Frequent Miler on the Air - Delta's Big Flip-Flop | Ep225 | 10-21-23

Episode Date: October 21, 2023

Delta has walked back their elite status changes in a big way. Long-term elites and credit card enthusiasts have come out as good as gold. Has Delta gone too far and made elite status too easy to earn and keep?  00:00 Intro 01:37 Giant Mailbag 02:56 Hilton credit card changes  https://frequentmiler.com/big-changes-to-hilton-aspire-and-surpass-cards/ https://frequentmiler.com/amxhiltonaspire/ https://frequentmiler.com/hilton-honors-american-express-surpass-card/ 23:23 What crazy thing . . . did American Express do this week? 25:01 Award Talk 25:09 Citi adds Leading Hotels of the World Leaders Club https://frequentmiler.com/citi-adds-leading-hotels-of-the-world-as-a-transfer-partner-51/ https://frequentmiler.com/citi-adds-a-new-path-to-luxury-hotel-stays/ 30:30 Avianca LifeMiles https://frequentmiler.com/another-crack-at-the-lifemiles-secret-code-turns-up-more-pricing-anomalies/ 35:08 Main Event: Delta's flip-flop https://frequentmiler.com/delta-revises-skymiles-changes-more-skyclub-visits-lower-elite-thresholds-better-1-time-rollovers-vastly-improved-lifetime-status/ 36:04 Delta SkyClub Access changes 39:40 Changes to Medallion Qualifying Dollars (MQDs) 42:24 MQD Headstarts 53:27 Accommodations for long-term elites 53:49 Rollover MQMs to buy status extensions 56:04 Million Miler Status 59:49 Is Delta now making elite status too easy? 1:07:48 Question of the Week: What's the best way to earn credit card rewards on student load repayments? -miles for college Music credit: Annie Yoder

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did City do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event. Frequent Miler on the air starts now. Today's main event, Delta's big flip-flop. Well, Delta had announced some really big and ugly changes to their SkyMiles program.

And now, as we knew was coming, they've announced a reversal. But the reversal is much, much bigger than I expected. So we'll get into all the ins and outs of that. It's so big that even I, for a moment, looked at it and said, maybe I'm going to get a couple of Delta cards and have low level Delta status. And I'm not somebody who's ever thought about it before, but we'll get into more about why as we get further into today's show. But first, I want to remind you, wherever you're watching, listening, et cetera, make sure you like, subscribe, enable

notifications, leave a comment, ask a question, etc. We always appreciate getting some interaction. If you're watching this on YouTube, leave comments down there for us. We appreciate all of that. Also, don't forget that if you want to jump around in the show, we always have the timestamps in the show notes. So again, whether you're watching this on YouTube, it'll be in the description there. Or if you're listening in podcast platform, it should be in the show notes description on those platforms as well. So you can skip around with the timestamps if you want to skip over one segment or another to get to exactly where you want to go. And then the next place that

you would like to go is probably to the giant mailbag. Yes, giant mailbag time. Today's giant mail comes from Nathan. In the comments of my post about delta's revised sky miles changes nathan says delta went from thinning the ranks to pivoting a complete 180 making it easy for existing elites to extend their top tier status for many years to come yeah um you know you know it's what you know what interesting. A lot of other blogs have written that Delta didn't go far enough to walk things back. And yeah, at first blush, if you just look at it at very, very surface level, it kind of looks that way. But boy, once you dig into it, it's a very, very different view. And I think Nathan's right. So we will discuss that in length at length in the main event. Yeah, it's really interesting because when I first looked at the news, I just I only looked at the changes to MQDs initially. And I was like, oh, I mean, OK, you know, they split the difference and went halfway. And I thought it was no big deal.

So it wasn't until after you did your analysis that I was like, oh, wow, yeah, that's a lot different than what they had initially announced. So I look forward to getting into that in more detail today. But first, we've got another big change to talk about. So we're going to do our card talk segment about the Hilton credit card changes, because there have been major changes to the Amex Hilton Aspire and Amex Hilton Surpass cards, which we probably talked about in a card talk segment once before. But now we need to talk about them again, because, wow, they made some big changes here. They really have. And with the Aspire card, it's not a surprise. We've been predicting for years that the 450 aspire card would uh that they would

amex would increase the annual fee and the surprise has been that they hadn't done it sooner because they every other ultra premium card in amex's lineup uh which uh used to be 450 went up in price uh quite a while ago so that part isn't really news at all. Except that it finally happened and they sprung it on us with no warning. That's unfortunate. MX didn't even give us as bloggers or podcasters any kind of advanced notice. Sometimes we get some advanced notice with embargo saying you can't release this information until this time, but nothing like that. This time was just woke up and people

started chatting about the new information that they saw on their login, right? Yeah. I mean, I would have appreciated a little advanced heads up on that one. Wish I knew, but yeah, yeah. Although I say wish I knew just because I could have probably stacked a little bit more value out of it. Not necessarily because the changes are bad. In fact, I think the changes on the whole are pretty good. Obviously, the annual fee went up 100 bucks. But like Greg said, I mean, I think we all expected it would go up and I was worried it was going to go up $200. Only $100 is not so bad, especially when you consider the fact that the card now comes with more in annual credits than it had before and perhaps better credits in some ways. So first up, there's a $400 Hilton Resort credit now. So previously you got up to $250 in statement credits for Hilton Resort charges. Now you'll get up to $400.

It'll be $200 twice per year. And there's a number of reasons I like this more. But again, this will be $200 January to June, presumably, and $200 July to December. So the first reason I like it more is obviously because it's more in resort credit, right? It's $400 versus the old $250. So that's nice. Obviously, some people will be unhappy because now it means you'll have to stay at a resort or find a way to use it at a resort two times per year instead of one time per year. But what I think is really cool about this is that it enables a triple dip again, because now if you get the card towards the end of a calendar year, for instance, like if you get it now, you'd earn a $200 resort credit this year in 2023. And then you could use a $200 resort credit January to June of 2024, again, July to December of 2024. And then again, in early 2025, before your next annual fee

is due. So really, before you hit that second annual fee, you could end up with $800 in Hilton resort credit. So that's pretty terrific. If you did it that way, if you weren't planning to keep the card forever anyway, you could do that. But again, as a card benefit, it's $400 per calendar year. That's $200 twice a year. So that's, I think, overall a net positive change. Yeah. Although, as you mentioned, people who like the existing structure and only go to a Hilton resort once a year and don't want to play games with trying to figure out ways to prepay charges or what have you, I think it's a big negative. Because before they were getting $250 once a year, now they'll be getting $200 once a year. But otherwise, I do see what you're talking about. The triple dip thing though, goes down with the airline fee stuff, I think.

That's true. So let's talk about that. Then we can talk about how it all nets out. So previously the card offered each calendar year, $250 in airline incidental fee credits. So that meant things like paying for checked bags, paying for airport lounge access, and it was with a specific airline. Now what they're doing is giving you straight up $50 per quarter. So every three months of airline rebates, basically. So as long as you're putting spend towards an airline, you get $50 back four times a year. So $200 a year in easy to use airline credits. What I was talking about with the triple dip loss there is that if you sign, so it used to be,

right, if you signed up near the end of a year, you could use the $250 airline incidental fee credit three times before you cancel. So you'd have a total of what $750 back now, because they're breaking up into quarters, the upside of doing that kind of thing on the airline side is much lower than before. That's true. That's true. So how does that work out then, I guess? Well, you know what, before we discuss that, so you got two different things there, right, going on in two different amounts. So those are changes that, again, depending on your use case, may be positive or negative. I look at it and it's not going to change anything about the way I use the credit. So, I mean, it makes it a lot easier for people who before only looked at it as a boxed in airline incidental fee credit. But if you already knew that there were certain types of charges that weren't incidental credits that would trigger the credit, then nothing has really changed in terms of how

you use the credit. You can still use it for a variety of things. And in fact, now that it specifically works for airline fees, or rather for flight credit, I would, as a Southwest flyer, just be using it for a want to get away plus fare because I know I can cancel that and retain a Southwest credit that I can use without expiration. So that's great from an official standpoint in the sense that that officially works. I never have to worry about that getting clawed back someday if Amex decides they don't like that anymore. So I think that that's kind of good for those of us who fly Southwest anyway or United, because, of course, they have a very similar feature with Travel Bank that I assume will still trigger this.

Yeah. And am I remembering right that the new credits don't require you to pick your favorite airline? Correct. You could use it on any airline. I think for people who travel a reasonable amount, you might not like using it to pay for your flights. But if you don't mind using it to pay for flights, you know, you don't have to think about this one as much as the old one to get it to get full use of it, I think. Well, and it's easy enough with most airlines these days with free cancellations and the ability to have a credit to just buy a very cheap flight with this then. And then exactly, you know, go ahead and buy the flight you really want using a card that to pay the difference using a card that that has travel protection. So I think it's easy enough to get good value out of that now, perhaps easier for a lot of people.

I think you still get the annual free night. So there's a lot of stuff hasn't changed. You still get your diamond status and you still get an annual free night certificate. And you still get a free night certificate with $60,000 spend. But now they've added another one. You get a free night certificate at 30,000 spend. So again, on the Aspire card, when you spend 30,000, you'll get a free night certificate. And when you spend 60,000, you'll get another free night certificate. And when you spend $60,000, you'll get another free night certificate.

Those are on top of the annual. And so you could get up to three annual free night certificates with this card if you were going to do $60,000 spend in a calendar year. So that could be interesting for people who are heavy spenders on this card, unfortunately. Oh, yeah. Good. No, I'm just saying, you know, absolutely. Having another free night certificate has huge value, especially if you use it at very, very expensive resorts. or more, then that's a good return or at least a reasonable return on spend when you add that to whatever the card earns automatically. Now,

if you don't have intentions, specific intentions to use it at such a high end place, then it might be questionable to spend 30 or 60,000. It's really going to depend on your needs and your plans there. But anyway, you got the opportunity to score up to three free night certificates a year. Unfortunately, priority pass is going away starting February 1st of 2024. This card will no longer have priority pass membership. That's not a big deal for me.

And I think I would venture a guess that most people that are going to consider this card probably have another card in their wallet that offers priority pass, probably. So that doesn't seem like a big hit to me. But if this was the way consider this card probably have another card in their wallet that offers priority pass, probably. So that doesn't seem like a big hit to me. But if this was the way you got priority pass, then for sure, that's obviously a big negative change. On the flip side, it now comes with an annual $189 clear membership credit. So for people who didn't want to have the platinum card or

didn't need the green card, that's a nice little additional benefit. I finally signed up for clear last year and I've only used it a few times, but the times I've used it, it's come in handy so far. So that's, I think, a decent benefit for a lot of people. It's also got national executive status now. OK, you know, there's other ways to get that, too. So not bad. Nice. And cell phone protection. So it's got the good Amex cell phone protection, which is a $50 deductible and up to $800 per claim. So that's decent. Of course, this probably isn't the card I'd be using to pay my cell phone bill with unless I was trying to hit the 60 or 30,000 or 60,000 spend and put all the different various purchases I could on it.

But if you do put your cell phone bill on this, you will get decent insurance. Yeah. Yeah. And let me say, we should have said this at the outset that the main features of this card that most people love most are still there. So the automatic diamond elite status is still there. The free night every year, so upon approval, and then every anniversary is still there. So those are very valuable perks you get right out of the bat. As far as the annual fee credits, like so previously they summed up to, I'm sorry, the Hilton credits and the airfare credits previously summed up to $500 a year. Now they're a little bit different, but they sum up to $600 a year. So if you're going to get full value from them, then the $100 increase in annual fee shouldn't make a big difference to you. So,

so, you know, it's a, it's net sort of even assuming you max out all of these credits either way. So things like the clear benefit and the national executive status benefit and cell phone protection are all upside. Priority pass, I don't know about Nick's statement saying that most people have this card or already have priority pass in some other way. That's certainly true in the circles that we tend to walk. You know, people who are really into rewards programs and everything tend to have a number of high end cards and we'll have something else with priority pass. But, you know, I think this is a card that we often said was was almost a no-brainer for just about anybody so people who just travel once a year you know and go to a hilton hilton resort just once a year uh would would have benefited from this card with the old structure and i think probably the new as well but before they also

got priority pass thrown in which good point um i think is is a negative um but yeah for all of us who have priority pass some other way, our version of priority pass some other way is probably better. As long as you're getting it not from Amex and not from Capital One, then you have restaurants and other stuff that are also included, not just airport lounges. So yeah, no, that's really a fair point. I guess my thought was, you're absolutely right. We've often said that it's a no brainbrainer. My thought was that there's probably not a huge crowd of people who are willing to pay $450 for a Hilton card, apart from the crowd of people who understand rewards cards really well, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Otherwise, a Hilton-based customer probably looks at $450 and is like, oh, no, I'm not paying $450 a year for a credit card without analyzing the benefits. So that was my thought process, but who knows? Yeah. I mean, there's no right or wrong there. So if you, if you don't have another priority pass, like you said, that's a big hit. Uh, so no doubt there. Uh, but if you do have it, then no, obviously it's a, it's a nothing burger there, but yeah, the Aspire card is not it. They also changed the surpass card quite a bit. They did. So a stress part card, the annual fee went up from $95 to $150. It still gives you a free night after $15,000 spend per calendar year. Um, it still gives you automatic gold status and diamond status. If you spend $40,000, um, what's thousand dollars. What's new besides the higher annual fee is $200 of Hilton hotel credit broken

up into every three months. So four times a year, you get $50 back for spend at Hilton property. So this is not just Hilton resorts like the Aspire card that's at any Hilton property. So you could get up to $200 total back on the $150 annual fee. So that's pretty good. It also throws in national executive car status. So that means when you book a regular size car through national, you can go pick up your car in the executive aisle as opposed to the Emerald aisle. And so that tends to have nicer cars. Um, so that's, that's good. Um, they threw in a new bonus category. So they have the usual ones of like six X for us, uh, restaurant and grocery and stuff, but now they threw in four X for online retail. Um, I don't find that exciting at all. If you consider hilton often sells their points for um half a

cent each getting 4x in some category means like two percent back basically and and that's just not something that uh you know um is hard to get in with many other uh options you could just get a two percent cash back card and spend it anywhere and get that kind of return. Finally, the surpass card also took away priority pass. So previously they had a set number of passes each year you got. That is gone. So yeah, we talked about both of these cards in our episode about must have Amex cards. And we like both of these cards. And one of the reasons we talked about the surpass card being neat is it was like a $95 card that had party pass access. And so that's gone.

And the $95 part is gone. It's 150. But what do you think about these changes overall? Well, you know, actually, I really like the changes overall for two reasons. Number one, Hilton gold status had kind of, I don't know, decreased in value, in my opinion, because of the fact that Hilton got rid of breakfast and replaced it with this food and beverage credit that I know some people like. But those of us who like breakfast find that it sometimes doesn't really cover breakfast.

Now, though, you get $50 to use four times a year. And so that probably will cover the difference for breakfast if you stay at Hilton properties a few times a year. And probably if you're going to spend the money on a Hilton card year after year, you're probably staying at least a few nights a year. Now, are they all in different quarters? I don't know. So obviously that's wishy-washy in terms of whether that's a good thing or not for you. But overall, I think that that makes it, it eases the sting of, I think, Hilton's breakfast change a little bit. And actually, I like the 4X online retail. I mean, you're right. It's not better than a 2% everywhere card, but it means that if you spend for your $15,000 for the annual free night

certificate, if you spend some of that in online retail, you're not really giving up a lot of return on spend probably and still spending towards the free night certificate. So if you're comparing against a 2% card as your baseline for an unbonused purchase at Amazon or Macy's or wherever. Well, I mean, now you're getting about the same return out of your Hilton points plus the free night certificate after 15K spend. I would still probably put the majority of that 15K spend at a supermarket at 6X on this card, but I think it now becomes reasonable to use it online also. So I think overall, that's not bad for an additional 50 bucks a year. I mean, as long as you'll use the $200 in credits, $50 quarterly credits,

if you use that twice a year, I think that was probably worth paying an additional 50 bucks for. So I think overall, I like this, I think. Yeah. Yeah, it's not bad. You know, again, as we said before, if you're counting on the priority pass, that's obviously a big negative. But otherwise, I think the extra annual fee is, you know, is more than offset. So even if you just stay once a year, even if you only get to use the 50 credit then it's like they only went up by five bucks basically right and so it's not it's not that bad from that point of view um and and it's upside obviously if you use it more than that um i'm though increasingly seeing like less reason to um get the surpass card over the uh aspire um so you. So I guess it depends whether you can make sure to use the resort credits with the Aspire. Because if you can, then if you think about it, $400 resort

credits alone with the Aspire, bring the net annual fee down from 550 to 150. And then the flight credit, 200 flight credit is all upside after that and and the annual free night without spend uh you know so there's a lot more to like there i think but obviously it's a bigger hurdle spending 550 off the out of the gate than 150 for sure for sure and you mentioned this before but i think it bears mentioning again because i think it surprises people often to to know that people that aren't familiar with these cards to know that that Aspire card comes with that free night certificate at approval for the first year. That's an annual benefit that doesn't even require the spend. I think just once you get

approved, you'll get that free night certificate in eight to 12 weeks or so. And then obviously the welcome bonus on top of that. But that's just part of the annual card benefit. So, I mean, that alone can still be worth the five hundred and fifty dollars for some people that would otherwise consider saying at a Hilton property that costs that much. And so when you add in everything else, I think it still becomes a really easy win. So I agree. I think the Aspire card is still my favorite card between the two. But I think that the Surpass card is not worse, not worse for anybody who has Priority Pass

otherwise. For somebody who doesn't have Priority Pass otherwise, it's a lot worse. And especially if you're going to use the Priority Pass several times a year. And so that's obviously huge bummer for that crowd. overall though i think for a lot of people these will be okay acceptable changes and and i think it's interesting to note that i wrote a post this week about amex family language and i wondered aloud so to speak whether that family language would be added to the hilton cards at some point and it wasn't with this change now who knows if and when they may add it, but I feel like this was an opportunity

to have added it along with all of the other changes and they didn't. So maybe it's not coming to the Hilton cards. Hard to say. Yeah, totally. I was surprised that it wasn't there, given that there are all these other changes. So that's a nice thing.

Yeah. All right. So that brings us to what crazy thing. What crazy thing did American Express do this week? Well, speaking of the Hilton cards and the free night certificates, I recently had gotten approved for an Amex Hilton business card and completed $15,000 spend so that I would get a free night certificate this year on top of also earning the welcome bonus on that card. So because, of course, the Hilton business card also offers a free night certificate after fifteen thousand dollars spend. But the crazy thing is when Amex sent me the email congratulating me, they congratulated me on earning a free weekend night certificate with Hilton, with my Amex Hilton business card, which, of course, stood out to me because I said, what do you mean a weekend night? It used to be a weekend night. It's not a weekend night anymore.

It's just a free night certificate now because Hilton has been allowing those to be used any night of the week since sometime during the pandemic. And they made it official. Gosh, it must have been at least a year ago already, right? That they made that an official long-term change, I think. Yeah. And it's been unofficial for a lot longer than that because of the pandemic. Right, for like three years or so or something like that. Yeah, so I was like,

wow, I can't believe they haven't changed the wording on the email that they send. It makes it sound like it's a weekend night. And for anybody who doesn't follow this stuff, you might have assumed that what Amex sent you was correct, but it's not. It's valid any night of the week.

Yeah, yeah. You know, I would make more fun of them, except I keep finding things on our own site where we refer to those as weekend nights and we have to go fix them over and over. So, you know. All right, all right. So we won't blame Amex too badly for that one. Okay, well, then that brings us to award talk.

So for this week's award talk, Citi has some news out. They do. This was a big surprise. All of a sudden, Citi Thank You Rewards, for anyone who has a Citi Premier or a Prestige card, can transfer points to leading hotels of the world. Leading hotels of the world has their Leaders Club rewards program. And so you could transfer your points to those points. Now, you probably don't know anything about Leaders Club or Leading Hotels of the World, which we'll now call LHW.

Sounds like a high school club, right? I mean, like a leader's club. Yeah. LHW, it's a lot like SLH, Small Luxury Hotels of the World, which we've talked about a lot in the past, which you can use to book Hyatt points. You could use Hyatt points to book SLH properties. You can now indirectly use Citi thank you points to book LHW properties by transferring your points to LHW. Some things to know. They don't really have an award chart. What it is is points, LHW points are worth about eight cents each, usually towards stays. And the city points don't transfer one to one. If they did, I mean,

that would be amazing to get eight cents per point value from your city points. But no, they transfer for five to one. So a thousand city points becomes 200 LHW points. And that makes your city points worth around 1.6 cents each towards these LHW stays. I looked at a bunch of properties and while 1.6 was the most common value I found, I also found values as low as about 1.33 and as high as about 1.9. So there is variability there. And so, yeah, LHW properties overall, I get the impression that they're higher in luxury than on average than SLH and some other competing things like priority. No, I'm sorry, like preferred hotels, which is something you could buck with choice points. That's the good news. If you like luxury, the bad news is there's no fixed award chart. So

you're not going to get more than that sort of 1.3 to 1.9 cents per point value from your city points. It's not, you're not going to get that far outsized value that you might've gotten with Hyatt points, uh, booking SLH or with choice points booking, uh, preferred hotels. Yeah. But you know, I think that's pretty reasonable value for city points. So, right. I mean, one point six, that's not bad. And especially because, like you said, when I looked at a few of these, I was like, oh, these look like pretty nice places. So if you like your luxury stays and not only that, but also I like the fact that, you know, you found that in many cases you could book just about any room type or, you know, multiple room types anyway with points. And so the chance to

get the one point six cents per point, not just towards a base room, but also towards a suite of some sort. That's appealing to me because, of course, I want to get a suite of traveling with kids. I want the extra space. So I love that. And we talk about that all the time. With most award programs, you can only book a standard room. In fact, we talk about the fact that choice is different in that regard, that sometimes you can get a suite. And it's good for that because sometimes you can book a suite for the same number of choice privileges points as a standard room. And that stands out in the award space. And we talk about Hyatt's award upgrade certificates because that's a great way to get a suite. Well, this is another good way to get a suite. You can get decent value out of your points towards a suite. And so I like that aspect of this quite a bit.

Yeah, yeah, me too. And it flips things around though, because when you can get the best value with your like Hyatt points or choice points is when the hotel prices, cash rates are really high and the award charts are keeping the point costs low. This is different. This is, you know, you're going to get the best deal, I guess, you know, when hotel prices are lower. I mean, you're going to because you're going to pay fewer points when the prices are lower. I mean, you're going to, cause you're going to pay fewer points when the prices are lower. And so, um, in a way that's nice. Cause, uh, sometimes when I'm traveling in the off season, it's a little frustrating that I like, I want to use my points, but I don't want

to use my Hyatt points or whatever towards poor value. But you often see that in off season rates. Um, this gives you an opportunity to, to get consistent with that 1.6 consistently, which is really nice. If you throw in a rewards plus card, you also get your 10% rebate on points redeemed. So that brings up the value you get from your points as well. So yeah, lots of light there. Yeah, I agree.

A cool addition. I agree. I agree. Something I've never really looked into before, but I'm excited. I'm glad to see Citi adding something unique. I think the addition of a new unique transfer partner was a good idea for them, differentiates them a little bit because the problem with Citi has been that most of their useful partners are also partners with everybody else now, or at least with one or more other programs. So this is another good way

for them to differentiate a little bit. So good on you, Citi. All right. Continuing with the word talk, got to talk briefly, quickly about Avianca Life Miles. So we've talked a lot of times before about how Avianca Life Miles has interesting features of its program, especially when it comes to mixed cabin awards and also when it comes to specific routes that just don't price according to the old award charts and for no particular reason or no clear reason and no sense whatsoever. And for instance, one of those routes is between New York and Lisbon, Portugal. Now, Avianca Life miles standard pricing to most of Europe is 63,000 miles one way in business class. But for some reason, the New York JFK to Lisbon

route prices out at only 35,000 miles in business class. And for a long time, I think anyway, that was only if you were flying tap air Portugal on the nonstop from JFK to Lisbon. But then after a while, maybe it was just that I hadn't seen availability, but I noticed eventually that Brussels Airlines flights were also pricing at 35,000 miles one way, even if you connected. So you're flying JFK to Brussels to Lisbon, and it was still pricing at 35,000 in business class. So I thought that was kind of interesting. But one frustration I've had lately, actually recently, and looking at awards to Lisbon is that I would find via Air Canada and

United itineraries that would fly business class on Swiss from New York to Geneva, for instance, and then connect to Lisbon, but they wouldn't show up on the LifeMiles site. No matter what I did in trying to switch Smart Search to Star Alliance to Swiss Airlines, I could never get those itineraries to show up because I was curious if they would also price at the 35,000 miles, but I hadn't seen one. And then finally, a reader in our Frequent Miler Insiders reported earlier this week that now some of those Swiss itineraries are showing up. Now, I've only seen it show up mixed cabin where it's business class JFK to Geneva and then economy class Geneva to Lisbon. But that mixed cabin

routing rings in at thirty six thousand miles one way. So that's twenty eight thousand and change for the business class flight from JFK to Geneva and then whatever, eight thousand more. So for the economy class, like from Geneva to Lisbon. So that's interesting if you aren't going to check a bag, because of course, you're going to go through immigration when you get to Geneva. And if you miss your flight to Lisbon, then you could potentially just, you know, stay in Switzerland, probably. So that's, I think, a new sweet spot anyway, for award travel to Europe, because that gives you an option to get to a different place in Europe for a very reduced price and business class. So I thought that was an awesome development to see. That really is. And just for the record, you can't do this in the

reverse direction. Is that right? You can't go Lisbon to JFK and expect 35K. That is absolutely correct. No, it'll be 63,000 miles from Lisbon to JFK. It does not price with that funny award pricing. In fact, I'm not aware of any routes that price nearly that low from Europe to the US. Now, I have found a couple recently that price lower than 63,000 from Europe to the US, but I think the lowest was about 54,000. So they're not wildly less. And there were only a couple of them. I need to go back and search and make sure that they continue to price that way. That's why I'm not going to get into which ones yet. But maybe I'll toss that into a post in the near future once I confirm that it continues to work and wasn't just

like an anomaly when I was recently searching. But anyway, so yeah, you're not going to get that pricing on the way back. But even still, if you paid $35,000 to get to Europe and $63,000 to get back, then you're looking at what, like less than $100,000 round trip in business class, which is quite good when you have no surcharges on those awards with Life Miles Ava. I think a $25 partner booking fee, but no carrier-imposed surcharges anyway. So nice new option. And with Swiss, that's especially great. I mean, because Swiss has huge surcharges anyway. So nice new option. And with Swiss, that's especially great. Because Swiss has huge surcharges otherwise. So yes, great not to have those pass along.

That's right. Because you could use Turkish miles to fly in business class for 45,000 miles one way on Star Alliance carriers to Europe. But the problem is they will add surcharges. And Swiss has really high surcharges. And same thing with ANA. You can fly round trip for 88,000 miles. But again, you're going to pay the surcharges.

So being able to fly round trip to Europe using Avianca Life Miles for less than 100,000 miles round trip with no surcharges, I think, is really notable. So that's good news in the award talk scene. But now let's slide our way into this week's main event. Main event time. Delta's big flip flop. So they have a really, you know, I guess a really, really big. I'm picturing like Delta does have a big foot. They have a big foot, big footprint, big impact on US flyers. They're a big dog in the field. And they upset a lot of people when they announced upcoming SkyMiles changes. And they realized they were going to lose a lot of customers.

They didn't want to. So they walked back. A lot of those changes made big, big changes to their changes. And they might've just gone too far, but let's dig into what's changed. And then we'll talk about what the repercussions of all this are. First, the change that impacts probably the most people is Sky Club access. So starting in February of 2025, so we've got quite a while before this kicks in, Delta is going to limit access to Sky Clubs for those who are getting in with credit cards. So you can get into Sky Clubs with American Express Platinum cards. These are not the Delta Platinum cards, by the way. Or you could get in with Delta Reserve cards. And today and until February of 2025, you have unlimited times you could go in as long as you're flying

Delta the same day. But they announced that with reserve card, you were going to be limited to 10 visits starting in February 2025. And with the platinum card, you were going to be limited to six visits. Well, they backtracked that a bit. So reserve cards are now limited to 15 visits and platinum cards 10. So that alone, a pretty big change. But the bigger change in a way may be what they consider a visit. So in the original announcement,

a visit was literally you enter a club and if you come out and go to another club down the hall, except in very special circumstances, that was another visit. Now, it's going to be all entrances to the Sky Club within a 24-hour period, all count as one. So let's say you're flying from Detroit to Asheville, North Carolina via Atlanta. You might get in the Sky Club in Detroit, and you might get in the Sky Club in Detroit and you might get in the Sky Club again in Atlanta on your way to Asheville. And so the previous rules that would count as two visits just for that one-way trip, now it'll just count as one. In fact, if you're doing like a same-day turnaround or within 24-hour round trip, coming back, you'll be able to use the clubs as part of that same one visit. So

that's I think that's a really huge change in the overall Sky Club admission policy. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I could definitely see somebody who's traveling for a meeting. They may end up getting to use the club on two different days, but they're within 24 hours and it counts as one visit now. So, so yeah, they increase the visits and increase the visits. They increase the number of visits and increase the potential number of visits you can get out of each of those. So, so I think that was good news overall. I mean, this is a perk I never use, but for the people who do, I think this is a very generous change. So I would have been happy if they had just probably switched to the 24-hour rule.

I would have thought, okay, that's a big change. That's a big plus. Because I think that was the crummiest part, was having to use a visit each time. Because like you said, if you live somewhere with a Sky Club and you connect, then using two visits for a single day's trip seemed kind of ridiculous to me. So I'd have been happy with that. The additional visits on top. Hey, I think this is a pretty good change.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, I could still see a lot of people complaining that, hey, I should be getting unlimited like I do with other, you know, club cards. But, you know, given that that's gone, you know, and compared to what was originally announced, this is a huge, huge, much, much better. Agreed. Agreed. Okay. All the rest of the changes we're going to talk about have to do with elite status and big changes there. So let's start with medallion qualifying dollars. So if you remember, they're moving their metrics.

So currently they have all kinds of metrics that you have to add up in order to get to elite status. They're going to change all that and base everything on MQDs, medallion qualifying dollars. That's basically how much do you spend with Delta. And the amounts, the required MQDs for each level of elite status were going to go up dramatically. And they are still going to go up, you could argue dramatically, but they've lowered what the thresholds are over the original announcement. So silver status, which is a bottom tier status will now require

$5,000 in Delta spend 5,000 MQDs, which is down from 6,000 in the original announcement. Gold is now 10,000 down from 12,000. Platinum is 15,000 down from 18,000, and Diamond, 28,000, down from 35,000. Now, as an aside, you may remember that I made predictions before any of these announcements came out about what Delta was going to do to change their SkyMiles program. And I had predicted that they would go to MQDs as the only metric, but I also predicted specific metric amounts and specific MQD amounts that would be required. And Delta seems to have read my post and matched me bullet by bullet, except for diamond size. So literally the new requirements, silver, gold, platinum, 5K, 10K, 15K. That's exactly what I had listed in my prediction.

Hat on the back for Greg, the frequent miler. Diamond status, I had predicted 25K, but they're now at 28K. So that is different. Well done. Wow. They really moved towards what i predicted which was uh really impressive now basically what they did here is they split the difference right between where the the requirements from 2023 up until 2023 have been and what they announced

were going to be the new requirements they basically went halfway on almost all of these were pretty close to the halfway point right in between. So it's half the increase that they were talking about. It still is a pretty significant increase. I mean, Diamond goes from $20,000 in MQDs to $28,000 in MQDs, I think, right? So that's a pretty big jump still. But the rest of these, at least it's half as bad as it was. Yeah, yeah. But that's before you count something called MQD Head Starts. So people with a Delta SkyMiles Platinum card, so this is not the Amex Platinum, but the SkyMiles Platinum card, and or a reserve card, get $2,500 MQD Head Starts per credit card that they have. So let's say you just have the Delta SkyMiles Platinum card and you start with 2,500 MQDs each year. That means silver status will only require another 2,500 MQDs, which is less than was required like this year for status. Gold will require 7,500. Platinum will require 12,500. All three

of those are really, really close to what was required this year for 2024 status. So in 2024 for 2025 status, just having one Delta card means that your MQD requirements are basically unchanged. Yeah. I mean, that's pretty incredible, isn't it? I mean, what a difference that is from where they started to here, right? Yeah. Yeah. and shocking because the whole point supposedly was to try to reduce their, their elite ranks, uh,

so that they could better serve their elite customers. But this makes it so easy. I mean, to, to have the same level of status you had before, um, or more because, um, credit card spend also gets you MQDs. And it used to be that earning MQDs was not something you could do with a credit card. You earned something else, MQMs. And so it was very complicated how you would use credit cards. And it wasn't really stackable with your flight experience. So what changes now is that your spend on credit cards plus your actual flying both add up together towards your elite status.

Before, it was like you sort of go in one direction or another. I mean, there were exceptions to that. It was very complicated, but my point is that for people who fly a moderate amount on top of, uh, what, you know, credit card spend, I think it's easier now, even with just one credit card to get to the same level of status you're getting before. But now let's talk about more than one. It gets even easier. It does. It's crazy. This is really crazy. So let's say you have both a SkyMiles Platinum consumer card and a SkyMiles Platinum business card.

Now you've got 5,000 MQDs each year. What? And so you're just going to start with silver status. What? have four Delta credit cards. You could have the two platinum cards I just mentioned, plus both a business and consumer reserve card and start every year with 10,000 MQDs. So you're starting with gold status and anything more you earn is just upside towards platinum or diamond.

I mean, that just reduces the path to elite status by such an incredible degree that, I mean, we've totally flopped here, right? From making elite status feel almost unattainable for the majority of people to making it like, all you need to attain it is a few credit cards. Now, the credit cards aren't cheap. If you were to get all four credit cards, you're talking about like $1,600, it would cost you. But for $1,600 a year, you would have gold status without stepping on a plane or spending a dime on any of your cards. So if you also happen to step on a plane some

or spend on your cards, then it probably starts to pay for itself pretty quickly. And remember that those cards come with annual companion certificates that could come close to or surpass wiping out their annual fees. it could be worth the 1600 a year if you're already spending on delta flights anyway like plus plus you you forgot to mention you you get sky club access so those two delta reserve cards means what 30 uh visits right 30 days of visits uh per year and into sky clubs so um yeah mean, one big downside is Amex only allows up to five or six, depending on who you are, credit cards in your portfolio. So if you do this with four Delta credit cards, you're looking at most one Hilton card or one, you know, everyday card or Blue Business Plus or

whatever. So begs the question, Greg, you must have thought of this. I mean, how do these headstarts work? Do you have to hold the card all year long to keep the headstart? Well, yeah, that's the thing. You might be able to, we don't know, but you might be able to just have one of each consumer and business and, you know, keep it one way for half the year, then upgrade or downgrade and keep it the other way for the other half the year. flip-flop them. So you always have a Delta Reserve and a Platinum card. Then you could always get into a Sky Club and you're basically paying a prorated annual fee that's more like having two cards rather than four. So if that works, we don't know. That would be the way to do it for sure. Yeah, it's kind of nuts. Okay. So that's the MQD headstarts. They're not done giving out MQDs though for platinum and diamond medallion members who get choice benefits. They're adding a new choice benefit, which is called an MQD accelerator. 2,000 MQDs as a diamond choice or a thousand mqds for platinum choice so

uh for renewing status at platinum or diamond level um it gets easier because you could pick mqds as one of your your perks this is such a wild change like i'm still kind of mind-blowing yeah the the changes here in terms of how much like it's, it's gonna be less like the path to elite status is gonna be like that. I mean, the difference is before if you were earning your elite status based on MQMs instead of MQDs, then obviously, this whole thing is perhaps less exciting, although you can get the MQDs so cheaply, you know, relatively speaking from having cards and not have to fly to earn the MQM. So I don't even know that it's even bad for that crowd, but yeah, it just, it seems like, wow, what a big change here. What a big change. It's, it's, it's huge. It's, it's kind of,

yeah, it's just amazing. But before you go to the next section, one thing I want to mention is, you know, I didn't think about this when, when we were talking about the number of Sky Club visits on the reserve card and the MX Platinum card. And I said that I thought these were positive changes. And you were like, well, yeah, probably. But if you were used to being like, oh, this is a club card, I ought to get club access all the time. And I thought about it. I was like, well, for a business traveler, I'd probably be pretty upset. Right. A business traveler, I'd probably be pretty upset, right? Because I bought the reserve card, so to speak, so that I could have unlimited access because

I'm flying a lot. I'm a business traveler. If you're a business traveler, you're probably flying, you know, or you may very well anyway be flying more than 15 days out of a calendar year. That's just over once a month. So anybody who flies round trip once a month is looking at this and saying, oh, well, that kind of stinks, actually. The change is bad. And so it's interesting because I feel like they made that worse for the typical business traveler while also trying to make the

program harder. You have to spend more to attain status, which is basically only going to be business travelers. So it was kind of a weird thing. But now, I mean, look at all this reduced stuff. It seems like to appeal to a leisure traveler, too. It's kind of weird. I don't even know what to think about it. Yeah, I agree. Those are good points.

Now, don't forget, you can spend $75,000 in a year on a Delta Reserve card or a Amex Platinum card and get unlimited visits for the rest of that year and all the next. So there is a way around that. And a frequent business traveler could also, as long as they have some level of lease status, they could buy a Delta Club membership. And so that's a way to get unlimited visits as well, as long as you're flying Delta. And as long as you're not flying basic economy, which is a restriction there, they're, they're still excluding anyone flying basic economy from their clubs. If you're one of those low class basic economy flyers, yeah. Fun Delta fun. All right. so those are some big changes and and exciting stuff and i look at it and i say wow you know we've talked before about the delta platinum card companion certificates and the reserve card campaign certificates and the reason i said at the beginning of the show

was that you know i went from thinking wow this is nuts to i don't know maybe i'll go after some delta elite status is because i thought to myself well we don't typically fly Delta because I'm from a fly out of a small airport where they fly small aircraft and my wife doesn't like to fly on a small plane. But if I looked into it and found some options where it was not such a small plane anyway, I feel like as a family of four, two companion certificates a year could potentially be useful. Although I guess the problem is I'd have to fly on them each time uh but but potentially i can oh you don't know that's right you can book them for somebody else i forgot about that yeah so yeah i mean that that could be uh useful for a family trip once a year so it might be worth the 500 a year for me to get to

delta uh platinum cards right the delta consumer and the Delta Business Platinum card. And then, bam, I'd be starting the year with silver status. And a little bit of spend would get me to gold. It just seems crazy that as a complete leisure traveler who had very little interest in Delta before, I look at it now and I'm like, well, it was already probably a win if I could make use of the campaign certificates. Yeah. Now it's a bigger win.

Yeah. Yeah. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. And then if you thought you were going to be, if you didn't already have like Amex Platinum cards or whatever to get into Sky Clubs, if you thought you were going to be going to Sky Clubs, you could upgrade one of your Platinum cards to reserve and get in that way. Yeah.

Yeah. So yeah, there's a lot of things you can do there. A lot different. Yeah. Yes. Yes. It's so different. Yeah. All right. So now let's talk about the other end of the spectrum, the people who have been elite, high level elites for a long time. What did they do for us? This

was the number one thing that I thought Delta was going to change was to make things better for their long-term elites. Because the original plan was, even if you had like tons and tons, hundreds of thousands of MQMs rolled over from previous years, like I do, they were going to let you exchange them for a paltry number of MQDs or a paltry number of redeemable miles. And so they introduced,

first of all, they changed the equation. If you want to trade them in for MQDs, they did say before it was going to take 20 MQMs to give you one MQD. They're changing that now to 10 to one. So that's a much better ratio. If you, to one. So that's a much better ratio. However, if you have 100,000 or more MQMs rolling over, which by the way, I'm going to have around 400,000 rolling over, then you could exchange

100,000 at a time for a year of whatever your 2024 elite status is for extending that for another year. So I could theoretically, right now on platinum for 2024, if I could trade in like 400,000 to keep platinum status for four more years beyond that. But here's where things get really interesting if i could make my way to diamond status this year and still roll over 400 000 um that's four more years of diamond status so you know basically if i push really hard towards the end of this year um i've got diamond status for a long time and i don't even have to worry about it from then on. Like, I don't even have to keep the credit cards or anything.

It's like, you know, just boom. What we don't know is whether choice benefits, which is where you get things like global upgrade certificates, whether when your status is extended, you would get those. We're thinking probably not, unfortunately, which is a lot of the best value of like Delta Diamond status. But still, as far as upgrade priority and things, you'd still be way up there. So that could be really interesting. But we're not done with the benefits for these high-level long-term elites, million miler status. So what we knew was that million miler status in the future is going to be harder to attain because previously, which is before there were like MQM accelerators and things that gave you ways to earn those miles much faster than just how many miles

you flew. But now it's going to be literally, if you're starting from scratch in 2024 and you want to get to 1 million miler status with Delta, you'd have to fly a million miles. Like that's how they want it to work. And that's a huge hurdle. But for those who already have a million miler status, this might be more exciting. What they're doing is they're increasing by one which elite level you have at each level of million miler status. So 1 million milers who currently have silver status. So that's both me and my wife will now have gold medallion status

for life. So, so all of a sudden, you know, if we just give up on Delta altogether, never fly them, you know, never do anything with them again, we still have gold status from now on. So that's crazy. At 2 million miles, you'll have platinum status instead of gold. 3 million, you'll have diamond status instead of gold, actually, was what you had before. So that's actually a two level bump. And at 4 million, you'll also have diamond medallion. And at 5 million, which previously was short of diamond status,

but at 5 million, you'll have something called Delta 360, which is a sort of secret level of elite status that no one knew previously how to get. But here's one way of getting it is fly 5 million miles with Delta. That's all. But let me talk about the short-term implications of all this. My wife is about 150,000 MQMs right now away from 2 million miler status. So right now, and this won't be true next year, but right now we can earn MQMs towards million miler status with credit card spend.

And so, if we push really hard with a lot of credit card spend towards the end of the year, we could get my wife up to 2 million miler status, which means platinum status for life for her. It also, I mean- That's incredible, right? That's incredible. I mean, it's incredible. And not just for the benefits of platinum status with Delta, which obviously there's good benefits to be had there, but also for status match opportunities in the future, right? I mean, cause you'll have a decent level of Delta status that you can potentially match, you know, for the rest of your life when their status match opportunities come up.

So, I mean, I think that's probably worth the push. Yeah, and the other thing for her and her situation, so all that spend is also going to get her to diamond status. So right now she was looking at, she has diamond status, but she was looking at re-upping for next year at only platinum. But with all the spend, all these new MQMs and everything, she'll get diamond status, but she was looking at re-upping for next year at only platinum. But with all the spend, all these new MQMs and everything, she'll get diamond status. And that means, and she'll also have more MQMs rolling over. And so that means she's going to be looking at probably about five years of diamond status, and then she'll soft land for the rest of her life at

platinum after that, thanks to this combination. So's incredible. Wow. So, yeah. So, all right, let's talk big picture. Is Delta now making elite status too easy? When they first announced all these big, bad changes, the previous big, bad changes, I thought, wow, this is really bad. It's going to be so hard to keep elite status. But the one good thing is, you know, there's going to be a point in the future where getting upgrades and things is going to be a lot easier

if you have that high level status because so few people will, like who's going to be able to achieve this. But now it seems like, you know, there's going to be all these people like my wife wandering around with diamond status for no reason at all. She made a big push this year um there's gonna be all kinds of people like you over wandering around with gold status right because you're

a leisure traveler that's going to take advantage of some of the credit card perks and right um yeah i don't know what do you you think? Have they have too many elite people and couldn't provide the benefits that they wanted to provide. And so they needed to find a way to reduce that. And they have done the absolute opposite here. I mean, anybody who can do the math, which to be fair, just like I said with the Hilton Aspire card earlier, I imagine Delta's average flyer is not going to consider A, paying $500 a year for two platinum cards. Two Delta platinum cards may not even realize that they could get a business and a consumer platinum card.

So I don't think it's a large segment of their customers that are going to go after these avenues we're talking about. However, they are making it exceptionally easy for those people who are paying attention to all of those things. And I think that that's really strange because I think the changes were clearly aimed at cutting our crowd out, right? I mean, they were aimed at identifying and rewarding the people who spent a lot of money on Delta flights, which in fairness makes some sense to me. If you've got somebody who spends $10,000 three times a year

on Delta flights, I mean, that's somebody you want to fly four or five times a year, right? So you'd like to incentivize that person. And previously you didn't have a way to do that, but now with the new program they do. And so I think that it's odd that they're going to make it so easy for us to join that crowd. Like that's kind of weird, isn't it? I totally agree. You know, I'm trying to think what, what could they, or should they do going forward to kind of correct their correction? And, and, you know, one thing I think that's kind of obviously they, they haven't said with the new MQD requirements, how long is that for?

Is that just for 2024 for qualifying for 2025 says probably, then they'll probably move back to their original plan or something like it. Um, so that's something obviously they probably will do. Right. The other thing is I totally can imagine them back backing off this idea that, that you can earn multiple of these twenty five hundred dollar head starts. Right. It's just not reasonable. You know, I don't I could see why Amex would love that, though. Right.

You know, to the extent that Amex has something to say about it, I could see Amex saying, yeah, you got to keep that in. But if Delta has their way, I don't see why they would keep that. That seems a little bizarre. It does. It seems overly generous. But I mean, like a lot of things in this game, you got to strike while the iron is hot, right? So if that interests you and you're like, oh, yeah, the math would work out on that, then I think that that's something you'll want to consider early in 2024 or at least

in 2024, because I would be surprised if that keeps it up for long beyond 2024. I mean, maybe it'll still last in 2025 and they'll be like, wait a second, hang on, hold on. We didn't thin the herd the way we expected to. Oh, it's because all these people have four credit cards. You know, so I don't think that that's going to last forever either. I would agree. And I think it's probably reasonable that it won't. But anyway, I think they obviously made it too easy. They obviously also, I think it's weird that they're going to allow you to use weird, I don't know if that's the right word, but to use the 100K rollover MQMs to buy an additional year of your 2024 elite status. That is such a generous change beyond what they

initially announced, especially because they allowed people to continue rolling over these MQMs so generously throughout the pandemic and keeping their status rather. It's just like, that seems like you're going to have all these people that have status for the next, like you said, four or five years. Cause I think there's a lot of things like 2 million miler, 3 million miler. It's probably a relatively small crowd that has that. And I'll recognize there's probably a small crowd overall that has four or 500,000 MQDs, but not as small, right? I mean, so I don't know. I think that's weird to have made it so easy for that crowd to keep status. Good. It's nice. It's great.

Yeah. I mean, at the same time, I mean, this was the number one thing that I felt like they had to change because the original plan was so negative towards those of us who have earned, you know, have been loyal to Delta based on the old definition of what loyalty meant and earned all those MQMs. Now, in my case, it was mostly through credit card spend, but regardless, that's how they counted loyalty. And so I was loyal in that way. And many people through flying earned it. And they were just sort of like slapping us in the face before, you know, like all that rollover

means almost nothing to us. It is how it was. Now, I agree. It seems like they almost went too far in the other direction. But I'm happy from sitting where I'm sitting. Yeah, man, I'm happy for you and the listeners who that will apply to. I mean, it's great news. And maybe Delta looked at it and said, well, they know that there's going to be a bunch of Greg the Frequent Milers with four years of status that he doesn't really deserve, so to speak. And maybe they said, well, we can live with waiting four years because we're rolling these changes back anyway because they realized it was too much too fast and and they're just going to gradually four years from now get to the point they wanted to be at next year uh because they i mean they

made it clear that the changes they initially announced were where they wanted to get they just realized that maybe they did that too fast and they need to do it more gradually. So maybe this is part of the solution for doing it gradually. It placates the Gregg the Frequent Milers out there by giving them status for a few more years before they make it really hard to get elite status. But that still changes things materially in the sense, like you said, I expected those upgrades would become pretty easy to come by, you know, come 2025 and not going to be the case probably now that they won't be for a while yet. But overall, I think this is good news for our crowd for now. Yeah, yeah, totally.

Suddenly Delta's back in play as gameable and more than ever. And wow, I just did not see that coming. Who did? Who did? Nobody. So congratulations, Delta, I guess, for really turning things around. I think that that has to be one of the most extreme about faces we've seen in terms of walking back changes. Totally. And again, if you just looked at the numbers, you probably would have missed that. the most extreme about faces we've seen in terms of walking back changes. And again, if you just looked at the numbers, you probably would have missed that, right? If you just looked at the MQD numbers, you would have been like, oh, okay, they walked back a little bit,

but it's still too much kind of a thing. It's really, you got to look into the details of the cards to see the beauty and the changes. And then, of course, the MQDs. So lots of good stuff there. All right. I think that brings us to this week's question of the week. So this week's question of the week came in through email. And so it's a general question that I don't think we've talked about in a

while anyway, but probably talked about it once or twice before, but it's probably been a while. So Justin wrote in and he wrote in about a month ago, so I apologize for the time lag here on the question, but the question's about maximizing student loan repayment. Since student loan repayments are restarting in October, I'm wondering if there are creative ways to pay them back. In the past, I've just paid them through my checking account.

I've learned that there may be a way to pay through gift cards with gift of college cards. So it led me to think about a way to pay student loans with visa gift cards and blah, blah, blah, and yada, yada. So rather than get into the rest of the weeds with the question, now that a lot of people are facing student loan repayments again, Greg, what's the best way to earn credit card rewards on that? Yeah, yeah. So there are these gift cards called Gift of College.

And if you're really lucky, you'll be able to find Gift of College gift cards loadable to $500 at a store where you could earn bonus on your credit card. So for example, Nick has, what is it? Cumberland Farms gas stations in the Northeast. And so he could go in with his, for example, Wyndham earner business card, which earns 8X at gas stations, buy these cards, earn eight points per dollar buying them, pay a small fee for each one, but it's more, that fee is way more than offset with the, um, with earning eight X or, you know, even if you were earning like three X with a city premier card, it would still be worth it just as an example. Um, and then you could, uh, use those

gift to college gift cards to pay back your student loans. They could also be used by the way to, uh, fund a, to fund a 529 account in advance. So that's two ways of using those same cards. The other thing you could do, and this is fairly new, is there's an app called Flues. And Flues will let you buy Gift of College gift cards with no fee. And if you load your account with cash and pay with cash, or you connect a bank account and pay that way, then they'll give you one and a half percent back when you buy these things. So this isn't really about that part. What I'm describing now isn't really about earning credit card rewards, but it's about saving. I mean, you basically are saving one and

a half percent on your college loan payments or your college loan savings if you're putting it into a 529 account. That's kind of amazing to me. Well, it really is because, I mean, depending on where your interest rate is on your loans, that could wipe out a lot of the interest rate effectively, right? If you're saving one and a half percent and it's a significant amount for anybody who's got a significant number in loans. I mean, for every 100,000 you have in loans, talking $1,500 in savings, I guess, right? If you're paying it off straight up.

And then, you know, again, it makes the cost of borrowing the money relatively cheap if you have a low interest rate, you know, student loans. So I think that is an interesting play, an interesting idea in terms of how to do it if you aren't just looking for the credit card rewards or if you don't value the credit card rewards enough. Although on the flip side, if you do have an option to get these at a gas station, earning just like you said, 3x on a city premier, if you cash that in for 3%, then you're going to be pretty close with the activation fee in terms

of whether the flu's play. The flu's play is probably still a little bit better in that case, if you're only earning 3x. If you've got a card that earns 4x or better, maybe it's, I don't know, I'd have to do the math. I didn't think about that end of it. I think that's a really interesting strategy. Justin also asked, is there a way to pay student loans with Visa gift cards that waive the activation fee? You get them at Staples when they're waiving the activation fee. Like, you know, this week as we record this, I think MasterCards have no activation fee at Staples next week. I think it's going to be Visa cards.

So is there a way to pay with those to avoid having to pay the activation fee on the gift to college cards? Well, what's your what's your answer to that? Let me turn that around. I don't I don't know. I don't think so. Yeah, same. I mean, there have been over time bill payment services that have come and gone where you can use debit cards to make bill payments to certain billers. And so it might be possible to go into a Walgreens or somewhere to pay your bills with a debit card and use one of these fee-free cards.

But there's so many things that it depends on which gift card issuer it is as to whether these things will work and it changes all the time. And then, of course, you have to find that particular biller that whoever you got the mortgage from is on there on their list of of billers. And so all that stuff means maybe. But it's kind of a long shot. I'd rather go gift to college where it's going to work. Right. It's going to be relatively easy. And if you mentioned this, forgive me, but I didn't process it if you did say it. So we mentioned buying the gift to college cards at like

Cumberland Farms or wherever they're available. Keep in mind, you can also buy them online, but they're only in smaller amounts. So the maximum amount on the card is $500 when you're buying it in person and in many places, maybe not everywhere, but those are the ones you want because they have a 595 fee for a $500 card. You don't want to pay a 595 fee on a $200 card, for instance, which is the case if I buy them online, I think, because then you're just paying a percentage that's so high in fees that it's not worth the rewards. Exactly. Exactly. All right. So hopefully that helps. And also, you know, we have a resource about miles for college, right? So that's something we probably need to look at refreshing and republishing for people that are now facing loan repayments. This is a really timely question. So,

so you can, you can find that in our resources on our resource page. Yeah. All right. If you've enjoyed today's episode and you'd like to get more of this stuff in your email inbox each day or each week, you want to go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe. Again, that's frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. You can follow us on all the various social media and join our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group where you can discuss this type of stuff all the time. If you have a piece of feedback that you'd like to be considered for a mailbag or a future question of the week,

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