Frequent Miler on the Air - Diving into Delta's huge card offers | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep375 | 9-17-26

Episode Date: September 18, 2026

This podcast episode is sponsored by Saily. Saily is an ESIM service app created by the security experts behind NordVPN. Instead of paying absurd daily rates to your home carrier or swapping SIM cards on arrival, Saily gives you flexible prepaid data plans in over 200 destinations worldwide. Download Saily from your app store and use our code FREQUENTMILER at checkout to get 15% off your first purchase. https://saily.com/frequentmilerIn today's episode, we'll get a Wild Card challenge update (including some cool tips regarding Capital One travel), Greg reveals that he's considering a United status match, Nick reveals he's considering a Delta status match, and we discuss the latest huge Delta card offers and how they relate to status matching.Wild Card Challenge Update(01:22) - Learn more about the ongoing challenge here.(03:01) - Nick's Wild Card update(09:52) - Greg's Wild Card update(17:16) - Find the Wild Card challenge landing page with more information hereGiant Mailbag(17:39) - Patrick asks, "Do we make hay while the Amex sun is shining, or are we crazy to keep piling into a currency we’re already very rich in?"Bonvoyed: Amex/ANA & AwardWallet(22:43) - Amex/ANA(24:40) - Award Wallet is changing how expiration alerts workThis Week in Points(28:50) - Chase news...(35:04) - Qatar Airways removed restrictions that limited the ability to redeem Avios for other peopleRead more about this update herePersonal Points(37:25) - Efteling: Book it through any of the major channels. Theme park tickets included with your stay!(40:57) - Greg's considering the 120-day United status match(45:36) - Nick's considering the Delta status matchMain Event: Diving into Delta's huge card offers(49:58) - Through November 4, Amex has some of the biggest welcome offers we've ever seen for Delta credit cards... all the way up to 200,000 miles...(50:28) - Some notes before we dig in...(56:13) - Quick overview of the 6 cards we'll be talking about(1:01:45) - Gold card offersLearn more about the Consumer Delta Gold card hereLearn more about the business Gold card here(1:05:18) - Platinum card offersLearn more about the Consumer Delta Platinum card hereLearn more about the Business Delta Platinum card here(01:10:06) - Reserve card offersLearn more about the Consumer Delta Reserve card hereLearn more about the Business Delta Reserve card hereSubscribe and FollowVisit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media.Music Credit – “Ocean Deep” by Annie YoderCheck out all of our other travel podcasts from around the worldThis podcast is part of the Voyascape Network, a collection of some of the world’s best travel podcasts. Explore more at Voyascape.com. For advertising or sponsorship opportunities on this show and across the network, email [e-mail] or you can find more information at Voyascape.com/advertsing.

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyescape.com. This podcast episode is sponsored by Sayley. Sayley is an e-Sim service app created by the security experts behind NordVPN. Instead of paying absurd daily rates to your home carrier or swapping SIM cards on arrival, Saly gives you flexible prepaid data plans and over 200 destinations worldwide. Setup takes just a couple of minutes on your phone before you leave. your data activates automatically when you touch down.

Plus, in order to reduce your data consumption, Saly actually blocks malicious sites, trackers, and annoying ads while you browse. Whether you need a quick gigabyte for a weekend away or unlimited data for a longer adventure, Saly keeps you connected without any surprise bills waiting for you at home. Ready to upgrade your international roaming? Download Saly from your app store and use our code Frequent Miler at checkout to get 15% off your first purchase. Details are in the show notes. In today's episode, we have a wild card challenge update, including some cool tips for Capital One travel.

Greg is considering a United status match, and believe it or not, I'm considering a Delta status match. And we'll discuss the latest huge Delta card offers and how they relate to status matches. Frequent Miler on the air starts now. Today's main event, diving into Delta's huge card offers. We're currently seeing some of the biggest. Delta welcome offers that we've ever seen before. And some of them are really interesting. They're not the usual, just more miles kind of thing.

You've got some twists on things there. And so we're going to talk about the new enhanced offers in today's main event. Yeah, you know, I'm interested in finding out more about what you think about those offers because there's a reason I'm considering a Delta card for the first time ever. So we'll see. We'll talk about it in a little bit. But before we do that, remember if you want to jump ahead to that part of the conversation or you want to come back to something, don't forget to expand the show notes to read the description

and find the timestamps so you can jump ahead or jump back. And wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to give this a thumbs up. Give it a like, hit that like button, hit the subscribe button, leave us a review. We appreciate all of that. All right, let's kick things off today with a wild card challenge update. So what's going on with this? What is the wild card challenge, Greg? Yeah, just real briefly.

So as you know, listeners, every year, the Freakomiler team makes up a new challenge, a new game where we challenge each other to make the most of points in miles. And this year, it's the wild card challenge where if you listen to a recent episode of the podcast, we actually did a live stream where we randomly picked cards that, that defined for us where we need to go, how many points and miles and sort of credit card perks we have to get there, and also some obstacles and power-ups. And so all of that was so much fun to do, for one thing, but it's also, it's made for a really fun game of like, how do we optimize this sort of random collection of assets and obstacles to, uh, to complete the goal. And, um, as we're recording this, we're, we're going to be starting our actual travel next week on, um, Tuesday. What is it? September 22nd. That's right. That's right. Yeah. And I'm glad you mentioned optimizing,

because, you know, we'll have to see who optimizes the most. I like that that's a, that's a, that's already a metric that Greg's throwing out there into the world. So, of course, Carrie and, uh, and Stephen are judging this. And so, that we've got a whole page you can go to to check out the Wild Card Challenge. So we'll have a link in the show notes to that. Quick update for me. So as a reminder, I've got Capital One miles from the venture card. I've got Lufthansa miles, the Marrioponvoy points, and some Cathay Pacific miles as well.

So that's my sort of budget. And I have to visit Guadalupe, Vietnam, and then we're all meeting up in Melbourne, Australia. So I wanted to update with a couple of small tidbits and pieces. a lot of people have pointed out the fact that there is an Air France flight from Miami to, I'm not going to say this right, point to peach, which is the capital of Guadalupe. And in a more perfect world, I would have booked that on Air France for either 9,000 Virgin Atlantic miles or I think Air France flying glue, maybe charges 7,000 if I remember correctly. I say if I remember correctly, because I took a free MSC cruise out of Guadalupe a year or two ago.

And so I was familiar with the ways to get there because I had to have to have. had to look into it to get there for that cruise. So that was my first thought also. But unfortunately, that flights only operated on Fridays and Saturdays, I think. And Greg pointed out, we're departing on Tuesday. And our first check-in is on a Thursday. So unless I wanted to be there for like five days ahead of the check-in, which is not going to be the case here. I couldn't take that particular flight.

There's also Air Canada from Montreal. But again, just operates on the weekends at this time of year. It's hurricane season. So a lot of airlines don't have the same frequency at this time of year that they do at other times of year. In absence of that, I could have just flown to the Caribbean and taking a cheap flight on a low-cost carrier. And actually, I feel like maybe I missed the boat here, so to speak, in that I could have flown to St. Martin and switched from one side to the other and gotten that video on Maho Beach. If you're not familiar with Maho Beach, you can give it a Google and you'll see

why that would have been a fun place for me to stop. So spoiler alert, I'm not going to be on Maho Beach. But you'll see what I have cooked up pretty soon. Cathay Pacific, that seemed like an awesome have there with 38,000 Cathay Pacific miles and some points transferred from Capital One. You would think that I'd pretty easily find business class or at least premium economy from Vietnam to Australia. Spoiler alert, that's not going to be what I'm using in that case. But you'll see what happens during the challenge. You have to keep your eyes peeled for it. none of the above were easily available, unfortunately. Like all of those things sound great, but they weren't as good. I could have done, like I said, the low-cost carrier thing from another

Caribbean island. I didn't want to do that because I really wanted to book carriers that could be booked with miles, something that people could easily replicate and, you know, it not have to depend on the cash cost of a ticket. So, so I did not do that. In the real world, though, we drew our cards on September 9th and all of my flights were booked two days later. And September 11th, I was all done booking. So believe it or not, this was actually not as hard for me as a lot of people thought that it would be. Part of it is that I didn't want to hesitate. I knew if I hesitated that Greg and Tim would take the flights that I wanted to book. And I couldn't afford to have that happen. So I needed to make sure I jumped on it really quickly. And so a couple of kind of small tidbits for you, a little slice, a little appetizer. I will only be staying in four star or better hotels. And more than four. 40% of my flight miles will be in premium cabins. So you'll have to watch out to see how I do that. A couple of quick, interesting findings that have jumped out at me so far from doing the challenge. Of course, we do these challenges because they lead us to find things that we may not have found otherwise.

And so first off, I had success with the Capital One travel price match. And it was surprisingly easy. I found a hotel through Capital One Travel. And of course, as part of the current introductory offer, offer on the venture card. There's a Capital One stays credit at the time we're recording this. And so that's part of my budget for this trip, a Capital One stays credit of $300. So I found a hotel I wanted to book, but I found it cheaper elsewhere. So I was booking a non-refundable rate, though, because I wanted to use as little as possible. So it was a little bit of a nail-biter in the sense that I had to book the non-refundable prepaid rate first proactively and then call Capital One for the price match.

hope that it was going to go through. But I was really pleasantly surprised the entire phone call from the time that Capital One travel picked up. And when I say picked up, I mean, when the phone tree, you have to navigate begins till I got through to an agent till the price match was done. And I hung up the phone was, I think, eight minutes and 16 seconds. Wow. Nice. Yeah, it was really quick, super easy. The person just took, asked me the questions about where I found the better price, how much it was. it was like lickety split like okay great you've got a credit for a future booking so uh really pleasantly surprised with how easy that was speaking of capital one travel the other thing that jumped out at me so far is that i found at least in one instance and i don't know if this is a one off yet

or if this is a pattern because i haven't had the time to dig into it yet but i will uh i noticed a difference a pretty sizable difference in the rate through the capital one travel app on my phone versus the desktop version of Capital One travel for the same hotel, same rooms. I looked at a specific place with three different room types and those three different room types. Two of them were 21% cheaper in the app than they were on the desktop version of the site. And both non-refundable, it was the same exact booking looking at the same exact time in both devices. And it was just significantly cheaper in the app. And so I booked through the app and it went through. So it all worked fine. Again, I don't know if that's just a weird one-off.

or if that's a pattern, but it's worth checking probably because on the higher end room type, it was a difference of like $75. So it wasn't, you know, a small, tiny little difference. It was a pretty, you know, pretty significant difference in that case, I thought. So anyway, that's something to be aware of. Last two little things, I had some weirdness with a phantomy award booking. So I look forward to sharing how that got worked out. I went through a booking and I got a confirmation code, but then I kept putting it into the airline website. and it said that it wasn't there.

And then I checked the account through which I booked it. And it showed that I had no bookings, even though I still had the confirmation page up with the confirmation code. And I tried putting it in on the booking site and didn't work at all. And I had to call the airline, get that one ticketed and worked out. So I look forward to sharing more about that as the challenge goes on. Keep your eyes peeled for some phantomy stuff. And then I'm just last thing I'm going to mention is that I've got some fun activities lined up.

So I'm actually pretty excited about a couple of things. I have planned. My trip is like, I would say 80% planned at this point. And I feel pretty good about that. A lot of times, you know, at the last minute, I'm trying to figure out the last few things. I feel like I'm pretty pretty close to done with this one. So that's amazing. I am nowhere near that. All right. Let me give my update. So as background, what I drew, whereas I have a bunch of Delta miles, a bunch of MX membership rewards points. I have a bunch of Marriott points. And I have a bunch of and I have a handful of American Airlines miles. That's my budget.

I need to get to Panama, Columbia, and then Melbourne, Australia, as does everybody. Last week, I complained, I guess, that I had bungled my use of my power up by picking to stay in the Central America region by going from Panama. Panama to Columbia rather than Panama to China, which was my original pick. Once I started actually searching for award flights and everything, though, I realized actually it was great. It turned out to be, believe it or not, kind of too easy. My first... Oh, I believe it, Craig. I believe it.

You believe it, yeah. Yeah, I don't have to go to Guadalu. Let me get back to the two easy part. So, you know, the first thought about going from Central America to New Zealand, I mean, Australia or New Zealand, is that there are a few ways using Delta miles to get from South America to down under. And so, you know, my thought was I would go from Columbia to more South America. Southern South America and then fly across. But so what I was looking at is China Eastern, which is a Sky Team airline, flies from Buenos Aires to Auckland. And then I could, you know, take a cheap flight maybe from Auckland to Melbourne.

LaTam has flights from Santiago, Chile to Melbourne, Sydney, and Auckland. So, and both of those airlines are bookable with Delta Mile. So theoretically, I could have used my miles for that. But there was no award availability on any of these routes for the dates I needed or even close to the dates I needed. And I don't mean no business class, no premium economy. I mean no awards, basically. Like, you could not fly economy, you know, in the toilet in the back of the plane with miles on these, unless I somehow had Latam miles, but then even those, it was asking way too many for any

credible way of doing it. So, yeah, so that was the situation. So I, you know, I gave up on that route, but even without, you know, looking for that route through South America, I found easy ways to get to Australia. And, but I wanted to do something really clever with my miles. And I had a plan. I had the perfect plan of how to do something really cool, get business class flights really cheap for, you know, about half the trip. And there was a word space available in business class that I could have done, but the obstacle card I picked was that I'm a night owl, and I'm not allowed to pick flights, book flights, that depart before 10 a.m. And the awards that I needed were available were before 10 a.m. I could not do that trick.

So, yeah, it really hurt. So I'm going to write up, I'm going to write up the trick on the blog soon, but the here's the I guess the good news is that it didn't really matter like it was a clever trick but my path is so relatively easy I didn't even have to do that trick to complete it all to book everything that said that said I was bored with my initial plan for how I would fly from point eight to point there were like no good tricks involved And so I found another option that is so far out there from anything I considered before and probably anything anyone would have considered for me before. And I figured out how to make it work.

So I kind of threw all my cards up in there and said, I'm starting over with this plan, doing it differently. And you're going to have to wait until sort of midway through my trip to see what it was that I did. Because the beginning of the trip is the same. And I think it'll be, I think people will be intrigued about, about the whole thing. So looking forward to that. Where I am overall, so I have my flights booked. I only have one hotel book so far.

And not a single activity planned yet. I have a solid idea about one of them. But I'm not quite to that stage yet. All right. So you got some more work to do over the weekend. And so if you have some help for Greg the Frequent Myler, then you could probably comment on the podcast or we'll each have journal posts going up over the next few days, hopefully as you hear this, where you can chime in with your tips and things also. And you know, I said that I have a lot of my stuff planned out, but I haven't made final decisions on I've got more things that I could do than I do time in at least one of my destinations. So I'm certainly interested in recommendations, particularly food recommendations, actually,

because that I have not dug into yet where I'm going to eat. And that's important. So anyway, I hopefully will get some help with that once I get my journal post up so you can see exactly where I'm going to be and what I'm going to be doing. But yeah, this is actually going to work out well. I don't know about you, Greg. I mean, I imagine you're going to have plenty of time in your destination since they're so close together.

I'm going to have more than 24 hours in both of my destinations before Melbourne. And then I don't know if I'm getting there first, but I know I'm not getting there last. And I'll compete for getting to Melbourne first, I think. So maybe I'll be a little behind, Craig. Yeah, I made it so that I would have at least a full day, meaning I sleep in a hotel and then have a full day and then sleep in a hotel at each destination. And so, yeah. So it should be a very comfortable trip, actually. Whether I can get in enough really interesting activities to make it exciting, we'll see.

I think the award booking part, especially for the second half of the trip, a lot of people will be very interested in. Nice, nice. Generate a lot of maybe even controversy about what I did. Oh, okay. I'm excited. I love a little controversy. All right. Sounds good.

I am not going to say that my trip's going to be comfortable. I won't lie to you like that audience. I won't. But it'll be fun, hopefully. All right. So let's move into this week's giant. Oh, by the way, so again, you can go to Frequentmiler.com and you'll see a banner at the top that has a link to all the wild card stuff. So as the thing progresses, you'll want to keep an eye out there. So you can also join us for our live streams because there are two live streams during the challenge if you haven't been following along yet. So definitely check that out. Just go to Frequentmiler.com and you'll see a link right at the top of the page to the wildcard. challenge stuff. Okay, now let's drag out this week's giant mail back. All right. This week's giant mail comes from Patrick. And I'm going to start by saying that Patrick's message is meant to be ingest mostly because it's going to sound strange from the beginning. So Patrick writes, I feel like my family is under attack from Amex. MX membership rewards is already by far, our largest transferable points balance, mostly from years of heavy spend in one business. Recently, I opened a business platinum for a different business and quickly earned the 300,000

point welcome bonus. Now I have another large expense coming up, and Amex is targeting me with another 300,000 point business platinum offer. Meanwhile, my wife, who already has a platinum, just received a 100,000 point gold card mailer and a 70,000. 25,000 Blue Business Plus offer. Even better, it looks like my 40K referral still triggers her 100K gold offer. And to add to our first world problems, her 45K platinum referral is showing me a 175k personal platinum welcome offer. So the question, do we make hay while the Amex sun is shining, or are we crazy to keep piling into a currency we're already very rich in? You know, it's tough when the points parade marches through your town, isn't it?

Right through your household. Isn't it tough? I say pick up a baton and march along. I mean, if it's coming through, right? I mean, there's no reason not to that I can think of. Those are some great offers. And if you have them available, I mean, I've mentioned the MX points parade, you know, called it that numerous times before.

And it really has been that way for the last. last several years. So I mean, I'd say join in. What do you say, Greg? Totally. Totally. And you know, MX points have been kind of stagnant for years as far as the value, like what you could use them for. They hadn't been changing it much. But recently they added the leading hotels of the world transfer at a good rate where you could get two cents per point value booking leading hotels of the world. And, you know, so if you're looking at it like, I have too many points for all the flights. Maybe start looking at some luxury hotels as well as a way to use your points.

Yeah, I would totally go after this. Enjoy, enjoy while it's good. You know, a lot of people are going to be listening to this being very jealous. You know, this, what you described, Patrick sounds a lot like what was available to most people during the pandemic when the Amex Points parade was seriously marching for almost everybody. I haven't seen those kind of offers targeted to me personally or anyone in my household personally for a while. So, you know, the points parade may end for you, but maybe because you spend big with your businesses, you know, maybe MX recognizes that and wants to keep you on the hook. So keep enjoying it. Yeah, and I will say the while I have not had the offers that you mentioned here in my account, the parade has slowed, but it hasn't stopped.

have offers in my account to add another business gold or another business platinum. And so, uh, so I, you know, I, I, I think that like Greg said, take advantage while it's there. There's no reason, no good reason not to, uh, you know, and I, I will caveat with there does come a point where you've got so many points that you don't necessarily need more points, but if you get to that point where you don't feel like you need any more points, then the welcome offers can still be worth it because if you have a Schwab platinum, you could, you know, cash out some of those points. You could redeem them. for deposits into your brokerage account at 1.1 cent per point and invest that money. And the bonuses

are really solid. Now, I'd rather use those for traveling. But at the same time, if you've got millions and you can continue to earn a million, two million, five million a year, whatever it might be based on your business spend, then, you know, it would be a reasonable use of points that way. And these welcome offers are really solid. So yeah, I would definitely take advantage while you can. I would also caution that some people may say, well, watch out for ending up in pop-up jail, which is a term that people use because they'll get a pop-up from Amex saying that they're not eligible for the welcome offer on a card. And nobody really knows why that happens. There's a lot of speculation about different reasons. I'd be less concerned about that if I were you because it sounds like you spend big through a business. So I would think that getting more cards is probably not going to be a huge problem with Amex in your case. Yeah, and I'm sending Nick to a lack of alliteration prison for not calling it. I said, not calling it pop up prison. Oh my goodness.

That was a, that was a big faux pa. Thank you. Thank you very much for calling that out. Hopefully somebody can bail me out of pop up prison now. All right. Next up, Bonvoid. Amex and ANA. How did Amix and A&A bonvoy us?

I saw this headline, but I actually haven't dug into this. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's not really a lot to say about it right now, But transfers from AMEX to A&A, people are reporting that them being severely delayed in most cases. Not for everyone, apparently. I guess some people have been able to get their points, but a lot of people initiated transfers and been waiting, like, weeks for them to come. It's typical for them to take about three days or so, but weeks is ridiculous. I dodged a bullet here because I seriously considered for the challenge.

using A&A because I can, you know, transfer from membership rewards to A&A. And, you know, my whole thought process was before the news came out about this. And so I would have been really stuck if this happened. So I feel for anyone who's in this situation that that's terrible. Supposedly, MX is working on trying to fix that connection. But, and I'm sure they will eventually. So hopefully by the time this airs me, maybe it'll be fixed. We'll see.

We can hope. Yeah, that's too bad. That's certainly frustrating when you're waiting to be able to book something. And then you watch your award availability evaporate. And with A&A, the miles have, I think, a hard expiration. So then you're going to be stuck with some miles that you have to find a use for. And that really stinks. So I hope they get that resolved. I'd really like to see it go in the opposite direction where transfers become instant. You would think in 2026, we could probably find a way to make that work, MX and A&A. Yeah. If only computers could move the points instead of, you know, having people or mules move them from one place to another. Those mules are having a hard time getting across the Pacific from Japan.

It's a long swim. It's a long swim. Or two, yeah. Yeah. Yes. All right. Now, next step under Bonvoid, we have got award wallet. Award wallet is changing how the expiration alerts work.

So people who have a free award wallet account, now let me back up, I guess, if you're not familiar, a word wallet is a tool for tracking your points balances across all. all the major, I say all the, let me back that up to, across many major airline and hotel programs. So some of them are very easy to link up and some require a little bit of effort on your end. But at any rate, there is a free account and there's a paid account. Those of us on a free account got an alert this week or an email this week saying, because you're on a free account, a word wallet currently shows expiration dates for up to three of your accounts, but alerts you about all of them.

So shows the dates in your account for up to three, but it'll always send you a an alert or it has always sent you an alert to let you know when something's going to expire. However, starting October 1st, expiration dates and alerts become an award wallet plus feature. So if you want to see the expiration date of your points or be alerted before they expire, you'll need an award wallet plus subscription, which I believe costs $50 a year. Yeah, $49.99. Yeah, this is tough. It's not that $49.99, that's not that much a year to pay for a piece of mind, but the problem is over the years, Ward Wallet has become sort of harder to use, not their fault, but as all the airline and hotel programs are adding two-factor authentication,

the ability for Word Wallet to log in for you behind the scenes to check your balance and update its system has degraded. So like more and more and more. you know, I have dozens of programs set up within my award wallet account. And last I looked, it said, like, 70 of them need attention. 70 out of, I don't know, 100 or more than 100. But, and that means that it wasn't able to log in without, like, a code that was sent to my email or my phone when I was sleeping or whatever. So, yeah, so, you know, we're in this, like, tough situation.

Some other tools, points path is one. I know there's others, are taking a different approach to this. What they're doing is they are setting up browser extensions, which will just kind of be there so that when you log in to your Delta account or whatever, it'll see how many points you have an update its system that way. the problem, and that works pretty smoothly as long as you log into all your accounts now and then. That's one issue with that. But at least as right now, as far as I know, those alternate tools don't cover nearly as many points programs as a Word wallet does.

So I would like to see a Word wallet add an optional extension plugin that does this as a way. of kind of fixing their the problem they have. So I don't know if they're going to do that or not, but if they do, I would feel better about just paying that $50 a year. Yeah, I don't know. I'm more on the fence on this because I just, the ones that I care, that I want somebody to track for me are the ones that I'm not logging into all the time. So, you know, it's not terribly useful for, I mean, I know, I know how many Southwest points I have because, you know, I go there to book enough flights. So I don't really need somebody to track my browser activity to tell me how many points I've got there or an American. It's the programs like Avianca Life Miles that expire after 12 months that I'm

not logging into regularly where I want to, you know, have that. So, but like you said, it's become difficult because for good reason, a lot of programs have gone to more two-factor authentication. But, yeah, I don't know what the solution is there, but I'm not, I'm not yet convinced that the solution is paying the $50 a year. Yeah. Yeah. So everyone will have to make their own decision on that. Yep. Okay. This week in points. Chase is out with some big updates or big-ish. I don't know if I should say big.

Some updates. What's up? What's going on with the Sapphire Reserve Business card? Yeah. So first Chase update is with that card. Starting November 15th, the 3X social media and search engine advertising category bonus is going to be capped. You'll only earn 3X on up to a million dollars of spend per card member year. So if that worries you, then you're obviously a big spender in that category.

Probably the bigger change that will impact more cardholders, I think, is starting January 1st, instead of getting just $250 per year the edit credits, you will get four of them. So Chase is advertising this as like $1,000 of, you know, I'm kind of laughing about it because it can be difficult to find good value opportunities to use these that they require a two-night stay. The edit prices are often inflated over other booking channels. There's only so many of the edit properties in any given place you're looking. Many places there are none. So, you know, I think for most people, they're not going to, actually use it more than they had been, but for a few people, for the people that find good uses for the edit, I mean, having four of them, that's great. Yeah, I think it really just depends on probably where you travel, because the coverage on the edit is so-so. You know, you happen to go to

some place where they've got good property options, great. But it's, I think that's a pretty slim set of, or a subset anyway, because there are a lot of places where they don't have any properties or They have very few, or like you said, the pricing is not as competitive. I have used my edit credits this year, and I use them with points boost at two cents per point on a recent booking. And so I was reasonably happy with the value that I got out of at least a couple of our edit credits. But I don't feel like I need four of them a year. I already have four right now because we have two Sapphire Reserve cards in our household, though. We'll downgrade one of those soon.

So I don't think I need more than two of them. So that wouldn't excite me a lot. But if you're traveling somewhere often where there's a good edit option, then you might be excited about that. I think that that's the kind of thing where I couldn't imagine who the Sapphire Reserve business card was good for before. Now at least I guess I can. Someone who travels a lot to places with a good, the edit presence. Then it works out, I guess. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Next up is a reminder. On October 1st, Chase is slashing the Hyatt transfer ratio. So transferring Chase Ultimate Awards points to Hyatt is going to drop to four to three, instead one-to-one, unless you have a Sapphire Reserve Reserve for a business card. So if you have like a Sapphire preferred card or an ink business preferred card, for example, your transferation is going to drop to four to three. If you know you're going to need, you know, Hyatt points before that, transfer before October 1st, after October 1st, of course, your option you could get a Sapphire reserve card to transfer one-to-one,

or you could, you know, maybe you could upgrade to the Sapphire Reserve from your preferred only when you need that one-to-one transfer. If you're going to be doing a big transfer, it could be definitely worth doing that, even if it's only a temporary upgrade. Yep, absolutely. agreed. All right. And then the last Chase update up is that there is a 70% transfer bonus out to Marriott. 70% from Chase to Marriott through October 15th. What do you think, Greg? 70% is that enough to get excited about? Should people be considering this? Looking for opportunities. Would you transfer speculatively?

What are your thoughts about the 70% transfer bonus? Well, I mean, it's looking like Chase is loving Marriott more than Hyatt, isn't it? Because they're degrading your ability to transfer to Hyatt and they're grading your ability to transfer to Marriott, at least temporarily. The problem is on average, a 70% transfer bonus to Marriott does not, on average, like Marriott points are worth around 0.7 cents each. And so a 70% transfer bonus is getting you, I don't know, around 1.2-ish. Somewhere. Somewhere. between 1.1.1.2. Somewhere in that ballpark cents per point value on average.

Now, that said, Marriott Redemptions, there's a wide range of what value you could get. So if you're looking at an opportunity to get, you know, over one cent or one cent or more value per point with Marriott, then this transfer might make sense to top off your Marriott so that you can book that valuable stay. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I've found a number of good opportunities with Marriott over the last year

where you could get pretty good value out of a 70% transfer bonus, though I certainly wouldn't be doing it speculatively because those are not the norm necessarily. And there are many situations where you'll get less than reasonable redemption value. So even with a 70% transfer bonus, you're just not going to do it as well as you might. otherwise also keep in mind that Marriott sometimes puts their points on sale and when they do sometimes they're less than a penny a point and so transferring here instead of just buying points might not make much sense if you can buy points on sale if you don't need them right now then I would be less enthusiastic about this. Oh totally. Yep. All right. And then finally, Qatar Airways removed a bunch of restrictions that

limited your ability to redeem avios for other people. So you might recall a couple of months ago, I guess it probably was when Qatar introduced all of these new restrictions on redeeming your obios for other people. You'd have like a my list and a who's this and a what's that. And some people could have an account or not have an account or they need to have an account. It was really confusing. So I'm glad to hear it's easier. So can you explain the new simplified way? Oh, it's not simplified. No, no, no. It's easier. There's a big distinction here. You still need a what's it list and a who's that list. And people can only be added to the what's it list if they are under 18 and have never had an account.

And you can only add to the other list. There's bizarre rules about that. Those lists still are necessary to book flights for other people. What's changed is before in order to create and maintain those lists, you had to have a co-branded credit card and have earned miles from it or flown a flight with Qatar Airways itself and credit and earn miles from that flight. So that was the hard part is like how do you accrue miles on a flight? It's not that it was like that hard because you could you could theoretically I think we learned that you could fly like American Airlines or something and credit it to Qatar to meet that rule.

But they took out that. So now there's no particular barrier anymore to creating a list. You have to have been a Qatar Airways privileged club member for at least 30 days, I think. can there might be some other like really easy rules like that but um no you still need to figure out how to how to add people to these lists so that's not that hasn't changed you as far as I know good luck with that so yes slightly easier but not easy so that's a I guess goodish news you got work to do guitar keep keep making it a little bit easier if you want people to use the program all right moving forward to personal points I quickly wanted to mention a post I wrote

this week about Efteling, which is a theme park in the Netherlands, because it was amazing. And I want to mention it both A, because the park itself was hands down our favorite part of our recent trip to Europe. And a theme park would not have been what I would have guessed would have been our favorite part of the trip to Europe, but it absolutely was. And it's a theme park we will go back to for sure. And I'm somebody who I'm not, like, I know there are a lot of big Disney fanatics out there. They go to Disney again and again and again.

I'm not that kind of person. In fact, I've been to Disney a few times and I don't. really feel a draw to go back personally. Efteling, I feel a huge draw to go back there again. So it is significantly different for me. Great park, a lot of fun. I think something that's really notable about this park is that, first of all, the prices to stay on property are relatively on par with Disney.

They're maybe a little bit less expensive, but pretty close to what it costs to stay on property at Disney, which is to say it's not cheap. However, however, and this is the big, however, when you stay on property at Efteling, the theme park tickets are included for your entire stay, including the day you check in and the day you check out. So if you stay one night, you get two days of admission to the park.

You stay two nights. You get three days of admission to the park. And that's a huge difference, particularly for a family. When you consider the cost of theme park tickets for most theme parks these days, I mean, they've gotten ridiculous and Disney tickets in particular. So expensive. So it's a huge ad.

And not only is that pretty cool, but you can book through third parties and still have that. So if you've got the Capital One's days, credit. I checked Capital One travel to make sure, yep, it's there. Theme park tickets included. If you've got Hotels.com gift cards that you've earned from Capital One shopping, you could use those and book through Hotels.com. If you got like the city hotel credit or built hotel credit, you could use all of those various hotel credits to book this place. So obviously within the rules of whatever those credits require a two-night minimum or this or that. But end up with a relatively

reasonable cost of accommodation that also includes your theme park tickets. So, and it's a great theme park. I mean, the fairy tale forest, we spent hours wandering around this fairy tale forest. It's not even a ride. It's just they have these life-sized replicas of fairy tale houses and things that have animatronic characters. Really neat to look at. The attention to detail is amazing. So it's definitely a place that I would very highly recommend going to. It's about an hour and a half south or southwest of Amsterdam. So it is a little bit of a ride. You could fly into Eindhoven. That'd be a little bit closer. Only about 20 or 30 minutes from there. So you've got a couple of options. but I would definitely, if you like theme parks,

I definitely recommend it because sometimes with like flying blue promo rewards or Virgin Atlantic, there are times when you can fly to the Netherlands for less than what it would cost you to fly to like Florida or California to do a theme park there. And this is a theme park that I would say at least competes. I mean, if you're a Disney person, you may always love Disney and prefer Disney,

but I don't think you'd be disappointed going to Efteling. It's all the like classic fairy tales that you would know and lots that you don't know. So all the brothers, Grim stuff, you know, the Sleeping Beauty and Snow White and Hansel and Gretel and Rumpelstil skin and like all the different famous fairy tales that you know as a kid. And then some that just seem to have never made it across the Atlantic. So totally worth it. I wanted to give a shout out because it was our favorite part of the trip and something that's a really good value when you're

booking one of the on property hotels. There's four different on property hotel options that include those theme park tickets. So so check out the post for more info. Yeah. All right. Now, as far as my personal points, one thing I wanted to bring up is that I am considering doing a 120-day United status match. So I could match from my Delta Diamond to, I think, top-level United status. And the way their match works is you don't get matched immediately, or you don't get the new status immediately. you need to trigger it with a paid flight. So I would need a paid United flight to trigger the high level status,

and then I would have it for 120 days. And then there are numbers of the status points that you need to get to complete the challenge. which is much less than what you would normally need from United if you were just starting from scratch. And you have the 120 days to complete it. And if you time things right and complete it in January or February, anyway, completed in early 2027, the status that you get from it, you maintain the status past 120 days all the way to January of 2029. So, yeah.

So if you have high-level status with a competing airline and you're interested in getting United status for a while, this is good timing right now because 120 days goes into next year. So anyway, so I'm really considering this because I do have the opportunity to book a triggering flight in mid-October. and I also have some other travel where I could legitimately earn United status points from paid flights that I would have booked, you know, they're reasonably priced compared to what I would have booked some other way. And so that would get me a long way. Plus, the status challenge now

lets you earn from credit card spend, which was not something they used to do. And so, you know, I maybe would consider applying for and hoping to get a United Club card, maybe the business club card, to get the welcome offer bonus and the ability to earn a high number of, high-ish number of status points per dollar spent so that I could complete the challenge with a combination of actual flat. and spend. And yeah, so I haven't decided 100% yet, but it seems pretty likely that I'm going to do that. That's exciting. That's a really good opportunity and one that, boy, it would appeal to me also. I had to double check because I was curious how, like when you can, when you're eligible again, if you've done one in the past, because I did do a United Status match, I believe

before our party, a five challenge, if I remember correctly. And so I, because I recall getting extra legroom seating. Three years? Is that what it is? That's what I read in the terms, yeah. Oh, very good. Yeah. So for me, it's been about seven years, I think, since I last did it. So I should be able to qualify.

Well, it's been about three years for me. So the Google AI answer told me five years. So there's another reason not to believe everything you see on the internet. Or everything Greg says. Because I was late at night when I was looking. of this. So I am not 100% sure about the three-year thing, but I do know it used to be five years. So whether or not it's still five or it's dropped to three, not sure. Yeah. All right, I just looked up the United Terms for their status match. And I was right. It says three years. It has to be,

it has to have been at least three years since you last did a status match. That's good to know. You know, the AI summary is not always right. And I do try to be careful about that. I'm glad that you knew the answer this time around and we're able to verify it. So thank you for that because I don't know, maybe I would have failed to have double checked. I should have known to double check that, but maybe I would have failed to. I'm glad you looked that up. Speaking of status matches, I am considering the Delta status match. Yeah, believe it or not, I'm considering a Delta status match, even though I rarely fly Delta. Can anyone guess as to why I might be considering a Delta status match? Well, let me, let me tell you a little bit about why. So about a week ago, I got looking at this,

And I would have sworn that it said that all of the JetBlue elite statuses matched to Delta Gold. In fact, I remember asking AI whether I would get a higher level of status with JetBlue Mosaic 2 than I do with American Airlines platinum if I matched over to Delta. And AI telling me, no, they match to the same Delta Gold either way. So that's why I think I'm not crazy about that. But then, but then a couple days later, I looked and there must have been an update, I think, because now Mosaic 2, 3, and 4 all matched to Delta Platinum, which has its appeal for Sky Team Elite status and things like that.

So I've been curious about it and I was taking a look at it. And I wondered whether this would be a good fit for me. So I'm very tempted, but I had a question. And my question was, if I did that match, right? First of all, could I do the same thing that Greg's talking about doing and earn the MQD is necessary to like extend this for even more than just next year, but the next couple of years, is it possible for me to time it out similarly? Because with Delta, you only get a 90-day window, but maybe that would mean I'd have to

delay doing the match and started a little bit later and completed in January. So my first question is, would that work? And then my second question is, if you do a status match with Delta, just like with United, you need to earn a certain amount of elite statusy stuff. Delta calls them MQDs within a short period of time. So if I do the match to platinum, then I would need to earn 3,750 MQDs during the 90 days in order to keep the platinum status. And I know that some of the Delta cards come with a head start of 2,500 MQDs towards status. And so I want to know, does that count? Like, would that get me most of the way to the 3,750 MQDs? Will spending on the card help me bridge that gap. So what do you know about this? Greg, you're the Delta expert here. Yeah, the good news is

that spend on the credit card, the MQD's urine from spend, those will count. The bad news is the head starts will not. It's pretty clear in Delta's status match FAQ that, you know, it's spelled out. The headstarts don't count, unfortunately. So that's not easy. As far as your question, question about timing, could you do the same trick of waiting to complete it till January? I look that up and unfortunately no. So Delta does their status match challenges a little bit differently. They have like a new one each year and it has a defined like date when your match status will end. And so if you do the 2026 challenge, it doesn't matter when you start it. If you do that challenge and you complete the challenge requirements within the 90 days,

then you keep status through the end of January 2028. So basically all of 2027 and one month into the following year. If you want to have status the longest, what you want to do is wait until 2027 for Delta to come out with their new status match challenge, which will probably happen in February of 2027 and then, and do it then because then you're, if you complete the status challenge, you'll keep that status all the way until January of 2029. There you go.

So that would be the way to do it. So unfortunately, with Delta, what matters is when you enroll. So if you enroll in the challenge in 2026, you're going to have status for 2027, doesn't matter when you complete the challenge. Whereas with United, what matters is when you complete the challenge. Right. So the difference, key difference there.

All right. We'll be right back after this with our main event, diving into Delta's huge card offers. And we're back. Let's dive into Delta's huge credit card offers. We're seeing best ever, I think, offers for the MX Delta Gold, platinum and reserve cards. These new offers are available through November 4th. And at the top end, we're seeing all the way up to 200,000 miles as the welcome bonus. But some of the cards have different spin on what you get. So we're going to talk about that. First, before we dive into the offers

themselves, there's a bunch of stuff that you need to know. about Amex, about Delta cards, and so on. First, two of the consumer cards, the non-business cards that we're going to talk about, the offers are described as as high as. So it'll say, like, you can get as high as 100,000 points or whatever. What does that mean, Nick? Can you explain that? It means that you'll fill out the card application and then Amex will say,

yeah, we like you. We'll give you the high offer. Or they might look at you and say, I don't think I need to give you that much to get you to apply for this card. So you're only going to get this amount. And then some people get something that says, you know what? You have the card if you really want it, but you can't have that welcome offer. And so they tell you how much after you've filled everything out, they tell you what kind of an offer you qualify for. And then you have the choice to either continue with the application and submit it or not. And so that really is, I don't know, it's crummy because you don't know for sure until you do it. And they advertise this big number that many people do get, but you don't know if you're

going to be able to get that offer or not. I feel like that. I don't like that. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing to know in general about Amex cards is that welcome offers, most of the welcome offers have lifetime rule language, meaning it says something like, you may not qualify for this welcome offer if you've ever had this card before. And the may is important because

sometimes you will. And also sometimes MX forgets over a long period of time that you've had the card before. So even if you've had a card before, it could be worth filling out the application. Just like the as high as thing, you will get a chance. Like it'll tell you if you're not eligible for the welcome offer before it asks you, do you want to proceed with this application anyway or cancel out? So there's no harm other than the time invested in trying it out. Yeah. And I think that's really important that what people refer to as the lifetime rule really isn't a rule. It's like it's a possible exclusion. Very similar to as high as means you may possibly get the highest offer or you may not be eligible is you may not but you may be eligible then

so it's it's worth checking like great said yeah yeah um lastly the consumer versions of the delta cards have family rules um now to to understand this first i need to describe delta's sort of hierarchy of credit cards um at the low end well at the very low end you have the Delta blue card. We're not going to talk about that at all on this episode. It always has an awful welcome offer and it doesn't have any perks or anything to talk about. So the real hierarchy that we consider is at the low end you have the Delta gold card. Next card is the Delta Platinum card and the most expensive is the Delta Reserve card. So what is the family rule then and why did I have to explain that hierarchy? Well, the family rules that are

are that if you've had essentially, if you've had one of the expensive cards, then you may not be eligible for the introductory offer, probably won't be eligible for the introductory offer on one of the less expensive cards. So if you've had the reserve, you probably can't get the welcome offer on the gold or the platinum. However, on the flip side,

they're happy to have you pay more. So if you've had the delta gold before, you can later get the platinum or later get the reserve. It just needs to be one of the higher. You need to be stepping up the ladder. They don't want you stepping down. ladder, then which is stepping up at. Right, right. So, and this is not for the business cards, but just the personal cards. So if you're thinking of getting personal cards and you want to make

sure you get all the offers over time, you want to start with first applying for the Delta Gold card and then later getting the Delta Platinum card and later getting the Delta Reserve. Okay. Another just general thing to know is, in general, Delta cards are not particularly valuable for spend. The points you earn per dollar spending on your Delta card is usually bad value. What I like Delta cards for is for the welcome bonuses and for the ongoing perks that you get. And we're going to talk more about the perks in a minute. They can be very valuable to have, just generally not valuable to put spend on. There are a couple exceptions, I want to mention. If you're chasing elite status, the Delta Reserve card gives you one MQD per $10 spent.

And so if you find MQD is very valuable because you really value the elite status you might get from it, then that could be worth the spend there. The other one is at the low one, the Delta Gold cards, they have a perk which requires $10,000 of calendar year spend. You get a $200 Delta flight credit. So for the first $10,000 you spend on the DELTA gold cards. Delta gold card, that can actually be pretty valuable because in addition to the Delta Skymiles you're earning, you're getting about 2% back towards future Delta flights.

And so that's pretty good. All right. Now, again, before we talk about the welcome offers, let's give an overview of the Delta cards themselves. All three of these cards, or really, I should say six, gold, platinum and reserve, there's, for all three, there's a consumer version and a business version. So for all six of these cards, if you have one, you get a 15% award discount as long as your award is entirely flown on Delta itself, not on partners. You get an extra free check bag. So, for example, if you have elite status that gives you one free check bag, then you'd have two free check bags. You get priority

boarding, and you get a $10 per month ride share credit. So that's with any of those cards. The gold cards, they have a $0 introductory annual fee for the first year, but then they cost $150 per year after that. And they offer that $200 flight credit with $10,000 spend. I already talked about, and all the perks I already mentioned that are in common with all the cards. The platinum card, now that's a step up in price, so that's $350 per year, but that adds an economy companion certificate each year after renewal. So you don't get it your first year, but once you renew your second year and onward, you get it each year.

it'll give you $2,500 of MQDs. So that right there just automatically goes to your Delta account. What that means is you're halfway to silver status just by having this card before doing anything else. If you get two of them, if you get like the platinum consumer and business one, you get silver status because you have 2,500 MQDs from each of them. Even without any elite status, you get complementary upgrades. grades. And you get either $150 or $200 Delta Stays credit each year. So you book a prepaid

a hotel through Delta Stays. And I've found good prices through there. And you'll get $150 back each year with the consumer Delta Platinum card and $200 back with the business platinum card. So the business one has a leg up there. And both the business and consumer have $10 per month resi credit. So when you spend at any resi restaurant, you get $10 back. Okay. Now moving up to the Delta Reserve card, that one has a $650 annual fee. So $300 more than the platinum cards.

And instead of the economy companion cert each year, you get a first class. companion cert each year after renewal. So again, not the first year. That one, it could be used for economy flights, but you could also use it for like first class flights to add a companion for free plus the taxes that they would have to pay anyway. You also get the $2,500 MQDs, just like the platinum card as a automatic thing towards elite status. So in theory, if you had all four like the business and consumer platinum and business consumer reserve card, you would have 10,000 MQDs each year just automatically with all four of those cards. And that would be gold status without lifting a finger. But of course, that's a lot in annual fees. I was going to say

you'd be lifting out of your checking account a little bit, though. The Delta Reserve card also gives you complementary upgrades, just like the Platinum one does. But Delta Reserve card holders are considered first, but if you don't have status, you're considered after everyone who has status, basically, on the upgrade list. The reserve card also gives you Delta Sky Club access, 15 visit days per year. It also gives you four Sky Club one-time guest passes each year. You get an Amex Centurion Lounge access when flying Delta same day, and you get bigger Delta stays credit, the platinum cards, so $50 more. So you get either $200 or $250 with the reserve card,

depending on whether you have the consumer or business card, and $20 per month in Rezi credits. So a lot of good perks with these cards. One thing I wanted to mention, you mentioned that the Rezi credit, when you talked about it on the Delta Platinum, you said for any Rezi restaurant, but I wanted to clarify that it's for eligible resi restaurants

because Amex did fold in the Tock restaurants a couple of months ago and not all of those are yet eligible for Resi credits. I think eventually in the long run they probably will be, but I did just see that Alinea in Chicago is leaving for open table. They're leaving Resi. So that's an example of a restaurant that's on Resi right now, I think, and probably is intelligible for the credit, I would assume. So just check most Resi restaurants are going to be eligible,

but you do want to check in Resi to make sure it has the little badge saying that it's eligible for the Amex credits. Yes. really good point, really good point. All right, why don't we dig into the offers. Do you want to describe the offers, Nick, and then I'll give my two cents? Sounds good. They're more valuable than my two cents. So it's a good exchange there you're getting with Greg's two cents. So the gold card offers, this is the $150 a year card, but of course the first year the fee is waived on both of them right now as we record this as part of the introductory offer. So the, The consumer Delta card right now has an as high as 80,000 miles introductory offer.

So you can get as many as 80,000 miles and a $250 statement credit. So that's a nice little benefit on a card with a wave fee in the first year. After $3,000 and spend in the first six months. So you get six months to spend $3,000. That's a pretty good spending window, pretty easy bar to, I think, meet for a lot of folks for 80,000 miles and $250. bucks. The business version, it's 90,000 miles after $6,000 spend in the first six months of card membership. So you've got to spend more if you want the business version of the Delta Gold card and no $250 statement credit.

Is that right? That's right. But this one does not say as high as. So, you know, this one is just 90,000 miles. So that's a big advantage. In this case, though, overall, so if you were to qualify for the 80,000 miles with the consumer version of the card, I would take that plus the $250 statement credit over 90,000 miles with the business card. Because you could kind of think of it as like, would you trade 10,000 Delta miles for $250? I would do that in heartbeat. So and that's and that's not even factoring in the fact that the the consumer card has a lower spend requirement, much lower spend requirement.

So in this case, I'd say the consumer card has a potential to be the better offer here. And it's really contingent on that as high as language. Either way, both offers, I believe, are bigger than anything we've seen before with these two cards. So if you're interested in the either Delta gold card, either one, I think it's a great offer. This is a great card to have for people who are not particularly interested in Delta elite status, since it doesn't have those MQD boosts and things, but fly Delta occasionally because the Delta stays credits kind of eliminate or sort of pay back most of the angles. fee and then other you know other benefits make it worthwhile especially like getting free check bag and so on so if you fly delta just now and then i think these are both solid cards either one

is a solid card to have yeah and you know you can usually count on getting one cent per point or a little bit better towards delta flights so you could easily look at these as at least eight or nine hundred dollars worth of delta flights and potentially more depending on you know yeah find a sale you might get more and probably more because the 15% discount will give you better than that 1.1. True. Not a huge amount of better, but better. And so, yeah, it's definitely, we're talking about easily around more than $1,000 of value you

could get from these welcome offers, which is great. There you go. All right. The platinum card offers are next. So this is the $350 a year card, $350 annual fee on either side. The consumer version is, of course, an as high as offer, as high as, 90,000 miles plus a $300 statement credit after $4,000 in spend in the first six months. Again, 90K and $300 statement credit for 4K spend.

The business version, the business Delta Platinum card, is a welcome offer right now of 100,000 Delta miles after $8,000 spend in the first six months of card membership. So double the spend for an additional 10,000 miles, no statement credit. Do you feel similarly here as you did on the consumer version or what do you think here? on their gold card rather, or is this different? Well, so this one, I'm a little surprised that these offers are not that much better than the gold card offers. So I feel like in the past, usually the platinum card offers are significantly better than

the gold card offers here. You're looking at, you know, 10,000 extra miles and $50 more statement credit. So it's not a big improvement. you know, if you've never had the gold or the platinum card before, I would definitely go for the golden and then wait in the future for to see. Maybe there'll be a better platinum offer in the future. If you're looking for the platinum card, though, I mean, these are definitely very good offers.

Don't get me wrong. It's just that, you know, you expect a bigger offer with a more expensive. of card. These cards, I think, are the sweet spot card to have if you fly Delta frequently and are not looking for the higher end perks that the Delta Reserve card offers. But because these cards come with bigger Delta stays credits and the annual companion ticket, for those who fly Delta a lot, especially with a companion, you can do really well with these cards. Yeah, you know, I think that campaign certificate can easily be worth pretty close to the annual fee on this card for somebody who flies Delta often enough that they know they'll use it. Yeah, no, easily, easily.

Yeah. All right. So those are the platinum card offers. So again, between business and consumer, would you, would you lean towards the consumer version? I mean, it is, it's only an additional 10,000 miles on the welcome offer for the business version. And it's double the spend. but of course the consumer version is that as high as language, which one would you be leaning towards here? Yeah.

I mean, once again, if you didn't care whether it was consumer or business and you were eligible for the top offer on the consumer card, I like that offer better. It has, you know, the $300 statement credit more than makes up for the 10,000 fewer points. And it has half the spend requirement. So it's a better offer. Some people may prefer in general, though, to get business amex cards instead of consumer ones, especially if you're worried about wanting to sign up for more Chase cards in the future. Because Chase will not see your MX business cards that you've signed up for when they're considering have you – Chase has that 524 rule where they're like less likely to prove you if you've opened five or more credit cards in the – the past 24 months, the business amex cards are not going to affect that count. So some people may prefer it for that reason.

Yeah. On the flip side, you could look at the consumer delta platinum as feeling like it, almost feeling like it comes with a waived fee in the first year, right? Because that $300 statement credit covers most of the annual fee anyway. So it's almost like getting it with no annual fee. Not quite. I mean, you still pay a net $50 for it in that first year. assuming you meet the spend for the introductory offer.

But that could certainly make the perks worth it, I think. So, yeah, like you said, depends on whether you care about 524 or not. Yeah, I guess one more thing why you might prefer the business cards, though, is $50 more Delta stays credit each year. Across the board, gold, platinum and reserve, you're getting more Delta stays credit. So if you're looking at this as a long-term card to have, then I would look, I would, I'd be less worried about the welcome offer piece of this and be looking more at what's its long-term value and the business one has better long-term value because of that. Very good. All right. And then we get to the reserve cards. So this is the expensive, splashy delta cards. The Delta

reserve cards have a $650 annual fee. The consumer Delta Reserve card right now has one of the most interesting offers we've probably seen for this, certainly unique and different. 50,000 miles. Now, that might not sound exciting, but it's 50,000 miles plus two round-trip flight certificates. And you got to tell me more about that. So I'll let you tell me more about how that works in a second. But it's 50,000 miles and two round-trip flight certificates after $10,000 in purchases in the first six months. So I'll let you explain how that works. But first, I'll mention the Delta business, the Reserve Delta business, the Delta Reserve business,

the Delta Reserve business. I can't remember which order they put it in. The business version of the Delta Reserve card has a very different offer. So no round trip flight certificates. Instead, it's 200,000 Delta miles after $20,000 in spend in the first six months. So big spending requirement there. We'll come back to that in a second. Let's back up to the consumer version.

What's up with these two round trip flight certificates? What does that even mean, Greg? What are those good for? Yeah. So they are advertised as Delta Comfort. flight certificates. So Delta Comfort is like their sort of economy plus, not premium economy, but just sort of like slightly more legroom. It's really like economy, but front of the economy cabin and it's sort of treated as if it's a separate cabin, but it's not. These are good for

travel to the United States. The, well, the 48 connected United States, as well, the 48 connected United States, as well as Puerto Rico or the U.S. Virgin Islands. So there's a lot of potential places that you can't get to with these. But if you travel often within the United States or to Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands, then these are good for that. There's no blackout dates. So if you are looking for flights around Christmas time to a warm destination, that fits within these requirements.

You know, Delta's economy prices are through the roof during that time. And you're talking about getting not just economy, but comfort. And it will be all included except for taxes. You do have to, there is a 21-day advance purchase requirement. And taxes and fees up to $80 per person apply. Travel must be booked and completed. In other words, it must be fully flown by January 15th of 2028. So these will expire after January 15th, 2020, 8.

So you have more than a full year to use them. Yeah. So, you know, I find this just really intriguing because I'm certainly in the position almost every year where there's some kind of like high season travel I want to do. maybe to visit family in Florida. So it doesn't say, like normally, flying from Detroit to Florida is pretty cheap. But these days, in the wintertime and peak season,

it's extremely expensive. And especially if you're working around things like, you know, I need to return home on a Sunday so that my wife can be at work on Monday morning, those are the worst. Like, believe me from my experience that prices to come home from Florida on Sundays in the winter are crazy expensive. So these are intriguing to me because it's sort of like get out of high-price jail free once. And I say once because if I'm traveling with my wife, this would give me two tickets for free, which could be worth a ton.

I mean, it could, these could easily be, you know, way more than $1,000 for these round trips, um, easily. Okay. So that sounds exciting, right? Right. However, now let's look at 200,000 miles for the business one. Uh, if we don't consider that it requires twice as much spend. So it requires $20,000 spend instead of $10,000 for the consumer card. If we don't consider that part.

This one has 150,000 more miles than the consumer card does, which has 50,000 miles. So with those extra 150, so here's the question. With those 150,000 miles, can you get as much value as you could from those two round-trip flight certificates? So I think you can count on getting, let's say, around $1,800 in value from the $150,000 Sky Miles, the extra $150,000 that you'd get with the business card. You could, as I said before, you could ease, you could be getting significantly more than that with these certificates if you are going to book, like, these seemingly expensive rates in high season, right? That's a big F. You know,

yes it is. And Delta Sky Miles never expire. The flight certificates do. So if all else was equal, I actually, I would, oh, and the other thing that the Sky Miles can be used for flights anywhere to Hawaii, to other countries. they're not limited to the U.S. and Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands. Yeah. So for me, it's really a no-brainer.

Well, I shouldn't say a no-brainer. You have to think through all this. But I like the 200,000 miles better than the consumer two round-trip flight certificates plus 50,000 mile offer. But they're both really, really good offers, especially if you could use the two-round trips for really expensive flights. Yeah, you know, I absolutely, totally agree with you. I feel like the number of situations where you'll get more value out of two round-trip flight certificates than you would out of the additional 150,000 Delta Sky Miles is like pretty limited.

And so if you're in one of those few scenarios, great. And otherwise, I'd probably be more interested in the 200,000 miles. Though, you know, you did say, and I think we've got to address it, that there is a huge difference in spending requirements. So the opportunity cost of spending the additional $10,000 on the business version of the card is not to be ignored necessarily. Now, if you've got a business and or you just spend plenty, right? So that's a negligible difference to you. Then maybe you don't need to bust out the calculator and figure out the opportunity cost of putting all that spend on the Delta Reserve business. But at a base level, if you put $20,000 and spend on the consumer version of the card, you'd actually

end up with 60,000 miles. So the difference is now 140,000 miles, right? So, because you put an equal amount of spend on both cards, then the difference becomes somewhat smaller, potentially. So, so, you know, I think it's, you do have to consider how much is that going to cost you to put the additional $10,000 in purchases on the business version. On the flip side, these are the best cards for spending towards elite status. So if you want MQDs, right, what do you get? One MQD for every $10,000 in spending? on these? For every $10.

For every $10 spent, right. So for the $10,000 spend required with a consumer card, you'd earn $1,000 MQDs with the Delta Reserve spending $20,000, with the business one, spending $20,000, you'd have 2,000 MQDs. Now, we talked early in the show before the main event that if you're doing Delta status match or status challenge, that the MQDs, that the MQDs, earned from spend do count towards qualifying for that status match. So you have six months to do this. So if you sign up while these offers are still available through, what did we say,

November 4th or something like that? So if you sign up, you know, towards the beginning of November, you've got six months to complete the spend. So one opportunity here is sign up, don't put any spend on other than like for qualifying for stays credits and things like that. Then apply for the status challenge in February-ish, I think is when the new one will come out, then start the spend and that'll count towards helping you meet that challenge. Yeah, I think if you're interested in something like that, then the business version makes a lot more sense. though I say all of that. And actually, either way.

Both of them would work for that. Both them would work for that. The timing is, I think, of interest as well, because for people who do a lot of resale, we're about to hit that part time of the year when there are lots of resale opportunities. So meeting big spend requirements are a lot easier in the last few months of the year.

On the flip side of that, early into the new year, many folks may have the opportunity to use tax payments to meet spending requirements. So we're really at a time of year that's ideal either way if you want the MQDs and the big offers. So I think that if you qualify, I think the reserve cards are probably worth a look. I would lean towards the business one though pretty strongly. I'm not as confident about two round trip flights, trivigants that expire. I don't fly Delta nearly as often as Greg does. So that's much less appealing to me than the 200,000 miles would be, though, if you're in a Delta hub like Greg is and you fly Delta a lot and you know you're going to fly during a super peak period, you already have your eye on something that's super

expensive. I could see the appeal of the consumer card. But either, well, I should say on the consumer side, you do want to just, I want to caution again, as Greg said, if you were to sign up for the consumer reserve and you haven't had the consumer gold or platinum before, you might be locking yourself out of a bonus on those cards. So, you know, consider starting closer to the bottom of the latter if you're new to Delta Cards. This episode was produced and edited by Carrie Yoder, music by Annie Yoder. If you've enjoyed what you've heard today and you'd like to get more of this in your email inbox each day or each week, go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list.

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