Frequent Miler on the Air - Conquer the impossible: The challenge is on | Ep205 | 6-3-23

Episode Date: June 3, 2023

The 2023 Frequent Miler team challenge is on. This week, Greg and Nick discuss what we've learned from past challenges and why we can't wait to see what is happening right now.00:00 Inro 00:00 Intro 01:20 Giant Mailbag 07:34 Card Talk: Business Platinum card https://frequentmiler.com/amxplatbiz/ https://frequentmiler.com/200000-membership-rewards-amex-business-platinum/ 24:50 Main Event: Conquering the impossible 26:02 Million Mile Madness 27:28 Necker Island 28:30 40K to Far Away 33:33 3 Cards 3 Continents 38:13 Party of 5 1:15:48 Question of the Week Music credit: Annie Yoder

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did City do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event. Frequent Miler on the Air starts now. Frequent Miler on the Air starts now. Today's main event, Conquering the Impossible.

The challenge is on. On my Donkey Kong on it's on the team challenge is in progress as you listen but we're recording before the the uh challenge started so some of the things we say here may be a little bit out of date but i think most of it will be very relevant still. Hopefully. And you can fact check us by going to Instagram, right? Because you can go to Instagram right now. If you're not following us already, you should be. And when you get on Instagram right now, you're probably going to see whatever cool thing it is

that we are in the process of doing like as you listen to this show. So feel free to pause right now and go over to Instagram, follow Frequent Miler and see what we're up to. Right. And if you're confused about what we're talking about, you don't know what the challenge is. Don't worry. We are going to get to that when we get to the main event. But first, Giant Mailbag. Today's Giant Mail was delivered to Nick. Nick, what do we have in today's Giant Mail? Giant Mail came in from Sam and Sam wrote in about our show two

weeks ago. So two weeks ago, I was talking about how I booked my flight to San Francisco to kick off for this challenge using United Mileage Plus. It was a, I take that back, it was a United paid flight. But what I had done was I did a status challenge. So I got United Gold. And I was excited about that because of the ability to fly in premium economy, United's premium plus and on a transcontinental flight thanks to my newfound gold status that came through instantly with the challenge you can go back and listen to episode two episodes ago to hear more about that but anyway Sam wrote in to say just listen to the latest podcast Nick economy plus is United's extra

legroom coach section premium plus is premium economy domestically United treats premium plus as economy plus except on the Newark to San Francisco or Los Angeles flights your United Gold will not let you select premium plus on the transcon to San Francisco so you unfortunately aren't in a more premium seat as you mentioned but instead in the standard leg room or standard economy seats, but with more legroom, think main cabin extra. Love the podcast. Take care, Sam. And so there was two things about this.

First of all, very interesting. I had no idea. So if you are United Gold, you can at the time of booking, you can pick premium economy, so to speak, which is in general going to be an extra legroom seat. I think it was a great comparison, main cabin extra, if you're familiar with American Airlines. And what Sam is saying is that they won't let you pick the actual premium economy cabin, what they call premium plus or yeah, premium plus. They won't let you pick that on the New York to San Francisco flight. But what Sam didn't realize is that I'm actually on the Washington DC Dulles to San Francisco, or I did fly that as you

saw on Instagram, if you've been following us a couple of days ago, as of now when you're listening. So I did fly in Premium Plus because you can pick that as a United Gold or higher member, again, at the time of booking if you're on the dullest San Francisco flight. Now, of course, Sam was just assuming I was on Newark to San Francisco, either A, because he knows that I'm New York state-based, or B, because most of the widebodies that fly on these transcontinental routes fly out of New York. But in this case, I had to connect anyway. I was flying out of Albany, New York, so I had to connect anyway. I could have connected in New York, but I'm glad that the itinerary through Dulles is the one that I ended up with because I wouldn't have gotten this otherwise. So there we go. Right, right. And so just a little

background, I think it would be helpful here, which is that, you know that all the domestic airlines, all the main domestic airlines have on their regional aircraft have main cabin and then something like main cabin extra, or in Delta's case, it's comfort plus. They have something where they're trying to make those main cabin seats seem more appealing, but in reality, you've got maybe two inches more leg room and there's not really much going on beyond economy. But then they also, on their internationally configured aircraft or their transcontinental aircraft, they have this premium economy cabin, which is actually truly different from regular economy in a way that comfort plus and that stuff is not in, in that there's truly a lot more leg room in general. There's usually a leg rest. There's going to be better, or there should be, I can't guarantee there will be better like

food offerings, free drinks, things like that. It'll be more like flying domestic first class than flying economy. So that's pretty cool. So what you're saying is if you book a United flight, like the cheapest rate for economy you could find short of basic economy, I think, when you go to pick your seats and you have gold status or higher? Yes. I believe it's gold status you need to get it at the time of booking silver i think is within some amount of time beforehand but gold status you could do it at the time of a booking you could just pick your premium economy seating that's sweet yeah it is i mean because like you said the the render the 3d

renderings anyway hopefully you saw what it actually turned out to be like on the instagram story but the 3d renderings that i have seen as we record this make it look certainly like you said a lot more like a domestic first class flight i mean not not quite as nice as that in the seat but it's like definitely a step a clear step between an economy class seat and that it definitely doesn't look like a regular economy class seat. So, yeah. But if you're flying New York, between New York and California, forget it. Right, exactly. You don't get that option. Not going to happen.

According to Sam, which I'll take Sam at his word that he knew what he was talking about. But Sam seems to know what he's talking about. I trust him. I don't know why, but I trust Sam. So there you go. I think that's a really good policy. It's a great policy. Hey, why not? Play it again, Sam. And I should mention also that, by the way, there was a significant difference in cost if I had booked premium economy. Now, I don't remember off the top of my head what the

difference is, but if I just look a few weeks from now at random dates it looks like the difference was about one million dollars it was double to three times the cost of uh of regular economy for that so i mean that's it so not not one man exactly i didn't know i mean i mean i did put it on the frequent miler card so uh so you'll find out that's what might be oh boy yeah i i i uh issued uh employees on the team uh business cards so that they could uh book their business flights themselves um probably should have put a sub million dollar limit on that baby thank i'm just you know happy that the statement didn't come before the challenge. That's all. So here we are, wherever we are. And yeah, so that's the Johnny Mailbag. Let's go

ahead and talk about Card Talk. So this week's Card Talk. We got up for Card Talk, Greg. Yeah. This week, we're going to conquer the business platinum card. And it's on our minds because a 200,000 point offer has surfaced. And hopefully, it's still around by the time this airs. But as things stand, at least many people are targeted for that offer, the ability to get 200,000 points after, I think, $15,000 spend, which is excellent. I mean, that's a lot of spend, but that's a lot of points. That's a really good deal. So anyway, that's what is available at the time of this recording. But regardless of that, there's almost always good offers available for the business platinum card. And sometimes you could get even better offers by just calling and asking what,

Hey, what offers are available? And then when they tell you say, is there anything else? And they might give you a better and better one. So, so that's worth a try as well. Anyway, let's get into the details. This card has a $695 annual fee. That's up there. Whoa. That's like nosebleed seats right there. I mean, everyone that seems like the courtside seats, but it's like a nosebleed type of a height. Right. I mean, my goodness. That's that's a lot. That's a big annual fee. You know, I'm pretty sure that when we started our podcast, it was 450 the annual fee on this thing. It's gone up and up and up for us to retire yeah yeah it's our fault sorry um all right but in exchange for that 695 annual fee you get to earn five points per dollar for flights and hotels the pre-booked prepaid hotels that are booked through amex travel all right well pretty much every card

in the in the stratosphere has some kind of like five extra rewards for booking travel through their portal. So not interesting. Sorry, Amex. Well, you can earn one and a half points per dollar at hardware stores, electronic stores, US shipping, or for purchases of $5,000 or more. Are we excited yet? Nope. No, we're not. Not at all. The no fee Blue Business Plus card gives you two points per dollar for all spend for the first $50,000 each year. And we talked last week about how you could earn 2.62% cash back on all that spend or two points per dollar with no annual fee.

So yeah, $695. Come on, get out of here. Yeah, yeah. And you're getting 1X everywhere else. So this card is just not a winner when it comes to the annual fee or the earnings for spend. So there's got to be more, right? You got to tell me more. There's got to be more.

There is more. There is more. There's big rebates available. So just like every Amex Platinum card, $200 airline incidental fees every year. So that means, you know, use your card for things like check bags or for food on board or for seat assignment fees. Or for other things. And a whole bunch of other things. Go ahead. That you'll find in our guide to what still works. So if you just Google or go to FrequentMiler and type in something like Amex airline fee reimbursements, what still works, you'll find our complete guide that

has tons of data points with all the various airlines because you have to choose one specific airline. So you only get those incidentals reimbursed on the airline that you choose. But we've got lots of data points about what works because there's a lot of things that work that aren't in the official list of uses. So plenty of ways to use those credits. Yes. Yes, absolutely. So that's pretty good. So $200 back. So that brings these, if you value it at full price, which you probably shouldn shouldn't but just to make the math easier that brings the 6.95 annual fee down to 4.95 which still not cheap it's up there with the highest

of the other cards on the market right i mean it's up there yeah there's still some other uh there's still some other rebates um let me jump down 120 in wireless rebates. So cell phone charges. So if you just auto bill, what it does is it's $10 per month. So if you auto bill your cell phone bill to the business platinum card, you'll get $10 back each month for that. And I should mention that it has pretty good cell phone protection. So it's not terrible. It's kind of sad to only earn one X on that spend, but there you go. And you also get $400 a year, $200 every six months in Dell rebates.

So if you like buying things from Dell, that's pretty nice. And if you want to sign up for Clear, you get up to $189 back for your Clear membership. Now there's other miscellaneous rebates that are less likely to be used by any given person. So we're not going to get into all those details. So, you know, quite a a bit quite a few rebates not as many 728 899 900 there worth of rebates we just talked

yeah if you if you get them all uh get them all yes and yeah and so things like dell like it's easy to use it all the way up because you could just buy every six months $200 worth of Dell stuff. The question is, are you really valuing that stuff that you get? Are you just getting stuff that you don't even want because it's there? So that's why I'm not super excited about that. And the total rebates are considerably less than the personal platinum card as far as what's there. Okay. So anyway, some good rebates, you get a lot of money back if you use them. And perks are where it's at. So you get a bunch of lounge access. So you get

Centurion lounge access, you get Delta Sky Club access when flying Delta same day. And there's miscellaneous other lounges that the Amex Platinum cards can get you into. Plus you get Priority Pass. Now, it's not the best version of Priority Pass. It'll get you into Priority Pass lounges. It just won't pay for your Priority Pass eligible restaurants or other Priority Pass things that aren't lounges it just won't pay for your priority pass eligible restaurants or other priority pass things that aren't lounges um all right moving on rental car benefits so uh the one that i mean you could get this a number of ways but national executive status

that's valuable right there it is all the time I use it to book a regular standard car and then pick what you want out of the, whatever it is, the executive area. The executive aisle. Yeah. Yeah. So executive aisle has like slightly upgraded cars from the main national Emerald aisle. And so it's worked out great. Both to, in my case, both to drive nicer cars, but also sometimes to save money.

Because if I've traveled with another family where we've had a backup rental just in case, but showed up and, oh, there's a minivan in the executive aisle. Let's get that and cancel the other rental. So that's great. Yeah. Let's see. Hilton and Marriott gold status. That's great. Yeah. Let's see. Hilton and Marriott gold status. That's okay. Well, Hilton status will get you a food and beverage credit anyway. Domestic Hilton's are free breakfasts overseas. So that's not nothing. It's not. Right, right. For Hilton, if you don't already have Hilton gold or better,

that's actually very valuable. If you're going to be staying at Hilton, if you don't already have Hilton Gold or better, that's actually very valuable. If you're going to be staying at Hilton, it'd be crazy not to sign up for that if you have the business platinum card. Yep. And I already mentioned cell phone protection, emergency medical and transportation coverage. This one is kind of neat. I agree. transportation coverage. This one is kind of neat. I mean, luckily, none of us on the team have had to use it. But the idea is, you don't have to pay for your travel with the business Platinum card or any Platinum cards to get this coverage. Basically, if something happens where you need emergency evacuation, you just call Amex and they should have you covered because

you're a cardholder. So that's pretty neat. We did get an email once from someone who had actually used it. A friend of mine's father was able to use it, had it and was able to take advantage of it when he needed it. So yeah, it's certainly a valuable benefit. I think the emergency medical transport in their case would have been something approaching $30,000 and Amex covered it. So and again, you just have to be a cardholder. You don't have to have paid for any part of the trip with it. So that's something I like having because Amex doesn't cap it. So, you know, unlike Chase's emergency medical evacuation is capped at 100 grand, Amex's

isn't. So presumably, if you need emergency medical evacuation, that would at 100 grand, Amex's isn't. So presumably, if you need emergency medical evacuation, that would have you covered, which I know is a reason some people buy travel insurance. Now, there's lots of other reasons that people buy travel insurance too, but that specific need is something that the Platinum Card covers. Yeah. If you're an astronaut, especially, I would get this because imagine you don't imagine how expensive emergency evacuation would be from like mars for example yeah i don't think there's any earth requirement in there and they probably didn't write that in the reading in the fine print

um okay and finally um this the business platinum does have one perk that really stands out compared to the platinum personal cards, which is a 35% airline bonus, they call it, which is basically when you pay for points for airfare through Amex travel, you're paying at one cent per point, but you get 35% of your points back as a rebate. And so it ends up being that you're getting about 1.54 cents per point value. And so that's pretty good, especially if you have so many Amex points that you're not going to use them all to transfer to transfer partners, but that you want to sort of cash some out. This is a great way to do that. Yeah, it is. And actually, I had written a while back about my experience using those. Well, I guess I had mentioned that I had a flight I had to cancel. And with Fiji Airways, I have written an update that hopefully is published by now by the time you're listening to note that I actually did end up getting the refund or at least I got the email finally from Fiji Airways confirming that I would get the refund for the flight that I had canceled via

email there. So that was a piece of good news because I thought I was going to be out on that particular flight. I'd use this to pay for a flight that I ultimately couldn't take because the kids got sick. And so I wasn't sure exactly how that process was going to work, but it seems that I am going to get a refund of the cash price from Fiji Airlines. So that worked out to be hopefully pretty good, but it did take a long time. And someone had come up to me at a conference and told me that it would probably happen, but it would probably take six months or so. And I was kind of, it seemed oddly specific to say it would take six months, but sure enough, almost, I was actually a month to the day from the day that I had submitted for the refund for the waiver of the cancellation penalty.

I got an email saying that my refund would be on its way within the next 60 days. So that's three months anyway. We'll see when it actually comes through, but I just wanted to pop that date there, but not, not entirely relevant. That's a, that's a nice, yeah.

Doesn't really have much to do with a business platinum card. Except that I used the 35%. Use that feature. Yeah. Which, yeah. Cause that, but yeah,

that's a good outcome. I should mention that not all airfare qualify. So if you're booking economy, you have to book the airline you picked as your preferred airline, the same one, which your incidental credits, your $200 incidental credits is valid for. And then you can use your points that way and get the rebate. If you're booking premium cabin, though, you can book with any airline and get that rebate. So very good. There you go. So that's the business platinum card. You're targeted for the 200,000 point offer. I mean,

if you can meet the spend, that's that's a large offer and it's a business card, so it won't add to your 524 count. And, you know, Amex tends to be pretty, if they've targeted you for it, then they're pretty good about these in terms of getting the bonus. Again, you know, you'll have to click through and see if you're able to log in. If you log in and it says, we're sorry, the offer is no longer available, that means you weren't targeted for it. But there'll be a link to our post about that, which has a link to the offer in the show notes here. So you can check for that if you're looking for 200,000 points. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So big picture, is this

a great card to get into keep? What do you think? A great card to get? Yes. Because obviously the annual fee is high. And so that might've turned off a few people that might've skipped by when they were like, oh, 695, forgot that. But I think that's a mistake because you could get, once you have this, if you get an Amex business checking account, you can cash out the points for one cent per point into your checking account if you wanted, right? If you didn't want to use them for partner redemptions. And so just if you did that with the 200,000 bonus and the 15,000 points, you'll earn minimum from meeting the spend requirement, you're 215,000 points. That's $2,115 worth of points if you just cashed them out to a checking account. So take out the $700 that you're spending on the annual fee and you're still 1,400 bucks ahead of the game if you didn't value the rebates at all. It's $1,400 back on 15K spend.

That's almost 10% back. And then if you do value those rebates at all, then, you know, hello, that's a really nice little savings there. And if you would use it towards paid flights on your preferred airline with a 35% rebate, then your points are worth about one and a half cents each. Now you're talking like $3,000 worth of flights for 700 bucks. I mean, that's a really good trade if you can meet the spend. Yeah. Yeah. And then as far as a keeper or not, I think that a lot of people will value the perks like the airline or airport lounge access, for example, that is pretty darn good.

But then the question will be around like, well, which platinum card should you keep long term? And so that's a longer discussion because there's a number of flavors of platinum cards that give you those perks. I'm going to go out on a limb and say... Oh, I'm going to disagree. For most people... I can tell from your tone, I disagree. I disagree. I disagree. Right. For most people. I think that for most people, the personal version of the of the platinum card is probably going to be better for you because I think more of the rebates will be relevant to you and you're going to get the same lounge access and all that. The one exception I'd say is if it's meaningful for you to be able to use your points to good value for paid airfare,

that's where the business platinum has the edge. Yeah, so that's exactly why I'm going to tell you that I think that the business platinum makes more sense for most people because you and I both know that most people just use their points to pay for travel through the portal that most chase points that are redeemed are probably redeemed initially for gift cards or statement credits. But when it comes to booking travel, tons of people only use their points to book through the credit card world. So if that's what you're going to hear from you all the time that are like, oh, you know, my Amex points aren't worth anything towards hotels because they're trying to use them to

book hotels through the Amex portal, which is horrible value, by the way. But so, I mean, this actually gets you a slightly better than one and a half cents per very slightly, but slightly better than one and a half cents per point that you would get with Chase for your paid flights, either an economy with your chosen airline or business or first with anybody. So I think that benefit is actually one that applies to a wide range of people. The Saks credit on the personal platinum. I mean, that realistically is, you know, very niche, I think. The $120 wireless credit is pretty widely applicable on the business platinum. It comes down to, do you like the Uber credit or do you like the Dell credit?

You know, do you like $200 in Uber credit versus $400 in Dell credit? Well, the personalized other credits as well. It has like the digital entertainment. So you get things like Disney Plus and whatnot. And it has the fine hotels and resorts credit so it has a lot more i think all right uh family friendly credits than than the business platinum card does so but your point is good is valid that a lot of people probably do want to use their points to good value for booking paid travel so so there you go you can do do that. Have a debate in your household.

So, all right. So that's that out of the way, I think, right? So now I think it's time for the main event. Main event. All right. We are talking about conquering the impossible, the challenges on. So we have long done challenges in the frequent miler verse. Just in the past, I don't know, three years or so, four years, we've been doing team challenges. Before that, I was doing individual challenges. I was challenging myself to do various things. And in the course of these challenges, we have routinely found ways to conquer what was previously thought impossible. And we'll get into why pretty soon. And there's good reasons for this. But let's go back in time a little bit and just talk about some of the impossibilities that were conquered thanks to having regular annual-ish challenges within the Frequent Miler universe here. Going way, way back, 2013, I was getting a little bored, to be honest. I was finding that I was totally 100% focused on

earning points and miles rather than using them at that time. And I was finding it just too darn easy at the time. There were a lot of things available at the time that aren't available today, by the way. So I decided to challenge myself to earn a million points and miles in one month that seemed like really really hard it's a lot that's why i'm a million a million i mean i think a lot of people be happy to earn a million in a year i mean they are they think wow that's a lot one month tall order yeah yeah tall order. And welcome bonuses were much smaller back then. On the other hand, on the other hand, card companies had fewer restrictions on like how many cards you can sign up for, whether you sign up for 11 cards on the first day of the month and that that covered about half of my million right there. The rest, I'm not going to go into how I did it, but I did do it. I earned a million points in one month and wrote about it and blogged all about it.

Yeah, that was that was before Instagram. We weren't Instagramming any challenges back then. My next personal challenge was when I started writing about how Necker Island, which is Richard Branson's private island, could be booked with Virgin Atlantic points. It was 1.2 million points at the time to book. And I actually wrote a post saying how ridiculous it would be to do this because there are so many other things you could do with that many points. Like, look, you could actually transfer one to one and a half to Hilton and stay like a month in a beautiful resort versus one week on Necker Island. It would be crazy to do this.

But I got to the end of the post going, well, this is a pretty good challenge. I think I'm going gonna do it anyway and um sort of like the million mile minutes thing uh i didn't earn the 1.2 million in one month but i it took me seven months from saying i'm gonna do it to get the 1.2 million that were needed to actually book it and i booked it and stayed and had a fantastic time. Okay. So that was then. And then finally we decided we had a team and we decided, hey, team challenges would be more fun. And 40K to Far Away was born. Do you want to talk about that at all? Yeah. So we came up with the idea to do a challenge where it was Greg and Steven and I at the time on the blog. And so we came up with the idea to do a challenge where each of us would start with $40,000.

I'm sorry, $40,000. That would be nice. 40,000 points and $400 and see who could get the farthest away. We called it 40K to far away to see who could get the farthest away with just 40,000 points and $400 to cover whatever travel expenses, food, lodging, the whole nine yards, 40,000 points and 400 bucks. And that worked out pretty well because we discovered some really awesome stuff in that challenge. Like for instance, I discovered the fact that you could fly all the way to Hawaii from the mainland in the U.S., anywhere in the U.S. with United Saver availability all the way to Hawaii for 7,500 points one way. And I mean, that's something that certainly people would have said was impossible before that, I think.

For sure. 7,500 points. Absolutely. I mean, that was pretty crazy. So that was a nice find. Absolutely impossible. Yep. Yep. So, you know, that made, made one of my, uh, experiences, which is traveling across the entire continent of Africa for only 10,000 points seem a little less exciting, but it was still pretty impressive. Pretty amazing.

And when you say all the way across, I mean, you flew from Southern Africa to pretty far North and Africa back down to the Seychelles, right? I mean, that was a, I don't know, do you remember how many miles? That was a long time in the airplane, 10,000 points. So, well, the 10,000 points was the one way. So like, for example, from Dakar, Senegal, all the way to Johannesburg, but via Ethiopia, basically went horizontally across the entire continent and then all the way down to the Southern, almost the Southern tip for 10,000. And then I did it again,

another 10,000 to go from all the way from Cape Town to the Seychelles. So, so far Northeast. But that wasn't it. We did, we uncovered some other like impossible things. Yeah. Like a manual life miles booking of complicated manual life miles booking. And this is something that I have written about again this year. And we talked about recently, but my first attempt at this was because of the 40 K to far away challenge. I wanted to try to put together some flights that weren't automatically coming together on live miles. In fact, they weren't coming together. I don't even think I'm united if I remember correctly. But when I searched through the precursor to tools like PointMe and AwardLogic, there

was a different site back in the day called Juicy Miles. And it came up with results through Lufthansa, Miles and more and Thai Royal Orchid, which are Star Alliance Airlines that put these four flights together. And I thought, well, if those programs can do it, I wonder if Avianca Life Miles can, because it would be, hey, I wouldn't have the miles in the other programs and B, it would have been cheaper with Life Miles and there was a transfer bonus. So I said, well, let's, I don't know, let's take a swing at this. I discovered this manual thing. You can email them and show them screenshots and sure enough, they were able to put it together. So that was something awesome that I've put to use again now. I mean, that was in the challenge, but I put it to use a couple of times this year for personal

trips. So, you know, it's a great piece of knowledge to have had. Yeah. Yeah. And finally, there were several, I had Chase points. We each had a different type of transferable currency. Mine was Chase. And I had found a flight and a car rental that I wanted to book. I wanted to use points at 1.5 cents per point value to book, but they weren't available through the portal, or at least not at those prices. And so I found a way to call and actually get Chase to book those, charge me the equivalent of 1.5 cents per point value. And that's the only one of the four that I don't think is... May not be available anymore today. you know to be clear you can still fly to hawaii for seven thousand five hundred points you could still cross the african continent for ten thousand points using the united excursionist perk it's very complicated but you could dig up our posts and figure out how to do that um you could still do a manual uh manually book a complicated booking through LifeMiles. As Nick said, he's just recently done.

The reason I don't know if you can still do the Chase thing is Chase has actually changed travel providers twice since I did that. And so maybe, you know, maybe you could still do it. But the particular tips I wrote about are probably not relevant anymore. There you go. All right. So that was the 40K to far away. So we had quite a few finds out of the 40K to far away challenge. We really did.

And then we upped the ante again with last year's Three Cards, Three Continents challenge, where we made some good discoveries there. So Three Cards, Three Continents basic premise was that each one of us got three welcome bonuses to plan a trip to at least three continents in as much luxury and style and comfort as we could. So three continents for the three credit card bonuses and up to $1,000, and that had to cover annual fees and travel expenses, etc. And so there were a couple of good finds that came out of that. You really knocked it out of the park with ana yeah uh well so it was almost like a geeky uh challenge you know my own i i i knew i wanted to make use of ana's round the world uh award they have an amazing around the world award chart for flying business class really cheaply. And it has different levels of how many points you have to pay based on the total distance flown. And there was a level

where if you fly, I think it's under 14,000 flown miles, you could book it for 90,000 points. That's on their award chart. And I kind of looked at that and said, is that even possible? Because I mean, the circumference of the earth is like 25,000 miles. How can you go around the earth with 14,000 miles? But what I learned, I had done some research ahead of time and I learned that you don't really have to have a continual loop around the world. You can have gaps in your itinerary and there's some rules about where you can have gaps and whatnot, but, but I figured that it was probably possible, but wasn't sure. So I purposely pick that as my target thing to do and, and, uh, book, not just me, but two people, uh, 90,000 points, fly around the world in business class.

Now, I did use some other points to fill in some of those gaps, but the point was I picked a award chart sweet spot that many thought was impossible to do and did it. I totally thought that was impossible. Yeah, there's no way I would have thought you could have done that. And that's useful, I think, especially in an environment and world now where there are a lot of people who are remote working now. And if you're a remote worker and you've got the flexibility

and the time to fly around the world, and maybe you don't have unlimited points, you don't necessarily need them. And or if you just can't find availability to connect all of the dots you need to, you could use Greg's techniques to replicate that kind of an idea where you're not all of the dots are connected with the ANA around the world, but it connects some significant dots anyway. So I think that's a great, great point. Right, right. And, and so like, you know, if you think about it if you just want to fly to, if you want to go to Asia and Europe you know, in general, just going like directly to either one and, and returning is usually going to cost you more than 90,000 points. Certainly to Asia is usually going to cost you considerably more.

But this you could do, as long as you go in one direction around the world, you could potentially use it to cross both oceans, which is one of the requirements actually. So yeah, that was one. And then you did a little complicated flight with your aeroplane award. Yeah, I was really excited about Air Canada Aeroplan and still am. I think it's just a really intriguing program for anybody who enjoys award booking.

And so I did an itinerary that was six segments visiting six countries on five different airlines. And so the visiting six countries, when I say that I had layovers, useful layovers of, you know, 18 to 20 something hours anyway, less than 24 in order to be able to see and do stuff in each place. So it happened over the course of five or six days that I visited six countries and again, five different airlines. And I think if you had asked before we did this, is it possible to book a single award ticket that incorporates five different airlines? I think a lot of people might have said, no, I don't think that's possible.

You know, if they didn't call it impossible, they might have not initially anyway been able to think of which airline can you do that with, which program. Maybe somebody would have said the ANA around the world chart. But now if we threw a wrench in it and said, and they can't all be airlines on one alliance, then you really probably would have thought, oh, that's got to be impossible. Right. But Air Canada has got so many alliance partners and their routing rules are so flexible that i was able to make that work so that was i think something interesting to come out of that challenge absolutely absolutely all right so uh that brings us to the new challenge the challenge that's on right now party of five we are out there somewhere somewhere i don't want to do any more. I know I'm a horrible singer. This is a musical interlude. All right. So party five. So what's going on here is,

you know, one of the things that we didn't really address in past challenges is the challenge of traveling with a family. So when you want to travel with a large group, things like finding a ward space for everybody, finding hotel rooms that fit everyone, a whole bunch of things become more complicated. And so we decided, hey, let's travel as an entire team, all five on the Frequent Miler team, travel together, and we'll challenge ourselves to build great trips for five people and see what we learn. Just like we learned some amazing things in the past challenges, what can we learn now that will help people going forward? Just like our past challenges did. Yeah, and I think we built in some decent constraints between the fact that, yeah, there's five people.

So that obviously was an initial constraint. But we'll talk about more, I guess, limitations in a minute. But I think that this is really an interesting idea. And I want to emphasize that the purpose of these challenges is not typically to give you a blueprint to follow. The idea isn't, you know, here, we're going to do this trip, and then you can copy and do the same trip. You're probably not going to want to do it exactly the same way that we do. The purpose for us is a little bit more complicated. And so let's get into that, I think, right? Or maybe we should back up a notch and say, okay, for anybody who's new and just kind of tuning in and still not sure, okay, well, what is this latest challenge? You just spent like 15 minutes telling me about all the old ones. So the new challenge, this challenge that we're on right now, if you're

get on Instagram, you'll see the party of five stuff. The hashtag I think is hashtag frequent miler party of five. You can find all of the content we've been posting about this. So we're on a two week trip right now. I kicked off just a couple of days ago on June 1st. And so we're on a two week trip. And basically what's happening is we have two teams and each team is planning one week of the trip. So right now, as we publish this a couple of days into the challenge, Carrie and Steven are in charge of planning this first week. And then Tim and I will be planning the second week of the challenge. And so in the end, we're going to see who came up with the best award trip, who did the coolest stuff or stayed in the most luxurious places or booked to the coolest flights or got the best values out of points and miles and money. So there's going to be a lot of

different ways, I guess, to measure that. But we we're going to see who wins. And Greg is going to be the judge, along with probably some help from the people who are going to try to sway him out there, I'm sure, with their opinions in the comments. So you're going to check out all the content that we're posting. It's going to be interesting, I swear. So why? Why, Greg? Why are we doing this stuff? Yeah, well, I mean, just what we already said, by putting us into the position of trying to win, right um that's what that's that's what it really comes down to by by um invoking our competitive nature so that so that we're like oh i want to outdo the other the other guys um it causes us to think really hard it causes us to try things that we probably wouldn't have tried otherwise. Like for example,

when I was talking before about using my chase points to book a flight that wasn't bookable through the portal, I wouldn't have bothered with that with my own travel, but I wanted to win. I was going to do everything I could to eke out you know, eke out every little, the value of every little point I had, which in that challenge, I had 40,000 points total. Um, this challenge, there's not a point limit, but what there is, is me, I'm providing all the points and all the dollars. Um, and so, and I'm also going on the trip. So the challengers, the two teams, are going to be trying really hard to please me, which is tough.

I don't know about please. Impressing you. Impress you. Impress me. Maybe please. Yeah, impress me is a better word. They're trying to impress me, but in two ways.

One, I'm not going to be impressed if they spend all of my points and money, but I'm'm not going to be impressed if they spend all of my points and money, but I'm also not going to be impressed if we're riding on a rickety bus for 20 hours straight. Sorry, Kerry and Steven. Rookie mistake, guys. Rookie mistake. So I want the impossible. I want top- know, top end luxury for nothing, basically. And I also want incredible experiences. I want incredible food. I want to be comfortable.

I want to be I want to be in luxury. I want to be happy. All those things. And that's a challenge. And it's not unlike the person in a family who's trying to plan a whole trip for extended family. Maybe there's a surly teenager or two. Maybe there's a picky spouse who dislikes lots of things.

There's all kinds of dynamics like that in pretty much every family. And so someone is trying to please everyone. And in this case, the person who you're trying to impress is going to be handing out bonus points based on each sort of segment of the trip. I'm going to be looking at the lodging and say, yeah, this was impressive. It was a great, amazing use of points or I couldn't believe how luxurious it was or how unique it was. Yeah. There's all kinds of reasons that I'm going to be handing out bonus points. And ultimately that's what I'll come down to is, is which team earns the most. Um, but

I think it's the drive to win. That's gonna cause the innovation, uh, you know, spark that. Yeah. And, and we know not everybody's going to be traveling with five people. But part of the idea is if we can conquer these things with five, then you can do it with, you know, your group of four or three, or maybe you can take some of the techniques we use to conquer it with five and bring your family of seven or nine or however many people it is you're trying to get. Hopefully we'll come out with some techniques because we built in some things that would make this more difficult right now and obviously the first one is five

people because that's going to be significantly challenging just finding award availability for flights for five people right so that was a significant limitation that was built in from the get-go that again is meant to make it more challenging so we can show well if we can do this you can do at least that or maybe even better, right? So I think that's a good limitation. Another limitation that I think is more exciting than I had considered before, exciting might not be the right word, maybe it makes it more impressive, is that we did something unintentionally that a lot of people face, right? A lot of people have to travel during set dates. You may have a vacation week that's set because of your work schedule each year or the school

schedule. There are various limitations that make it so that you have to travel during this time and that's it. So you don't have the luxury of picking whenever there's award availability. And in our day-to-day lives, Greg and I and Tim and Steven, we can go where we want, when we want, more or less with our points, right? We're not usually confined by schedule. Of course, I'm starting to become confined by the school schedule because I've got young

kids. But generally speaking, up until now, anyway, I haven't had that limitation. But with this, we sort of built that in because we first found the award availability we'll talk about in a second and booked an outbound to Tokyo and then a return from Tokyo. So we set it up and said, OK, Carrie and Steven, you have this exact week. It doesn't matter if you find a word availability three weeks before, three weeks after. You have to find it and plan a trip during this week. And same thing for Tim and I.

And that's a real challenge that a lot of people face. And then on top of being locked into a specific week, we had the group of people. So I think that adds an interesting element and challenge and, in fact, limited in some ways some of the things that we wanted to do initially that we couldn't because we had to pivot because we've got five people and we've got to find things we can do with all five of us. So I think that was kind of a fun one. But, of course, with that come workarounds.

And so we talked about how we wanted to find not only sweet spots, but also workarounds for problems like when Greg was talking about using one of your points at one and a half cents per point to book things that weren't in the Chase portal. Same kind of thing here. You know, we got to find workarounds for those problems. And of course, we want it to be fun. If you're watching on Instagram, I bet you are. We've gotten such great feedback in past challenges. I think this one's going to be even more fun with all of us traveling together. I think there's going to be interesting dynamics happening as we're traveling. Probably already has. And Nick, what I said to you know, and, and, uh, Nick, you know, what I said to you earlier today and in the future, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be rude. Well played. Just put that out there in advance. None of us have ever spent anywhere near this

amount of time together. Right. I mean, you and I did the gut trip a couple of years ago. And so we were, that was a week or so maybe uh but that's the longest you and i have ever spent together and as far as carrie and tim and steven i mean we've spent like three days with everybody together before i know more than three days i don't think right so you know this this is going to effectively double the amount of time we've ever spent face to face with tim i think right and or more than double oh Oh, much more than double, yeah. Triple, quadruple, right? And then, of course, you know, with all Tim and Carrie and Steven,

obviously, we just, we don't have much experience with that. So I think it's going to be fun just to see how that all goes. Like, do we continue to have fun? And I like the fact that readers, people who regularly follow our content, get a little window into who we are,

you know, off the page, so to speak, and what our interactions are like. Because I'm not going to lie, we have a fun team, and we have a good time in our team meetings. So I'm hoping you're going to see us having a good time. And if you see Greg strangle me, hopefully you'll end up in the search results, just like when Richard Branson strangled him, right? So we'll see. I'm just hoping that our next show isn't going to be like, well, we found out we don't travel. I don't like those guys. When's that flight home? Okay.

Changeable. Is this thing still going on? What's happening? Two weeks. What were we saying? We'll see what we were thinking. All right. So, but we have conquered some impossibility already at this point.

We've already shown a little bit of it and we've talked about it. So what have we conquered so far that was thought to be impossible? five people on ANA International First Class on the new product, all on the same flight. I mean, and it was within, it wasn't on a, you know, the exact day that we wanted, but it was within a block of time that we'd already allocated for the challenge. So unbelievable that that happened. You could say that, well, lightning struck, you got lucky, fine. But we needed then to get... That was the flight from Tokyo to the US. We needed a flight to Tokyo and we managed to find all five of us on Japan Airlines business class. So that too- Preston Pysh, Lightning struck twice. Jason Lowery, MD, Yeah, i mean uh so we conquered an impossible unfortunately i mean i'm not really sure that those those examples give an outline for people

like going forward how how to do it as much as maybe i think they do encouragement here's how i think they do in in at least two senses so one is that if you want to travel like this with five people, you have to constantly be following blogs like ours and others where you're going to find these opportunities. Because at a time when five seats come around in a first class, you're going to have a short window of a heads up. And if you're following the right people, whether that's on Instagram or whatever your social media platform of choice people, whether that's on Instagram or, you know, whatever your social media platform of choice is, or via email on the blog, you'll need to be following them in order to catch that. Cause those are the kinds of things that are going to be around for hours, not days. So, you know, you're going to want to be able to

jump on it. So that's, that's one piece is following these things. So you can jump on it because they do happen. I mean, five people in a, class. No, that's the only time we've ever seen that happen before. But if you were following, we let you know. And lots of readers were able to book it. So, you know, when the next thing comes, you'll find out, too. Right. And the second part you already said, which is you got to jump on it. I mean, like instantly, if you're trying to book for that many people and you find the award space,

you got to be ready to just go lock and load. And in general, you'll usually have like 24 hours or so to you could cancel for free and get everything back. So there's not usually like that much risk in jumping on it if you have the- And the secondary piece of that point that I think is also the reason why this is replicable sort of or at least worth knowing about for people and not just a lucky lightning struck kind of a thing but we jumped on it yes because it was an awesome deal but also we jumped on it with the confidence that we would figure the rest out later on because you're often or I should say most of the time you're not gonna find the perfect scenario where the stars align, you find five seats in both directions, right?

On the same day in amazing products, right? So we weren't gonna wait around to be like, oh, but can we figure out how to get to Tokyo? No, we're gonna book that ANA first class because there's five seats. And then, yeah, there'll be a way to get to Tokyo. We'll figure that out. And if we don't,

then Virgin Atlantic's cancellation policy is what you forfeit the taxes. So it would have been what or rather, actually, I think because this would have had higher fees, maybe it would have been $55 a person because if the taxes and fees exceed $55, then I think you pay $55 a person to cancel. So still, the cancellation penalty was relatively small. We're talking about $275. So it's a $275 gamble that will find a flight that works for the outbound. That's a gamble worth taking if you're searching for impossible availability like this. And I think that's an important lesson because I've often seen people see flights from abroad to the United States and be like, well, that's great. But how am I going to get there?

Or the vice versa. That's great. But how am I going to get back? Well, you got to keep looking, you got to keep looking. And then that's the thing, once you lock it in, then you've got to look like a rabid animal and like, you know, just search and search and search and search. And it only took us what, two, three days, something like that in order to find the five seats in business class. Again, lucky. Yeah, it was actually really quickly. You know, and it was, yeah, you know, I think I had stumbled upon a whole bunch of Japan Airlines award space. I can't remember what I was doing that I stumbled on it. And so then I was like, oh, let me see if there's five.

And wow, not only was there five, it was like really good timing for it. Yeah, that worked out great the other thing that that is uh good to know if if you don't already have everybody's full name and birth date memorized um get it all down in a spreadsheet or somewhere that easily accessible because when you jump on these things the other people in your party might not be available to get that information from them so get, get it in advance. Ask us how you're ready to ask us how we know about that. Right.

I mean, it's like we had to scramble and I just like, oh, it's Tim's birthday. I don't know. Is that, you know, can we find it somewhere? And does he have a middle name? And so we had to figure out all that stuff in a scramble. And now we're prepared for next time. So I think that's a really good piece of advice, particularly if you travel with other adults anyway in your group that aren't folks that you're going to have easy access to their

information. So yeah, I think that already is a big piece of impossibility conquered. And that's not all we're doing. Like that was just the bones. That wasn't the competitive part, right? That's just like. That's right. That's right.

And so what have we learned so far on the actual travel? We don't really know yet because we're recording this. Yeah, we are. And we can't share all of the tidbits yet, but I think there are some things at least we can talk about in terms of, well, first of all, the spreadsheet tip, I think was a good tip. We could talk about maybe some things that didn't work out, I guess, or findings where we tried to do something and couldn't. So we in the beginning, we had originally had this kind of set up to be an individual competition.

And so I had in mind that I really wanted to get everybody to Alaska because I knew that United, if they had saver award availability, it would be just 7,500 miles per passenger to book via Turkish miles and smiles to get to Alaska. We talk about that frequently with Hawaii. We don't talk about it very often with Alaska, but that's still a domestic flight. So it could be done for 7,500 miles a person. So I very, very much wanted to get all the way up to Northern Alaska, in fact, because I could have booked a separate award on Alaska Airlines. And so when Tim and I teamed up, that was something we talked about right away. We talked about trying to get to what is it? Barrow, I think, is the northernmost airport served by Alaska anyway.

And you can see you can go up to northern Alaska and dip your feet in the Arctic Ocean. And so we thought that would be really, really interesting and exciting. And then we had a plan that we wanted to do from there. But, but one, and so also another part of the reason I wanted to do that was because there are some really awesome looking Vacasa rentals in the Anchorage area. I was really, really excited about that. Yeah. Mentioning that now, and hopefully by the time this publishes, I will have booked mine because I do have plans to be in Anchorage. And yeah, there's some really nice looking three and four bedroom places that cost more

points like we talked about last week with Greg's example in Hawaii, but they look like some out of control places. So that was a big piece that excited me early on. I was like, oh, this is amazing. I'm going to get an awesome Vicasa rental here that's going to accommodate all of us. And we're going to hang out and cook a great meal and this and that. And so I ended up having to retool on that. And Tim and I, when we got together, we were talking about it from the beginning. That was like our initial plan. But man, finding award availability for five people to Alaska,

finding it for one person at saver level was just impossible. And so, yeah, I mean, it was like 30, 40,000 points with everybody per passenger to fly an economy class up to Anchorage. Wow. Yeah. And we kept searching and searching and looking and trying to find, oh, well, can we fly somewhere else first and then fly from Chicago or New York or wherever else to get there? And it was just not possible to do. And we were really disappointed about that. But there's a few good takeaways here. you know, of failure, so to speak, for the challenge is that when you're traveling with a group like this, sometimes you have to tailor your trip around where you can get to with your miles and points. And even though we wanted to get to Alaska, it wasn't something that we could

do with our points. So rather than beat our heads against the wall and, and, and, or use tons of Greg's points to get us all to Alaska, we realized, okay, that's not going to be the perfect one for this trip. We're going to have to retool and come up with a different idea. And so I think that that's a good takeaway. Because a lot of times I think people that are used to the traditional method of planning trips, when you planned it with all cash, you probably picked a destination first and then figured out, okay, well, how much are the tickets and what are the hotels I'm going to book? But if you really get into this award booking, I just don't book trips that way very often anymore.

It's more so, oh man, there's great award availability here. So let's see, is there something interesting to see there? Sure, I'll go there then. And I think that that is something you really have to consider when you're traveling with a larger group. What can I find that's interesting where there is availability and so i i think that's a fantastic point and and and you'll probably end up somewhere that that you'll love and never thought about going to and and uh you'll be that much happier about having done it and someday you'll get to the originally you know

and someday there'll be five seats going and we'll get there and yeah exactly that'll be great so i have to ask nick you Nick, you've written all about, and we've talked on the show all about free cruises through status matching. Why are we not flying up to Seattle and taking a cruise up to Alaska from there? What's going on? Because my family wants to take that cruise. So, and we only had a week. We only had a week.

I totally would have, I actually thought about this quite a bit and, and did have a cruise offer that I'm not sure we're going to get a chance to use this year. Cause we've already got too much travel booked, but it would have been like one thing, right? Cause the cruises are too long or they're too short. One or the other.

I mean, they're too short. There's just like out and back. So you can go and party on the boat and come back. Right. If you want to actually see something interesting, it's going to take some time and so it's going to take up too much time uh to have done that so so if you were looking forward to me putting us all on a cruise i'm sorry to burst your bubble that that was not uh was not something

i seriously considered i looked at it for a little bit and then gave up on that. Yeah, yeah, that's okay. I'll take some bonus points away. Don't worry about it. But luckily we did find availability other places. And so I want to share something else that came up and I'm not going to share it in total detail yet, but enough detail that I think it'll be useful anyway. So we had a situation where we found five seats on something we wanted and we thought, oh, that's great. And it was a partner award. I'll give you that much detail. And so long story short, when we

finally were like, okay, now we're going to book it. Suddenly there were only four seats and then there were three seats. And then we kept searching and eventually it went back up to four. And we said, okay, well, you know what? There's four seats right now. There were five before it went down to three. It went back to four. I think it's bouncing around and there's time between now and okay, well, you know what? There's four seats right now. There were five before it went down to three. It went back to four. I think it's bouncing around and there's time between now and then for a fifth seat to open up. Let's book four in business and one in economy and hope, right. And see what happens. So, so that first of all was, I think a smart strategy because we had enough time cancellations for free. we had like the opportunity to to come

up with something there right so yeah as long as i'm not the one back in coach if we have to fly it then luckily i won't have to tell you so uh because eventually that fifth seat did open up much as i kind of expected and i should i should say that i i did some research and looked at okay how many available seats are there uh a through through the seat map, looking on the airline website, but then B, I took a look at expert flyer to see how many seats were actually for sale in the various fair class buckets. And I was like, yeah, with the number of seats left and the amount of time, I feel good about rolling the dice on this. And so, again, we booked the four in business and one in economy. So then,

okay, fifth seat opens up after we have the four booked in business, another seat opens up in business. And so we tried changing the economy to business and it looked like it worked. And then we got a call a couple of days later that, Oh no, actually it never did get confirmed, even though the agent said it was confirmed. And so it's back down into economy. And so like, Oh, you've got to be kidding me.

Right. So, so we thought we had it, we were all excited. And then that's what happened. Right. But I remembered that a reader had told us a while back, because we talked about how, when you have a partner award booked or when you want to book a partner award, something goes wrong and there's no availability through the partner, then you're just out of luck and there's nothing you can do.

Right. Because I think in that case, I think it was Alaska Airlines and British Airways is what it was. And we said, well, the British Airways can't open up any more space on Alaska or Alaska can't open more on British Airways. I can't remember which way it was. But so there's nothing you can do. And what a reader had written in and said was that they had, in fact, called Alaska before and gotten Alaska to call somebody at British Airways at the partner desk and open up space, even though space wasn't showing as available anymore to fix whatever the problem was. i was like yeah well maybe it's worth a call right and you knew yeah so we're flying british so uh so anyway uh sure enough there was a mechanism for that now ultimately it didn't seem to work the way that we were told it would work so uh there wasn't a mechanism for it though like the agent knew you know what what to do anyway to try to make that happen to and then they said it would take some time to get a response back from the partner desk at the other airline and and so there was at least a mechanism to ask for that and so okay great you know asked and and

ultimately it was supposed to automatically, you know, auto magically fix itself and it didn't, but another seat opened up. And so we just canceled, rebooked, which is probably what we should have done right from the beginning, because you're trying to change it was probably the mistake because something got lost in translation somewhere there. So we probably should have just canceled the coach seat and rebooked it as a business class seat when we first saw that fifth seat come available, since it would have been free to do that. So rather than relying on an agent to manually change something and submit everything the right way and wait for it to go through, should have just canceled and rebooked. And I think that would have been a more effective

strategy from the beginning. So there you have it. If you have a problem with a partner award, and this is something that's supported by also what we saw with Air Canada and Etihad recently, where Etihad canceled the change in aircraft for like a hot minute, and then it canceled everybody's first class awards. And so they went away. And then of course, there was no more availability and blah, blah, blah. And somehow, Aeroplan has been getting Etihad to fix that and get people their first class awards back, even though it didn't show as having more availability online to rebook. Aeroplan has gotten in contact with Etihad and made that happen. So I think it's worth at least asking. I think you shouldn't have the expectation that if you're booking a partner award, that there's anything that the airline you're booking through can do to force the partner to accommodate whatever you need. But you can always ask. Right, right, right. Yeah. The tough thing is knowing when you have to somehow know it's possible in order to push the thing. Because if the first agent you ask says no you don't know whether it's is that a real like is is what they're saying when they're asserting no that's completely

impossible i'm 100 sure it's impossible are they right about that because you know take take marriott for example so we've written about how you can get your free night certs extended when they're near expiry by calling and asking and calling again and asking, calling again, asking because the first three or four or five or six agents are going to say, no, that used to be possible, but now it's 100% impossible. We're not allowed to do that anymore. And then you call again and you get an agent who says, okay, sure. I just extended it for a year. You know, you have to know it's possible in order to have that kind of persistence. Another thing that I was dealing with, American Airlines.

So some news came out that, so American Airlines will no longer let you change award booking if it's entirely on American Airlines flights themselves. But if you have partner awards booked with American Airlines miles, you can still make changes to the existing booking. And so I was trying to add a leg to an existing booking. And yeah, the first agent 100% was just saying, no, it's completely impossible. We can't do that anymore. May I speak to your supervisor? Supervisor's like, sure, I'll give that a try. And it turned out it didn't work.

But next time I called, the first agent actually was fine with trying to do it. And there was a technical reason why it didn't work, but it wasn't because they can't do it, you know? But it's tough. In many cases, you just don't know. I think the takeaway there is something we've said a lot of times before, and that's don't take what you're told at face value the first time. It's always worth hanging up and calling again. And you got to know when to hold them and when to hold them, right? You got to recognize when it's somebody who's just dead set on, no, I'm not going to do that. Or I can't do that and realize, okay, there's no point in fighting because I'm not going to fight this person into doing something for me either. I'm going to be nice and get them to do me a favor or B I'm just going to hang up and call somebody else.

So, you know, you got to recognize that I think when it's when it's time to try again, but yeah, it's often worth trying at least twice for anything, at least twice. Yeah, yeah. So I'm going to share an example of something I learned with this Party of Five thing that I don't know if it's going to be helpful or not, but it's useful to know. And so if you remember, in the case where we're using airline miles or hotel points, we're using mine. And so the teams are, we're doing it different ways, but in most cases, the teams are reaching out to me saying, can you book this thing? And so I was going to book this one thing with Cathay Miles. And that seemed to be the best option for booking that flight.

And so with Cathay, in order to book for people besides yourself, they have to be listed in your account. You have to kind of add them into your account as, I can't remember what they call them, designates or something. There's some name for it. But you only get to add five people for free. I already have two people in my account. And I haven't even added my son yet. So if I ever want to book something for my son, that would mean I only have two more slots where I can add people for free. Um, and then if I wanted to add additional people, I have to actually take out people that are already there.

And so, so if, and pay the fee. Yeah. So, so one of the people, one of the two people listed, fine. I booked for a friend a long time ago, especially when you're traveling outside of your immediate family with people. Yeah, that's an interesting limitation that we don't ever think about, really, because the U.S.-based airlines don't have anything like that. You can book for anybody at any time. You don't need to list them in advance. But especially in Asia. I guess it's an Asia thing, right?

I was going to say, I guess it's an asia thing right i was gonna say i think it's mostly asia because you got a and a requires you to be related in certain ways so you have to list how you're related they don't really check that but but they they make you at least say that you're related uh korean used to be really strict with that they'd make you like fax in marriage certificates or birth certificates and stuff yeah send your blood sample all that crazy with it and so and and Singapore requires you to designate redemption nominees. So and I don't know how many you can have, but I think maybe there's a limit there, too, in terms of the number of people you can have in your account. And then the only airline that I'm aware of that

does this at all, apart from the Asian airlines, is Turkish. Also, you have to like list them in the online. If you're going to book them online, you have to list them in the online account over the phone or via email. You don't need to have them listed ahead of time. But if you're going to book online, I think you got to add them to the profile in advance. And some airlines will save.

Well, Turkey is Asian. Yeah, it is. Well, half of it is, right? So I mean, not even half, more than half of it is. Istanbul. Half of Istanbul, anyway. Yeah. So yes, I guess that technically is.

It does qualify. You're right. So, yeah, that just seems to be a thing there. Some airlines will save your frequent passengers. Like, LifeMiles has some, all the passengers. Sure. And that's just handy. Exactly.

You could do that in American Airlines. You could do that. Yeah. Right. But the requirement. Anyway, that's a weird Asian airline thing. So although I think that that my guess is that's the case because miles brokers, I think, were frequently buying miles in order to book tickets. I think in general, wealthy Asian customers, because I remember reading before that it was a red flag potentially in your account. If you were booking for somebody flying miles brokers wasn't really i feel like i've heard of that that with american airlines sometimes they'll ask the

person how they know the person who booked for them and blah blah blah when it's tickets originating in asia so so interesting anyway so that does seem to be a thing there so all right we got a couple of takeaways there anyway that are already out and we're gonna have more there's gonna be more interesting things coming right um i have more there's going to be more interesting things coming right um i have no doubt there's going to be more i'm really looking forward to it and hopefully we've already published some on instagram you'll see if you go there um if nothing else we've probably published some entertaining footage of what we've done so far what we haven't published though is, Kerry and Steven let us know that

one of the things that they had planned, but they changed their plans. One of the things they planned was a stay in a hotel in Tokyo called the Henna Hotel, where dinosaur robots are the check-in agents. Go to the counter and there's a dinosaur standing there. Can I help you? I can't figure out whether they would have been helping me earn points with my kids or draw the forever resentment that I didn't bring them on the trip. I'm really not sure where we were going with that. Because my kids would have been awfully jealous about the dinosaur robots.

But at the same time, I guess they would have been excited that daddy checked in with the dinosaur so whatever they plan now has to be bigger than dinosaur robots i think the bar is really high so hopefully you're seeing some really amazing stuff on instagram right now yeah i mean i'm kind of disappointed we're not going to be checked in by dinosaur robots but you're right they must have something better i can't wait to see what it is i mean i think we're enjoying it already i think we probably are but you can find out whether or not we are and how much on instagram so i know we mentioned that a lot of times and i'm we're only put it's not like we're pushing that because we you know are going to make a million dollars from instagram or something this is just we don't make any money from it's just the most fun way to

tell travel stories. You know, if you want to see travel as it's happening, you got to look at the story. And if you're not particularly familiar with Instagram, I guess it's worth mentioning to you when you go to our Instagram profile, there's going to be a bunch of posts you can click on and watch videos and read or see stuff. But then if you want to actually see the stuff live kind of as it's happening, so to speak, you want to click on our profile picture. That's how you see the stories on Instagram. And then you can kind of next through the various

story slides. And I feel like that's worth a mention for those folks out there who are. Yeah. Yeah. Now you're not going to see our little profile picture come up on your, on your feed and unless you follow us. So make sure you, you follow us on Instagram and then, yeah, there'll be a little circle that pops up at the top of your screen whenever we have a new story published. You just click and watch it. Tap and hold the screen if you want to stop something. That was something that wasn't obvious to me at all when I was first doing Instagram. Like, I want to.

How can I read that? It's going too fast. Right, right, right. Forward with the right side and backward with the left side. I think all that stuff's worth mentioning for folks that are just not familiar with Instagram. Maybe it's even worth throwing a little video on the blog just like, hey, this is how to follow us and how to, you know, watch. So hopefully you already saw that. How to watch it.

Yeah. That's funny because we can't. It wouldn't do any good to publish on Instagram because whoever's watching this wouldn't know how to pause it to watch it again. Right, right, right. That's the YouTube video embedded in the I bet Carrie I bet Carrie has already done that by now so hopefully you've already saw that on the blog and if not there'll be a link in the description to wherever you can figure out how to learn about Instagram if you're not familiar oh the pressure is I know because I'm but not for us exactly exactly because if it's not there

it was Carrie's fault. That's right. And it's not our fault, even if we forgot to tell her. She should have read our minds. Okay. So I think that wraps it up for this week. So for the main event, anyway, that wraps this up. So make sure you're checking us out there.

And obviously keep an eye on the blog. We're going to have regular updates on the blog also, along with all of our regularly scheduled content. So, all right, that's that. Let's go to the question of the week. So the question of the week came in via the giant mailbag. And this is something I think we've kind of talked about a few times before, but I thought we'd get a little bit more into the weeds-ish on it. So Daniel writes in and says, everyone, I don't know who everyone is, but everyone values

Hilton points at half a cent to six tenths of a cent per point. Does that take into account the resort fees that you will not be paying also or just the price of the room? So I wanted to ask this question so you could address that and talk a little bit about how the reasonable redemption values are figured and why they're at that point. Yeah, yeah, that's a that's a great question. We obviously can't answer for everyone

um what we could do is answer for ourselves and say um in order to uh figure out what our reasonable redemption value is which means what what's the value at which you can reasonably expect to get that much value or more from your in this case Hilton points. The way we do that is we look at several dates at hotels in a number of cities across the United States. And we do just the United States because what we've learned in the past is that the vast majority of the point redemptions are within the United States. So we're trying to get an average of what most people are doing. And what we do is we actually look at what are the cash prices and the point prices. And recently I changed the methodology to where we are actually specifically looking at things like resort fees, hotel taxes. We're also looking at points you're

not earning because you're redeeming points or how many points, you know, and looking at how many points you would have earned if you had paid for it and mashing all that together to come up with a good calculation of what's, what's the average point value across the, you know, these cities that we picked, what's average. And then by looking at average, we say that's a reasonable number to expect to get that much value or more before, before looking at taxes, fees, and resort fees, um, Hilton point value was down around 0.42 or the reasonable redemption value that we came up with around 0.42, if I remember right. I think the latest was about 0.48, so very close to 0.5 even. Easier to just say 0.5, so half a cent. So yes, he's right. If we're everybody, then everybody's

valuing it about 0.5. And yes, it factors in the resort fees that you don't have to pay on points days with help. Yeah. So, and our reasonable redemption values are as scientific as you can get. They're scientific-ish, scientific-based-ish in the sense that Greg does look at the same cities each time and updates them pretty regularly in terms of picking out hotels in all the cities and the higher rated hotels from the TripAdvisor, I think is probably the metric that you use in terms of picking the desirable hotels in common US cities where people might redeem their points. And of course, you can get far more value-ish, I'm going to say ish, I'll come back to that in a second, in other places. And lots of people who

are reading, I know, redeem points overseas. But the idea, like Greg said, is to get, okay, this is what's reasonable for most people that travel on the more average spectrum of destinations and that sort of thing. You could do that well without a lot of effort. And then if you're willing to put in effort, of course, the more effort you put in, the greater the payoff in just about anything in life. So you can certainly do better. Now, that out of the way, I want to say with Hilton Point specifically, I always have trouble with where to value them. I shouldn't say I always have trouble. It's been pretty easy because they've been worth less than half a cent each. But even if Greg found that those points were

buying hotel rooms that were worth one cent per point, let's say, I would still struggle a little bit with, do we value them at one cent? Because Hilton sells them for half a cent so often, almost always perpetually on sale for half a cent per point. And so if you look at a hotel, let's just say to keep the math easy, it costs $100 a night in cash or 10,000 points. So your point value then is theoretically one cent per point, right? But if you were actually going to book that place and your option was to pay $100 or 10,000 points, would you pay $100 or would you just buy the points for half a cent each and pay $50 for the hotel room? Well, I mean, of course, if the points are on sale, you would just buy the points. So the points are getting you $50 in value by at least some measure. So I think that

the half a cent with Hilton is like, I think that's a good level to have, Matt, because that's what you're going to get out of them, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, I mean, IHG has exactly the scenario you're talking about, which is that they frequently sell the points for half a cent each, but their reasonable redemption value is above half a cent each. It's like, I can't remember exactly, but 0.65 or 0.7, something like that. And so that means we should stop using the word value at all. So it's reasonable to redeem IHG points for, let's say, 0.7 to make it easy to talk about for 0.7, which makes it a deal to buy the points for 0.5.

Yes, that's true. And there you go. That's true, yes. But I make that point because how much cash is it keeping in your pocket? It's keeping. Yeah. So I, but I make that point because, you know, if you have the, how much cash is it keeping in your pocket? It's keeping $50 in your pocket, right? So that's, that's what I mean by that.

But Greg's totally right that if you can redeem them for more than whatever the cash price is, then you would buy them. Right. And so I do sometimes buy these points because I know I can redeem them for something that's more valuable than, than the cash price of them. But that's, I think, another piece that must factor in if you're talking about everybody, because I don't know how everybody else does their values. But I think that's another piece that factors into why they're

widely valued at half a cent each, because that's the value Hilton tells us they are by selling them at that price all the time. That's a really good point. Yeah. All right. So that brings us to the end of this week's episode. If you've enjoyed it and you'd like to get more of this stuff in your email inbox each day or each week, you want to go to frequent miler.com slash subscribing. And that's frequent miler.com slash subscribe. Join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media. Like we said, Instagram right now for the party of five challenge.

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