Frequent Miler on the Air - Credit Card Collectibles | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep352 | 4-3-26

Episode Date: April 3, 2026

In this episode, we'll talk about how United credit cards make United miles more valuable, how Southwest discount codes make Southwest points more valuable, and we'll take you on a ride through a classic card show discussing credit card "collectibles".Giant Mailbag(01:34) - Justin: I was annoyed to discover I couldn't change the frequent flyer number on my upcoming award booking from my Atmos number to my AAdvantage number, which would have made me and my girlfriend eligible for Oneworld Emerald perks...Learn more about Alaska not allowing frequent flyer number changes on award tickets hereCard News(05:33) - United cards now unlock better earnings on paid flights, 10%/15% discount on award flights, and more Polaris business class saver awardsRead more about recent United changes here(10:46) - Amex card offersLearn more about The Business Platinum Card® from American Express hereLearn more about the American Express® Business Gold Card here(16:18) - Amazon Business Amex moving to US Bank(17:59) - Southwest cardholder discount codesRead more about Southwest discount codes hereMattress Running the Numbers(20:28) - Hyatt/Under Canvas cardholder promoLearn more about the Hyatt 2K promo here: https://frequentmiler.com/hyatt-promo-earn-2k-bonus-points-per-night-at-under-canvas-properties/Awards, Points, and More(27:32) - National Car Rental’s One Two Free Promo ReturnsLearn more about National Car Rental's One Two Free promo here: https://frequentmiler.com/national-car-rentals-one-two-free-promo-returns/(29:27) - Transfer bonusesLearn more about transfer bonuses here: https://frequentmiler.com/current-point-transfer-bonuses/Main Event: Credit Card Collectibles(35:00) - Citi® AAdvantage® Globe has us predicting the next credit card collectibles(35:44) - Find our Coffee Break Ep35 here: https://frequentmiler.com/predicting-the-next-credit-card-collectibles-coffee-break-ep35-12-3-24-podcast/(36:56) - Citi collectibles(53:36) - Chase collectibles(59:54) - Bank Of America(1:01:25) - Capital One(1:06:15) - US Bank(1:14:46) - Almost collectiblesQuestion of the Week(1:28:42) - Do you have suggestions for how to preemptively link loyalty accounts to Chase, Capital One, or Amex without needing to transfer points?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: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 NetworkVisit FrequentMiler.com Did you know that Frequent Miller is also a website? At frequentMiller.com, you'll find all the latest deals, news about points, miles, and rewarding credit cards, the single best, Best Credit Cards page on the web, guides to all popular rewards programs, and many other terrific resources. If you'd like to get our posts sent to your email, go to frequentMiller.com/subscribe and sign up for free. https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world atvoyescape.com. On today's episode, we'll talk about how United Credit Cards make United Miles more valuable. We'll talk about how Southwest credit card discount codes make Southwest points more valuable. And we'll take you on a ride through our classic card show. Frequent Miler on the air starts now. Today's main event, credit card collectibles. Credit card collectibles are credit cards that you can no longer get new,

but if you happen to have them from when they were available, they have some powers, they have some capabilities, they have some benefits that make them worth keeping potentially forever, but it's a collectible because other people can't get it. You're the lucky one who has it because it's been around. So we're going to talk about a bunch of credit card collectibles that Nick and I have today. We're going to talk about ones we don't have, but wish we did. And we're going to talk about some that might become collectibles in the near future.

So if you have the opportunity, you might want to pick up one of those cards. Yeah. And unlike other collectibles, you can't buy seller trade these. So you need to get in while the getting's good, so to speak, and hang on to it if you want it. But we'll talk more about that later on. If you'd like to jump ahead to that or come back to something later on, don't forget, you can always find the timestamps in the show notes. Just expand the description box in order to find those clickable timestamps. Wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to like this.

Leave us a review. Let us know what you thought of the episode. Leave us a comment. We love to hear from you. All right. Let's drag out this week's giant mail back. All right. Today's giant mail comes from Justin.

Justin writes, I was annoyed to discover I couldn't change the frequent flyer number on my upcoming award bookings from my Atmos number. to my advantage number, which would have made me and my girlfriend eligible for one-world perks, namely the free selection of premium seats on both flights. I found Nick's article on the subject when troubleshooting. I was thinking it was a technical issue, but his post had information about how Alaska was not allowing you to change your frequent flyer number. Now, this is Greg talking. I sort of rephrase that. little bit. That wasn't in Justin's voice just for the record. Now I'm going to go back to quoting Justin. He says, however, when I dropped off our checked bag at LAX and the Alaska

attendant at the counter asked if there was anything else I needed, I asked on a whim if she would be able to change my frequent flyer number for me. To my surprise, she not only managed to do so, but she also gave us a complimentary upgrade to two adjacent seats and first before I even had a chance to ask about premium. I've checked to see if the frequent flyer number change was reflected on the second leg of our trip and it appears to be. I upgraded us to premium seats and added a check bag for no additional charge. If only I'd tried asking before I paid the $35 for the check bag on the first leg. It's always a pleasure when my obsession with points and miles net's real-world benefits for my girlfriend, who was constantly annoyed by my lengthy ramblings on the subject and preference for

certain racketing dining and resi restaurants. Well, very good. I'm glad that it paid off there with a couple of first class seats and a free checked bag. So great tip that you're able to do it with the agent at the check-in counter. I think actually, Greg, you and Tim have both managed to find ways to do this in advance even, right? Yeah. So there's a few things you can do here that might be a little easier. One is if you booked with Alaska Miles and American Airlines flight, which is, I don't think is the case here. This person booked an Alaska flight with Alaska Miles, but wanted to put their advantage number on. But if you book an American Airlines flight, you can actually just ask American Airlines, like through Twitter or wherever that

you contact them to put your American Airlines number on, and they'll do that for you, even though you can't do it through Alaska's website. So I've done that several times. With an Alaska flight, there are probably other workarounds, but the easiest one I know of is when booking the flight, don't book it for yourself. Book it for someone with the exact same name as you. And so the thing is, they won't let Justin, you know, when Justin books a flight as himself,

It automatically... Logged into his Alaska account, right? Right, right. Well, which he has to be in order to use his Alaska Miles to book it. Then he can't change the frequent flyer number. However, if Justin just books for someone else who has the exact same name, named Justin, so added as if you're not flying but put in the same name, then you should be able to... I can't remember off the top of my head if you could set the frequent flyer number at

point or if you just leave off the frequent flyer number and then you can you can change it later one or the other uh will let you um do that from the get go yep so you just book it like you're booking for someone else instead of booking for yourself that's that's the the simple simpleish solution there but but anyway i'm glad it worked out for you justin and now hopefully you've got some ideas about how you might accomplish that same thing in the future if you'd like all right let's move on to this week's card news so in card news the united cards now unlock better earning unpaid flights, discounts on award flights, and more Polaris business class saver awards. Is that exciting or what?

Well, I don't know if exciting is the right word, but it does make it more important than ever if you fly United at all or use their miles at all for United Zone flights to consider having a United Credit Card. So on paid flights, you're basically by having a United Credit Card, You earn three miles per dollar more than what you would earn if you don't have a United credit card. So, you know, obviously that gives you some benefits if you book paid flights regularly. Where I think it's much more interesting to our audience is two things. If you have a United Credit Card, and I'm going to get in a little more detail about what that means,

then and you're booking a United Flight with United Miles, you get an automatic 10% discount. So for example, I looked up today business class flights to Europe that are normally 80,000 points flying United, using United Miles. But thanks to this discount, it was showing up for me. The 80,000 was crossed out and it said 72,000. So that's what they would charge me after the discount. If you also have elite status with United, which sadly for me I no longer have because I used to get it from Marriott titanium status, which I just lost recently.

Anyway, if you also have any kind of United Elite status, then the discount jumps to 15%. So you have to have both the credit card and elite status to get that 15% discount. Of course, they may in the long run do what Delta did, which, which was Delta initially lowered prices for cardholders. And then as time went on, they appeared to raise prices such that you had to be a cardholder to get basically what was the previous pricing before all these changes. You know, with programs like these where the awards are pretty dynamic, it's kind of hard to say what's happening.

But anyway, that may happen. I don't know. Regardless, if you have United Miles or you have like, chase or built points that you might transfer to United, having a United card will get you lower award prices than you would get without having a United card. The other thing is that United has promised cardholders will have access, cardholders and elite members will have access to more Polaris business class saver awards than non-cardholders or non-elites. So that's something that I don't know how to tell. Well, I guess we could tell by logging in as someone without a cardholder as well

and seeing if there's a significant difference. But anyway, those are good reasons, I think, for people who book awards a lot with United to have a card. I updated a post I have on that. Well, I have updated post about comparing all the United cards to each other. And you'll see in there that I really like the United Business card as a really good value card to kind of have and to hold. However, it's worth noting there are two lower fee cards worth considering. There's the fee-free gateway card and there's the United Debit card. Now, both of those are unlike the other United cards in that, they require $10,000 of calendar year spend

in order to unlock the features I was just talking about, but they can unlock those features. So depending on how far into United World you want to get, those are some options. And of course, there are reasons to go, if you're a regular flyer, to go higher, like the United Quest card, which is like $350, I think, or even a United Club card if you want.

United Club access. But check out the post. We'll have that in the in the show notes. Yeah, and I think bottom line there is that it's become a credit card first program. If you want the best prices and the best access to awards, you've got to have a United Credit Card. So if you're a United person, that means you'll want the card. And if you're not big into United, then it probably won't matter very much to you. But the program is primarily for cardholders at this point. Yeah, yeah. That is true. I mean, I would feel really, yeah, like you're really missing out if you're, especially if you're booking a lot of awards and having to pay the full price.

We're booking a lot of paid. And they're going to missing out on the extra miles, I guess, right? Yeah, I guess that too. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, that's United in there.

They're card holders. All right. Let's move on to Amex. MX is out with a bunch of new, ish, uh, card offers on the Amex business gold. There's now an offer as high as 200,000 points after 15,000 spend in three months, business platinum as high as 300,000 points after 20K in three months. What do you think about these as high as offers? Yeah, I'm not a fan of that language. So what they're doing is

they're not promising this is what the offer is. What they're saying is you can apply and then we'll tell you what the offer is and you can cancel out of the application before we do a hard pull, which actually Amex doesn't always do anyway. But if you don't like what the actual offer is. Yeah, if you have a lot of patience, I recommend trying different browsers and things if you don't get the top offer right away, because it would be a shame to go for one of these

and not get that top offer. The other thing I need to mention is that these particular offers, as we're recording this, have been like coming and going last couple of days. It seems to be in flux. Hopefully, by the time, and this publishes those offers 200k and 300k will be what, or I should say as high as 200k and as high as 300k, will be what you always see when you click through to the application.

But I can't promise that because it hasn't been consistent the last couple of days. Talk about under promising, well, over promising. I mean, because they're under promising in the sense is as high as, but they're over promising in the sense that they're giving you these big numbers. that you might be eligible for, but you might not be. It's worth noting when Greg says, you may want to use different browsers, by the way, that sometimes you'll open one of these links

and you might actually see an offer that doesn't have the as high as language that just has a set bonus amount, and that might be a good bonus amount that you want. So it's worth clicking around and trying a few times. That's all I'm saying. Yeah, that's true. And I was kind of going to mention that,

that even before these as high as offers, came out. It used to be the case like, you know, the fixed offer might be 100K, but if you click around different browsers, you might find one that's 150 or 200K. And so I guess having the as high as like maybe is helpful because it gives you an idea of what to look for. Because before it was just a guessing game, like whether you should even try to look for something better. Yeah. Yeah. I'll be curious if we see anything that's higher than one of those in the future here. We'll have to see. Time will tell.

But in time, we're going to be losing a benefit on the MX Platinum cards. So it was announced this week that Amex will remove the Platinum cards shop sacks benefit. They're giving the axe to sacks, as thrifty travelers said, on July 1st. So you can enroll in and use the Sacks benefit. Now, as a reminder, the shop sacks benefit is up to $50 in statement. credits once between January and June and previously once between July and December. But this year, it'll just be the January to June credit so you can get 50 bucks back for purchases at SACS. If you can find something in stock at the SACS website that actually ships, or if you have a SACS store near you,

that's got anything that costs $50 or less, then you could do that. Of course, you could use it on something that costs more than $50 if you want something else as well. But anyway, this isn't a huge loss and it isn't a huge surprise because SACS has been struggling for a while. They filed for bankruptcy in January and we've kind of long expected this couldn't possibly last forever. Nonetheless, I think it's kind of surprising that Amex would pull the benefit mid-year because presumably people are still applying now and it's still listed as a benefit and then they're going to end it or people applied before this announcement came out expecting to get it twice this year and they're obviously not going to July to December. So it's a little surprising.

Amex says that they're going to launch a bunch of platinum card holder exclusive Amex offers starting in July 1st. So we'll have to see what those are. We've seen some good offers occasionally and maybe they'll make a good effort to make up for this, which really any effort is a good effort to make up for this, right? It doesn't take much. No. No, the bar is low. So probably they'll make us happy enough if they offer us a $5 credit for something. All right.

So that's that. other bad news for Amex. Amex is apparently ending transfers to Etihad Gast as of June 30th, 2026. So the last day to transfer from Amex to Etihad Gass will be June 29th of 26. That was reported by several blogs. I think it's coming out on April statements. I haven't actually seen it in my Amex account yet, but I think it's coming out in wording on your April statement that it's ending on June 30th. So not a huge loss. Etihad Gast has a horrible cancellation policy. so I don't usually recommend it to people in general and certainly not for awards that are booked far in advance unless you're really willing to commit to that award since the penalties for cancellation are so high. Though I've written about how it can be useful for short distance jet blue flights, sometimes for American Airlines.

I only consider it for last minute bookings, but nonetheless, there are some uses. You could still transfer those. As far as we know, there's no change to the transferability from Capital One Miles or City Thank You points are built. So there'll still be opportunities to earn it to had miles if you really want them. Other news, the Amazon business card is an American Express. So the Amazon Business Amex, Amazon Prime Business Card or Business Prime. I don't know which way they word that. So Amazon has a couple of different credit cards.

There is a consumer chase card that's an Amazon Prime card. This is the business version, which is an Amex. And it's an Amex now, but in August of 2026, it's going to become a U.S. U.S. Bank cards. So it's transitioning from Amex to U.S. Bank. That card gives you 5% back at Amazon. I actually have this card myself for the 5% back at Amazon. Yeah, I could probably buy Amazon gift cards somewhere, but that's, then I have to plan that in advance. So I just use this for the five, easy 5% back at Amazon all the time. Some people will look at this and say, oh, man, it's moving to U.S. Bank. That kind of stinks because U.S. Bank is kind of just antiquated

and not as consumer-friendly in many ways. On the flip side, I'm kind of looking forward to that because it'll free up an Amex slot for me. I'll have one more Amex credit card slots since Amex limits most people to having five credit cards. Now that will drop one out of my portfolio and free up a spot for a different Amex credit card. So I'm actually kind of happy with that change.

So it is what it is. By the way, worth mentioning Dr. Credit has reported that right now the cap on the 5% back on the Amex version is $120,000 in purchases per year, but it's going to move up to $150,000 when it becomes a U.S. bank card. So if you're somebody who buys a lot from Amazon, maybe you're into buying grips and that sort of thing, I guess that'll be a piece of good news for you as well. Thanks a sense. All right.

Last piece of card news is the Southwest Credit Cardholder discount codes. I wrote about these this week because both debit card holders and credit card holders receive annual discount codes. and you get them at anniversary for the credit cards, for the debit card. Oddly, you get it in January if you had it open by December 31st. Either way, the debit card offers a 15% discount code. A couple of the credit cards, the Southwest Rapid Rewards Premier and Premier Business offer coupon codes for, I'm sorry, I said that wrong. The debit card offers a 20% discount code.

The credit cards, the Premier and Premier Business credit cards, offer a 15% discount code and the Southwest Plus card offers a 10% discount code. and the Southwest Plus card offers a 10% discount code. Somewhat oddly, no discount codes for the higher end Southwest cards. But the Premier and Premier business anyway, come with 15% coupon code. And that I mentioned here, and I mentioned the credit card one, because either the credit card or debit card codes can be used to reduce a cash fare. However, as I wrote about this week, if you're a credit card holder,

you probably want to use that discount code for an award fair. because for some reason, the discount codes from the Premier and Premier business cards are yielding higher discounts on the points cost of a flight. So that is to say, well, they'll give you 15% off of a cash price. It's closer to 30% off of an award price. So that's been the case for a while. I noticed that, I don't know, a year ago probably and didn't write about it because I was using it to book something.

And I was like, oh, that's a big discount. But I was hurrying to get something booked. And so I said, I'll have to look at that again sometime in the future. And then it popped up again a couple of months ago. And I was like, oh, one of these days I got to check that out. And finally I sat down and said, okay, let me run some numbers and look at some examples. And it seems to be consistent. So again, you'll get a bigger discount on an award ticket with the credit card holder coupon code than you do on a cash ticket. So it actually works out to be even better than the debit card discount. Even though the debit card discount is supposed to be the bigger discount, I Anyway, worth using those codes. Keep those in mind. Yeah, yeah. That's a great point. It's a little more valuable.

Yeah. Right, right. Thanks. Especially since Southwest had been like over time, you know, reducing the value of their points. So it's nice to have a trick to make them more valuable again, which is great. Yep. Yep.

And if you're booking for multiple passengers, that can be really nice because you can get a really good savings there. All right. Let's talk about mattress running the numbers. Mattress running the numbers, Hyatt and under canvas are out. with a cardholder promo. I have mostly ignored the under-canvas partnership here. Okay. Well, first, what under-canvas is, it's a brand that supplies, or that has glamping places that are often near national parks. So if you want to stay in a really nice tent or sometimes a cabin and sort of get the luxury treatment, but in a camp like,

setting. That's what under canvas is. And there's also a few other, so Hyatt lumped under canvas under its Mr. and Mrs. Smith collection. And there are a few Mr. and Mrs. Smith properties that are also camp like. And so when we talk about promos like this that are under canvas promos, they also include a few. other properties that aren't technically under canvas. And so like Hyatt lists them as alum, ULU M-M-M-M-O-Ab. That's one. Fields of Michigan is two, and something called Bar and Ranch is the third. So anyway, so these are all these like camping like or ranch-like properties. And we've been seeing lots of different promos over the past year, year and a half. So,

I'm guessing that Hyatt's not seeing as much uptick and bookings through these as they had hoped, or maybe they get a bigger, more revenue when they're booked. I don't know. But the nice thing here is there are going to be two promos that overlap. And so let me talk about first. The new promo is that card member, so you have to be a Hyatt card member. You will earn 20 points per dollar on stays at under canvas. Now, where does that come from? It comes from 11 bonus points from the promo in addition to the nine points you'd earn anyway. So the nine points you'd earn anyway are the five points you get as a Hyatt member and four points per dollar as a card member if you're paying with your card. So the promo part, again, is the 11 bonus points per dollar, which is

pretty significant. That promo, it's available at all the under canvas camps, which there's 14 of them, as well as the three other properties I mentioned. And it's valid on stays between June 1st and September 8th. So that's pretty nice because it goes all through the summer. So summer vacation, you know, I think that's when people want to go to these places anyway. And make sure you register before or by June 12th. And you can earn a... a maximum of 100,000 bonus points. I think we're safe there. But here's where things get more interesting is this all overlaps with a promo that we had reported on the blog previously, which is 2,000 bonus points per night at under Canvas and also the three others I had mentioned.

And that's per night, not per stay. So if you register by June 30th, the 2K per night promo is valid on stays from March 13th to July 1st for a maximum of 60,000 bonus points. So, you know, again, either one of these alone would be, I think, a good promo, but not super exciting, but they overlap. So you could stack these. The overlapping dates are basically the month of June, June 1st to July 1st, and which is not a bad time, I think, to go to these kind of properties, and you can qualify for both promos. So, for example, let's say you stay at a place that is $200 per night, and I'm going to gloss over

the fact that you don't necessarily earn points on taxes and fees. So let's just, we're rounding off here. So if you're staying in place $200 per night, with one promo, you're earning 20 points per dollar, you're paying with your Hyatt credit card. And so that's 4,000 points per night from that promo, plus an additional 2,000 points per night from the other promo. So a total of 6,000 points per night. Our current reasonable redemption value for Hyatt points is 1.7 cents per point. So you're getting about $100 per night back in points from this promo. And you know, spending 200. So basically kind of getting half back as a as a rebate in,

in points. Yeah, I mean, which, okay, you know, not bad. It's not going to necessarily make me run out and book a stay because I'm not super interested in sleeping under canvas. I like walls and doors and always. But although there, as you pointed out, there are some places to have cabins and whatnot. And if you are into the glamping thing, that could be a good return. And even if it's a slightly more expensive night. You know, you could be looking at a really good deal in terms of what you're getting back for points. So, you know, if these interests you, it's worth a look during the month of June when you can stack both of them. And after that, I mean, the 11 bonus points per dollar is really good. When you look at Hyatt, how you earn a base of five points per dollar as a member.

And even as a globalist, you only earn six and a half points per dollar at Hyatt properties. So an extra 11 is a really good return for somebody who wants to book one of these anyways. I'm not going to, again, make me run out. I'm not going to mattress run this one for points. But I could see where some folks would be like, hey, you know what, let's take a glamping trip. Why not? Yeah. Yeah.

You know, I've been eyeing the one in Michigan that's Fields of Michigan. And I almost actually booked it for August, but our plans were had changed. So now I'm like, oh, I wonder if I could jam in, you know, a weekend or something in June so I can stack both of these. So, you know, it's one of those where, yeah, I might go out of my way, but it's a driving, you know, a couple hours. It's not like, I don't think I would book a flight somewhere to try out one of these properties if I didn't also want to go wherever that is, right? Right, right. It's in your backyard.

It's a little extra incentive to get away for the weekend if we can manage it. there you go. I feel like I already live in fields of upstate New York, so I don't really need the camping experience on that. But I'll be curious to hear how it is. All right. Let's see. Next up, we have awards, points, and more. So first of all, National is back with its one-two free promo, which I always love to see return, although, of course, these days it requires a little bit more than it did in the past. So you have to register, first of all. So see our post. We'll have a link in the show notes because you've got to register before you rent in order to take advantage of this, which is a good reminder for me because I'm picking up a national car soon, and I need to make sure I register.

So make sure you register. Your rentals have to occur between April 6th and June 7th for this promotion. So it's a pretty tight window, just two months. And you'll need to make a minimum of two two day rentals. So you need two rentals and each of them need to be for at least two days in order to earn a free day. And then your free day will expire on December 31st of this year, I believe. So you don't have quite as much time as normal in order to use the free day because I think they're normally valid for a little bit longer than that. That's kind of a bummer. But the reason that this stands out to me and we mention it anytime this comes up is because national free days can be super valuable. If you're booking a one-way rental, National kind of bakes the one-way rental fee into

the daily rate. So using a free day on a one-way rental can be. really valuable. It's one of the more valuable credit or rather a rental car reward type things that exist. So I love to gather national free days when I can. Back in the day, this promo didn't have the two day minimum rental. So there were times where I would just book two separate one day rentals that were cheap enough that I'd be getting a good deal on the free day that I needed. Nowadays with the two day minimum, that's a little bit more difficult, especially with the fact that National is relatively expensive most of the time when I'm searching for a rental car these days. But if you like National, you're booking with National, certainly register and earn some free

days. Yeah, yeah, totally. All right, good. Also, in awards points and more, we have transfer bonuses. So, as always, we keep up to date all the current transfer bonuses in a post called current transfer bonuses. And so check that out. We'll have a link to that in the show notes. But you could always go there to see what's happening at any time. But we thought we'd mention some of the ones that are happening now. City is out with a couple, like 25% to life miles and 30% to Virgin through April 18th. Choice is out with what's described to 100% transfer bonus to Flying Blue. That's Air France and KLM.

But you have to understand what that means. that normal transfer ratio from choice to flying blue is five to one. So five choice points becomes one airline mile. So with this transfer bonus, it becomes five to two, which is okay, but I wouldn't go out of my way with that. But if you do have choice points sitting around that you don't know what to do with, go to our frequent mile or insiders group on Facebook. Join it if you haven't already. I have a post in there about what happened when I transferred some points to miles. It's, it is pretty interesting.

We can't promise that it'll stay that way, but it's worth a look. All right. Chase is out with a 20% transfer bonus to Air Canada Aeroplane through April 30th. And that on its own is not bad if you've got a use for it. But it could be a little bit better. Yeah. If you have the Chase Aeroplane card, you always get a 10. You always get a 10% bonus when transferring to aeroplane,

and when they do a promo like this, the two stacks. So you get a total 30% transfer bonus if you haven't to have that aeroplane card. So that can be, that's a better deal, obviously. Chase also has their 70% transfer bonus to IHG, which despite that big number is a terrible deal. Wow. Don't do it. We've talked a million times about why, so we want to get into that.

more interesting Capital One is back with their 30% transfer bonus to Japan Airlines, which brings it really close to a one-to-one transfer ratio. Yeah, and that can be interesting because Japan Airlines has some sweet spot uses. Now, what you'll hear in most places mentioned is that you get expanded access to Japan Airlines Awards, which is true. And there are some really reasonable deals if you want to fly to Japan from the United States, then that could be a great ticket there. But there's some other good uses, too, that are perhaps less discussed. I've mentioned a couple of times now in a post that Japan Airlines partners with Air France, which is such an interesting partnership since Air France is in Sky Team and Japan Airlines is in one world. I think it's even more interesting

now because we recently reported that Air France, KLM Flying Blue has increased surcharges on their own awards. So whereas taxes and fees from, let's say, New York to Paris are now somewhere around $350 on an award ticket that you book through Air France, KLM, Flying Blue. You can get a much better deal if you book via Japan Airlines. Now, not every Air France flight is going to be available, but when they are, I just looked it up a few days ago, and I found availability from New York to Paris for just 42,000 Japan Airlines miles and $5.60 in taxes and fees. So you won't pay any of those surcharges.

In business class, that is, yes. So no surcharges on the. those awards from the United States to Europe, and probably I would assume no surcharges in the other direction either, though you will pay departure taxes from Europe. So, I mean, that's about 42,000 capital one miles right now. I guess tiny bit more than that because it's not quite one to one, but less than 43. You could transfer 43,000 capital one miles to Japan Airlines and potentially book business class to Europe on Air France. That's a pretty awesome. It really is. And I, you know, I booked a similar deal using Japan Airlines to book JetBlue business.

class for also for 42,000 Japan Airlines Miles. Unfortunately, that partnership is ending, I think, the end of this month or sometime really soon. If it hasn't already, I can't remember the exact date, but luckily I booked it before that partnership ended. And I also did it during the time Rove Miles was having a 50% transfer bonus last month to Japan Airlines. So it was actually really cheap to book that, which was crazy. Anyway, yeah, Japan Airlines, more and more and more, you know, seeing these great opportunities there. It's just something I hadn't really looked into much before, but now we're seeing the ability to transfer to Japan Airlines from Capital One, which is not one to one, but they've been doing these frequent transfer bonuses now. So it's

often or sometimes very close to one to one. And then you've got. that rove miles one to one and built one to one. So several opportunities to get Japan Airlines smiles, which is exciting. Yeah, and great to see Capital One continue to bring around this 30% transfer bonus with some regularity. This is now the third time, I think, we've seen that transfer bonus in a relatively short amount of less than a year. So it's been good to see that come back. Speaking of being back, we'll be right back after this with our main event. We hope you're enjoying the Frequent Myler on the air podcast. Did you know that Frequent Miler is also a website?

At Frequentmyler.com, you'll find all the latest deals, news about points, miles, and rewarding credit cards, the single best, best credit cards page on the web, guides to all popular rewards programs and many other terrific resources. If you'd like to get our posts sent to your email, go to Frequentmiler.com forward slash subscribe and sign up for free. And we're back with today's main event, credit card collectibles. As I said at the outset, credit card collectibles are credit cards that used to be available new and have some benefit or perk that makes them worth keeping, but they're no longer available new. So you're lucky if you have one of these things in your collection. Nick and I have several of the cards we're going to talk about, and we'll talk about some that we wish we had, and we'll also talk about some that we think are likely to become collectibles in the future. So it's worth keeping an eye on those. As a little bit of background on a previous show called predicting the next credit card collectibles, we talked about how the Aviator Silver Card, which was issued by Barclays.

We knew that it was going to transition to Citibank as the issuer at some point. At the time we did the show, we didn't know any details about what exactly would happen, but we hypothesized that it would become a collectible, meaning that even though it moved to Citibank, it would stay, it would keep the perks of the Aviator Silver Card. and so therefore it would become a special card that you had to have gotten in the past through Barclays, but would now be issued by City, but would be no longer available new. A variant of what we predicted actually did happen.

So we'll talk about that as one of the things in our list of credit card collectibles. But I just wanted to point that out that if you want to see what we predicted, back in December of 2024, you can check out Coffee Break Episode 35. Very good. All right. So let's talk about these. Let's kick it off with City. First up, first collectible to talk about is the City prestige card, which is a card

that had a $495 annual fee and had some awesome benefits. This is one I really regret getting rid of. I don't have it anymore. And you do. And I'm entirely jealous of you for this. So tell us more about the prestige card. Yeah, this card has such an interesting history. When it first came out, or at least when I first got it, it had this weird benefit around airline miles.

Like when you booked a flight with the card, you got points that had something to do with how far you were going. And the funny thing is, if you just paid the taxes and fees on an award flight, you got the full miles or points, whatever they were. For the distance, you were flying. So I'd book an award flight to halfway across the world, and I would still get that many points. And then those, I don't know. I can't remember that part. It was a very interesting card. Yeah, they changed all that.

So I got it shortly before that whole scheme ended. And so I like maximize that. Got a lot of points. Back then, if I remember right, like points were not transferable at all. It was just a card that earned points that could be used to redeem for, you know, travel and stuff. But not transfer to partners at that time. Anyway, it morphed into a card that has had and still has if you have. have it around. It earns five points per dollar for dining, airfare, and travel agencies,

and 3x for hotels and cruises, one X everywhere else. It does cost $495, but if you are a city gold, you know, bank member with city, you get $145 back each year. So that brings down the, you know, actual annual fee quite a bit. It also has a $250 annual travel rebate. So just use the card for travel purchases. You get $250 back. So between those two things, if you have City Gold and you use the travel rebate, it's getting down to a really cheap card to keep. And so I use it like crazy. Five-X dining I've been using for years as my just my primary dining card. Even now that I have the Strata Elite card, which offers 6x for city. nights, I don't usually, like, I keep that in a binder at home. And so it doesn't occur to me to bring it

out on Friday and Saturday nights. And so I'm losing one point per dollar during those particular hours, but that's not a huge loss. It's just easier for me to just know I've always got the city prestige card in my wallet. It also has priority pass with a couple free guests, plus family, like children, also in addition to the free gas, and it includes restaurants. So because so many priority passes have stopped offering restaurants as a benefit, I've made that version of priority pass my main one that I use. And it also offers a fourth night free hotel benefit, which used to not be very useful because when you booked hotels through city,

they used to charge a lot more than most other places for those hotels. They've switched to a new travel provider that actually has often really good rates, sometimes better than you'd find elsewhere for hotels. So that Fourth Night Free becomes really interesting now. Yeah, a lot of people dump the card when they used to allow you to book that Fourth Night free through the city concierge and it was more like a direct booking and you'd get your elite benefits and everything and they stopped doing that they make you now book through the city travel portal and so you can't stack your hotel points and stuff but for independent hotels it's

it's still good um the other thing they nerfed it they used to get um the city premier card which is now the city strata premier used to get a bonus on hotel bookings through the portal and used to be all stack that bonus plus the fourth night free and one thing all of that that's gone so so there are perks that this card used to have that it no longer has but it still has the the ones i talked about yeah that fourth night free used to be really hot back in the day i heard people using this because it was actually the fourth night that you got free instead of like the average cost and so i heard of people doing things like booking the new year Eve as your fourth night, you know, Times Square, where, you know, rates were incredibly high.

And so not only were they earning hotel points, but they were getting an amazing deal because the three nights before that weren't nearly as expensive. So that was, I think, awesome back in day. But even still, I mean, even if you don't have city gold. And so you pay basically $500 a year for this card. If you're listening to this show, you probably spend more than $250 a year on travel. So you're going to get that back. So for a net 250-ish, five accents, dining airfare and travel agencies is pretty darn good, especially when you consider that at least for now, while we record this,

you still get a 1 to 2 transfer to choice privileges and a 1 to 4 transfer to preferred hotels. That's been awesome up until now. Of course, those transfer ratios are scheduled to change on April 18th. So it won't be quite as good as before. But with 5X on dining, they'll still be decent. So that's a pretty incredible one. That was one that you were wise to keep.

Yeah, yeah. I'm so happy I did. I had strongly considered canceling it, but luckily, I don't know what held me back. I'm really glad I didn't cancel it. All right. That brings us to a card where I did make the mistake of canceling, which is the city AT&T Access More card. This card, only $95 a year. It offers three X, three thank you point.

points per dollar on online retail and travel purchases. And so, you know, very broad categories there. When it first came out, you could buy gift cards online and get 3X and pretty much anything. Like, you could pay bills through plastic and get 3X. They kept, you know, reducing which things like that offered 3X. But still, you know, lots of things earn 3X online. And you also get just by spending $10,000 on the card each year, you get a 10,000 point bonus. So that's a pretty cool card.

And it enables point transfers, too, at the premium rate that, like the City Stratta premier and the strata lead offer. Yeah, yeah. That's a, I think probably a solid one for people who still have it. The big question mark was that sometimes there were things that should have earned three points per dollar that weren't earning the three points per dollar. It became a little difficult to predict which ones would and which ones wouldn't. And actually for a while, the doctor credit payments workshop became an indispensable tool there and trying to figure out what people were reporting success with and what they weren't having

success with. But if you still have it and you're able to take advantage of it, it can be a terrific card to have. All right. Next step. Do you still have this one? No, I don't. No, I haven't for a long time.

Yeah. Back in the day, though, this was a terrific card to have. a big for people that were into resale product resale that was an amazing opportunity because you were running three on everything you bought online back in the day it was i i have talked a lot about reselling big products and what i was doing for a long time is there was a an auction company that ran the auctions for all the radio stations so sometimes if you if you still listen to regular radio i don't know if they still do this but years ago they would they would have these periodic auctions and a radio station would auction off all this stuff and what

I figured out at some point is that they were they were essentially giving businesses discounted advertising. They were saying, okay, give us a product for the auction and we'll give you the full retail value worth of advertising and we'll just keep whatever we get for at auctioning it off. And of course, not many people were listening to the radio anymore by this point. So when I discovered it was one company running it for all of Clear Channel, which eventually became my heart media, I found lots and lots of those auctions and I was buying lots of stuff in different places because they had a lot of high-end stuff. and so I was, you know, getting pellet stoves and wood stoves and massage chairs and big items at huge, massive discounts and earning three points per dollar on a lot of it.

So it was great while it lasted, but yeah, I haven't had that for a long time now, unfortunately. So in the business company that ran those auctions went out of business. So that's a thing of the past, unfortunately, but a good collectible for those who have it. But back to our collectibles episode where we talked about predicting collectibles. One of the ones we talked about was the Barclays Aviator Silver card, and we didn't yet know when we recorded that what would happen to the Barclays Aviator Silver card, but now we do. Yeah, yeah. So in the meantime, since we did that episode, the city brought out a new card, the Advantage Globe Master card,

which is a $350 annual fee card, which is more than the Aviator Silver's 199. and it sure looked like City brought it out to be the replacement for the Aviator Silver. So City knew they'd become the sole issuer. It seemed like they were looking to provide a card that at a high level had similar enough perks to be able to tell people they were getting basically the same thing. But, you know, the annual 50s. was considerably more. And so we didn't know, you know, what's going to happen?

Are the city going to keep the aviator silver as like a special thing, or are they going to transition everyone to the globe? And what they did was sort of a hybrid. They did transition or they're about to, as we're recording this, later this month, transition everyone to the aviator, I mean, to the advantage globe card, anyone who had the Aviator Silver card, but those card members will keep their 199 annual fee. So all of us who have that silver card will be getting a $350 globe card but for $199 per year. And then for some amount of time, we're going to keep

some of the Aviator Silver's like special features like the ability to earn up to $15,000. thousand bonus points by us you get five thousand I'm sorry bonus loyalty points you get five thousand loyalty points with twenty thousand dollars annual spend another five K at forty thousand and another five K at fifty thousand that's a feature that the globe card doesn't have and yet we get to keep that for a while it's unclear will they ever end it or you know they've promised it through the end of the next um elite qualifying year. But until then, you know, we don't know what will happen after that. And so we get to keep that, but we also get like the key benefits, all the benefits that the Globe Card offers, which include,

I'm not going to list all of them, but some that are worth mentioning are you get four Admirals Club passes. You get a $99 companion cert each year upon renewal. So you don't have to do any spend to get that, different from most other American Airlines cards. You get $100 slurge credit, which is up to $100 back for spend through Advantage Hotels, something called First Dibs, Future Personal Training, or Live Nation. And you also get the ability to earn up to 15,000 loyalty points, but in a very different way than the Aviator Silver did, which is with the Globe Card, you get it, you get 5,000 loyalty points for every four eligible flights you take with American and up to a maximum of

15,000 per year. So yeah, so we really are getting the perks from both cards at the cheaper cards fee. So it's a nice collectible. Yeah, I think that worked out well. My wife and I both got the aviator silver and I definitely didn't intend to keep hers, although I look at this and I say, I don't know. I mean, I'm going to have to think about it a little. I got a few months to consider it. But the $100 slurge credit and the club passes, I feel like, might be worth the $200. And then if we can use the companion cert, all the better. This is a collectible that I'm glad I kept so at least I can think about it.

I can decide whether or not. Yeah, yeah. It is hard because it's not really a no-brainer. You know, if, I mean, yes, if you can use the American Airlines club passes, I think it's probably. worth it, but I don't use them very often. I don't go into American Airlines clubs, like are they personally. The companion cert, yeah, if you use it, that's great. I haven't used mine that I've earned from spend. So, I don't know, $100 splurge credit, it's missing American Airlines itself as one of the ways you get it. So will I book Advantage hotels in order to get that?

Will I book something through Live Nation? I don't know. So, yeah, it's, I'm at once feeling smug that I was like smart enough to get the silver card and keep it to see what would happen with it. And we get this great collectible, but then I'm realizing like, I don't even know if it's going to be worth the $200 a year. But I am going to keep it for a while and see how it goes. Because as I've seen with other collectibles, like the AT&T Access More, you know, With that one, there was a time where I looked at it and said, oh, I'm not getting value from that. So I decided to cancel it later on, like something came up.

I had this card called the Curve Card where it was like a physical card that behind the scenes would actually charge any of your other cards. And a reader reported that the AT&T Access More all charges through the Curve Card were showing up as online 3X. and so, you know, that kind of thing, that's long gone. But the point is, like, things like that happen where suddenly you wish you had that card. And so I'll keep it for a bit and see where things go. I'll say it's a lot closer of a decision at a $199 annual fee than it is at the $350 annual fee that city's charging for the World Card today. So at least it's close. And you're not going to get that type of like even close decision point.

I can't see really, for me anyway, the globe card wouldn't make any sense at 350. $199. At least there's a debate to be had as to whether or not to keep it. Well, I'll tell you who it's great for it. Anyone who, you know, if you fly American a lot, and you're going to want an American Airlines card anyway, so it's good for that purpose. But also, if you like to earn loyalty points through advantage hotels so that you could get elite status, the car.

Also, we didn't mention this, has bonus points, not bonus loyalty points, bonus points for advantage hotels bookings. Plus, you could use your splurred credit towards them. So it's a really good card for that. For that purpose. Good point. Good point. All right. So that's that's that issue, right? Let's move on to Chase. So Chase collectibles. There's a couple of these collectibles that I have a couple of them. You might even have all of these, I think, right? So first up, we've got the IHG select card. So this is a card that no longer. longer exists. I just got my new select card in the mail, actually. So this is a $49 annual fee. Again, you can't get this card anymore like most of the cards are talking about today. But if you got the IHG card back in the

day, you still have this $49 annual fee and you get a 40K free night certificate each year. So that's, to me, that's a great trade. I pay 50 bucks for a free night up to 40,000 points. The downside is that you can't top off the 40K certificate from this old card like you can, the certificates from the newer cards. However still, I mean, even if the 40K points were only worth $150, which you can pretty easily get better value than that, that's still a great trade for $49 bucks a year. And it gives you 10% back on award redemptions, which I always forget about until I redeem points. And then I get the 10% back. And I'm like, oh, that's right. I still get 10% back on those. And you get automatic platinum status. So for 49 bucks, this card's a steel. I'm glad I got it.

I wish I had gotten one for my wife also back when it was still available. Yeah. So both my wife and I have this one. I've actually been, I would never give it up for myself. I've actually been trying to decide whether she should keep hers or not. Just because we don't stay at IHA hotels often enough that it seems like we're always like scrounging to like, who can we give this cert to basically at the end of the year when it's about to expire. But, you know, for 49 bucks, it's hardly anything. And sometimes we either get great value ourselves or someone, a family member, friend gets great value from it. So it's probably worth it for that reason. For myself, one of the cool features of it is that the 10% back stacks with, if you also have a IHG premier business premiere or I think it's called traveler, then you get four. fourth night free on award stays. And the 10% back also stacks with that. So you're getting, you know, a great deal on fourth, on four night award bookings, um, by having that set of cards,

which I do. Mm-hmm. Next step is one I don't have, but you do. Yeah. So before, um, before both Chase and Amex issued Marriott cards, um, Chase, um, Chase, issued Marriott cards and Amix issued SPG cards. But then Marriott and SBG merged and now both issuers issue them. But anyway, some cards were lost in the shuffle as far as like when they decided who was allowed to issue what type of card. The Marriott, I mean, Chase lost the ability to do Marriott business cards. And so the Marriott Bonvoy Premier Plus business card, there's also a few other variations on their business cards. It's no longer available new, but if you still have one of those, you can keep it and still get the perks. The Premier Plus business card is $99 a year, and you get a

35K free night certificate each year for 99, you know, for 99 bucks, which is a really good deal. It's, you know, I think it's a very easy to book a $300 a night type of property with a 35K certificate or at least a $250 property. Plus, you can top them off. Now you can add up to 25,000 Marriott points on top of it to book a higher-end hotel and get potentially even better value from your certificate, or at least it makes them easier to use because, you know, if you see a 40K per night property that you want to buck, you can use it for that, obviously, as long as you have enough Marriott points to top off.

So that one's great. You get that certificate each year. And another Chase one that I have, but I don't know. It's not as exciting, but I've been keeping it around for its, because it's a collectible, I guess, is that the ink plus card is no longer available new, hasn't been for quite a while. currently there are four ink cards that you can get new and the ink plus is not one of them. This one is a $95 annual fee card. Like the ink business cash card, it gives you 5X for office supply purchases.

But this one's up to $50,000 per year in spend, whereas the ink cash is up to $25,000. And also, unlike the ink cash, the ink plus allows you to transfer points to hotel and airline partners. And so within cash, you'd have to move the points to another card that allows that in order to get that ability. I don't need this card, but again, it's one I kind of keep on the shelf as like, here's a collectible. Maybe it'll come and use it. You see, I sit on a different side of that fence. So I recently got the Sapphire Reserve card. But until that recent development, this has been the card that I've kept in order to transfer to partners.

So I don't particularly need the ink business preferred card, and you can still get that new. And I was using the 5X office supply pretty close up to the 50K limit per year for years on this card. I haven't been as much anymore because I don't have as many opportunities to take advantage to that as I once did. But I keep it so that I do have that expanded capacity. If I want it and transfers to partners, I won't keep the Sapphire Reserve long term. So this will be my long. long-term card to transfer to partners still. So I keep it for that personally. So I'm definitely, this is one you'll have to probably pry out of Nicole Dead Hands. Hopefully it won't come to that.

Hopefully not. Hopefully not. All right. Next up, though, we've got Bank of America. Bank of America, you know, when I saw this on the list that Greg created of collectibles, I was like, that's not a collectible. That card's still available. But then I realized why you put it on here. So the Alaska Atmos Ascent card is still available. available. However, the version on here is the $95 annual fee with an automatic $99 companion certificate. These days, if you get the card, then you have to spend, I think it's $6,000 a year in order to earn a companion certificate. But on this older version, which, for example, my wife has, she just gets the automatic $99 companion certificate each year without any spend on the card.

Yeah. So this is a card, too. I used to have it. with that automatic thing and I canceled it and I regretted having done so when they changed the new one that requires spend in order to get it. But it's not a big deal. I mean, you don't have to spend a ton to get the companion certificate, but at the same time, it would be nice to have one where it's automatic. Yeah, and that companion certificate can be pretty valuable. They've changed the way it works a couple of times. But now I think it works on Hawaiian Airlines flights as well, right? Yeah, it's getting more valuable over time. And so, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and who knows if, you know, we talked about what's going to happen with Jeff Blue.

And it's very unlikely, I think, that Alaska would buy them. But if they did, then, you know, probably that these companion tickets would become even more valuable once they merge them in. Yep, we'll see. All right. Next up, Capital One. There are a couple of sort of collectibles here in the sense that, well, let's just explain them. So the first one up is very old Capital One Venture One cards. I know for sure. I don't know whether this applied to any venture cards, but in my case,

it's a venture one card that has no annual fee. Some of these old Capital One cards are grandfathered into a unique redemption opportunity. So I have one of these. And we don't know, all I know, all we were able to gather from Capital One, they weren't willing to say very much about this. But basically what we were able to gather is that it was people who opened the card during some specific window of time where they advertise this benefit have maintained it. And I know my card's been open like probably at least a dozen years. So sometime a long time ago, this was available. And so what the deal is, is that you can, you get a special redemption opportunity. If you go into the rewards, redemptions, you can, of course, you know, transfer to partners or you can get gift cards,

etc. But there's an extra option that says get hotel special offers. And that hotel special offers enables you to redeem $62,000, 64,250 Capital One Miles for a $900 Marriott gift card. So you get about $1.4 per capital one mile towards a Marriott gift card. Now, you might look at that and say, well, but I could transfer 43,000 of those points to Japan Airlines right now with a transfer bonus and get a business class ticket to Europe. And you're right. There are definitely more valuable ways to use your capital one miles, but there aren't that many great opportunities to use points, particularly transferable points for hotels. And so that has stood out to me as a good opportunity with capital one miles for years. And I have redeemed for those $900 Mary gift cards multiple times

because they do earn a lot of capital one miles. And the nice thing with capital one cards is you can move miles from one card holder to another. So I have this redemption capability, but my wife can transfer her capital one miles to me. My parents have a capital one card that earns miles, they could transfer their miles to me and I could redeem for a $900 gift card. So it's a pretty valuable, unique thing to have. I have avoided product changing that old Venture One card because I don't want a chance that I lose that redemption option because it doesn't exist anymore. So I've left that card alone. I just used the card, I think, for something the other day because I want to make sure that it doesn't get closed for inactivity. So I used it for some small purchase, I think, like $5 or something.

I try and do that periodically just to keep the card out. active so that I can keep that redemption opportunity. Another Capital One card is an old version of the saver card. So there used to be a couple of different. There was a saver and a saver one card. And at some point, the saver card came with 4x on dining and entertainment. Really, it was 4% back on dining and entertainment. And now it only offers 3% back on those. And of course, as you probably know, you can move Capital One cash back from cash back to miles. So essentially this is earning four miles per dollar on dining and entertainment. Again, this is an old version of the Sabre card that doesn't exist anymore.

But if you had it, then that would be great. I know we heard from a reader recently who still has that old version, right? And it's still earning the 4X on dining. Yeah. So that's pretty cool. It seems to me, you know, that Bank of America and Capital One tend to like, retain like old capabilities when when cards change like you you still have you often not not always but you often keep like whatever the old card was and the old card capabilities for like

long term or forever um which is interesting because other banks are better about you know saying if the card changes then um we're going to change what perks you have as well because you're a current card holder so uh it just seems to vary from bank to bank how they handle those situations. Yeah, it does. And Capital One is weird about that. I mentioned, too, that like, if you get something changed in your,

my parents years ago had had an issue with, they had the fee-free Capital One card. It wasn't called the Venture One at the time. I can't remember what it was called. But it only earned 1.25 miles per dollar spent. They had some problem that got escalated. And so the short version of the story is that customer service had eventually told them they'll earn two miles per dollar spent with no annual fee,

like ongoing from now on on the card. And I don't know how that happened or what they did. But sure enough, my parents have a Capital One card that earns two miles per dollar spent with no annual fee. I mean, I don't know. Capital One just keeps those things forever. And that's been like 20 years. They've had that car at least, probably 30 years.

Long time. All right. Let's talk about a couple cards with US Bank. So first up, the Smartly card. So this came out, I don't know what, about a year ago. We knew it was doomed. as soon as we saw the thing, right? Because what they were offering at the time

was an unlimited 4% cashback on this free, free card as long as you had $100,000 in savings and investments with U.S. Bank. They later made drastic changes to it. And weirdly, for some people, the changes were more drastic. than for others. And so for many people, the big gotcha, or one of the big gotchas was that the only way to qualify for the four percent, which requires $100,000 with U.S. Bank, was to have the $100,000

in their checking account, which there's a huge opportunity cost for that because you're not earning all the interest or, you know, or growing investments that if you had another form, forms. And so that's, it doesn't look like an expensive requirement because they're not saying there's a fee, but that's in effect a really big fee to lock up $100,000 in checking, right? And but in return for that, you get the 4%, but that's cap now at up to $10,000 per billing cycle, which is probably fine for most people. That's still very good. where another thing that they change that kind of nerf the card is they have certain categories of spend where you don't get more than the base 2%. And that includes like taxes, insurance, education, and a few other things.

For me, so I got the card right before it got nerfed. And I got it explicitly because I saw the opportunity for a collectible company. And it turned out that it's a partial collectible for me. So the things like being limited to 4% on the 10K per billing cycle, yeah, that applies to me. The limit on not being unarmed 4% on taxes, insurance and stuff, yes, that applies to me. What doesn't apply to me is that checking account thing. So if I put 100,000 in self-investments with U.S. Bank and or the smartly savings, which earns a pretty good rate compared to savings accounts or some combination of those two,

I can qualify for that 4% rate. And so I haven't done much with the card yet, but it's one of those that when I get around to it, I can start moving investments in there and have a 4% card on up to $10,000 per billing cycle. Yeah, that's pretty cool. If you've, because if you have the investments to be able to do that, then 4% on $10,000 per billing cycle is a nice return. I mean, if you were able to max that out each billing cycle, that'd be a great return each year. And a great everywhere else card that would cause a lot of cards

that don't have a similarly strong earning to feel like they've got a high opportunity cost when you could be earning that 4% back. So you were smart to pick up the smartly while you still could under the old rules. Speaking of picking up a card while you still could from US Bank, the altitude reserve card is one that we're listing under the collectibles, although I think many of us who've collected it are considering uncollecting this one. But the altitude reserve card has an annual fee of $400. And it comes with $325 in credit for travel booked through the U.S. Bank Travel Center. In the past, that was any travel, but now you have to book through the U.S. Bank Travel Center for that credit. The key feature is that it earns three points per dollar on mobile.

wallet purchases, although now that's capped at only up to $5,000 in purchases per month, although I say only. I'm sure that's probably enough for many people out there. It earns 3x on travel, 10x on hotels and car rentals and 5x on flights booked through the U.S. Bank Travel Center. So that sounds maybe marginally interesting if you're hearing it earns 3x points and you're thinking, oh, where can I transfer those points? But you can't.

So they have been saying for a while. now that it's about a year already almost that they were going to launch a transfer partner program, but they haven't done it yet. So so far, all you can do at those points is redeem them to a checking account for one cent per point. And that's not terrible. I mean, earning essentially 3% back on mobile wallet purchases is certainly not bad, but it would be much more exciting if you could transfer those to partners. Now, I did see a comment from someone on a post recently that they were told that this was going to go live soon. I think April 8th was the date they were told. So I'm going to keep my eye on my U.S. Bank account and see if that does happen. And maybe that'll make it a more

interesting collectible. And keep in mind, they may reopen applications. They may bring this card back. I think we all assumed when they mentioned that they were going to launch a transfer partner program that, oh, well, obviously they're going to start allowing people to apply for the card again. But they haven't launched that. So you can't get it. For the moment, it's a collectible that's been it's been nerfed in a number of ways. In addition to what Nick mentioned, it used to have the ability to get 1.5 cents per point value in various ways. And they took that away, which to me, that's one of the biggest outchies from its transformation. But yeah, I fully expect that at some point they will reintroduce applications for this. Maybe they're waiting until they have this transferable

points thing working and live. I don't know. Right. Right. Yeah, I would kind of figure that. I would kind of figure. The card also has, has eight priority pass restaurants or eight priority pass visits per year and they can be used for restaurants. So if you would use those for restaurants, then I mean, that's about 30 bucks a pop, $28. So right there, between that and the annual travel credit through the U.S.

Bank Travel Center, then it might suddenly look like a pretty good deal, even if you don't use a lot else. So I hope that, they bring it back. I hope that they give us transfer partners even if they don't bring it back. Yeah, although don't forget, you can product changes us to a no fee. What's the card called that has the four visits? Yeah, the connect. The altitude connect card is no annual fee and gives you four of those priority pass visits for free.

So really, you know, the annual fee here is just giving you four additional as well as the other perks that we mentioned. we mentioned. So, yeah, it's, it's hard to put as a collectible since we, we think it's probably coming back. And also it's, it's just not super exciting and it's not super interesting in its current form until we know more about the transferable points thing. And that's what we're kind of holding our breath. I think my, my annual fee is due like in May, which is pretty good timing because that, you know,

that gives them still another month to bring out something with transferable points so I can make a more informed decision about whether to product change. If it does come out new, there's probably no downside of product changing because then I'd be able to change back. But if it becomes a true collectible, they might not allow product changing back at that point. We don't know. So if we don't find anything out by May, Greg and I are going to have to flip a coin as to who is going to get stuck keeping this card so that we can write about whatever happens. because mine yeah we should probably keep at least one of them but yeah so we'll see we'll see what happens with that right now i have it and i'm not excited that i've collected that one yet come on us

bank give me some excitement add some excitement to my life make it make it have worth having collected and kept because they stopped taking applications on that more than a year and a half ago at this point so it's been a collectible for quite a quite a hot minute here i'm i'm hoping they do something else with it but anyway we got a couple of almost collectibles What does that mean? What's an almost collection? Yeah. In a few cases, these are ones that are possible to get by kind of hard to get.

And we don't know if they'll always, you know, they might at some point stop being possible to get. And in one case, it's not hard to get, but we foresee the end. So let's go over those in order now. The Chase has their Ritz Carlton credit card, which we've often done. talked about it, we think it's like the best Marriott Bonvoy card you can get. It depends exactly, not necessarily best for everybody, but for a lot of people. It's not available new. But if you can get one of the other Chase Bonvoy consumer cards that has an annual fee, then you can upgrade to the Ritz card after you've had that other card for a year. And

So as long as that avenue exists, then it's not a true collectible, but it's still a card that anyone who's managed to do that process is proud to have, I think. For $450 annual fee, and we'll talk about exceptions to that in a sec, you get $300 in annual airline, annual airline incidental fee credits. So, for example, I recently booked some awards and paid the award taxes with my Ritz card, and then I sent a message saying this was qualifying flight activity or whatever, and they credit it back right away. it also gives you priority pass with also what's interesting about that is that authorized users for the Ritz card are free so you can give virtually anyone else you want a priority pass because you can add them as an authorized user you don't have to give them

the authorized user card what you want to give them as the priority pass card that comes with that. And you get an annual 85K Marriott cert, and that can be super valuable for the Ritzcard. Yeah, absolutely. And also worth mentioning, the Ritz card gets Chase Sapphire Lounge access too. And so that's a nice benefit that I had kind of forgotten until we did the JetBlue 25 for 25 thing last year. And your free authorized users are also going to get into the Sapphire Lounge. And this is something that yesterday, by the time this publishes, I will have gone to a Sapphire lounge and the only way I was going to get in the entire family was having at least a couple of of them as authorized users because we're traveling as a big group. And so sure enough,

that's going to help having the free authorized users on that. So good deal there. I have actually a collectible version of this. So even though the Ritz card is almost collectible, I am in possession of an actual collectible Ritz card because I opened my first Ritz card a long time ago back when the annual fee was only $395, and it has kept that $395 annual fee, even though the annual fee went up to $450 at some point. So that just charged for me in February of this year, and again, I got the $395 annual fee. So the $85k cert and $300 in credits for $395 is a slam-in-deal. That's another one of those that I'll keep forever. I have a second one because I also at some point had a Marriott consumer card that eventually I product changed to a second Ritz card.

So I actually have two Ritz cards. And that second one is a $450 annual fee, which is still a good deal, as we said here. So it doesn't give me an additional priority pass, but it gives me the 85K start and the $300. And incidental fee credits, which have been super easy to use. So I'm glad to have a couple of those cards. Yeah. No, totally. Okay.

And then sort of a similar thing on the Amex side of the world, Amex stopped being able to issue. to their low-end consumer Marriott card, which used to be the SBG card. But you can still get it. So for those who had the old SPG card, that got product changed automatically to the Amex Bonvoy card, which is a $95 annual fee card. But if you have the Bonvoy Brilliant, and I think this would also work from the Bonvoy Bevy, you can product change down to the $95 Bonvoy card. And that gives you an annual 35,000 point free night certificate, which, as we talked about before, is well worth the $95.

Yeah, absolutely. And if you product change, remember, with Amex in the middle of the year, you'll get a prorated refund of the annual fee from the card from which you downgrade and then get charged or prorated amount of the annual fee of the new card. So I had written about and talked about previously about how I was just waiting for the elite nights to credit this year because that gave me lifetime platinum status with Marriott. I finally crossed the threshold for lifetime platinum. And then as soon as that happened, I downgraded my brilliant card and got back most of the annual fee because it had renewed in maybe September or something like that.

So I got back most of the annual fee and got charged a big piece of the annual fee for the Marriott Bonvoy card. And of course, I had already received my 85K cert. So a fantastic deal as far as that's concerned. I don't know if you'd be able to time a downgrade out in the same way that you've sometimes been able to time and upgrade to the Ritz card and get two certificates. I don't know if that would work. But the $95 a year for the 35k cert is a great deal. So I'll probably keep that for $95. Although we'll see. I've got some time before I need to make a decision on that. I'm going to do a quick aside about the cards we were just talking about. Because as we're talking, the bevy and brilliant cards have really fantastic point offers right now for welcome offers, I mean.

But the bevy says you're not eligible for the welcome offer if you've ever had the brilliant card. The brilliant card does not have that same term. So if you're thinking, if you're kind of new to the Marriott stuff and you want to get in on the big point bonuses, start with the bevy, get that welcome bonus. And then once you've had that for a bit, then you should be able to apply for the brilliant and get that welcome bonus theoretically. At the end of the first year with either of these cards,

you should be able to downgrade to the Bonvoy, the $95 Bonvoy card. And so potentially this is a path to getting you know, a lot of points. You do have to pay those annual fees the first year, but in exchange for a lot of points, and then long term only having to pay $95 for each of those cards and getting that annual 35K free night certificate.

So anyway, that's a path that I think could make sense for a lot of people if you, and it's kind of, only if you haven't gone into the Marriott stuff before because there's limits. If you have Chase Marriott cards, you might not be eligible. Yeah. Yeah, but that could be a good play also to strategically upgrade again if you want the brilliant card for say platinum status because you've got a, you know, a stay coming up where that's going to be really valuable. You may strategically upgrade that $95 bond boy card back to the brilliant card again.

After you've gotten those welcome bonuses. There's some opportunity. Yes. After. Yes. Definitely. Because those welcome bonuses, if you've had the card before, you're not going to be eligible to get the welcome bonus. It doesn't matter whether you've got a welcome bonus on it before.

So true, good safety recommendation there since we are talking about that in terms of people who are new to Marriott. So great safety tip. All right. The last almost collectible, but not quite, are the Barclays Hawaiian Airlines cards or A Barkley's Hawaiian Airlines card. I don't know which one is still available at this point. There was both Bank of America or not, sorry, not Bank of America, both Barclays and Bank of Hawaii for a long time. I think it's the Barclays one that's still available. I think the Barclays one.

And I think it's only the consumer one that's still available maybe. Yes, yes. But the business one may already be a collectible for all I know. But as far as the consumer one goes, we think this may become a collectible because we had been told a while ago that Alaska, when they bought Hawaiian, they would eventually consolidate to one card issuer, which is Bank of America. But these are issued by Barclays. So I think there's a good chance that the Hawaiian Airlines card will become a collectible. It doesn't have like a lot in the way of like special perks that make it exciting as a collectible. But it does have, you know, $100 off a companion ticket for round trip coach travel.

And that includes now both both for flying Hawaiian and Alaska Airlines. And there are restrictions about where you can use it and whatnot. But because of the merger, it became more valuable than it used to be. So that's cool. Also, Alaska Atmos, sorry, not Alaska, Atmos elites. So that's whether you're getting your elite status through Hawaiian or Alaska. Get up to $100 of annual statement credit toward in-flight purchases. So you get up to $10 back per day for in-flight purchases on Hawaiian Airlines and Alaska Airlines flights.

It's one of those things like, you know, great if you've got it, but I wouldn't go out of my way to get or keep that perk necessarily. Yeah, I think the Barclays Hawaiian made sense to get or still makes sense to get because we are as confident as we can be that that partnership isn't going to last forever. Now, both of us assumed that these Barclays cards would be gone a long time ago. I think it's fair to say that neither of us expected these to still be available in April. of 2026. So I'm surprised that you can still get one of these. I really think that Atmos is only going to partner with Bank of America in the long term. I assume that the Barclays cards are still around because the Hawaiian agreement with Barclays must still be on. There must have been a minimum amount of time that it was still alive. So they're still out there. It's worth getting the bonus because

you won't be able to get the bonus on those forever. It'll be extra points that probably you won't be able to get in the future. So worth it for that in terms of collecting it to keep. Yeah, I mean. Not super exciting. Yeah. Yeah. One really far out there, potential future collectible. This is like way out there. I'd say chance is very, very low, but I'm just going to throw it out there. We know JetBlue is looking for a suitor. They're looking for someone to buy them. So they've got like three different credit cards out there, I think. And like a couple of, I think, actually, three of them have 10% rebate on award bookings. And so it's possible that those cards will become collectibles after a purchase, because we just don't know what will happen. But again, I put that pretty low.

I wouldn't go out getting a JetBlue card right now just for the hope that it becomes a collectible, but it's something to keep an eye on. Yeah, and you know, probably worth a mention, even backing up to the Barclays Hawaiian cards for a second, unlike the city move with American Airlines. So the Barclays American Airlines cards are moving to City because City bought the backbook from Barclays. That's not happening with Bank of America and Barclays on this, at least not yet. We haven't heard anything to indicate that that will be the case. So I wouldn't assume that the Barclays Hawaiian cards are going to move to Bank of America

or if, say, United bought JetBlue. I wouldn't necessarily assume that those JetBlue cards would move over to Chase. So we don't know what's going to happen, although that may not be bad either. I mean, we saw some people, not very many, but some people whose Berkeley's Aviator cards are not becoming city cards. It was pretty rare for that to happen. But some people in that boat are getting transitioned to other Barclays cards. And like on the business side, it was a Barclays card we'd never really heard of before, didn't know existed. That might be interesting for some people.

So that's the one reason why I think the Barclays Hawaiian cards, particularly the business card, could be interesting to hang on to because if it does change into something else, maybe it'll be something of interest. But that's very much a gamble. You've got to be the kind of person who'd be like, like, you know what, I'd throw a hundred bucks down on a hand of black check. If you're that person, then okay, you know, try for 21 here. But if not, if you're like, no, no, no, I'd never risk $100 on something like that. Then you probably don't want to keep paying the annual fee on these cards and the hopes. Yeah. Yeah. Something happens. Good point. I'm going to correct something I said about JetBlue. There are four JetBlue cards out there. There is a no fee card that I

kind of forgot about. The other three that have fees, all have that temperature. percent rebate. Good. Good correction there. All right. I think that wraps up our discussion of collectibles and moves us into this week's question of the week. So this week's question of the week came in via email from Zena.

And so Zina says that Zina set up alerts with seats dot arrow for flights from the west coast to East Asia for this fall, got an alert, three different alerts, in fact, for a lie flat business on Alaska metal, flying from Seattle to Seoul. Now, the specifics of the situation will not matter a ton in the end. But there were three options. So one option could be booked via Qatar Airways for 77,000 points. So that's Qatar Airways Privilege Club. Or that flight could be booked through American for 60,000 miles.

Or it could have been booked through Alaska for 95,000 miles. Now, in this case, Zena didn't have access to American Airlines miles. So Zina's choice was between using Alaska Atmos points. Again, that was 95,000. or transferring to Qatar Privilege Club, which was only 77,000. So Zena says, you know, I have a Qatar Privileges account, but I've not linked it to my MX membership rewards points account and therefore haven't previously transferred points into that account.

While I would have loved to have booked this for only 77,000 points, I've run into issues in the past when trying to frantically book an award like this, where in either there's an issue linking the accounts or there's a delay in the transfer. So just to be safe, I bit the bullet and got the 95,000 points. booking through Alaska because they had a lot of Alaska points just to reduce that piece of stress. But do you have suggestions for how I can do this in the future with this, or less of this stress? I've already opened many different frequent flyer accounts with any of the usual airlines. Is there a way to preemptively link these to my Chase or Capital One or Amics accounts without going

through the process of transferring points in? And in order to avoid that, I've heard about problems with test transfers, et cetera. So what would be your advice? Would you, first of all, would you have just transferred to Qatar Airways and tried to book for the 77,000 points? Was Zena's concern reasonable here? And if it was reasonable, what would you do in order to feel confident about this? Wow. Okay.

Several things here. One, I would mention that when an award tool finds availability through multiple programs, it's often available through that same flight is often available through additional programs that that award tool has no way of checking. So, for example, often British Airways has the same pricing as Qatar. Not always, not for everything, but it, so one of the things I would do, if like you already had your transfer set up to British Airways and that's working is check. Does British Airways?

have that same price and then book it that way. Similarly, you can connect up your British Airways and Qatar accounts to move Avios around. So again, if you already have the ability to move to British Airways, even if British Airways itself wasn't showing the same fee, I would see if you can successfully connect your British Airways and Qatar, accounts, then you're 100% safe transferring to British Airways from your transferable points and then moving your points to Qatar Airways or even booking through Qatar Airways and it

has a way of pulling from your British Airways accounts. There's multiple ways you can make this happen that would be very safe. That's all presuming that you've already linked up British Airways and you're not worried about that. I don't know. I've never had a problem that I can remember. That's not true. I haven't had many problems with transferring from a transferable points currency to a airline program, but I've had lots of problems in the past until I got it all set up, moving my obvious around from one program to another.

That's like the bigger nut to crack, but I would, I would have just done it, even in, you know, I would just take the chance. I don't know. What can you do to make sure without doing a test transfer? I don't know. I mean, I think you have to do a test transfer in order to be 100% sure that it's going to work. Well, so I had a few thoughts. So all of Greg's thoughts totally valid.

And so worth listening to that again if that didn't all make sense. It was a little rambling. Following along with all of it. Well, no, I mean, I think that if you're new to this stuff, sometimes it takes a second listen to get everything. So I relisten to everything Greg said, because cosine and all of that. The other thing that I would mention is you've done the right thing in terms of opening lots of frequent flyer accounts because my understanding from speaking to people from points.com is that one of the ways to avoid those kind of red flag situations where an account

gets locked up, is to have an existing account. Like, one of the red flags that this is somebody who's doing something wrong is they just opened a brand new frequent flyer account and they try to transfer in a billion points and book something right away. That's a red flag that will often trigger some sort of a fraud alert on one end or the other. Now, if you already have this long existing, you know, you've had a Qatar Airways account for months or a year or two years or more than that, then that's an established account that is less likely. to get any kind of a flag. So the only time, and I've booked a lot of awards,

the only time I've run into a problem with this situation was when my wife opened a brand new Emirates account and transferred MX points to Emirates to try to book a first class award right away. And that tripped up and it ended up not being able to book it and it took months to get the account unlocked and still have the points sitting there and got to use them at some point. So that was a big headache. But I realized later that the mistake was opening a brand new Emirates account.

and doing that. I should have had the Emirates account existing for a long time and ready to go. And then I would have been far less likely to have that problem. And in general, that's going to be your best bet. So you've already kind of done the right thing. Now, second, you can link up with some transferable points programs without actually making the transfer. Like, for instance, built, I know you can link your award programs without making a transfer

to them. So, you know, so you may be able to do some. linking of that. I don't think you can with Capital One without transferring, because I don't even think they always save your partner programs. Amex does save the partner programs. I don't know if you actually have to transfer. I don't think you actually have to transfer in order to link them up. The problem is with with Amex, I'm not really sure how much verification happens until you do the transfer. Yeah. You know, so that's a little unclear. I think Build has some kind of connection. I think they're actually querying to make sure the connection is, is like actually there and

establish. It may vary from program to program. I think you probably, would have been safe, though, as the short version of the story, like Greg, I probably would have just transferred to guitar in that situation. I'm not telling you you were wrong if you had the atmosphere points and you really, the reward was really important and you didn't want to chance anything or waste the extra time. I could see booking it through Alaska. Probably would have been safe in that case. And the safety tip there is, as I said, it'll just repeat again, open those frequent player accounts now before you need them. Some of them have minimum times. Like I think Iberia is known for, I think you have to have your account open for like 90 days or something.

There's some ridiculous amount of time before you can do stuff with it. Maybe 90 days is wrong. Maybe that's for linking it up with British Airways. But I've been told at least seven days before you start transferring is a good rule of thumb. And some programs have a longer period of time before they flag stuff. So it may be 30 days or 45 days. So open all those frequent flyer accounts now. No reason not to.

All right, Zina, good luck with that next award redemption. That brings us to the end of today's episode. If you've enjoyed this and you'd like to get more of this stuff in your email inbox each day or each week, go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media. Join our Frequent Myler Insiders Facebook group where you can look up what Greg talked about earlier today in terms of transfer bonuses. And wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to, again, leave us that thumbs up. If you have a question that you'd like to be considered for a future question of the week or a piece of feedback that you'd like to be considered for a giant mailbag, you can send that too. Send it to Mailbag at Frequentmiler.com.

Bye, everybody. If you love travel but don't always have time to plan, we've got a podcast for you. It's called Travel in 10, and in every episode, in about 10 minutes, we give you a smart, practical overview of destinations all around the world. We cover what to see, where to stay, where to eat, and what actually matters when you're planning out a truck. It's designed for real life. Listen on the way to the airport, in the car, or while you're thinking about your next. get away. So if you want expert advice, zero fluff, and travel inspiration that you can actually use, search for travel and tin wherever you listen to podcasts, or you can also find us at voyscape.com. Hi, I'm Mike Siegel, host of the Travel Tales podcast, and I'm a stand-up comedian who's been touring

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