Frequent Miler on the Air - Deal of the Year 2024 | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep287 | 12-27-24

Episode Date: December 27, 2024

What are the best miles and points deals we've seen in 2024, and which deals came out above the rest? In today's episode of Frequent Miler on the Air, we'll decide what we think the best miles and points deal of 2024 was. (01:05) - Feedback about Greg's "Frequent Miler’s 2024 State of the Business Report" Read Greg's "Frequent Miler’s 2024 State of the Business Report" here. (08:12) - Additional datapoints regarding possible Atlantis stays for after February 1st (12:14) - Greg's Marriott Mattress Run (20:48) - Capital One Offers (26:18) - Easily extend National Free Day (28:41) - Catch our "Bonvoyed of the Year" episode from last week to see which loyalty snafus we thought were the worst in 2024. (29:11) - Buy Aeroplan miles for 1.14cpp: Read more about buying Aeroplan miles here. (30:41) - Big payouts via Capital One Shopping (36:35) - Virgin goes dynamic & lowers surcharges Read more about Virgin's dynamic pricing here. (40:00) - Bilt transfer bonus up to 150% to Flying Blue, Virgin Points, and IHG One Rewards (Jan 1) (42:19) - Bilt transfer bonus up to 100% to Alaska (July 1) (44:05) - Amex +10x restaurants referral offer Read more about this Amex referral offer here. (47:11) - 120K Ink Business Preferred offer + 40K referral (48:27) - Hilton SLH (53:20) - Alaska's awesome shorthaul AA pricing Read more about the Alaksa award chart winners and losers here. (57:41) - SAS Eurobonus Millionaire Read more about the SAS Eurobonus Millionaire challenge here: https://frequentmiler.com/sas-eurobonus-millionaire-promo-frequently-asked-questions-million-mile-madness-2024/ (1:00:02) - Which did we actually take advantage of? (Or which didn't we?) (1:01:59) - So...which was the best? (1:11:10) - Read more about this story here: https://loyaltytraveler.boardingarea.com/2015/05/25/frequent-flyer-history-latinpass-million-miles-mileage-runs-that-bankrupted-a-company/ (1:13:17) - Can you swap a cash seat you've already purchased with Southwest with a companion seat with your companion pass instead? Subscribe and Follow

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did City do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event. Frequent Liler on the air starts now. Today's main event, deal of the year 2024. We're going to go over some of the best miles and points deals that we saw in 2024. And ultimately, both Nick and I will pick which ones we think were the single deal of the year. Yeah. And remember, if you want to go back and check out one of those specific deals or some other segment on the show, don't forget to expand the show notes because you'll always find timestamps. So you get links to click around and go to the different parts of the show you want to listen to. And we'll always have links to more information. So if you want to hear about that amazing deal that you missed, you can find a link probably to the post that we wrote about it in the

show notes and wherever you're watching or listening. Don't forget to leave us a comment. Give us a thumbs up. You know, if you're watching on YouTube, like the video, if you're listening in podcast platform, leave us a bunch of stars we always appreciate those things thank you very much for that and let's drag out this week's giant mailbag all right uh this week's giant mail has uh two pieces of mail the first is from me uh basically i'm going to talk about uh a post i wrote which is was called frequent mililer's 2024 State of the Business Report. So each year for the last several years, I've been, you know, posting about how we did, how we, Frequent Miler, the business did in the year. And so I'll just summarize it kind of quickly here. But if you want to see the full details, go to that post and we'll have a link in the show notes. All right. So first of all, even though in the post I presented stats

showing like how we did with page views and all kinds of stuff, you need to know that the way I run this business, it's not about stats. I could go for years without looking at stats at all, the way I run things. It's not something that I think about much. I do look at them now and then just out of curiosity, but it's not how I make decisions about the business. My goal with the Frequent Miler business is it comes down down to really one thing is, am I proud of what we're doing? And how can I be even more proud of what we're doing? And so really, that's what drives most decision making. And so what that means for me is producing great content that's both informative and entertaining.

It means doing what's right for our audience. So things like only showing the best credit card offers, even if it means we don't earn any commission on those cards. It means avoiding any pop-up ads or any actual pop-ups that will like cover up content that people want to read. You know, so there's probably many other things like that. I'm not going to bore you with the whole list of them, but that's the type of thing that is important to me to, to, to be proud of the site. And that's why we do those things. Yeah, yeah. I think that's really interesting. And being behind the scenes for years now, I think it's very different than the way a lot of people run a business.

We're very fortunate to be in the position for Greg to run it that way. But yeah, I mean, that's what seriously does drive decisions. It's not like, OK, what can we do to increase revenue? You would see very different posts if that were the goal of Frequent Miler. So it's always to, you know, what can we do to increase revenue? You would see very different posts if that were the goal of frequent milers. So it's always to, you know, what can we do to increase page views? I mean, surely there are different topics and things we could write about differently in order to draw more people in. But we try to focus on what we think is going to be useful for people and entertaining and interesting. And, you know, of course, we do want people to read our stuff, but hopefully they read it because it's informative and entertaining and interesting. Right. And that formula seems to have worked for us over the years. So we're going to keep

on doing that. Next thing, again, before I get into the stats, when I think of Frequent Miler, what it is, it's not me. Even though I post to the blog as Greg the Frequent Miler, what Frequent Miler really is is the team that produces the content. That means not just me and Nick. It's also Tim. It's also Carrie, and it's also Steven. That makes up our entire team, and we're all in it together. We all think of ourselves as the Frequent Mylar team and we're all committed to making Frequent Mylar great, you know, so that we could all be proud of what we're producing, right? So, I'm really excited to announce that

Kerry and Steven will both be doubling their time with Frequent Miler next year. So in 2024, Nick, Tim, and I, we're all full-time and we'll continue to be full-time next year. Kerry was 50% time and Stephen was 25% time. But in 2025, Kerry's going to jump up to full-time and Stephen jump up to 50% time. So there's going to be all that much more great stuff coming from the two of them and hence the team overall. That's incredible. That's, and I feel like I have to say thanks to the readers and listeners out there who

support FrequentMiler and read our content, share it with people because that makes it possible to do those kinds of things. So I'm excited that we, that we've got the ability to do that. And I mean, I couldn't be more excited that Kerry and Stephen are increasing their time because they both are fantastic parts of the team. We're very lucky to have a great team. And so I'm excited to see what they do with even more time into the blog and what we can collectively do, because we're all going to have that much more in terms of resources.

Right. And last but not actually last last but kind of least, the statistics. So at a very, very high level, revenue was flat year over year. But that's a good thing. We did really well in 2023. And we did really well in 2024. So I'm very happy to report that. Page views on the blog are down a little bit. Not, you know, not terribly, but a bit. But interestingly, our ad revenue from the blog actually increased a tiny, a little bit. So there doesn't seem to be a perfect one-to-one correspondence between page views and ad revenue, which is good. And our podcast and YouTube audience increased quite a bit in both cases.

So they're both growing rapidly, which is fantastic. Yeah. Thank you for listening and watching this wherever you are, because that certainly has been great to see. And I think that's probably, as Greg said in the post, largely due to the fact that we're producing more content for these platforms because we like it and people seem to like it too. So we will continue to hopefully produce as much or more of this type of content. We've added several new things this year.

If you had just been listening to this show for a long time, now we've added periodic card talk episodes and how to's and of course, we have coffee break that we added that comes out every Tuesday. So we've added a bunch of stuff in this realm. And I think that's useful for a lot of people who prefer to get, I'm going to say a more condensed version. And I'm going to say that somewhat ironically, because you know, this show is sometimes an hour and a half long. But for people that don't have time to read every single post, and we're highlighting some of the stuff that we find most interesting and exciting and i think we get feedback from some people anyway that say they

don't have time to read everything but they do have time to listen to something on their commute and they appreciate the podcast so a lot of people just prefer to listen or watch instead of reading and that's that's cool so we're trying to you know uh present something for for everybody there you go yeah okay all right so that's that's the giant mail from me uh now we have giant mail from bobby i'm gonna read it then i'm gonna ask nick to explain what's going on so bobby wrote in saying when we booked our atlanta stay they don't release the next year's availability until the February reset. So I wouldn't get your hopes up for a spring break or summer trip. Maybe they changed it

since last year, but might want to check before you get all your plans set. What's that? So this is in response to a giant mailbag piece that we had a couple of weeks ago, where we had a reader who wrote in and explained that they had called in and checked with a couple of different agents that it was possible to book your Atlanta stay after your Caesar's status expires. Let me back up a second. If you have Caesar's diamond status, one of the benefits is a complimentary four-night stay at Atlantis in the Bahamas. Now I say complimentary, it's not really free because you have to pay something like $60 a day in resort fees. And if you have a car, I think it's 40 bucks a day to park. So it's not really free, but it's much less than what it years now you've been able to get the Wyndham Earner Business Credit Card and get instant Wyndham Diamond status and match that to Caesar's Diamond. And that status runs through January 31st every year. And in years past,

starting on February 1st, you could rematch again after your Caesar's status dropped off. But that's no longer going to be possible. That's ending January 31st. So many of us that have our Caesar's Diamond status courtesy of the Wyndham Earner Business Card longer going to be possible. That's ending January 31st. So many of us that have our Caesar's Diamond status, courtesy of the Windermere business card, are going to be losing our Caesar's Diamond status on January 31st. And so Edward had written in saying that he had called a couple of times to verify that he could book a stay for sometime after February 1st, when his Caesar's status dropped from Diamond to whatever the general member gold status is, I think, if he could book that stay, even if he wasn't going to have Caesar's diamond when he

arrived. And it sounded from the emails a little unclear, but it sounded like he did actually book that stay. I don't know for sure, though. It does sound like he for sure verified with a couple agents. It would be OK. I can't tell you for sure whether he booked it or not. Bobby is telling us that, sure, maybe they don't check your Caesar status when you arrive, but they won't release the availability to book those complimentary stays until after February 1st for this coming year, because that will be when they'll know who has Caesar's Diamond status for the coming year. That's always been my understanding, that you wouldn't be able to book beyond January 31st until the reset in February.

So that matches what I always thought was the case. It was news to me when we heard from that reader last week saying that they were, you know, potentially you could book after January 31st. So my guess is that Bobby's information is correct, but it's only a guess. So I want readers to help out here. If you have Caesar's Diamond status and you're interested in the Atlantis Day, try and book it and let me know. Are you able to book for after January 31st? If you if you're Caesar status, I mean, they won't know whether your status is set to expire January 31st or beyond, I don't think. So, again,'t know whether your status is set to expire January 31st or beyond, I don't think. So again, if you have your status courtesy of a match, and you are either

able to book or told that you cannot book after February 1st, I would love to know about it. So if you're planning a trip for March or April or May or June or whatever, and you try to book it, I'd love to know whether you're successful or not. Because I'm curious whether this was only asked as a question initially. And a couple of agents were like, oh, yeah, sure. You can book whenever without actually looking at availability or whether this might be agent dependent. Maybe it just depends on the agent that you get. So we need more data points. Or has it changed?

Because it sounds like Bobby did this in 2023. And so the question is, you know, has it changed since then? Yep. Yeah. So let us know, is availability there now for after, you know, February 1st? All right. All right. Let's mattress run the numbers, Greg. Mattress running the numbers this week. You've got a mattress run you're considering, right?

Not just considering, but I'm going to check in this afternoon as we're recording this. Yeah. So on a previous episode, I brought up the question, should I mattress run one Marriott night? Because I would be one short of 75 nights, but I thought there was a chance of me getting one night from my boundless card. I had incorrectly in that show said that I had spent to the $5,000, but that my December statement had cut before that extra spend had credited to my account. What had happened was, the reason I was wrong, it was a different Marriott card where the statement had cut early December. This one, the statement cut December 17th. So after we record that show, I saw that.

I was like, oh, I'm good. I don't need to match this run another night because boundless card, if you spend $5,000, you get an elite knight, and that would get me to the 75 nights i need for titanium status which also means getting united silver status and air canada aeroplan uh 25k status so um i thought i was good but then december 17th came and went and i didn't see a night appear although i saw some points appear from that credit card so i was like oh no what's going on here i downloaded my year's um transactions

from my chase account and i had forgotten to count that i had gotten a refund from a hotel or something and so that subtracted so i had,000, but there was a subtraction on there of eligible spend. And so I actually had time. I could have completed that spend had I done my homework and actually run the numbers beforehand. But so now I'm back into the situation we thought we were at. I thought we were at, I was at, um, at the beginning of the month. Okay. Uh, long backstory there of, of Greg, the frequent miler messing up. It's easy to do though. Right?

I mean, that's an easy mistake to make. I almost made the same mistake on my Hyatt card because I looked at how much I had spent and I was trying to calculate how many elite nights I was going to get from spend. And I was just looking at the total on my, like, you know, they have that spending sort of, I don't know, it's like a pie chart or something. It shows how much you've spent for the year. And I forgot initially, thank goodness I caught it in time, but that the $95 annual fee was included in there. So that was included as part of like my quote unquote spend, but that's not spend. It doesn't count towards the spending requirements. So I had to spend $95 more than

where I thought I had to be. So right. Gotta be careful about those things. Yes, you do. Okay. Um, yeah, so, so, um, all right. So I realized I had to get another night in before the end of the year. I already have like Hyatt stays booked pretty much through the end of the year. I can't really change those. So that left tonight. And I looked around at my options. I'm going to kind of condense this a little bit. But the best options I found where I could actually go and check in was there was one where I could book a stay for 10,500 Marriott points, but it was a bit of a drive. Another one close by would be more points, but only about $100 all in. So that's after taxes and everything.

So if you consider that our reasonable redemption value for Marriott points is 0.7 cents per point. Then you could argue that choosing $100 versus the 10,500 points is like me buying points for 0.95 cents per point, which is not a point at which I would buy points normally. So you would think that I should go for the points. But I really, I don't have, so I'm traveling tomorrow as we're recording this. I don't have a lot of time to go like driving around. I've got a lot of stuff to get done. So I really value my time here over

the value of the points I'd be saving or buying, whatever. So, okay. So that brings me back to, okay, I'm definitely going to just pay. So now I looked at the options for paying. And I saw that, all right, so this hotel was actually $98 all-in AAA rate. But then I found that they had another rate, $109 all-in, that gives you 5,000 bonus points. Ooh. Yeah, ooh.

So ultimately it came down to, do I want to buy 5,000 points for $11? That comes to a price of less than a quarter of a cent per point. Yes, I'm definitely a buyer of Marriott points at that price. So, okay. Before you go on, I'm going to say, I've seen that quite a few times at these lower end, cheaper, I just said lower end, it's not the right way to phrase it, less expensive Marriott properties.

I've seen some opportunity, a few times, I think I've sent screenshots to the rest of the team, been like, am I missing something? Because this looks like it's like two cents, you know, two tenths of a cent per point to buy Marriott points, pay just a few dollars more for this rate. I don't find that's usually the case. Usually the, you know, the, the, the rates that include bonus points, you're overpaying for the points. But I find this specifically on the really cheap properties. Sometimes the additional cost for that rate is a really good deal.

Yeah. A really good deal. Um, and that's compared to the triple a rate, you know, if you compare it to the standard refundable rate, it would be almost a wash, I think. Anyway, okay, so I've got that going for me. I have a 10% back offer for this Marriott brand, both through Chase offers and through Bank of America offers. So I'll pay with one of those cards that I've applied that offer to. I know I booked through a portal that gave me 8%. I don't remember whether it was Capital One Shopping,

where it'd be gift cards, or if it was like Capital One Offers, which would be miles, or if it was racket. I just can't even remember. But let's just call that eight percent cash back for uh to make that simple and that so so basically i'll be getting um almost nineteen dollars back from those those rebates and and then whatever my status gives me for a welcome gift i think at this chain it's like 500 bonus points or something so right little a few more points so plus you're gonna earn points on this day right so yeah in the day're going to spend a hundred bucks yeah but you'll earn i mean what learns another another what 1500 or so 15 points per dollar it depends on which brand it is even let's call it 10 points per dollar it's another thousand so you're looking

at earning what six thousand points probably 6500 with the welcome gift i guess so 6500 with my status i'm getting more points than that probably you're right about the brand yeah yeah yeah whatever yeah whatever it's a good rebate it's it's not a free free after rebate stay by any means but no i think that uh i i did pretty good for finding a hotel that's nearby that i could easily check into well as compared to paying 10 500 points instead you're going to pay a little bit and earn quite a few points. I mean, not quite the 10,500, but not bad. Well done,

Greg. Thank you. Well done. Yeah. That's my mattress running. Okay. I have a question about your mattress running, though, that I'm sure a lot of people can identify with, and that's this. Do you ever get any pushback from player two about, I want, I'm going to go check into a hotel for a hundred bucks that we don't really need tonight.

I'll be back in an hour. Like, do you ever get any pushback about, I'm going to go blow a hundred dollars on a hotel we're not even staying in or just player two, just trust that you've got this, you're going to trust me on that one. Yeah. The only time I'd get any pushback from my wife on this stuff is if I'm asking her to do something. Like, you know, can you go into this store and buy some gift cards? What? No. Otherwise, she's like, oh, you're Greg the Frequent Miler. You probably got it figured out.

You've done the math. It's going to work. She's pretty happy with all the rewards we get and the status benefits, all those things. Yeah. Good. Good. All right. So that's, that's magic. Starting the numbers, I guess, let's talk about awards points and more. So awards points and more, we've got Capital One offers up first. And I think it's ironic for you to talk about the Capital One offers. So let's do it. Tell me what's up with Capital One offers, Greg. Well, so, so this is more of a somewhat of a reminder and a late, very late news item,

which is there are two shopping portals that are called Capital One. There's Capital One Shopping that we talk about all the time, where the rewards you earn are gift cards, even though they call it cashback. And you don't need a Capital One card in order to use Capital One Shopping. There's another portal, which is called Capital One Offers, where you have to log into your Capital One account, and then you see the Capital One Offers. And it used to be cashback. Now, though, if you have a miles earning card, you earn miles. You earn Capital One miles, which, of course, are transferable to multiple airline and hotel programs. And so that, to us, is a much better option than cashback. And so that's pretty exciting. exciting um i sometimes see better even though capital one shopping has like these outrageously big offers often but um aside from those outrageously big ones capital one offers i often see um very good uh rates on there that often beat racketon which is my other kind of go-to shopping portal that earns miles because that one you can optionally earn membership rewards points. So now it's like

another stop. And I just wanted to point that out that when you're about to shop at a store that might be available through a portal and you have a Capital One Miles earning card, it's worth checking out Capital One offers to see how good is the deal there. Yeah, and this gets confusing. And we've talked about it and written about how confusing it is. I have an interesting, so I'm not going to call it a theory because it's not a theory. I'd have to think that it was right, I think, to call it a theory or that there was a chance that it was right.

And I'm not that far along yet. But so we've talked about this before. And just to quickly repeat, Capital One offers are something you see when you log into your Capital One credit card account within your Capital One credit card account. Capital One shopping is a public shopping portal that anyone can sign up for with an email address. And that's that's just the gift card rewards versus Capital One offers, which are credit card rewards that you're offers, which are credit card rewards that you're getting through shopping through their portal. Now, the reason I mention this is because Capital One Shopping, the public portal, gives

you several different ways you can sign in. You can sign in with an email address. You can sign in with a Google account or Facebook, or you can sign in with a Capital One account. And I think, could be totally wrong, but I'm curious if signing into Capital One Shopping with a credit card account might not give you the same Capital One Shopping offers that we've been talking about. Because every now and then I hear from somebody who says, I haven't seen any of these big Capital One Shopping offers.

And I'm wondering if it's because when you log in with your Capital One credit card, log in information at Capital One credit card, log in information at Capital One Shopping. This is so confusing. Yeah. And that's where I'm like, oh man, I'm wondering if you don't get the same stuff. So anyway, the point that I wanted to make here is if you have a Capital One credit card, use your Capital One login for Capital One offers. But for Capital One Shopping, it might be worth setting up an entirely different account based on an email address that's not your Capital One email address. Because I think that might give you different offers in both ways. You know, yeah. Nick, your theory is very, like not, it wasn't Capital One shopping, but so it's using the same backend.

And so therefore it makes sense to me that if you're using the same login as your, as your credit card account, that you probably won't get, you'll probably get similar offers as what, I don't know. As the credit card would have. Yeah, I think, I really think that that might be the case. So moral of the story is if you have a Capital One credit card, create a different email address for Capital One Shopping and create your Capital One Shopping account, the public portal with a login that's not your Capital One credit card login. Right. And use your Capital One credit card login just for Capital One shopping account, the public portal with a login that's not your Capital One credit card login. Right. And use your Capital One credit card login just for Capital One offers.

And it's worth a mention that we have seen some really big offers in there. Some readers have reported some huge ones and frequent miler insiders also on the credit card side. Yeah. Some of these where you can earn 100,000 miles by spending a little bit of money and it might be worth buying the miles, so to speak. So there have been some interesting things on the credit card side also, but the Capital One shopping like 60% back type things, those are more on the shopping side. Anyway, separate. That's a good point. I failed to mention that there are some amazing offers on the Capital One offer side, but those are a lot less common, it seems like. Less common. It seems that way, yes.

Much less common. So there are some really big ones much less commonly than Capital One Shopping, but worth knowing about both and keeping separate accounts with both. Yeah. All right, let's move on from that. All right, next thing in this area is

that I learned from Dan's deals that you can easily extend your National Free Day Award. So if you've been renting from National Car Rental and you earn those free days from them, Dan wrote about having one that was about to expire at the end of 2024. And he just got on X, what used to be Twitter, and messaged at National Cares and asked them, can you extend it? And they extended it a whole year. yeah I thought this was really cool because I've used my free days in the past for suboptimal rentals where I'm only saving like 30 bucks or whatever because they were going to expire before

I had another rental coming up and I think it's great that to the extent that they keep doing this that there's a way to extend them so that you can try to use them for those really expensive one way rentals or whatever that where where you can get a lot of value from them. Yeah, yeah, that is awesome, because they are really valuable, potentially, and totally agree that using them suboptimally is probably the move that a lot of people have made before hearing about this. So definitely a great tip there.

And also, I think the other good tip to come out of this is ask, you know, you don't know unless you ask. And I've never asked National to extend one of those. But my goodness, I don't I feel a little silly that I never asked to extend one. And, you know, you can go in knowing that the answer is probably going to be no. In a lot of cases, the answer will be no. And there are some things we know, like, for instance, Marriott doesn't freely extend their free night certificates anymore. They used to give you an additional year just by calling in and asking.

And now, unless there's some big major reason why you were unable to use it, they probably won't extend it. So there are some things like that where we're reasonably confident the answer is going to be no. But even still, I mean, if it's a choice between something expiring unused or using it to really poor value versus asking to extend, you might as well ask. I mean, don't expect to get the answer you want, but you might as well ask. So good job, Dan, on asking there.

That was a good lesson for everybody to take away there. Absolutely. Squeaky wheel gets the grease sometimes. All right. That brings us to this week's main event. Main event time. Deal of the year 2024. We're going to go over our picks for the deal of the year. And ultimately, Nick will say who his pick is and I'll say which mine is.

And we'll see our Bon Voit of the year. We actually picked the same the same answer last week. We both were unhappy with Hyatt's implementation of Mr. and Mrs. Smith. We'll see what happens this year. All right. First up in the deal of the year category is we had the ability sometime this past summer

to buy Air Canada Aeroplan miles for only 1.14 cents each. So the deal was structured so that you got more of a bonus the more you bought. And so you had to buy something like $1,500 worth in order to get that low price. But that's a smokingly cheap price for Air Canada miles, which we know can be really, really valuable. Yeah. If you had the right redemption in mind, that could totally have been well worth buying the miles. Now, obviously, maybe not obvious. Let me back up. I don't generally even consider buying miles speculatively. Although in that case, at 1.14 cents, it was like a fringe case

where maybe it was worth buying speculatively when you consider the range of partners that Aeroplan has and the variety of different award chart sweet spots. So if you're somebody with a lot of flexibility, Air Canada Aeroplan is a particularly exciting program. And yeah, 1.14 cents each, you're looking at what? I mean, a little over 700 bucks for one-way business class to Europe from the East Coast. Some parts of Europe from the East Coast, some parts of Europe from the East Coast. I mean, you go to New York to Frankfurt, for instance, for 60K on Singapore Airlines for just over 700 bucks one way. That's certainly not a bad deal. Of course, you got to consider taxes and stuff like that too. I'm doing quick math here. But anyway, yeah, I think that was an interesting one. Good deal for a lot of people. But that's not our only contender this year. We've

got the big payouts that we were just talking about via Capital One Shopping. We've continued to see really big payouts from Capital One Shopping. And here I'm talking about Capital One Shopping, the public shopping portal that you should sign up for with an email address that has nothing to do with a Capital One credit card, as we mentioned earlier in this show. And to give an example of one of the ones that isn't even a headline number, but has been really good for a lot of people is we've pretty frequently seen them offer 10% back at giftcards.com, which can be a great deal depending on what you're buying

at giftcards.com. I mean, I think of even during the holidays here, we saw a day or two or three or whatever, where Disney gift cards were on sale at gift cards. So I think there were 10% off at giftcards.com. And then if you went through Capital One Shopping for 10% back, you're talking about a total of like 19% back or off or whatever combination on Disney. On Disney. I mean, that's crazy. It's a huge percentage back for Disney. And of course, lots of other ways to use that to good value at giftcards.com. So that's

one that stuck out. But we've continued to also see rates as high as like 60 or 70% back at some stores. And they've included in some cases like TripAdvisor. We've seen numbers close to there anyway, back on activities booked through TripAdvisor or Expedia. I mean, that's nuts. Oh, yeah, totally. You know, when I got that offer. Now, these huge offers usually come to you via email if you've been shopping on these different sites. So you've got to watch your email. And it's when you've been shopping in the browser

where you have the toolbar installed. That's how that happens. But, yeah, we've been seeing all these 60 70 percent type of offers i got one of those for sketchers which um this is kind of funny i'd seen some commercials for how they have their their new like slip-in shoes that don't look like slip-in shoes right and so i was like you know at 60 something percent back i can't remember the exact amount it's like i've got to try these out so i bought a pair of shoes and a pair of boots and they both turned out great. I love both of them. So yeah, that's worked out really,

really well. Yeah, that's great. And you know, and a reader pointed out at some point in an email exchange with me that most of the stores that offer big percentages back and I say most because like we've mentioned just a second ago, TripAdvisor being one of the things in there. But most of the stores are more like fashion brands, like Skechers or department stores or whatever. But sometimes you can still find really good deals at those either A, on products like Greg mentioned, or B, on products you might not think about. I mentioned actually to Greg a little while ago that I got one this morning. It was like 39.5% back on most things at Neiman Marcus. And one of the things they carry is to me bags. If you're somebody who would buy it to me back at full price, getting almost 40% back, like, I mean, that's, that's a crazy deal, right? So

now you may look at to me prices and be like, there's no way I'd ever buy it to me. And hey, that's cool, too. I understand that perspective also. But there's been just a lot of great opportunities to get deals that you just wouldn't get otherwise, like on products that don't get discounted. Right. Right. I mean, some of those department stores also carry things like Apple watches that, you know, never go on sale. So that's a great way to indirectly get a huge rebate on those kind of things. Great. Great point. Yeah. We've seen lots of stores continue to offer 30% plus. We're seeing lots of stuff that's 30% plus. Like Greg said, though, most of those huge payouts are via email offers. So what you want to do, and I think maybe we have a post about this somewhere is in Chrome, if you use Google Chrome, anyway, you can set up different profiles.

And so I have a profile where I have that browser extension installed and I only use that profile when I want to click around on a site where I hope I'm going to get an email offer targeted in a couple of days and so I'll click around on some site where I'm hoping to get a good offer and then oftentimes not always but oftentimes I'll get a targeted email offer from Capital One Shopping a few days later that says hey you want a great here? And or after I've made a number of purchases through the portal, I tend to get lots of emails. Yeah. And in my case, what I do is I just have a browser that's kind of my main browser, my main instance. And that's where I shop for prices. Like normally I use a different browser instance to click through to a portal, but I'm always shopping for prices. Like normally I use a different browser instance to click through to a portal,

but I'm always shopping for prices for things through this main browser instance. And so I just, without even thinking about it, I end up getting all kinds of Capital One shopping emails. And most of them I just glance at and delete. So they tend to be good just for a few days or a week or whatever. So what I do is I glance at them to see what stores are in there. I delete. And then let's say I'm coming along and I'm like, oh, I'm going to buy something now from Macy's. I actually searched my inbox, I say in colon trash Macy's, and that shows me whether there was any Capital One offers that were for Macy's. And now I think the trash deletes after 30 days, but that's fine because all of those would have expired by then anyway.

Yeah, that's a great technique. Smart. Smart thinking. That's Greg the Frequent Miler with a little trademark there in terms of smart thinking. That's a good way to do it. I keep those emails around forever, but like you said, they're not going to be good.

Those links aren't going to be good probably for more than 30 days anyway. And believe me, I've tried. I've tried using them after they technically expire and you don't get anything um the toolbar shows what percentage you're getting and it just doesn't show anything yeah um all right so that's one that's a capital one shopping what's next yep next up uh virgin atlantic goes dynamic and lowers surcharges on their award flights so this one made one made our worst of list and also our best of list.

So we never like to see a program abandon award charts and go dynamic. But one of the things that happened here is that they released a lot of award space at lower and often much lower prices than their old award charts had. And so at least for now, while they're offering these low prices, there's a lot of good to be found. Now you have to be available to travel during, you know, a time when there's actually these low prices available. If you're just looking for a specific date, you're probably out of luck. But when we first posted about this, we saw prices like New York to London in economy for 6,000 points one way and $74 in taxes. That's about half what it used to be in the surcharges. Seattle to London for 9,000 points one way plus $79 in surcharges.

New York to London in business class for $29,000 and $254 in surcharges, which may not sound cheap if you compare it to some programs that might only charge like $6, but it's really cheap compared to what they charged before going dynamic. Before going dynamic, it was what, like $800 or something? Yeah, around there. Around $800, yeah. Yeah. So there's a lot of good stuff there.

Just as we're recording this, I think it was yesterday, on our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group, someone posted that they've dumped a whole lot of cheap award space out there. So I can't tell you whether it'll still be there when you look, but that happens periodically. And so it's nice to see, I mean, as long as this keeps going, that there's some dirt cheap pricing, specifically, it seems like between North America and London, less so, at least when we've looked, less so between London and other places like South Africa or wherever. Yeah. And if you compare it, you mentioned the surcharges being not outrageous any longer, but they might not seem cheap if you compare. But you also have

to compare like, so it's 29, we saw 29,000 points and $254 one way to London in business. If we think of the $254 as being like 25,000 points, if there were penny points, it'd be about 25,000 points, right? So we add that on top of the 29K, you're at what, 54,000 points one way? That would be a competitive business class price to London. So essentially, even though they've got the surcharges of the 250 or so, it's still a really good deal in a lot of cases where it would be competitive, even if those were

points instead of pennies that you have to pay. You do have to pay out of pocket, though. There's no way around that with Virgin Atlantic. Right, right. And I haven't had a chance to fly their new upper class suites, but I've heard great things about those. So I'd love to do that sometime. And this is making it more affordable when you can catch the deal. You know what would make it even more affordable? If you had taken advantage of the next thing on our list for the best deals of 2024, which was the built transfer bonus of up to 150% that happened on January 1st, all the way back on January 1st.

So first day of 2024. So it might seem like it was in a different year, but it was this year, January 1st, they had a transfer bonus of up to 150% to Air France KLM Flying Blue, Virgin, and IHG1 rewards. Wouldn't have done IHG1 because the points just aren't valuable enough. But to Flying Blue or Virgin could have been a good deal. And my goodness, had you transferred a chunk to Virgin and then you were able to take advantage of some of these dynamic prices, you'd be getting dirt cheap awards on Virgin Atlantic now, which I don't generally tell people to transfer speculatively. But if you did, you would have come out ahead here. Yeah, yeah. Now, in my case, I had a bunch of points that I transferred to Flying Blue at 150% bonus, which meant transferring something like 100,000 points.

And I ended up with 250,000 Flying Blue miles, which I used a lot of them to great effect during our Flying by the Seat of Our Points challenge. I flew KLM a lot, and it was great. So if you think about that, I paid, you know, that it took me a fraction of the built points for what I paid in flying blue points to fly business class on KLM or basically to the other side of the world and back was a fantastic deal for me. Yeah, and to frame this for anybody who's relatively new to this stuff, transfer bonuses are something we see periodically

from transferable currencies to airlines. But normally we're talking about 20, 25, maybe 30%, maybe 40% on rare occasion to an airline program. 150%, which did require the top tier of status with built. So you did have to have in the past probably spent a lot with your built card in order to earn status. Most likely probably a lot of people earned it or had a lot of rent, I guess, earned a lot of points that way.

Anyway, you would have had to have had top tier status to get 150%. But even with no status, it was something like, I don't know, 75% or 100%. I can't remember exactly, but it was a lot. And so, you know, great, great deal, way, way beyond what we see from other programs. Absolutely. All right. Next one is also built, the next contender. So in, I don't remember, May or June of this past year, they lost their partnership with American Airlines. So they were no longer able to transfer to American. But they gained Alaska Airlines. And Alaska up till then had no, you know, there were no programs that transfer to Alaska. And then, so that was exciting on its own. Then they added on July 1,

they did that one day up to 100% transfer bonus to Alaska. Yeah, I mean, that's that's also a great deal up to 100% to Alaska, because Alaska, of course, has an award chart that has changed. And so if you're West Coast based, and you know, you were really good at finding those unicorn deals that there were a couple of really good sweet spots in their old chart that were almost impossible for anybody to find. And so you might miss those if you were a unicorn hunter. But for most of the rest of us, the Alaska award chart has either improved or not gotten worse. For me, it's certainly improved being an East Coast person, it's improved quite a bit. And so 100% transfer bonus to Alaska, I mean, that was just great.

And something that probably if not for the fact that there's been this short window where you could transfer points to Hawaiian and then from Hawaiian to Alaska from Amex membership rewards, if it weren't for that little loophole, I think this would have been even in hindsight would have been even bigger news. I mean, obviously it was big news at the time, but, but I think we would look back on this even more fondly if there were no

other way to get a good, you know, a good deal for Alaska miles because Alaska miles are hard to earn. So a hundred percent to Alaska notable. Right. Right. All right. Next up, there was an Amex plus 10 restaurants referral offer. So there was an offer earlier this year where you could refer

somebody to a new Amex card. And if they were approved for a card, then as the person referring them, in addition to the points that you earn for referring them, you would also get 10 points per dollar restaurants for three months on up to $25,000 in spent. And that's, I mean, that was great because if you had an Amex gold card, right, which ordinarily earns four points per dollar on restaurants, and you were able to refer someone and keep in mind that with Amex multi referrals, if you've got a gold card, you can refer someone to almost any other Amex card. They, you know, you can give them your referral link and they could open a Hilton Aspire card, or they could open a no annual fee Hilton card, or the Delta Blue card, or whatever, lots of different options, or a business card even.

And you could get credit for that referral. And in many cases, with the gold card, you might have been earning, let's say, 25,000 membership rewards points for the referral, plus 10 additional points at restaurants for three months. So you'd earn referral plus 10 additional points at restaurants for three months. So you'd earn a total of 14 X at restaurants for three months. I mean, that's pretty hot for anybody who goes out to eat often. Right, right. And that was true for the business gold card too, which gives you four X on the, on the categories you spend the most each month. And, uh, dining is one of them. Um, and, um, one of the things that makes those kind of deals with Amex accessible to more people is the fact that you might say, well, my spouse, my child, my parent, whoever it is

you're going to be referring is getting those pop-ups saying they're not going to get a bonus if they sign up. So they're not going to get a bonus if they sign up. So they're not going to use my referral or whatever. But you know what? If you're playing the game together, they could sign up for like a fee-free card. And you still get that full – even if they get no referral bonus at all because they get the pop-up saying – No welcome bonus. Welcome bonus.

I mean, sorry. Yes. Even if they get no welcome bonus at all because they get a pop-up saying you will not earn a welcome bonus. You may not because you've had this card or because we don't like you, whatever. Whatever the reason is, if they still go ahead and apply, you still get – and they get approved. You still get that full referral bonus, which is however many points were promised plus the extra 10 points per dollar at dining for six months. So those who could spend a lot at restaurants could really make out well with those kind of offers. Yeah. Yeah. If I were planning a wedding at a place where the caterer or restaurant would code as a restaurant, that certainly would

have been one I would have been happy to get 14 points per dollar on $25,000 in spend, right? I mean, that would have been a fantastic offer. Really, a lot of people could have done well. I remember hearing from someone who was a caterer and sometimes with the overflow catering, they would outsource that to restaurants or, you know, order food from restaurants. And my goodness, what a boon that could have been with an extra 10 points per dollar on 25K spend. So yeah, pretty cool offer there. Absolutely. All right. The next contender is the Chase Inc. Business Preferred card had a 120,000 point welcome bonus. And it

was at the time when the referral bonus was 40,000 points that's no longer the case but so back in the summer you could and I did with my family like I would refer I'd have you could refer from any of the chase ink cards so as long as I had an ink card and and my wife had an ink card and my son had any ink card, we could do this and we did, which is like I would refer my wife to the 120,000 point offer. She would, once she met the welcome bonus requirements, she would get the 120,000 points.

I would earn 40,000 points for referring her. And then she referred our son and my son referred me and so we did like that whole loop there and earned you know i'm not gonna try to do the math in my head half a million or more yeah around a half million points from doing that that loop and these are you know chase ultimate rewards points which can transfer to hyatt which are you very, very valuable points. So great, great deal. Yeah. All right. Next up is one we've been excited about and talked about quite a bit. And that is Hilton's partnership with Small Luxury Hotels of the World, SLH. SLH used to partner with Hyatt, but this year they switched over to Hilton. And it's been a really interesting transition to see.

You found recently, I think you noticed that there are more properties available via Hilton than there were via Hyatt, right? Yeah. Yeah. I don't remember the exact numbers, but I think there were maybe in the low 300s with Hyatt, how many hotels were bookable with Hyatt points and how many small luxury hotels were bookable with Hyatt points. But we've got now, I think, over 400 with Hilton.

It also seems, and I have no way of proving this, that there's more award availability with Hilton. Total just subjective guess there. But you know what? So those things are great um but hilton really surprised us with how well they pulled this off so and by how well i mean like how kind of customer friendly for those of us who are into the point stuff uh it was so they they rolled these out with the same approach that they do all their hotels, which is that they decide behind the scenes what's the top point price they're going to charge for a standard room at this hotel. And at SingStand, at least as we're recording this, 150,000 points is the most they do any hotel anywhere so that's the most of

any slh hotel um and that's for standard rooms just like any hilton hotel they also have uh the non-standard the the uh i don't remember what they call premium room awards premium room awards where where if you really don't want your hilton points you should book a premium room room award because they make sure to give you poor value for those. But for the standard room awards, we found really great value and often much better than we normally see with Hilton's own properties by booking with standard rooms with Hilton points. Not only that, they kept the ability to book fifth night free awards. So you book a five night stay with an SLH property through Hilton and you can get the fifth night free as long as you're booking with points.

Or you could use those free night certificates for any SLH property at any time they have a standard room available, which I have to contrast. These last two, Hyatt does not have fifth night free for anything. But Hyatt, they did let you use free night certificates at SLH properties, but only, so there are, there were at the time with Hyatt category one through four certificates and

category one through seven certificates. And a lot of the best SLH properties were category eight. So you couldn't book those with free night certificate. With Hilton, every free night certificate is uncapped. So you can use them at all of them. That means if you get a free night certificate with your Hilton Surpass card or your Hilton Aspire card, or previously got them with the Hilton Business card, no longer available. And also Hilton sometimes has welcome bonuses that include not just points, but also free night certificates. So there's a bunch of ways to get those.

And wow, their implementation has been really good. It has, it has. Two quick points of clarification that I'm sure we're clear to people who are very familiar with this, but for other folks, Greg mentioned the Hilton free night certificates are uncapped.

And that's absolutely true. But they can only be used for a standard room. So they're uncapped, but you can't use them for one of those premium room awards. But like Greg said, we've seen more standard rooms. I've just anecdotally in my searches anyway, I've seen places seem to offer more standard room availability than we saw with Hyatt. So that's been great news there. And when Greg mentioned that the free night certificates are no longer available on the Hilton business card, I just wanted to make sure it was clear that the Hilton business card is still available, but that card no longer offers any path to free night certificates. So if you want free night certificates,

you need the surpass and or the expire, expire, aspire card. But you still I mean, between the annual free night certificates that you can earn from spend and the, you know, free one that comes every year with the Hilton Aspire card and two player mode, you could bank up several free night certificates and a decent number of points each year, depending on how you do your spend. And if you like fancy hotels, SLH has got a lot of them. They sure do. So I'm excited to this this summer i should be uh if all goes well we'll be trying out next favorite uh hotel at lake como and uh we'll see i can't wait hopefully it'll be good all right yeah so so exciting stuff there i think we're both pretty excited about that partnership next up alaska's awesome short haul American Airlines pricing. Boy, Alaska offers some really good deals on American Airlines short haul awards.

So flights under 700 miles in distance cost just 4,500 Alaska miles in economy or 9,000 in business class. Over 1,400 miles, you're talking 7,500 in economy. Under 1,400. I'm sorry, under 1,400 miles. Thank you. In distance flown, you're talking 7.5K. In economy, 15K. In business, those are much better than what other partners charge for similar awards.

Yeah, and they seem anecdotally to have good access to American Airlines award space. It's true. So more and more, we've been seeing different partnerships offer different award space to So more and more we've been seeing different partnerships like offer like different award space to different partners. And I think that's happening here, but whether or not it is like I've personally seen when I've gone to book flights where I'd be flying or a, or I'm booking for relative, they'd be flying American airlines um i'm seeing things like american airlines wants to charge 500 600 700 for a particular flight and and it's bookable in economy for for 4500 alaska miles i mean that's insane value uh or or 9 000 business class or maybe for the slightly

longer ones we're looking at the that 7.5k in economy or 15 000 business class, or maybe for the slightly longer ones, we're looking at that 7.5K in economy or 15,000 business class. And those are just amazing prices. Yeah, so I'm seeing deals where I could book with Alaska Miles in first class for what's a really good deal, even when comparing to the economy price. Sometimes, not always. Yeah, of course, not always. But I've seen this quite a bit, too. It's come up on my radar a number of times. And one of the things I like about it right now, in particular, is even if the price in terms of miles is close to what American charges, which often it's not. But for instance, I was looking at a flight just the other day that Alaska wanted 7,500 miles or American wanted 11,500 miles.

Now, I've got the American Airlines miles. I could book it for 11,500. Of course, I'd like to pay fewer miles with Alaska at 7,500. But that's even more attractive because right now, I could still transfer points from Amex membership rewards to Hawaiian and then from Hawaiian to Alaska and essentially book those flights. Even if I didn't have Alaska miles, I could book them with transferable points and hold on to my American Airlines miles for a situation where transferring from a transferable currency

isn't as good. So yeah, no, that's a great point. As things stand today, it's a lot easier to earn Alaska miles or get Alaska miles than American Airlines miles because you have transfers from built and you have the indirect transfer from Amex membership rewards as we're recording this anyway. American doesn't have anything like that right now, although we are expecting at some point

probably to get transfers from City Thank You Rewards, but that still is a to be seen. So definitely won't count that for this year. Interesting little aside here, I guess. I was looking at flights just the other day with Alaska Miles that were $7,500 and now are $12,500. So I wonder if they have access to different buckets and the price might not entirely be decent.

I don't know. I'll look into that later on on i mean alaska does do that with other partners like so for example if you want to fly um uh starlux to uh taiwan um you'll see that they sometimes have like 80 something thousand point pricing in business class, but more often have like 170 something thousand sort of trying to remember the rough pricing, but it's something in that order of magnitude anyway. And so, yeah, they have access to different buckets and so they'll charge differently. So, yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if they have that for American as well. Yeah, it does seem to be the case based on the distance. But so anyway, good deals available via Alaska for sure. Right.

And in the case that I was just like very off the cuff talking about the cash prices were over $500, just like Greg's example before. So definitely a great deal booking via Alaska. Anyway, so that's what's our next deal of the year up. Oh, how can we forget? How can we forget? Go ahead, Greg.

Our last one is the SAS Eurobonus Millionaire promotion. whoever completes flying 15 of their Sky Team partners before the end of 2024. And you have to either use your SAS miles to book the flights for them to work, or you have to earn SAS miles for those flights. It has to be 15 different airlines. It can't be you fly 15 segments on one. And the promo was introduced like in, I want to say, late October maybe or something like that. So there was never a lot of time to do this. Of course, listeners know that Nick, Stephen, and I made up our own challenge around this with Kerry and Tim judging. And we did a contest to see who could sort of do this with the most sass. But never mind that. The point here is to make this a candidate for deal of the year.

Yeah, because for some people, it certainly was, I think, especially for people that are not US based, which I know not much of our audience probably fits into that bucket. But we met in Bangkok on the flight to Guangzhou, we met a whole bunch of people that were on that flight that were doing this. And many of them were European. And they were saying, you know, unlike you guys in the States, we don't have very many ways to earn one million miles from a single thing or even from multiple things. It's hard to earn a quantity like that. So I think it was even more compelling. I mean, I think if you're U.S. based, a million miles, even though that sounds like a lot, it is a lot. If you take the right strategy with credit cards, you could probably earn that, you know, with much less effort than flying 15 airlines. But if you're not US based, it might be hard to earn that many miles otherwise.

So right, right. Absolutely. All right. So before we pick our winners, what I want to do first is have each of us say, of the contenders, which ones did we personally actually take advantage of um or not and and in my case i've taken advantage of so many of these i think it's much easier for me to say which ones i didn't do okay um so i think that the only ones i didn't do was i did not buy aeroplan miles for 1.14 cents each. And I have not yet taken advantage of Virgin's lower dynamic pricing. I think I've done every single one of those. Wow. Wow. Wow. Well, so I mean, talk about putting your money where your mouth is. You take advantage of all the deals that you're calling the best deals. I mean, I think that's a good indication that they were indeed good deals. They were good enough to get Greg to take

action on them. So that says something about the quality of the deals we've got here. Yeah, I'm in a totally different situation. I did not use nearly as many as Greg did. So I'm not going to talk about the ones I didn't do, rather the ones that I did because there are fewer. So let's see the ones that I did big payouts via Capital One Shopping. I've done a lot of shopping through Capital One Shopping. So that's certainly one I've used a lot. The 10x restaurants referral offer I did use. I didn't use it as extensively as other people probably did, but I did get my 14x for a while. Hilton SLH, I have booked a few SLH properties now and been pretty excited. I even bought some Hilton points to book an SLH property. So that one is one that I certainly have taken advantage of.

And the SAS Eurobonus Millionaire, I participated. Who knows what's going to happen? Because I still haven't had Aeromexico credit. The flight, my backup insurance flight still hasn't credited. And neither have any of the three that I was missing already. So I now have four airlines that I've flown that have not credited to my SAS account. So I took have four airlines that I've flown that have not credited to my SaaS account. So I took advantage of it, but I guess you could maybe think that if I don't get the million miles, they took advantage of me. I'm not sure which. We'll get back to you later on that.

All right. Let's move on then to what's our pick. And I want to point out before we each pick a winner that we have not defined the criteria for choosing and I want that's partially intentional I think we should be free to pick what we think is either the best deal as far as like objectively

the best deal it had the most benefit for your most benefit for your you know most bang for your buck or um the one that may have like benefited the most people like i remember one time when we picked a built uh deal as deal a year some people push back and saying but so few of us could take advantage of that you know um so that that's one way of looking at it, is which one had the most impact. And the other, I mean, it could be just a totally subjective, like this deal was wow. And so I'm open to any of those. And so with that caveat in place, Nick, you're up. What do you pick as deal of the year?

This one's tough. This one's really hard because I think Capital One Shopping is the one that's been most broadly useful because it doesn't matter how much you've been traveling or not traveling or what you're buying. There's a good chance that you could earn a really good chunk back on it. So it seems really broadly applicable. But some people have had problems with Capital One shopping with offers not crediting properly. Of course, we get reports like that from most portals, but more maybe from Capital One, I guess, Capital One shopping. So I'm a little hesitant to pick that, even though I think it's very broadly applicable and a great deal for a lot of people.

The other two that I struggle between are the Inc. Business Preferred, the 120K plus the 40K referral bonus. If you took advantage of that the way Greg did, I mean, hard to pick against that. Half a million points just referring a couple members in your family, like the referral conga. That's a great technique and a good one to highlight for people that haven't been doing it because there's a lot of extra points you might be leaving on the table if you're not doing that kind of referral conga in your own household. But the one that I think I'm most excited about, and so probably I'm going to have to pick for deal of the year, even though those other two are strong contenders, is the Hilton

SLH partnership, because some of these properties are just absolutely amazing. And even if you just got the Hilton Aspire card for the $550 a year, if a couple playing in two player mode did that, and you were two people that normally spend a bunch on vacation or save up for vacation, if you look at that as okay, we're going to invest $1,100 in this. And we're going to get a bunch of benefits that are pretty easy to use the airline fee credits are really easy to use. And the Hilton resort credits are less easy, but you can at least get the airline fee credits pretty easily out of the value of that. And then you're looking at two really cheap nights, essentially, at a really nice place every year with no effort.

So I feel like that is just such a good, easy, low effort deal that does cost money, but probably a lot less than a lot of people are used to spending on an annual vacation anyway. So I think the Hilton SLH, even though it may not be as broadly applicable, because maybe there aren't so many Aspire card holders out there now, there should be probably a lot of people that would consider this. Anybody that would consider spending hundreds, four, five, $600 per night on a nice hotel should probably be considering a couple of Aspire cards in their household. So yeah, I think Hilton SLH, I think the implementation has been overall very smooth and broad, and there are just a variety of different nice places. And it gives Hilton

what Hilton was missing forever. And that's like, Hilton always, I always liked Hilton properties, like apples to apples comparing to the average property from other chains. I always liked Hilton in terms of, you know, I always thought rooms were clean and things were consistent. Service was pretty good. But what it was really lacking was there were a few of those like wow properties where you were like, oh my goodness, I want to dream about going there. And SLH gives them that. And the ability to get these free night certificates relatively easily and earn Hilton points at a really good clip depending on which card that you're using i think just makes

hilton slh an exciting deal so that's my pick hilton slh well done right next next uh put in his vote i had i'm having a hard time with this you know so yeah uh so there were some big, big deals where I got hundreds of thousands of points from a lot of these deals, actually, even if you consider the transfer bonuses, right? Yeah, yeah, which one of these has the most ongoing positive impact on our hobby, Hilton wins with SLH there. Ultimately, though, I'm going to pick a different one. Good. Good. I want to hear the justification. Go.

Yeah. All right. I'm going to tell you what it is, and then I'm going to try to justify it because it's not that easy. My pick is the SAS Eurobonus Millionaire promotion. Really? It is. That's a tough sell, Greg. the best objective deal because it's really hard to fly 15 of these qualifying airlines for like under even five thousand dollars so you know it's a it's a big expense it's a huge time commitment

so there's all kinds of reasons why it's not really that objectively great of a deal um but um it it's it's the biggest in terms of the spectacle of um the excitement around it i think that that it it generated a whole lot of excitement um and as you as nick said not just within the u.S., but worldwide, especially in Europe, I think, where a lot of people are already familiar with SaaS. And then we're like, oh, I can get a million of these miles. That's worth pursuing. So it's just big and exciting. And I want to, part of it is I kind of want to encourage other companies to think big and exciting when they're coming up with promotions. So, so I want to give them, I want to give them a, a nod partly because of that.

Well, you know, Stephen made a great point about this promotion in that, A, like you never see an airline offer a promotion for a million miles. I mean, that's nuts. So it's just so far off the charts in terms of what they were offering. It was such a huge carrot that it just outpaces any incentive we've seen for a promotion, I think, from any other company ever. And what made that even more interesting is if you could imagine some other airline or hotel or entity giving away a million miles, it would probably be to incentivize you spending with them instead of this, which encouraged you to spend your money with their partners, not with a SaaS. And I think that that was brilliant in a lot of ways.

It was so out of the box that what company would have come up with that idea, right? What company would have been like, let's give people a ton of miles for flying somebody else's airline. Like that just like I have to imagine that that proposal would get laughed out of the room at the majority of airlines, right? I mean, it just wouldn't even be considered. But how brilliant because it made people aware of what partnerships SAS has and where you can go in order to get to those places and how the connections

operate. I mean, I have way more familiarity with SkyTeam now than I had before because I just didn't do much SkyTeam flying. It was mostly Star Alliance and sometimes One World. But very rarely did I fly any SkyTeam airlines for the most part. I am way more familiar with SkyTeam now than I ever was before. And I'm sure a lot of other people are, too, even if you't do it, because you read about it, you read about other people doing it or heard us talking about it. So I think it was a brilliant promotion to give people an idea of the reach that they have with their airline and their airline program and highlight SkyTeam. I think it was a smart move that they probably didn't anticipate as many people would go after as did, but I'm not sure that it was, I mean, even if a lot more people did this

than they expected, I think it was still probably a smart move on the whole for SAS to have done this. So yeah, I think that's an interesting pick because like the cost of doing it is not cheap, really. You know, even if you did it better than we did, it still wouldn't be cheap. One thing I learned from this

is that SkyTeam flights are rarely the cheapest option, right? I mean, like, if you looked at SkyTeam flights, they were often more expensive than other options. So there weren't flights I would have necessarily picked on my own. So this is not, you know, even if you're like, oh, I could get from here to Europe for this amount, and then you got to start looking at the flights because it was more expensive than I would have expected. But that said, I think that was an interesting, cool pick. So, yeah. Now, I need to correct something Nick said.

Uh-oh, what did I say? We've never seen anyone do a million miles like this. Okay. But actually, digging back into history, back in the year 2000, there was a Latin Pass Million Miles Mileage Challenge, Latin Pass, which offered – now, I'm reading a post from Loyalty Traveler. This post was written in 2015. Okay. post was written in 2015 and it's called it's called frequent flyer history latin pass million miles mileage runs that bankrupted a company so hopefully this isn't sass's fate but don't jinx them craig in in the article he says the the promos uh was that you'd earn a million miles uh any member who flies at least one international segment on each of the 10

Latin Pass member airlines, flies at least three partner segments on any of our partner airlines, KLM, US Airways, TWA. I think you have to do all of these things. Stays at least three nights in at least two of our partner hotels and rents a car for at least five days from any of our car rental partners but they had in your head and rubbing your tummy yeah so there were there were a lot more complicated requirements to that but you had um you had six months you had january 1st to uh july 1st so um yeah yeah so you had more time okay so not totally unprecedented, but how many of you were familiar with that one? So if we had to dig back to 2000 and that

complicated of a thing, yeah. I mean, you're right though. That's a good point. I thought you were going to bring up Greg's million mile madness where you earned a million miles in a month, but that's where I thought I was going for a second. But of course that wasn't from a single promotion. So, all right. Well, I think that that's a really interesting discussion anyway for deal of the year. What's your pick? Let us know in the comments wherever you're watching or listening to this. Do you agree? Do you disagree? Do you pick something else entirely? Did we leave something out? Let us know. All right. I think that brings us to this week's question of the week. This week's question of the week is a pivot to talking about Southwest Airlines. So Christine writes in and says, my family has a trip to Cancun already booked on Southwest in March. Given how pricey

the tickets were, I decided to try for the Southwest companion pass and just got the business card to start working on the intro bonus. I just noticed, however, that one of our flights is completely sold out. Is it going to be possible to swap the cash seat, Christine already booked, for a companion pass seat once I have the companion pass? I know that it's sometimes recommended to hold a points reservation just in case,

which would be a similar situation, but I wasn't sure how to actually go about making this switch if it's even possible. Thanks so much for all your amazing content, Christine.

Oh, interesting. All right. So I'm going to take a guess here and then Nick will correct me. Hopefully. I don't know. Fingers crossed I'm right. I think. So most airlines oversell their flights.

And so holding a seat, however you book it with most airlines, whether it's with miles or cash and then canceling it doesn't ensure that a seat will become available if they oversold that flight. I don't think Southwest does that, though, or at least hasn't been doing that. that cash flight and immediately look to book the companion, I think it would be available probably as long as you scoop it up before anyone else jumps in. Yeah. I mean, Greg's right. So it's a fundamental difference between how most airlines do business and how Southwest does business. Most airlines, if there's 100 seats on the plane, will sell 110 tickets, let's say, because they know that 10 people usually don't show up or cancel at the last minute or whatever the case may be. So if you've got ticket number 109 and you cancel that, you're just part of the math they're doing to make sure that every seat goes out full. It's not going to open another seat there, especially if you're close to departure.

They're not going to sell another one to replace that. You're just part of what they were already expecting to cancel at the end. Whereas Southwest does not oversell their flights, or at least says they don't. I mean, how do you confirm that? Without being on the inside, I don't know. But at least in my experience, in times where I have had a flight where all of the seats were booked, it was totally sold out. If I've canceled one passenger, it is immediately shown back up as an available seat on that flight. So I would expect that you could cancel one passenger in the cash ticket. And as long as you're immediate about it, you're right on top of it on the website, you should then be able to add that person as your companion. Like Greg said, as long as somebody else isn't trying

to beat you to it. But chances of that happening at any given time are pretty low if you're right on top of it. And now Southwest does offer the ability to cancel just like one passenger on a booking yourself online. So you should be able to self service this entirely and make sure that it happens fast enough. So I think that should work. If you wanted to be, I'm not sure if it's safer, I'm going to use the word safer. I'm not convinced that it is. But if you wanted to go about it differently, you could call and ask them if they are able to cancel and add that person as your companion. And maybe a phone representative would be able to make sure that nobody could scoop that up. But I'm not totally confident that they're not doing the same thing that you would do

in terms of canceling and rebooking right away. And then I'm counting on somebody else to be as fast as I am. And I don't typically like to count on that. So, uh, so I would probably, yeah, just cancel it and try and re-add the person back again. I can't guarantee that Southwest won't start overselling flights at some point, but in all of my experiences in the past, and I've done this a number of times, um, the seat has immediately gone into inventory on a sold out flight. So I've done that before where a relative has decided not to come and somebody else is going to come. And so I'll cancel one person, add the other person right away.

And it does work exactly as you would expect it to at least has in all of my experiences. So Christine, I think you would be safe to do that on the flip side. If it's really important that everybody get there, maybe you, you know, maybe you don't want a chance that I think you're probably 90% safe. It would be my bet, but I'm going to leave a little bit of room for error in case. So don't come with your pitchfork if that seat doesn't come back up, but be ready to refresh a few times, you know, keep checking. It should come back. Hopefully. Yeah.

And if it doesn't, you know, send send your send your message to pitchfork at frequentmiler.com and we'll be sure not to receive it be sure to dodge that one good luck let us know though seriously do let us know just send the pitchfork to pitchfork at frequentmiler.com but send a nice kind email to frequentmiler to mailbag at frequentmiler.com to let us know whether it worked or not speaking of mailbag if you have questions that you'd like to be considered for a future question of the week, or you have comments that you'd like to be considered for giant mailbag, like I just said, you can send that to mailbag at frequentmiler.com. Wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to give us a thumbs up, leave us a

review, leave us a like. We always appreciate all of those things. And we will see you guys next week. Bye, everybody.