instacart above the $10 to $20 credit

but we'll, and aside, coupon, we'll go on the gift card for an effective 11x chase points on grocery spend rather than on a less than ideal ink business card, which you'd get the maximum of 1.5 points per dollar if using the ink business unlimited. Yeah, so that's a great point. And we'll talk more about pays later, like Greg said. Similarly, if you read Greg's post, I think you talked in your post, if I remember correctly, about buying discounted Instacart gift cards. Sometimes you can get them for less than face value.

And you may, if you get a good deal on them, may prefer that over the 11x points or you may prefer the 11x points. So either way, that I think is a good strategy. And I should probably pursue one or the other. I haven't to this point because I'm spending less than $5 an order and I'm doing 10 orders a month. So it's $50 a month. I haven't felt the need to go out of my way to save the extra couple of dollars or earn the extra

couple of points on that small amount of spend. however, that like does run contrary to most of what I do in this world. So so I probably should be doing something like that. So it's a great tip and I think a smart one that Christine has there. Yes, absolutely. All right. Let's talk about what crazy thing? What crazy thing did IHG do this week? All right, I have no idea what IHG did. What did they do? All right. IHG is out with a targeted promotion. People are receiving this targeted promotion from IHG. And the offer is, and I quote, zero K points every zero nights. So, you know, this is really great promotion because most promotions require at least one night.

This requires zero. None. No, I mean, I was already naturally meeting the terms of this one. This is like the definition of a no-brainer. So I am definitely going to earn my zero-k points on this one. I've already racked up so many zero-k points. It's just not funny. I mean, I've daily, daily, I'm doing this.

This should be under mattress running the numbers, probably, because this is mattress runworthy. I've slept on my mattress every night for the last week and earned zero K daily. There you go. All right. Well, well done, IHG. Thanks for joining us today. All right. Let's move on to Bonvoid this week.

Who has Bonvoid us, but Wells Fargo. How did Wells Fargo bonvoy us? Yeah, they've announced the end of. point sharing, September 25th, will no longer be able to move points or other rewards from one person to another. Until then, Wells Fargo has had a very generous process, just like Capital One, where you could move your points to anyone else who has a card that earns rewards. And, you know, I think this is really a big shame for any people who have like multiplayer, who are, approach the points in Miles game in a multiplayer mode where you have one person earning points,

you know, with the, with a Wells Fargo cashback card, another person earning with, you know, a Wells Fargo points card, you can no longer combine those together. Now, if you have multiple things, including cashback and points in your own name, you'll still be able to combine those together into points that are transferable. So thankfully, that's not ending, but the sharing part is ending. So that's a shame. Yeah, I think it's a real bummer, like you said, certainly in a two-player household, I think probably particularly for some folks, because every now and then we hear from somebody whose spouse has like some really old Wells Fargo card that they picked up in college and never got rid of or something. And they're like, oh, it's got this one good bonus category or one good feature. And so maybe not be the person who primarily handles the miles and points, but it's a good option to have and to be able to combine those points then is useful.

Or, you know, if you travel with other family, maybe. We take a lot of trips with other family members, and they don't have any Wells Fargo cards. But if they did, then I can totally see where it might be like, oh, well, why don't you just transform your rewards from that? And I'll book these flights. And so I can see lots of situations where it'd be useful to be able to share points. And it's a shame that they're getting rid of that. I don't want to steal your line.

I saw in the outline for today's show, you wrote a question. And it made me really nervous. Yeah. So, you know, so this came right on the heels of Citibank doing the same thing of stop. popping point sharing. And so the question is, is Capital One next? They're the only one I can think of that has transferable points that allows unfettered sharing. You know, what do you think? That makes me nervous. I, you know, to be honest, hadn't even remotely considered that until I saw that they put it in in the outline today. I was like, oh, oh, wow, that would stink

because, and I say that because we earn the majority of our Capital One rewards on my wife's cards because she has a VentureX with a large credit limit and a Spark Cash, Spark Cash or Cash Plus, I don't know, one of the Spark Cash cards that also similarly has a big limit. So we use those for a lot of larger purchases to generate some rewards. But then we often end up moving those to one of my cards because I have an old Capital One card that has this weird redemption of 64,000 or so miles for a $900 Marriott gift card and or, or I, I just booked most of the award flights and things. So it's just easier.

She calls every once in a while and just moves over all the rewards. And so I hadn't even considered that maybe we won't be able to do that in the future. That'll be a bummer if Capital One does cut it off. Why do you think issuers are cutting this off? City cut it off, Wells Fargo cut it off. Oh, man. I hope Capital One doesn't. Please don't think.

What's going on here? I think a very likely cause is points brokers. So organizations that buy points from other people, you know, it's not always easy or possible to buy points directly. So they often do things like indirectly buy points by telling a person who wants to buy, who wants to sell their points, how to book a flight, basically, with those points for someone else that the points broker has sold the flight to. But when you have points that are transferable like this to other people, they could just buy points directly, and that's much simpler. So that's my guess as to what is probably motivating this. It's also possible that maybe even probable that some airlines,

I know airlines have been fighting this. So the points brokers like get on as soon as word flights for popular routes are released, they book them all up, and then they have some tricks for later changing them to the person who buys that flight from them. So that's a real problem for airlines because, I mean, their own members don't get to book awards. And so it wouldn't surprise me if there aren't transfer partner airlines that are pressuring the transferable points programs to say, hey, stop allowing this.

Now, if that's what's happening, it could be that Wells Fargo's, you know, trying to get a new partner that's saying not as long as you have this in place, we're not going to, or it might be an existing one that's pressuring them. There could be other reasons, too. But anyway, I think that's a likely source of pressure. So I don't know why Capital One wouldn't be getting that same kind of pressure. They might be resisting it because they care more about their customer experience than the airlines' customers experience possible. But, you know, I do think that there are pressure out there that are forcing it to happen. And I would like for more programs to go the way of like Chase, for example, where Chase, you know, allows you to move points just within your household.

Or even Amex where if you have a authorized user card for at least 90 days, then you can transfer points to that authorized user. Things like that where it's like possible to move points around within, you know, within your, the people you play this game with would, you know, I think there are ways of preventing that point broker problem, but still keeping things accessible to, to us, to our, to the customers that are trying to use it as designed, but as a family. You know, why not introduce family points pooling like some airlines have done? you know, there are ways of preventing you from adding random points brokers to your pool. You know, so do something like that.

So anyway, I'm hoping that we'll get something like that in the future rather than just a blanket. You can't move points. Yeah, rather than framing it as the way people play the game, I would frame it as make this customer-friendly. Right? Yeah, yeah. You know, like, that's really the bottom line. Like, I don't even think that the majority of people listening to this show are like trying to game the system here. It's just like, it's just customer friendly to enable people to at least within their household, like you said, share the rewards that they're earning.

It just seems like logical probably to the average. If I pulled somebody off the street and I was like, you know, should you and your spouse be able to combine the rewards you earn on your credit cards? I think most people would be like, well, yeah, I mean, we combine our checking accounts and our investment accounts and whatever. Yeah, why wouldn't we be able to combine our rewards accounts? It just seems natural. So yeah, I think the programs ought to make that more customer-friendly. I mean, I'd love to be able to have a family and friends points pool like JetBlue's gone to that or they don't even have to be related or the same address necessarily. But maybe you travel with other people.

And so it'd be useful to have that pool or where you just want to be able to share that kind of thing. And that is an example of a situation where the airline isn't losing. You know, I think like you said, the key concern for them is probably losing out to these points brokers that are booking flights that, their customers probably would have paid the cash rate for, if not for the broker. And so they're not seeing any of the benefit of offering award availability in that case because the actual rewards enthusiasts aren't getting it. And the airline is losing a customer that may have otherwise purchased a fare. So I can see where they don't like the points brokers.

But there's no harm in letting people in a small friends and family identified friends and family group pool things. So I don't know. I mean, are we advocating for the way of like the Asian Airlines that only allow you to redeem rewards for some people, though? I mean, like, you know, because we always, we find that annoying that you need to like, you know, add sponsors and stuff. Are we advocating for something like that, no? Right. It kind of feels that way.

It's really unfortunate that I think the, you know, the further banks and loyalty programs go to to prevent points brokers and other kinds of shenanigans. that are on a mass scale, they make life more difficult for those of us that are trying to use our rewards the way they're intended. But then it becomes a bigger problem. So yeah, I don't know. I don't know if there's a good solution for the latter thing that you just brought up. But I think points pooling, you know, it's fine if you introduce restrictions that make, you know, make it difficult for a, points broker to take advantage of it. And there are ways to do that. But not difficult for a regular

customer to be a regular customer. That's the challenge you got to strike out there. Awards programs, all right. All right. Speaking of awards programs, let's talk about awards, points and more. And let's talk more about pooling because there's some big news out, I guess, about United's pooling. Yeah. Some people have noticed a change in United's pooling terms and conditions. And so when United first introduced points pooling, we were really happy to see that, that fairly recent edition. But it had a huge caveat, which is that pooled points could only be used to book United's own awards, not partner awards. Well, the new terms list tons of partners that the pooled points can now be used on. I'm not really sure why it didn't just say all awards can be booked this way.

There must be some reason for that, but I don't know. Anyway, that's great news. I haven't verified personally yet whether, you know, technically that's working yet. But obviously, if they put in the terms, they intend to enable it if it's not already. Yeah, that's good news. I mean, the ability to book partner awards makes pooling far more useful. And it eliminates the need to, like, create a pool and then close a pool in order to move points to somebody else. so they can book in it. There was ways around this, but it was kind of a pain. And so allowing partner

awards, I think, makes a lot of sense. And for all the reasons we just talked about, you know, again, people within a household or family or whatever want to be able to combine the forces of their awards to book meaningful trips. And, and, you know, as much as it might seem like you'd think that the program doesn't want you to get a good deal, you know, they do. I mean, they want to offer this award availability so that people walk away feeling like there was a good reason to be loyal. And what better way than to let people book that trip that they're hoping to book by combining the power of their awards. So glad to see that, United. Let's keep up the good work there. Speaking of rewards and pooling and moving, Alaska is out with something kind of interesting.

The Alaska Airlines CFO hinted that Alaska is interested in point transfers from Bank of America rewards. Yeah, yeah. The specific quote was, we would love ultimately for the proprietary cards that our bank partner provides to be able to convert to points and redeem. And I think those types of things are all opportunities for us under the new contract. So basically what they're talking about is those Bank of America like Premier Rewards cards, for example, that today earn points, but that can only be, you know, cashed out through Bank of America itself or redeem for travel through Bank of America's portal. basically the CFO is saying we would like them to be able to enable points transfers to Alaska

and of course they would have to pay Alaska for those miles so that's why they're interested in that yeah you know that's this was fascinating to me because this exact topic came up in a meeting I was at with leaders from Alaska mileage plan at the time but now atness right and and so because they had completed the purchase with Hawaiian and there were transfers from MAMX membership rewards to Hawaiian and and so they were asked a question about that, about points transfers. And the answer from Alaska was a pretty definitive. We don't want our program and to be diluted essentially by transfers and the point they made and I'm putting words in their mouth, but this was essentially what they said in not so many words is that

they have loyal members who earn lots of miles flying and they don't want those loyal members to be unable to use their rewards because people who are transferring in from other programs are booking all the awards. And so that was essentially what they said, that they wanted to protect the people who are collecting their rewards, like sort of the traditional way from, from those rewards being diluted by this huge massive supply of rewards coming in from external sources. Now, that said, they've obviously partnered with built for a while and you could, you know, pay, rent with an Alaska card and earn additional points per dollar. And so there are reasons to think that their behavior doesn't match that. But I was surprised to hear this because it ran pretty contrary

to what they had to say about point transfers before. But I mean, good news if it's true. Yeah. I mean, it could be that not everybody at Alaska has the same opinion about this, right? For sure. CFOs just saying, oh, a new revenue source. Yeah. And others are saying, oh, you know, it could be a problem for our customers or our best customers, right? So, yeah, it's an interesting, interesting topic anyway. So it'll be great for the- Yeah, I mean, it would be great for those of us who, you know, earn Bank of America points or are interested in earning Bank of America points,

they would become more valuable if that happens. So pretty exciting. Fingers crossed. All right. Next up, Gondola has added a feature. flight auto save. So a while back I wrote a post about a company called autopilot. I think the website's with autopilot.com. And autopilot, the reason I had written about it was because essentially you could feed it your flight information, your booking information, and it would automatically search for a lower

fare for the same flight and rebook you when the flight dropped. And then they would charge you 25% of whatever flight credit you got for rebooking that flight. Gondola offers a very similar service, but doesn't take that 25% cut. You get the full flight credit. How is it free? How is that working? That's interesting, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, I think that Gondola is just looking for ways to attract people to Gondola itself,

to use Gondola lot, to hopefully, I think where they make most of their money is probably booking hotels. when people book paid hotel stays. So to back up a little bit, Gondola is primarily a hotel search tool, which I fell in love with because it shows you the point prices for all the hotels, as well as a lot of other useful information when you are searching for hotels.

But it also lets you book with cash through Gondola, and you'll earn some Gondola cash back when you do that. And you'll also automatically get Gondola, Gondolas auto save on the hotel side when you book hotels with cash. But now what they've done is they've added the flights, which is a great extra feature. Yeah, I don't see how they can make any money with this directly as much as just it's a feature that's going to attract people to Gondolas. For sure, for sure. Big caveat, I don't think any of us on the team have tested this yet.

So we don't know how well the auto save works or anything, but presumably it does what they say. So it will, they say it'll automatically reprice United, Delta, American, and Alaska flights. And then for other airlines, it will let you know if there's a price drop, but it won't automatically reprice it for you. Yeah. So you could certainly save some money there. Now, I haven't tested this because I just don't have any paid flights on any of those airlines coming up anytime soon. If and when I do have one, then I will probably give this a shot. A question that came up before about autopilot that hits me now in looking at this was what happens in terms of your credit card protections when your flight gets rebooked like this? Like, do you keep the same credit card protections if the flight gets rebooked?

I don't know exactly how that works. And it's the same question. Yeah, I'm sure you do because it's not, you know, you're just getting airline credit back. So you made the purchase. The purchase is still on your, you know, on your credit card report showing, showing that you made that purchase with that airline. So, you know, it should, it should still qualify, I don't think. Okay.

All right. Very interesting. And also they do fare drop alerts for select other airlines to let you know when the fare has changed. I've found Google flights to be really useful for that, too, for the fare drop alerts. There's several routes that I'm checking all the time now where I do have. lights booked. Not on any of those airlines. But I do have those running and I get updates every couple of days when the affairs go up and down. So I found that really useful. So I can imagine how that would be useful here in conjunction with the auto save on the airlines that they offer.

So cool feature. Good reason to check out Gondola if you have it already. Just a little more detail here. If you enable Gondola to be able to see your email, then you don't have to do anything. Like when you book a flight and presumably the receipt goes to your email address, like Gondela will just watch that and automatically start checking for repricing. If you don't want to do that, and that's very understandable, you can instead just forward those receipts to Gondola. Those, you know, when you've booked a flight,

just forward the confirmation to Gondola and then it'll watch it for you. Very good. Okay, next up in this segment, We have Chase and Pays, the Chase Pays Promotion. You can earn an additional 10x points when you check out at merchants that accept Pays. So what is Pays and what's going on here? Yeah, this is a really sort of old news. If you're listening to this now going, why are you guys talking about this a month after it hit the blogosphere?

The reason is I was on vacation when this came out. And, you know, and so it was a few weeks before I was back, and we forgot about it until now. Well, you know, I think I forgot about it. And also, I had mostly ignored it to be truthful. And maybe we'll talk about why. But let's, I mean, let's talk about what it is because I'm sure that we're not the only two people who missed that news. Right, right. And the good news is that this is still a very relevant promo.

It's good through the end of December of this year, 26. It applies to most Sapphire and Freedom cards. So Sapphire Reserve, Sapphire Preferred, Your Freedom, Freedom Unlimited, Freedom Flex, they all can register for this promotion. And the way it works is on up to $1,500 in purchases per month, when you check out at any, like, you know, online merchant that allows you to pay with P-A-Z-E, Chase will give you an extra 10 points per dollar over what your card earns normally. So to be clear, pays is essentially like a PayPal alternative.

It's like a digital wallet that's like works functions like PayPal. It's just it's called pays. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, you know, when you're checking out for a merchant, you know, sometimes they'll say, do you want to check out with PayPal? But sometimes they have a list of things you can check out with. And if pays is on there, you know, bingo you. you win a prize if you if this all works for you so who takes pays there's a whole list of

merchants or big list most of them are like those kind of gifty places i was going to say i don't if i call it a whole list there's a list well there's a couple pages of merchants yeah it goes a little but most of them are yeah most of them are places you're not likely to shop very often but um there are some very interesting ones um united airlines probably the most interest for for our audience you know if you're paying for a United Airlines flight and you check out and pay with pay through pays with one of these cards you know you'll earn 10x on top of what your card normally earns and and then you'll still earn United Miles for the flight itself as well so so that's all good you do need to be careful if you have a United Credit card and you don't pay with you United Credit Card, you might not, you wouldn't technically qualify for a free check bag, unless you also have elite status, or you bought a premium cabin that comes with free check bags. So be careful about that. But otherwise, I mean, that's a great deal. New Egg is on there,

and New Egg, in addition to selling lots of electronics and things, sells gift cards to lots of things, Delta, Southwest, a bunch of other stuff. Stubhub is on there, and that's mainly interesting because of the Sapphire Reserve card Stubhubh rebate, which I'll talk about in a minute. And then there's a bunch of other miscellaneous ones as well. Phew. All right. So I'm going to talk about what I did with this Pays deal.

So I have the Sapphire Reserve Card, and it has that offer where you get back $150 that's spent with Stubhub every six months. They'll give you that back as statement credit. That's an ongoing perk of the Sapphire Reserve card. I also found on the Capital One shopping page an offer to get $100 back on $100 or more spent on event tickets. It didn't specifically say stuff that, but it just said event tickets. So what I did is I clicked on that and I went through to find an event that I was really interested in going to.

And that event was listed three times. When I clicked on it once, it showed it was available through, let's say, Ticketmaster or something. But anyway, the third click, I think, was the one that got me to Stubhub. And then I was able to buy the tickets to that event through Stubhub, and Stubbub, and Stubhub's checkout, let me select Pays as how I would pay. So I pick Pays, and then Pays lets you pick which of your registered cards you want that payment to go to. So I picked my Sapphire Reserve card. Okay, so I did all that. So what were the results? Results are I got my expected $150 back from the Sapphire Reserve StubHub Credit.

I got $100 in Capital One shopping rewards. So that's really gift card rewards. I earned 10 points per dollar from the Pays offer and I earned one point per dollar from the Sapphire Reserve. So total of 11 points per dollar for this whole purchase. So, you know, overall, I'd see that, I see that as a pretty darn big win. In fact, if you could find something that's like exactly 150 and you didn't even, like, it's getting towards the end of our six months with, with this Sapphire Reserve offer. So if you weren't going to use it for anything, find something in stubboff that, that costs like 150 or close to 150 and go through steps like what I just said. So you'll get. some kind of portal rewards, you'll get your 11x from your Sapphire Reserve card, and then the money

will be repaid for your Stubhub. One last thing I want to say about the stack I did is that for some people, you might even be able to add additional rewards because some people say they're seeing a chase offer on some of their cards for Stubhub to get 5% back. And so if you had that on your Sapphire Reserve card, presumably, you'd get the 150 back plus 5% back thanks to that chase offer. So anyway, it's just something worth checking out. That's a great point.

Well, and actually, yes, well, that is a great point. I did not, that particular sub-hop offer I had on a bunch of my other chase cards, but not on our Sapphire Reserve cards. So it's possible they don't have it for that. But if it is, and I think it's a good point to look for that kind of stack. If you're shopping at any of these merchants, see, because it's probably somewhat likely anyway that you'll see one of those. stacking opportunities and and somebody, as we read in the mailbag, had mentioned buying

Instacart gift cards through New Ag this way in order to stack some rewards. And I certainly see where that would make sense. Particularly so if you shop at Instacart pretty often and you're not already buying discounted Instacart gift cards. So lots of good stuff there. All right. We'll be right back after this with our main event. Hey, Nick.

I just got a text from my cousin. He's asking me about a credit card offer. just got in his email and asking if it's any good. Yeah, well, your cousin ought to go to frequentmiler.com and click the link at the top of the page for our best offers page. That's the best way for your cousin to know whether or not they're getting a good offer because we're committed to publishing the best publicly available offers. So if you see an offer for a credit card anywhere on the internet, you should always compare

and make sure you're getting the best possible offer. And we're back with today's main event. today we have a double header, the Hyatt gut punch, and the refreshed Sapphire preferred card. So we're going to start with the bad news, the Hyatt gut punch. What's all this about, Nick? Yeah, well, this is pretty sad news. So brace yourself if you haven't heard it and you're not sitting down. The transfer ratio from Chase Ultimate Rewards to World of Hyatt is going to drop from one to one.

it'll no longer be one to one. It'll be four to three on all of the cards that offer transfers to airline and hotel partners except the reserve cards. So if you have a Sapphire reserve or a Sapphire reserve for business, you'll keep the one-to-one transfers. If you've got a Sapphire preferred, an ink business preferred, the old and no longer available ink plus or a corporate flex card, then you will not have one-to-one transfers to World of Hyatt in the future. That's effective right away for those who apply on or after June 15th of 2026. So by the time this publishes, it'll be almost there, I guess, probably. So you'll only have a couple of days left if you don't want it to be effective immediately. If you apply or have applied before June 15th,

2026, or if you've opened, I guess, I should say, before then, then it will be effective on October 1st of 2026. So if you're a long existing, Sapphire, preferred or ink business preferred card holder where you have an old ink plus it'll still be one to one until october first and then it will become four chase ultimate rewards points to three world of hyatt points so that hurts it really does and you know it's seems so crazy that this is right on the heels of the massive hiate devaluation that we've talked a lot about on the show um you know it It just goes from where before transferring chase points to Hyatt was like our number one recommendation. And now like it was already because of the Hyatt deval like something like it's probably still a good use, but it's not definitely.

And now it's like, well, unless you have that one to one from a Sapphire reserve card, I can't see recommending it at all. No, you know, and this has come up for discussion in our Facebook group and, And some folks have pointed out, well, yeah, but a Hyatt still costs fewer points than other chains do. And so it'll still be a good deal. And the thing is, you really have to look at your buying power here. And we're expecting, we haven't completed the new reasonable redemption value of Hyatt points, but we're fully expecting that the value of Hyatt points is likely going to decrease to about one and a half cents per point. And after the four to three transfer ratio, that means that you're going to, to be getting for an average like one and a half cent per high at point redemption, that means

you'll be getting about 1.125 cents per Chase Ultimate Reward point. So getting just over 1.1 cent per chase point is really poor value redemption. We normally wouldn't recommend doing that because if you transfer to airline partners, you can very frequently do significantly better than that. So it's below our reasonable redemption value for Chase Ultimate Rewards points. Now, Will there still be some outsized value high at properties, you know, in the 90th percentile where you can do well enough that even after the four to three transfer, you're still getting decent value for your points? Yeah, there probably will be some, but those will be the exception, not the norm. Yeah, no, exactly, exactly. So why? Why is this happening? Why is Chase giving us this? I mean,

this hurts. Why are they punching us in the gut, Greg? Yeah. It hurts. And it's surprising. Because when emirates, you know, all of a sudden we saw all the different transferable points programs reducing the transfer ratio to Emirates. Presumably Emirates was increasing the price they were charging for points. And so most programs reduced the transfer ratio. But Chase just dropped Emirates altogether. And we thought it was because Chase wanted to preserve the simple one-to-one transfer ratio to all parties. But if that was the reason, that reasoning did not hold out for this situation. No, it didn't. Yeah. I mean, that was something that you had predicted or you had guessed must have been

important to Chase. That must have been why Emirates went away. But obviously it didn't hold. So what's the deal here is, do you think Hyatt just wants to charge more for their points? Do you think that Hyatt was just becoming too expensive for Chase because bloggers like us are talking about how we always use our chase points for Hyatt. And so, you know, let me back up the truck on that a little bit. I think maybe a lot of people don't have the context of how transferring works. So these airline and hotel programs are selling points to the bank. And for the most part, it seems based on conversations we've had with folks over the years, that this is not really profitable for the banks. Most airline and hotels are charging enough for their points that this doesn't work out

favorably. The transfer partners don't work out favorably necessarily. for the banks, but the banks bank's bank on earning enough from all the other stuff and the fact that most people probably aren't going to transfer to the transfer partners. And if they do, they might not transfer to the expensive transfer partners. So they might have an expensive transfer partner, but not really want people, everybody to transfer to them. And so maybe the problem here is that just too many people were transferring to Hyatt and Hyatt points were already expensive and it's become too much of a liability. Do you think it's that or do you think Hyatt is asking for more money for their points? Yeah. I,

I mean, I don't know, and I don't think we're going to find out, but these are both good possibilities. You know, another possibility, this takes a little bit of a line of thought here to get to this, but we know that there's a new Hyatt card planned, presumably a premium card, but we don't know that for sure. Is it possible that in discussions with Hyatt, when they were developing, when Chase and Hyatt were working together to develop this, new card, that they looked at the cards like the Saffro preferred and the ink business preferred that are $95 cards and said, wait, why would people get this new, I'm going to make up a number, $495 card that earns, you know, 3x for dining and 2x at this other thing, when they could get similar or better earning rates with our $95 cards and transfer the points to high it.

So if that was a factor, they might have said, you know, Hyatt may have, I guess, said to Chase, you know, hey, if you want to keep our business, you need to do something about that, that problem. That seems like a stretch to me, but it's possible. Possible. Yeah. Possible. Who knows. But I wouldn't have thought that that was it. But at the same time, I don't know what's behind this. Because I can't imagine that Chase. wanted. I think that some people maybe had the perspective, they felt like Chase did this to them, kind of a thing. And yeah, Chase is changing the transfer ratio, but I can't imagine that what they wanted to do was make the program complicated. Like I can't imagine the Chase wanted to go four to three. I think that one way or another, they got kind of pushed into having to do that, whether it's because Hyatt wants more for their points or because so many people are transferring to Hyatt that it's costing Chase more than they feel like is sustainable, or it's because Hyatt.

wanted their credit card to look good by comparison. There's some external factor that is, you know, pressuring here. Yeah, I'm going to raise another one, which is that it is internal, but it's from the Sapphire Reserve team who's saying, you know, hey, you're not giving us enough reason for, you're not giving our customers enough reason to pay $7.95 for the Sapphire Reserve when they could get such, you know, great things from the, suffer preferred and ink business preferred and and have the same redemption options in this case

Hyatt, which is probably the number one redemption option that a lot of points in miles people care about. So, you know, I'm scary. That's scary. Do you think? Because I mean, if that happened, would it happen with other partners in the Sapphire Reserve? You know, will the Sapphire Reserve eventually be the one that still offers one to one? And will most other partners change too? Wow, wow. I really hope not. So, and I don't think that's necessarily an outcome of that if this is a situation. Because think of it this way. Sapphire Reserve comes out. They have better points redemptions through the Chase portal. They have better points boosts, right? So you could get up to two cents per point, depending on situation, with Sapphire Reserve points, but up to, I forget what the top end is, 1.75 maybe for the Sapphire preferred. And so they already had better, you know, points value for that. And I think they probably saw a lot of, a lot of podcasters and blogs like ours saying, you know,

well, if what you really care about is the best use of chase points, which is transferring to Hyatt, then none of that matters to you. Just stick with one of those $95 cards. And then you can still transfer one to one. That's where I think the conversation probably went. And I don't think there's enough people saying, well, United is such a great deal that you should be transferring all your points there. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah.

To be clear, United can be a great deal. But it's not a no-brainer the way Hyatt used to be. Right. Used to be. And that's a key thing used to be. Though Hyatt will still offer good value in some cases. And one thing that came out of this, something I wrote in the post is that I felt like, this was Chase doing builds marketing for them because, you know, now you're looking at builds and

you say, well, built has one to one transfers to United and Southwest. Chase's quote unquote unique partners and also to high it and you can earn two points per dollar with the palladium card or three if you're using the accelerators. You can earn points through racketing, et cetera, et cetera. So I think the natural next question for a lot of people is, is that sustainable? Will Bill be able to keep one to one transfers? Or do you think that's going to change too? Yeah. I, I, I mean, I do think Bill T has done a really good job of keeping their great point transfers sustainable by encouraging their less informed customers to do things like spend points on rent where they're getting terrible value.

And that helps offset the value we get. And in some cases, with big transfer bonuses, we've seen them limit them, you know, like 100,000 points max for the transfer bonus. I think it'd be more likely that they would limit, rather than reduce the transfer ratio to Hyatt, I could imagine them limiting how many you could transfer to Hyatt each year if it became a problem for them financially. Don't give them ideas like that, Craig. They might be listening. Oh, my goodness.

I hope not. I hope not. I don't know. My take on this is different. Yeah, I think Bilt is going to keep one-to-one transfers. I think that transfers to Hyatt are probably significantly less. significant to built. And here's why. I think that they're probably as expensive, maybe even more expensive than whatever Chase is paying for the points. So I don't think it's that they're getting a

better deal. Right. However, I look at it and I say, well, built has a lot of different things going on. And I think it's easy to narrow down built to what we think of built as. But like on the sense of scale, the majority of built members don't have the credit card, aren't playing the points in miles game. They just live in a building where they have to pay their rent through built because the building requires that's the payment platform. And so they're earning some little bit by paying their rent. And then they accidentally earn built points by going to the built neighborhood merchants in their neighborhood, the restaurants that they already go to or the pharmacy they already go to, etc. And I imagine the vast majority of those built points are redeemed, like you said, at very poor value

towards paying the rent because it's really easy in the app to apply points to your housing payment. And I can imagine that a very large percentage, I would think, of Built users are probably using points that way. And so while that's somewhat true of all the rewards programs, I think it's probably even more likely I would think with Bill's customer base that a lot of points are being used that way. And so that does subsidize the ability to offer the transfers to programs like Hyatt. And then, and then when you consider that people like you and me that are big time rewards enthusiasts, let me ask you this, Greg, are you transferring all your bill points to Hyatt? None. None. Why not? Because if I need Hyatt points, I transfer from Chase and I keep my bill points for those big transfer bonuses. Well, that's, and that's exactly it. So you're like really engaged miles and points people. I think a lot of them are holding out hoping for a big transfer bonus. And to be clear, I'm not suggesting everybody listening, do you. that. I think people have been concerned about the future of built and whatnot. While I don't have

as much concern as other people have, I can understand why some folks are concerned because they're the new kid on the block and they're less established than a lot of other folks. And so maybe you do transfer all your bill points out to Hyatt right away. Great, if you do, fine. You're not doing bad, probably in that case. However, I think that there probably are a significant number of people like you and I that look at our Chase points as our Hyatt points that don't look at built the same way. We look at it and we say, oh, we can transfer to Hyatt, but I'm hanging on in case I get a great transfer bonus to this foreign program that I like. So I bet it's been less expensive for Bill to offer Hyatt in that kind of overall scheme of things. Could be. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it could be wrong. I'm guessing.

No, I mean, we're guessing about any of this. Right. That makes a lot of sense to me. And don't forget, um, built also has maintained the ability to spend built points for travel through their portal and get 1.25 cents per point value. That's something the Saffirate perfect card used to have. They did away with that. So there's a lot of things you can do, and to your point, there's a lot of things you can do with built points other than transfer to Hyatt,

and some of those are great value things you can do. Yeah. Yeah. So... They have airline partners. Chase doesn't have. I think the focus on Hyatt with Chase wasn't only that Hyatt was the only way to get good value. It was just

the clear winner, because their airline partners, like United will sometimes be useful. But I have redeemed like, you know, 15,000 United Miles in the last several years probably. Like I don't, I just don't redeem them often because they're not usually my best option. So like most of Chase's other partners are that way where I'm earning those points in other currencies. So that's why I only transferred my, my Chase points to Hyatt for the most part, whereas Bill has all these other partners that Chase, a number of partners anyway, that Chase doesn't have that I also consider transferring points to. So I mean, Alaska is a great example of one that Built has that, are all of those sustainable?

Now, that's a question, I don't know. Like, is it sustainable for Built to continue to have Hyatt and Alaska and United and all of these other programs? That's a terrific question that, you know, I'm sure a lot of people have. And I don't know about that for sure, but I don't know that Hyatt itself is as significant with Built in terms of the cost to build as it has been for Chase. That'd be my guess. One really interesting thing that I just realized as you're talking through this is that

Bilt's transfer partners, when they have those big transfer bonuses, their transfer partner supplements that deal. Yeah. Like by giving Bilt a discount or something, right? Or maybe just floating the doubling or whatever it is. So by offering those kind of deals regularly, Bilt is probably actually saving money over letting people redeem or over, you know, those of us who have lots of built points, choosing to transfer to the partners that cost built the most money,

which are going to be Hyatt and United and I don't know, maybe even Marriott, even though it's a terrible deal for Alaska probably. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, it's kind of brilliant if you think about it that way. Well, and also I don't, this I wouldn't guess to be the case, but I think that it's possible, just like we talked before, like, why is Chase doing this? We've got some possible things that we don't know if it's true. I mean, it's possible that a loyalty program, whether this is true for Hyatt, I don't know, but that a loyalty program is just more interested in builds customers. I mean, built offers access to presumably, you know, if they're renters, mostly, not all built members, of course, but mostly renters, then probably a younger, you know, base of members. There might be reasons why that's more desirable. Maybe they have more members in, you know, different higher income zip codes or cities where those companies want customers. And so it's possible that Built has good deals with some programs, probably not with Hyatt, but,

but maybe with some of those airline programs. Yeah. Better deals. All right. Let me, let me ask you, is, is there any upside to Chase abandoning this one to one everywhere? Is there a chance, for example? No. That they will look at like poor, transfers today, like the one-to-one to IHG, which is a terrible deal, will they look at and say, well, now that we're not doing one-to-one everywhere, why don't we make that one-to-two? I don't think so. I mean, I wish they would, but even if they made it one-to-two, I still probably wouldn't be trans-ray. No, it's still a bad deal. Although if they did one to two to Marriott, then I'd have to say, oh, that could maybe

be interesting now. It wouldn't have been interesting to me six months ago, but and truthfully, wouldn't be interesting to me now because I have a Sapphire reserve, so I'm still happy enough with one to one to Hyatt at this point. But if I was looking at four to three to Hyatt or like one to two to Marriott, then Marriott would suddenly look pretty compelling. They're not going to go to one to two to Merriott. No, they're not. There's no chance in the world.

No, I agree. I agree. But yeah, is there an upside? I don't know. Do you think that they'll do this? Do you think they'll offer better transfer? No, I don't think so. But maybe we'll see more big transfer bonuses, which is how they've handled.

it so far, you know, to the different hotel programs. Someone pointed out in the comments that now, now they could do a 25% transfer bonus to high it and it still wouldn't be one-to-one for Sapphire preferred cardholders. I don't expect that to happen because, well, that would, they would then need to have the transfer bonus for Sapphire preferred cardholders and not for Sephire Reserve Cardholders. I don't see them doing that. I don't either. So I agree with you there. I don't think we'll see that. And I would call that wishful thinking, except like getting less than one to one to Hyatt doesn't feel wishful to me at all. Yeah. So I don't see that happening either. All right. So what should you do? A lot of people have asked, should I just transfer all of my points to Hyatt now? If you're an existing cardholder, you presumably have until October 1st. What do you think? Should people be considering moving all their chase ultimate rewards? points to Hyatt now while they still can at one to one? Yeah, I mean, we're not going to be able to answer that for you, right?

I think that makes sense for some people. I think you should first evaluate whether a Saffir reserve card is right for you. Or, and keep in mind, you only need one per household because you can, if one person in your household has the Saffir reserve card, other people can move their chase points. another person can move their chase points to that person, and then that person could transfer to Hyatt. And even if you don't have your authorized users and stuff set up so that you could transfer to the right person's Hyatt program, Hyatt lets you move points for free with some restrictions. And so you could get the one-to-one. It might be indirect. So, you know, I think before you

think about, like, just dumping all your points, you should at least evaluate that option. And maybe, maybe the answer for you is if you haven't had the Safar Reserve before, get it, get, get, if you can, get a proof for it, get a welcome bonus for it. And then you keep your one-to-one for another year, and that's at the end of that year, that you decide whether you like the benefits of Safai Reserve enough to keep it, or do you transfer all your remaining points one-to-one? Yep. or another example or another option, I guess, is maybe you have a Sapphire preferred card now,

but you're not sure if you need Hyatt in the near term. I really, I would be pretty hesitant about dumping all the points into Hyatt right now, particularly right now above any other time, because they just launched this brand new award chart with a million different price points. And so is there going to be a Hyatt where you want to go that costs the right number of points? That's harder for me to predict today than ever before. I mean, it's almost an impossible thing to predict ever, but now more so than before because of all of the multiple price points. So we just don't know how much hotels are going to move in category.

I mean, Hyatt says they're going to change category less often. We don't know whether that's true. And I don't know how often popular places are going to be at the top end. Of course, at launch, it was, you know, just small effects here and there. But a year from now, they might all move to the higher ends of the chart. Who knows? So I'd be very hesitant about just speculative. moving all my points over. Instead, what I would probably do, if I were a Sapphire preferred

card holder, is keep my Sapphire preferred card and or downgraded even if I don't want to keep paying the $95 annual fee, which I think there's enough reasons to keep it that we'll get to you later on that it's probably worth the $95. But if not, downgraded even to a freedom card. And then, if and when, I want to redeem Hyatt points, if I say, oh, you know what, there is a Hyatt where I want to go. And it is priced well. But man, I wish I had the one-to-one transfer ratio will then call an upgrade to the Sapphire Reserve card. And if you're midway through the year, you'll get charged. I think a prorated annual fee, I think on the upgrade, even if not, even if you pay the full

annual fee, then you'll have a year to use the Sapphire Reserve card's benefits and be able to use your one-to-one transfer. I think that's probably what I would be considering. Because if you take away the travel credit and you're able to use a couple of the other coupons, then the cost might not come out to free on upgrading to the Sapphire Reserve, but it could easily work out to be worth it for the one-to-one transfer, I think. Yeah, yeah. No, I think that's a great way to do it.

And that's probably the best move for most people who look at the Saffer Reserve and say, I don't want that. But maybe they haven't, maybe they're, you know, it's not that they absolutely hate the idea of it, but, you know, you don't want to deal with the coupons. You don't want to deal with that big annual fee. right off the bat, but, you know, just wait until you actually need the Hyatt points. And then that's an option. And, you know, and then all of those coupons and things that you didn't really want to get involved with, well, you could still get value from them. And yes,

it'd be some effort, but you'll probably end up doing all right. Well, and let's, very quickly, let's just say that you, down the road, you have a need for four nights at a top tier Hyatt, which are now 100,000 points per night in category eight, like down the road sometime, you're like, oh, wow, I'd love to be able to spend four nights there. And I have 400,000 points in my Hyatt account.

If you have the Sapphire preferred, you're not going to have enough because the four to three ratio, you'd be transferring 400. You said in your Hyatt account, but you meant in your chase. Let me back up. Let's say there's 300,000 that you needed. So you'd have to transfer 400,000 chase points

to get 300,000 Hyatt points, right? So you're essentially kind of giving away that, 100,000 point value. Instead, you just upgrade to the Sapphire Reserve, cash out 80,000 points to pay for the annual fee and transfer 300,000 points over. You're going to be 20,000 points ahead if you don't use any of the coupons of the card. Now, that's assuming you need to use 300,000 high points, and you've got that many, you know, more than 400,000 in your account. But if you did, it would be very easy to just even pay the annual fee on the Sapphire Reserve. And if you didn't use any of the benefits on the card, you'd still come out ahead over.

the four to three transfer in that case. Now, if you only need a small redemptions, it may not make a difference. But if you need a big redemption like that, it'll almost be a no-brainer to upgrade. And actually it gets better than what you just said, because I don't know if it's true currently, but it has been true in the past that Chase has pay yourself back with the Saffir Reserve, lets you pay yourself back for your annual fee. So again, check whether that's still true. And you get better than one cent per point value doing that. So yeah, you wouldn't need the 80,000 points. It'd be something probably quite a bit less than that.

Quite a bit less than that. Yeah. So you come out even farther ahead. So don't cut that off. Don't be like, no, I hate that. I don't want the coupon book. I don't want the hassle. Don't cut that off from your mind as an option in the future.

Because if you do the math, you may work out to come out ahead. If you run into one of those cases where you're like, oh, I want to make a big high at redemption. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So our basic advice is really there's options to avoid just moving all your points to Hyatt now. And we don't think it's a good idea because the latest Hyatt award charts are not pretty.

And things could get worse when they start repricing the Hyatt hotels in the future. So, okay. So that's good. But that's all about what to do with your current stats. of chase points. But what about earning chase points going forward? earning points that can be transferable to Hyatt going forward. Yeah, I was going to say,

if we're talking about earning chase points moving forward, don't do it. Well, no, that's not really true. But if you want to earn points that are transferable to Hyatt, I would be much less interested in Chase moving forward and much more interested in the built cards. A pladium card, 2x everywhere is a flat earn. If you use your built cash for accelerators,

maybe 3x or even more if you're using it for rent and mortgage. The Obsidian card, you can choose between 3x dining or 3x grocery and get 2x on travel. And again, you could bump those up with accelerators. So either of those cards, I think could be a great way to earn high at points. They're transferable one to one to high it. And so you can again, earn more points with the accelerators, whether you're just doing that to earn more points per dollar on the card itself or you're doing it in order to earn points in your housing, which makes more sense. for you. It gets really complicated, so we're not going to get into the details on that. But if you're using one of those cards regularly, then you're probably going to spend the $10,000 per year for silver status with built. And that will enable you to earn one-to-one on Rackettin. So when you're shopping online on Rackettin, you know, you see 10% back, you could be earning 10 built points per dollar

on purchases there. But you do need built silver status or higher in order to get the one-to-one rate from Racketon to build, and that requires $10,000 an annual spend on the credit card. So which again, I mean, if you're using the Palladium for your everywhere else card or the obsidian for dining or grocery, I think a lot of people will probably be able to hit the spending requirement with relatively minimal effort there. So that's certainly what I'm looking at. I'm saying, okay, well, if I want Hyatt points, that's where I'm going for them in the future. Right, right.

And I think that makes a lot of sense for a lot of people. another approach to consider is switching your spending to a World of Hyatt credit card. Now, we don't know. The new credit card, we don't know when it will appear, what kind of spend bonuses it will have, but we know a lot about the current cards that are out there, the World of Hyatt Consumer Card and the business card. Both of them have base earn rates of only one point per dollar. then they have some minor like bonus categories, but you're not going to earn a lot of points per dollar

with either of those cards. However, there is an argument to be made for a Hyatt loyalist that the true earning rate of these cards is significantly better than what it appears. And that comes because both of those cards let you earn elite knights with spend. So if you spend enough, like with the consumer consumer card every $5,000 of spend, you get two elite nights. Why is that important? Because

starting at 20 elite nights per year with Hyatt, you start getting Hyatt's milestone benefits. And some of those are pretty valuable. And so if you look at those benefits and you figure out how valuable is that milestone perk to you. Now imagine, imagine converting that whatever dollar might you come to to points. Like say that, that, you know, category one through four certificate is worth to me 12,000 points, let's say. If you can do that, then you could sort of back up and figure out, oh, so my spend on this card was actually worth more than one point per. dollar was actually worth you know maybe two points per dollar or whatever and now that's really hard to do especially off the top of your head especially because

actually staying at Hyatt's adds to your night count as well and for a whole lot of reasons it's hard to do but we do have a spreadsheet on our blog where you can use that spreadsheet to try to figure out what is your points per dollar you're earning given some estimates about how much are you likely to spend, how many nights are you likely to stay at Hyatt this year, and how much do you value each of those milestone benefits? The point is, like, with some reasonable-ish assumptions, you might be seeing, oh, my spend is worth to me the equivalent of four points per dollar

for all my spend. And if, and I'm not saying that's true for everybody, it's definitely not. But the point is, if you're seeing something like that and you care a lot about Hyatt, you know, spending on one of these cards might be the right answer for you. Yeah, I think it's a great point. I think the post you wrote something like, what's your X, right, on the Hyatt points. And so we'll have a link to it, I'm sure, in the show notes. But that's definitely worth checking out because it is complicated and it is entirely personal. If you're somebody out there listening is like, I don't care about Hyatt. Can we move on to something else? Then that's not going to be

for you. But if you're someone who's like, oh, I love my globalist benefits, I enjoy being able to use sweet upgrades, et cetera, et cetera. There are reasons why you might consider spending on the higher card. I'll probably end up in that situation. Right now, pretty soon I'll be at 33 elite nights this year with Hyatt. And at 40 is when I can get a guest of honor award and a sweet upgrade award. And so I may end up spending to get my way to 40. I may end up crossing a threshold for 40.

But if I were going to end the year at 36 or 37 or 38, I might be looking at, oh, well, I could spend X amount on a card. and how much do I value the Guest of Honor Award and the Sweet Upgrade Award? How much is that spent worth? So I think this is a really good point that does require a lot of extra math if you're like a casual game player that might not be something you're interested in. But I think for a lot of people out there, it's worth thinking about. Yeah.

Especially with this four to three ratio. Now a minute ago, Nick, you said, if you're out there saying, I don't care about Hyatt, can you move on to something else? This is your opportunity. now is the time. Let's talk about the Refresh Sapphire Preferred card because if you don't care about Hyatt, this card is actually significantly improved. And I think that it's easy for those of us who are way into Hyatt to lose track of the fact that there are a lot of people out there who just prefer to stay at vacation rentals or they have a different preferred chain or they like boutique properties

or there's a lot of reasons why or Hyatt's footprint just doesn't work for them. You know, there's a lot of reasons why Hyatt might not be important to you. And if it isn't, man, the Sapphire preferred got way better this week, I think. We very much expected that the Sapphire preferred card would fall victim to the continued couponification of credit cards that we've seen over the last couple of years. A lot of alliteration there. I like that. So we expected a higher annual fee. We expected a bunch of merchant funded coupons that nobody really cares about. And we thought that Chase had kind of lost its way in that regard and was just going to do that with every card. We also, And I say we, and you, I think very strongly thought that the Sapphire preferred card was going to lose 2X for all travel.

After all, they chopped the all travel category from the Sapphire Reserve card. It no longer earns a bonus on arguably most travel categories, not necessarily most spend. It still earns bonuses on flights and hotels, but not on general travel. The Sapphire Preferred has long earned two points per dollar on all travel. And you said that was going to go away. I was sure of it. Yeah. I mean, how could they have the Sapphire preferred card be better for general travel purchases than the Sapphire Reserve card that, you know, that costs eight times as much?

It didn't make any sense. But that's not what happened. We were we were floored by the changes that we learned about this week. So, first of all, they kept the $95 annual fee. I mean, I would have bet you anything it was going. to at least $150. I mean... And I wouldn't bet against you.

No. I mean, look at every mass market airline card, like all the Delta cards, the United cards, you know, the sort of entry level ones that give you free check bags, all went up to $150. How could the Sapphire prefer not to follow that model? It's shocking. Thank you, City, for keeping the Premier at 95 and Capital One for keeping the venture at 95, because if those cards had changed, maybe this would have, too.

Maybe. But don't forget, there's been rumors about City changing the strata premier to couponify that. And maybe, maybe Chase's move here will prevent that from happening. Because if City does any of that stuff, right now they could argue that their card is still better than the Saffir preferred. But it'd be hard to argue if they raise the fee and add annoying coupons. Anyway, all right, back to the show. So they kept the $95 annual fee. They kept 2X for all travel, and they added new 3X categories.

So they added 3X for gas and EV charging. They added 3X for vacation rentals. Huge for a lot of people. Yeah. So now if you're booking through Verbo or Airbnb or one of those kind of things, the Sapphire Preferred is going to earn three times as many points. as the Sapphire Reserve. Wow. Wow. It's crazy. Then they did not add like a whole bunch of new merchant coupons, but what they did do, they took one of the few coupons the Sapphire Preferred already

had, the $50 annual hotel rebate that when you book a hotel through Chase Travel, they doubled it. So you're going to get $100 back instead of 50. So right there, way more useful. Oh, yes, yes. I mean, you know because before like so yeah let's let's just talk about this for a minute um before let's say you're looking at a 150 you know hotel you're just going to book for one night but it it costs it might cost a hundred and fifty dollars through the chase portal but 130 dollars elsewhere the the old you know $50 off is really just saving you $30 out of the whole thing so it was nice but not like a big win. Now it's going to drop the overall price to you in that scenario to $50 versus the $130 or whatever I said. So it's a big, it's a it's a big discount. Yeah. I mean before like you said,

it was very variable as to like $50 off is not going to in most markets cover a free night, so to speak, right? So it's just a discount. And it's, you know, again, like you said, chase travel doesn't usually have the best hotel pricing. So in most cases, is you could probably get a slightly better price at least somewhere else, sometimes a significantly better price. And so the amount of savings with that $50 coupon felt insignificant to me. But at $100, there's enough times where I need a night that's around $150 bucks, sometimes even closer to $100 in the right scenario, where I'd be like, oh, okay, well, okay, maybe I'm not getting 100% of this, but 80% of $100 is much more useful to me. I'm not going to go out of my way to save $20. But to save

80 bucks, then I might be in. So I really like that change. Exactly. Yeah. No, that's not it, right? They also add, they, they improved their travel protections. The Saffir preferred already had a good collection of travel protections built in, including primary auto rental CDW. They added emergency evacuation and transportation up to $100,000 in coverage there, which matches the Saffir Reserve's coverage. It's also, I cannot think of any card that's under $300 or $400 a year that provides this at all, let alone $100,000 of this. That's really impressive. But yet, wait, I'm not done. They also added, you know, every four years, get refunded your global entry, TSA precheck or nexus fee. And that kind of matches what like the venture card already has. So that's sort of

keeping up with the Joneses, but still that's good. And they added one year of free Apple TV. So like the Safar Reserve gives you as a regular benefit free Apple TV, but Safra preferred now will give you one year, which if you pay for Apple TV, hey, that's one year less of having to pay for it. That's really good stuff. Yeah, it is. And when I look at that and I say, okay, well, if the hotel coupon,

if I can get 80% of face value out of that, that comes close to mitigating the annual fee, not quite there, but it's getting close. And maybe I shouldn't even value it at that. But even if I value it at 50%, if I use the Global Entry TSA pre-check, then between those two things, I'm cutting a big chunk of the annual fee off each year. So if I value 3X of gas or vacation rentals, then, or, you know, the enhanced travel protections, then I think this card becomes easy to justify for quite a wide range of people. They have definitely kept up with the Joneses here. Yeah, yeah, it's a very compelling card. Now, I'm not saying it's the best $95 card on the market, but I think it needs to be in the conversation. If you're looking

for a good all-around travel card and you're looking for $100 or less, this needs to be in the conversation now. Unfortunately, it wasn't all good stuff that they've changed. So obviously, we talked in depth about them moving the Hyatt transfer ratio to four to three. That was a huge surprise and a huge bummer. But they also discontinued or are going to discontinue the 10% annual bonus on points earned. So the way it worked before, it was just on base points. So if you're earning three points per dollar for something, at the end of the year, you got an extra 10%, but just off the base point.

So that really worked out to like you earning three points. point one points per dollar for those three X purchases instead of not it didn't work out to three point three so anyway it it really I think for most people was a pretty insignificant benefit to begin with so they are getting rid of that no big deal I think the the ads are are in you know far surpassed the downside of losing that 10% bonus and then of course for those who didn't care about Hyatt anyway you know the the transfer ratio may may may not make a big difference to you. And so if you're in that camp, I'd say you should be pretty excited, I think, about this effort, preferred changes. One note about the 10% bonus being discontinued.

If you get the card new starting June 15th or later, you don't get any 10% bonus ever. But if you've already had the card and you've been spending on it, you could keep getting that 10% bonus until October 1st is when it's discontinued for you. And you'll get, you'll actually get those extra points the beginning of next year. Yeah. So, you know, I think it was interesting what you said a minute ago about you're not saying this is the best $95 annual fee card in the market, but it belongs in the conversation. And I think that's really interesting because, you know, you look at a card like the venture card and the venture card offers a base earn rate of two points per dollar. So it's better for a wide range of purchases. But if you're primarily a travel person, like if you primarily spend in

travel categories, whether that's regular travel or particularly true. If you're spending a lot on vacation rentals and gas, well, then that's, I think, where the Sapphire preferred starts to shine. And if you're able to use, I think if you're able to use the coupon, the hotel coupon and the global entry TSA pre-check, if you don't have other cards that already offer those things, this card becomes a pretty cheap way to get a good travel card. And that's kind of how I would look at it. So, and interesting that a lot of those things are similar or in some cases better than what's offered on the Sapphire Reserve card. That's kind of surprising.

So I don't know. What's going to happen here? I mean, are we going to see this is obviously all changing June 15th? So very short order, not long after we publish this podcast, those changes are going to come into play for new applicants. So if I'm interested in this card, should I be getting it now so that I can have one-to-one transfers to Hyatt through October 1st? And I say now, I mean, before June 15th. Or does it make more sense to wait? Yeah.

I think it makes a lot more sense to wait because now we don't know what the welcome offer is going to be for their fresh card, but every time they've made major changes to any of their cards, they've come out with a really attractive welcome bonus for it. So I'd be really surprised if we don't see on June 15th a nice new welcome bonus for the Sapphire Preferred. I would think that the added value of that should outweigh, the loss of being able to transfer one-to-one to Hyatt through October 1st. So, yeah, do you have a different opinion about that, Nick? No, I totally agree.

If you didn't already have a Sapphire preferred card, the chance that you're going to have enough points between now and October 1st for that to be a better deal than whatever the new welcome offer is, I think are pretty slim, you know, unless you're going to take that new welcome offer and transfer it to Hyatt right away, but I think that probably be better off waiting at least a year so that you can upgrade to the Sapphire Reserve if you really need high at points or collecting your high at points in a different way, as we've already said. So, yeah, I don't think there's really any upside to getting it sooner rather than later.

The things that you lose, I think, are unlikely to swing the needle enough to the like must get now. I think a lot of times when you see big changes like this now, I feel like more often than not, there have been reasons why you might want to get it sooner, right? other than later. This time I feel like it's an exception. This is one where I feel like I'd wait and see because like you said, big changes usually they got to make a splash to market that, right? Right, right. I do want to point out something about timing for existing card holders. Now, when the Sapphire Reserve came out, it took a very complicated chart to explain which features you would get when. That's not the case now. All of the good stuff is effective June 15th,

regardless of whether you're an existing cardholder or a new cardholder. Just boom. You get all of that stuff. You get the new 3x categories. You retain your existing 3x categories, restaurants and everything. But you're getting new ones. You're getting the enhanced hotel coupon. June 15th, boom.

It's that simple. The bad stuff, though, for existing cardholders is waiting until October 1st to take effect. So the loss of the 10% bonus and the loss of the one-to-one transfer ratio. So anyway, my point is it's, it's pretty. pretty simple the whole timing thing this time right right if you're a vacation rentals person you're going to get that bonus category on june 15th it's nice that the good stuff you're getting the good stuff right away basically you know if you're existing cardholders so that i think was a wise decision on chase parts this time around or chase this time around so yeah well done on that

so overall i think i'd call the refreshed sapphire preferred just the card itself i think it's probably a win, to be honest, even though I'm personally devastated by the fact that Chase has changed the transfer ratio to Hyatt to four to three. And I think that's awful. I think that probably for more people, this is probably a net win, I would bet, just not for the Hyatt enthusiasts. And even for the Hyatt enthusiasts, as I explained before, I think that upgrading to a Sapphire Reserve, if and when you need a big Hyatt redemption will be the answer. Yeah. You know, it's interesting. If they had staged these differently. If the change to the Hyatt

transfer had come out a month ago and we all complained about that and threatened to cancel and everything but didn't get around to it yet, then they announced the refresh of the Saffir-P preferred card would have been like, oh, it's unquestionably a great deal. Because all we're

losing now is that 10% thing, which wasn't a big deal to begin with. But, you know, it's very hard to tease out the Hyatt thing with it all happening in conjunction with each other. That's true. The marketing team should have consulted with you

because you would have definitely advised them on how to release those details in a better way because I think you're totally right. You nailed it there. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm sure they were worried that that people would cancel their cards. Yeah, that's true.

They didn't want that. So they wanted people to see the good stuff at the same time as I heard the bad stuff. That's what I expect that's behind all of this. And there is some good stuff there. There is. There is. So I, you know, I would be giving the Saffir preferred team huge kudos for the refresh if it wasn't for this Hyatt question. But so we'll call it a huge kudos with an asterisk, with a footnote where you have to read the terms and conditions of that kudos. This episode was produced and edited by Carrie Yoder, music by Annie Yoder.

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