Frequent Miler on the Air - Do we undervalue Delta card welcome offers? | Ask Us Anything Ep83 | 2-4-26

Episode Date: February 8, 2026

Do we undervalue Delta card welcome offers? How do you guys maximize SkyTeam? We answered these and many other questions on the Ask Us Anything hosted live on February 4th of 2026.(00:39) - Given the amount of travel and exposure to different cultures that the whole frequent miler team has had over the years, what experiences have changed how you live day to day back home? For example, after a trip to Italy, I became very interested in espresso to the point where I bought myself an espresso machine that I now use every morning. Has something similar happened for you all?(07:42) - Greg and Nick laugh at the idea of “things we do to keep the banks happy,” but only after they spent the Main Event discussing how they spend extraordinary amounts on credit cards – which surely keeps the banks happy! I appreciate Nick mentioning that his habit of keeping Amex cards >1 year might make Amex happy, but it’d be nice to keep some perspective given that most listeners/readers/watchers aren’t spending nearly the same amount as you two. So it’s logical that we might think more about “keeping the bank happy”.(13:23) - Should I open frequent flyer accounts at EVERY possible airline? Is there any downside?(14:57) - Has anyone here applied for the Disney Inspire card?(19:08) - What would you pay for a subscription to a benefit? How do you value the Alaska Atmos 100K companion fare?(23:06) - For issuers other than Amex, are there any pitfalls to be aware of when buying merchant-branded gift cards online to hit minimum spend for SUBs, from obvious gift card websites like DoorDash Gift Cards?(27:13) - I'm overwhelmed. Do you use a flowchart on how to make decisions on how something is booked? For Loyalty points, using points, using cash, using a portal, which portal...(32:55) - ​​Do you think we undervalue Delta card welcome offers? The 15% discount gives you more award flight buying power. 90k miles gives you the buying power of 103,500. Is that a bad way to frame it?(35:20) - Do you think of Citi transfers to AA as the best transfer option, similar to Chase and Hyatt?(40:26) - ​What are your thoughts about the revised BofA Air France/KLM Visa card? I have thought that that card is a acutally better for SkyTeam than any Delta Airlines related card. AF/KLM vs. Delta cards?(42:25) - ​​Is it possible to change which airline is credited to a flight after your bags are checked but before the flight departs? I'd like to get my free AA bags but have the flight credited to Alaska(46:13) - Best use of Wyndham now that Vacasa is gone and no Caesar match in Vegas? Any other options like Vacasa?(48:40) - ​​My friend wants to transfer 100,000 Citi points to me. I know that’s the yearly limit, and they expire in 90 days. My question is, if I get them then transfer them, do my ThankYou Points transfer first or the gifted ThankYou points(49:30) - ​Since Delta is crazily underwhelming, how do you guys maximize SkyTeam?(51:55) - Do any of the FM team ever get denied for credit cards? Has anyone ever been in pop-up prison? How do you avoid denials?Visit 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 – “swappin’ back n’ forth” by up @ night

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyscape.com. Welcome to Ask Us Anything, where the Frequent Myler team answers your questions live. All right, Frequent Myler's Ask Us Anything starts now. Yes, and wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to give us a like or a thumbs up. I guess that was my cute. Sorry about that. Wherever you're watching, you're listening, don't forget to give this a thumbs up, like it.

We always appreciate that. and go to Frequentmyler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. All right, let's kick this off. Stephen, I know you got a question for us. Yeah, we had an email from the reader this past week, and it was a really interesting one, so we figured it would be a good one to ask first. So their question is,

given the amount of travel and exposure to different cultures that the whole Frequent Mila team has had over the years, what experiences have changed how you live day to day back home? For example, after a trip to Italy, he became very interested in espresso, to the point that he bought himself an espresso machine that he now uses it every morning has something similar happened for us all.

So I guess... Sir, what do you think? You know, what's funny, I do think I became way more of a food snob after traveling. So, like, you know, I stopped going to Thai restaurants because they're never,

they're never authentic, which is a sad, that's a sad, you know, that's more sad. Yeah, I don't know. How about you, Nick? Well, you know, it's funny that the person who emailed in this question mentioned coffee because that was one of the first things that came to my mind because I had never seen a French press until we were at a fancy hotel somewhere. It's not something that my family used at home or that I had seen before.

And now I use a French press every morning. I grind my own beans and make a French press of coffee every morning. So, you know, there are a lot of little things like that. I actually have a, I feel like a lot to say about this. So I might write a post at some point about it because I think it's kind of an interesting topic because I think there's different ways that travel has changed me day to day back at home. Sure. You know, there's ways it's influenced my perspective. It's ways that it's influenced habits like the French press and lots of other stuff too. So but I thought this is a good one. I'm curious about everybody else's take, though. How about you, Tim? So yeah, I mean, I think that I would argue, and again, I think it's a big topic. You'd probably spend the rest of the hour and beyond talking about how, how, how.

travel has changed us. The first time that I went overseas was when I was a freshman in college and my roommate and I were in the computer lab. So you had to go to a actual central area where they had computers. And we found a ticket in the middle of the next week from Omaha to London for like $140 round trip on price line. So we just bought it and went to London. And I think I was eight, I would have been 18 at the time, 17 or 18. And ever since then, I would say that it just blew my mind. Like to me, and I, and I'll go as big picture as I possibly can, to me, almost the most invaluable thing is context. Like, it creates such a bigger context for the world, for how people live, for what people value. There's things that I think it's given,

it's given me such a better viewpoint on my own country and where I live in comparison to it. It's given me such an appreciation for, I think probably at that point, I was sort of unnerved by things that might make that were uncomfortable or that were different. And I think I've gotten, because of travel, become much more, much more interested or much more delighted by those sorts of things. Those things are actually like invigorating for me now and not just tolerate, not just tolerant, but invigorating. So yeah, to me, it's an invaluable. And still, every time I travel, like every time I travel, there is stuff along those lines, like within that kind of big. picture. There's just ways that I understand my own life in the world in a different and broader and I think more more vivid context than I do without it. Like what a luxury like refrigeration is

like you go to Southeast Asia, Central America like you go to a little corner store and buy a drink that you think is going to be cold and the the refrigerator is a closet. It's like it's funny you both say that because I think the biggest thing like the biggest way it's changed. my day to day is not sweating the small stuff because, yeah, like, you realize all of the, those little things that are, that you might feel like go wrong, but you realize it's just different in different places and it gives you more perspective on this really isn't very important. Totally. Yeah.

Yeah. And for sure. Greg, how about you? Yeah. Well, the funny thing is I'm going to copy off a Nick a little bit, because he mentioned the French press. And absolutely. I do a French press every single morning, and it came from following a trip to Costa Rica,

where I learned how much I enjoyed that. But I'd say, you know, as far as more meaningful changes, I've always been kind of shy about, like, meeting new people and stuff, and, you know, travel has, like, I don't know, it's taught me over the years to, like, really actually seek out the type of experiences where you're put together with people in a situation where you'll have a good chance of talking with them. And so, like, I like things like small B&Bs where you're sat at a communal table together with other travelers and you can't help but, you know, have a conversation and you get to know them. Because if you're not, at least in my case, if I'm not kind of forced in that situation to

have that conversation and ask, you know, start asking them questions and everything. it's that's not as likely to happen. So that's a big thing during I'm sort of going on my way to make to try to ensure I get into those kind of situations. Yeah, that's a good one. Stephen, how about you? For me, like one of the things is that distances don't seem very far. That is a good one. And I don't actually mean on the grand scheme of things in that like everything's just an award flight away. I just mean like we're driving anyway. It's not that far because growing up in the UK, if you have to drive more than like 20, 30 minutes, that's a road trip somewhere because everything's like so close together that I didn't learn to drive until I was 26 years old

because I never needed to learn to drive because I could like take a bus or walk or get a train anywhere I needed to go or to go to work and things like that and we could get groceries delivered and things like that. And so yeah, if we ever had to like take a car journey anywhere then like anything more than now is just like ugh. But now like having lived in the US where like everything's so much further apart and like doing a 50 state road trip and things like that. Now like we live up in the north of England and it's a five hour like six hour drive to Heathrow Airport depending on what traffic's like and now it's like okay it's not ideal but okay we'll just do it in a day and like just drive all the way down and like stay overnight at Heathrow

the night before our flight and we're good and so in the past I would never have like considered that I just would have found some way to like fly out in Newcastle every single. single time because that's only an hour away from where we live. Whereas now it's like, okay, fine, we'll do the five or six hour drive. So just things like that. And specifically having lived in the US, that's kind of helped my mindset with that. Yeah. Well, and I think there's things that impacted my day to day life from travel. And then there's things that impacted my day to day life from nomadic travel, which I think is a little bit more what you're talking about, Stephen. It's like the road trip. But anyway, you're right. That could be like a

whole. We could spend an hour on that. Instead, we're going to move on to another question. So Greg, we're going to start with you. Greg and Nick laugh at the idea of things we do to keep banks happy, but only after they spent the main event discussing how they spend extraordinary amounts on credit cards, which surely keeps the banks happy. I appreciate Nick mentioning that his habit to keep amex cards greater than one year might make amex happy, but it'd be nice to keep some perspective, given that most listeners, readers, watchers aren't spending nearly the same amount as you two. So it's logical that we might think more about keeping the bank. happy. So I want to just know, do you have a comment for that person's kind of like mailbag type? Sure. So this was in response to, I guess, a conversation Nick and I had on the podcast where we answer the question of whether we, you know, go out of a way to put like spend on certain credit cards to keep the bank happy, I think. I don't remember actually the exact situation. Yeah, that was pretty close. And we certainly, if we laughed about it, we certainly weren't laughing at the idea of someone doing it, more at the idea of us doing it. I think that that's not something, at least in my case, if I was laughing at it, it's more like it's just not something I worry about. And, you know, I think the person who wrote in here has a good point that Nick and I both do a lot of spend anyway. So maybe it's not something, maybe that's why we, we, we might react that way. That said, my perspective on it is, is this that we don't know that

spending a certain amount on certain credit cards is going to make, let's say, Amex is usually one we're talking about when this conversation comes up. We don't know that that'll make you less likely to end up in Amex's pop-up prison where they won't approve you for new cards. So that just doesn't seem to me like a really good idea of a way to focus your spend versus focusing it on new welcome offers. And if they're not from MECs, then from other banks and just going for what you can get. So that's my perspective on it. When I have a question for all of us, but I think for both of you two along those lines,

I think there's a – that question to me or that comment, makes an assumption that when you talk about, like last week, it was a great podcast, you talked about the things you do to increase credit card spend, that you're doing large amounts of spend on individual Amex cards. And that's what's keeping you going. Now, my assumption would be that's not the case, that when you're doing large amounts of spend on an individual card, it's probably not Amex. And when you're doing spend on an Amex card, it's usually to meet a sub or to meet a welcome offer and then you may be transitioning to a different card. Is that correct? Or do you do lots and lots of spend on individual Amex cards? Okay. So two or three years ago, I forget

exactly when it was, I did a heck of a lot of spend on Amex cards because there was a one-time opportunity to get multiple years of Delta diamond status through rollovers by spending many hundreds of thousands of dollars on cards. And so I went nuts and and focus, you know, like crazy on those cards. So, you know, I think your overall perspective, Tim, is right that I don't, Amex is not, you know, the cards that I'm usually talking about when I'm talking about big spend. But certainly there have been times where I focused on Amex and that was one. More recently, it was when I accidentally paid my taxes with my wife's business platinum card.

Oh, nice. Because PayPal decided to use a backup card on my PayPal account instead of it. So the one I intended. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, I think that, like, what Tim is saying is, I think for me, absolutely true. I've never pursued Delta Diamond status, like who Greg's talking about. So, yes, I do put a lot of spend on a number of cards.

I'm not even going to say a lot of cards. It's a relatively small number of cards that get the vast majority of the spend, and none of them that get heavy spend are MX cards. I mean, maybe I put a purchase on a card here or there because, like, there's a fine withals and resorts credit to use, so I'll use that. or there's a Lulu Lemon credit to use, so I'll use that. But there's not like other purchases going on my platinum cards. And my gold card comes out at the grocery store and it comes out when I go to a restaurant.

But I'm not putting extraordinary amounts of spend on my gold cards. It's situational though, right? Like so when MX had those deals where you refer someone and then you get an extra 10x or whatever, then of course you would put a lot of support on for those. Right. Yeah. You're right. You're absolutely right about that. Yeah.

But year to year, I'm not saying, oh, how can you? I sprinkle some, you know, tens of thousands of dollars to spend across my Amex cards to keep the bank happy. I'm not, like, individual cards. I'm not thinking about that at all. I'm spending heavily on cards that have some benefit to me that I want for one reason or another because of the big spend. And the other thing is I'm not personifying the bank. Like, I think that whole idea of making the bank happy is such an abstract thing. Like, the bank isn't a person.

It's like, it's not happy or unhappy. You're talking about an algorithm that you're trying to please, I guess. And like, there's no real evidence that there's any way to please an algorithm. So I don't think that like it's worth going out of your way. I can understand, totally understand where the person's coming from and thinking about that. But I don't think it's worth going out of your way for something that's so unproven to make any difference at all. I'd rather put that spend somewhere where it's going to reward me. Yeah.

All right. Nick, this one's for you. Should I open frequent flyer accounts at every possible airline? Is there any downside? I mean, my first reaction is yes. My second reaction is, well, the potential downside is just tracking it all. But, you know, if you use something like- Even obscure little things?

Well, I mean, I guess not ones you're never going to eat. But the thing is, so the reason that this comes up is because when you open a brand-new frequent flyer account, some programs restrict, A, how long you need to wait before you can transfer points in. And they don't necessarily tell you. And other programs, you might be able to transfer the points in. but then if you try to open a brand new frequent flyer account, transfer any huge pile of points and make a redemption all right away, that has been a known trigger, a known flag for fraud activity.

And so that will sometimes cause your account to get locked up. You won't be able to redeem the miles right away. And yeah, you'll probably eventually get it unlocked. But speaking from experience, sometimes it takes months to get that done. So to avoid that, I recommend opening frequent flyer accounts with all the major ones.

You're going to want like Air France, KLM flying blue and all the, the Avis programs and maybe Emirates because they're the ones that flagged me in experience in the past, although there's less reasons to use Emirates these days, probably than before. You don't probably need an account like Thai Royal Orchid. It's not a program that anybody writes about. But any of the programs where you think there's even a small chance that you'll eventually redeem Miles, why not?

Put them all in a spreadsheet, keep all the numbers so that you have it all there. And then you're prepared. Yeah. All right. Stephen, this is for everyone, but we're going to start with you. Has anyone here applied for the Disney Inspire card? Stephen? I haven't and I don't intend to. I wrote about it today, and it is a potentially great card for people who are really into Disney.

I'm not into Disney, and so it's not one for me. But for the right person who does go to Disney every single year or pretty much every year, then it is a pretty good card. And how about everybody else? Anyone else here? Quick yes or no? doesn't seem like it. No, but great deal if you go to Disney every year.

And that's a great point. Because there's some people that really love Disney. Yeah. And they go to Disney a lot. And they, there's some people that every year they do a trip with their father to go to Disney. And maybe with any sisters.

Like maybe, and those people. Those people should probably consider the inspiration. Those people may want to do something. Well, okay, so tell me what makes it appealing, Stephen. Why would I want to? You got Kerry's interest. Yeah. So it's a brand new card.

And so the new welcome offer is a $300 Disney gift card upon approval. $300 as a statement credit after spending. I think it's like a thousand within three months or something like that. But yeah, like the spending requirement is fairly low. It's $149 annual fee, but you get a $10 credit each month when you spend at least $10 bucks on Disney Plus, Hulu or ESPN Plus. It earns 3x at Disney and I think it was gas, 2X on dining and groceries and then 1x everywhere else.

And then it's got these other like spending bonuses and stuff. So if you spend 200 bucks a year on Disney think park tickets, you get $100 statement credit. If you spend $2,000 on accommodation at Disney Resorts or on Disney cruises, you get another $200 statement credit. And then there are like a few other perks. Like you get like 10% of like certain merchandise from their stores, online store, 10% from their merchandise at parks and 10% off like dining places. You get like a character, mean, greed and things like that.

So some of those perks are on all of the Disney cards. I think even like the Disney debit card that you can get with Chase as like some of those kind of deals. Yeah. Like for those like 10% off things and stuff like that. I feel like there's like one or two other things, but overall, like, it's a good card for Disney enthusiasts who are going to be going there every year and spending a decent amount of money, especially if you're going to be spending like $2,000 a year at Disney Resorts on lodging there or on their cruises, then it definitely makes sense because then you're probably also going to be spending like $200 on theme park tickets. So then you're going to be getting $300 worth of statement credits off the back of that, which will more than offset the annual fee. the welcome offer that you get and things like that.

So it's a pretty good card. Wow. For certain people who might... Oh, yeah. My sisters. I'll have to tell both of my sisters about that. All right, Tim, on theme, I have two questions for you, starting with someone wants to know, did you go to Disney or something?

So please explain this hat. Well, so this is, for those who are not resident in the Northwest, this is a clear seahawk. This is what a seahawk looks like as it's flying around in the sky. I'm pretty sure every time you wear it, you have to explain it. Thus far, and the Seahawks are in the Seattle Seahawks, right, are in the Super Bowl this week. And since I started at Frequent Myler, the Seahawks have never lost a Super Bowl when I have worn this hat the week of Super Bowl. And you're hoping to keep that trend alive. I'm hoping to keep that alive so that this week we can revel in Super Bowl glory.

Okay, so now we know. Kind of like how I've never been denied for a Disney credit card. Me neither. What is worth him, my five-year-old is rooting for the Seahawks. Of course, he's five, so he doesn't know any better, but he's rooting for the Seahawks. Oh. And what team is it that you support, Nick? Well, we don't even talk about football anymore.

What's the next question? This is a football podcast. Tim, this next one is for you again. What do you pay for a subscription? What do you pay for a subscription for a benefit? How do you value the Alaska Atmos 100,000 companion fare? Tim, what do you say about that? that. That's a great question. So just to back up a little bit, if you spend $60,000 in a anniversary

year and a card member year on the new Alaska Summit Visa card, you will, of course, get all of the points and status points that you get from the $60,000 to spend, but you will also get a 100,000 point companion fare that effectively, I shouldn't say, I have one, I've never actually, I haven't used it yet because we just got it on my we just got it we just got it on my wife's card and what it probably if it functions the other does it effectively works as a discount where if you have a booking for two people that is over 200,000 points you will get 100,000 off if you have a booking for two people where each ticket is 70,000 points you'll get 70,000 points off and you can't re can't You can't reuse it for the additional amount.

So it effectively gives you a discount up to 100,000 points on the companion that you're booking with, but it's only for one use. So because of that, and the reason why I bring that up is because if it were 100,000 points, I would value them much more highly. It wouldn't expire. And I could use 25,000 here, 25,000 there, 25,000 there, 25,000 there, right? Or whatever increment it might be. Here, you only get one shot and then it's done.

done. And that limits the value of it somewhat. However, for me, personally, we do a lot of traveling. We do a lot of international traveling. And I've created this monster where my wife turns up her nose at anything but international business class at this point. So given that, it will be fairly easy for me to use, or I'm fairly confident in my ability to use. I should say that. However, what I will probably have to do in order to use it or what I can imagine is having to book, say, like a round trip ticket, as opposed to a one-way ticket, which is normally how I tend to do it. So it's inconvenient. Let me just put it that way. There's an inconvenience. However, if you told me, and this is how I would value it, how I would think of how to value it,

if you told me, hey, I have 100,000 point Alaska or at most companion fare, and I'll sell it to you for X amount, I would probably be willing to spend like somewhere around $800,000, $900,000 for it, I would think, maybe $800, $900, because I would be really confident that I could get that. I mean, maybe I wouldn't because I have a lot of atmost points, but in general, if I wasn't a person with a lot of atmost points, I would probably use it that way. But that's how I would think about it. And I would want to understand, and the reason why I bring up kind of all of those kind of pitfalls of it is I would understand very clearly what it does and doesn't do before I would value it. Because in my opinion, you can't just value it as 100,000 points. You need to value it according to how much you can,

what you'll be able to use it for and how easy it will be for you to maximize. But like, for instance, this last year, my wife and I went to, we spent 110,000 points apiece on business class from Tanzania back to Seattle on Condor. If had I had that, that would have been 100,000 points back in my pocket. Another thing that actually a reader brought up to me at one point, that Alaska has great availability, or I shouldn't say great, but very good availability for Qatar Q suites or Qatar business class, oftentimes not at saver though. They'll sell them at like 150,000 points all the time. Now, if you had 100,000 point companion fare, all of a sudden, that

takes it from being 150,000 points apiece to 100,000 points apiece. And if it's, you know, a day that you have to travel on, that may be worth it. But so there could be some additional stuff like that that it can be valid before. But in general, that's how I would think about it. Yeah, those are good suggestions. All right, Greg, for issuers other than Amex, any pitfalls to be aware of when buying merchant branded gift cards online to hit minimum spend for sign-up bonuses from obvious gift card websites like DoorDash gift cards. I'm going to turn this over to who wants us, Stephen? Sure. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't have any qualms about doing this for the most part. You mentioned Amex. There's like kind of a lot of scare stories out there about buying gift cards on Amex cards.

in order to meet the minimum spend requirements. But I haven't heard of any issues regarding that for, I don't know, probably like moving on a decade or something like that now. I feel like years and years ago there was some kind of issue where people were buying gift cards at the grocery store when Amex clawed back some welcome offers because people were buying in like $505.95 increments or something like that. But that's been so long and I haven't really heard anything since. even with Amex, I wouldn't have any kind of issues. You might want to add in some regular spend rather than purely buying thousands of dollars of gift cards from gift cards.com at a time or something like that.

But even then, I think that I've met quite a few welcome offers just purely for gift card spend, whether that was slide back in the day, pepper rewards, a lot of people, when the app was alive, we're doing it through that and other like similar kind of things or just like buying gift cards from DoorDash in the app for like 10% off and things like that. So yeah, I wouldn't have any kind of concerns about that at all personally. All right.

Any other comments? And this is for everybody. Because this person specifically mentioned merchant branded as opposed to Visa and MasterCard gift cards. Has anyone ever heard of there being issues at all with the purchase of what I would call third party or merchant branded gift cards as opposed to. opposed to Visa because I can't think of an instance. I think those two things get conflated a lot, but the Amec stuff that I remember is from people buying Visa and MasterCard gift cards, and I think it was in very specific places, but I might not be completely aware.

Yeah, and I mean, at some point, so Simon Malls used to be a hot spot for buying those years ago, not anymore, probably. I don't even think they even, if they do it anymore, it's not the thing it once was. So, and at some point, they stopped awarding points for purchases. at Siamall's period. And it wouldn't count towards spending requirements for the various big spend bonuses. But yeah, I mean, apart from that, like, I would, I probably wouldn't meet the welcome offer entirely through givecarts.com, I guess. But at the same time, like Stephen said, I think there's this way overblown thing that people

think they know something that doesn't actually exist for the most part. So I would agree with you, Tim. Now, that said, I mean, I always meet my welcome offers or almost always with a mixture of things, or it's like all taxes or something like that. So I don't typically go out and buy like what's clearly, obviously, entirely gift card, but I've never had any problem buying a couple thousand dollars and merchant gift cards from somewhere. So I wouldn't worry about it personally. Yeah, one thing I probably should add regarding Amex in particular is that if you buy gift cards online, from websites that are owned by income, which is amexgiftcard.com, mastercardgiftcard.com, vanillagift.com, and the giftcard shop.com. We posted about sales on all those sites

because they're running like purchase fee-free deals on Visa MasterCard and Amex gift cards at the moment. Those sites specifically don't earn points with American Express cards. And as a result, they don't count towards minimum spend requirements. So although I wouldn't have personally have any issue with buying gift cards on an Amex card to meet the minimum spend requirement, don't do it with those specific sites just because that won't actually help you in that case. Right. Great.

Thanks, everyone. Nick, this one's for you. I'm overwhelmed. Do you use a flowchart on how to make decisions on how something is booked for loyalty points, using points, using cash, using a portal, which portal? How do you go about making those decisions? No, I mean, I don't. I can understand why you might want that.

and maybe we should create something like that to help people. I feel like this is such a common question. But no, I mean, as boring as it sounds, I just do the math. You know, to figure out how much, how much does it cost with cash and how many points would it cost? So is it giving me better than our reasonable redemption value for points? Or if I value the points more highly than our reasonable redemption value, is it giving me more than whatever my floor and my minimum is for redeeming that particular type of point? and if it's not, then I should probably be considering cash.

Now, I don't spend as much time as some people may looking through all the various portals. I'll look at road of miles and see what the deal is. I rarely am looking at like AA hotels and stuff like that because I want to get my elite benefits and elite credit. So I don't typically look to book through many third-party sites. Now, if it's a one-night stay, then it's a different story. and then I might look for, okay, do I have a good offer for Hotels.com? Capital One shopping has had some really good offers for Hotels.com. Lately, 100 back on 200 just the other day for some people.

So I take some look at that. SaveWise has been helpful. Get Saveways.com for comparing portal rates and card-linked offers. So that's been a good place to start. But I don't do a lot of that for hotels, to be honest. I know, Greg, I think you use Gondola some to check and compare prices and award pricing. Yeah, I mean, it shows you your point prices for the hotels in a way, you know, across programs. So that's really helpful.

All right. Maybe we should make some. So can I reframe that question a little bit for Nick? Sure. Really quickly. Just because I'm curious to see, to hear what you would say. You have a $125 widget to buy. Okay.

How do you determine how, what you're going to purchase it with and what, like, what would your flow be? Like, what would your personal flow be to enter into? to buying that $125 widget. You know, that I probably spend an inordinate amount of time on it. So, which is pretty ridiculous. And there are times when I catch myself. And I'm like, you know what, this is a little ridiculous. Let me just use a card that earns good everywhere, you know, base or any rate.

But then I do. I use a tool like a cashback monitor was always my go-to. I've been using SaveWise more and more. It's getsafeways.com because I can look at the card linked offers to in one quick, easy display. and I find that particularly useful to compare the portals and that. And then how do I decide, man, it's hard. Like if I'm working on a new card bonus, I might consider that.

Although Greg and I have talked a lot of times before, I try to knock out new card bonuses with very big purchases and not with stuff that I might return. So I wouldn't be buying that widget if I thought there was a chance of returning it with a card where I'm working on a new welcome offer. So I'll just be looking for my best everywhere else card. And then looking for portals. and in my mind Capital One shopping is the first place I go most of the time now to see

because they often have such good targeted rates. And then if I don't have a great rate there, then I'm probably looking to use Racketon for the most part. I'm taking built points with that right now. I may go back to MX, we'll see. So, yeah, I think that that maybe answers that question a little bit. I'm not sure, but. I've got a very tiny edition now for that.

Go ahead. After you've checked Capital One shopping, do you, wait a day or two just to see if you get a targeted offer? Or do you just go ahead and think like whatever? This is becoming a flowchart. Well, you see, now it depends on how badly I need that widget right now. But Stephen makes a great point because Capital One shopping will very frequently give you a targeted offer for a site that you've browsed around on. Now, I keep the extension installed in a separate browser instance that I only use when I want to try to trigger a targeted offer and when I'm going to click through and buy something. So, if I know I want to get that,

widget and I'm going to get that widget from, you know, whatever, make up your site here. And so I know I'm going to get it from this particular site. Then I will go and browse to that and click around looking at that widget and some other things in the browser where I have the extension installed and then I'll leave. I'll navigate away from that site, leave my computer. And actually, I don't wait a few days anymore because Capital One shopping nowadays, usually switch an offer within a few hours. So very often, I'll see it the same day.

How many browser instances do you have? Well, several because I have capital in shopping. You know, my wife has a capital and shopping account. I have one. So we have different offers. So there's different instances of Chrome for that. And then there's the instance of Chrome where I'm logged into all my work stuff. So that's the one I'm using most of the time.

So but within Chrome, you can set guest profiles. I think maybe Greg wrote about this at some point, how to set guest profiles in Chrome. And that's really convenient for, for logging into. to different accounts, like different people's accounts, my accounts, my wife's accounts are in separate instances. And so that way it recognizes us on each one of them. So very long answer there to talk about. And no flow charts for any of this. And no flow charts, but you should always compare against our reasonable redemption value. That's the easy answer. Go to our reasonable redemption value page, do the math and figure out, okay, how many cents per point am I getting here? Is it better than

Frequent Miler's reasonable redemption value? Yeah, that's a good takeaway. That's your flow chart. Greg, we're going to send this one to you. Okay. Do you think we undervalue Delta card welcome offers? The 15% discount gives you more award flight buying power. 90,000 miles gives you the buying power of 103,500.

Is that kind of a bad way to frame it? Yeah, I mean, I think that math's like slightly off, but that idea is smart. I think that's a good way to think about it. In fact, we should be thinking about it with our best offers page because the way we calculate the reasonable redemption values for Delta Sky Miles is assuming people don't have the credit card. And so it's without the 15% discount. Those discounts are only good for, you know, Delta's own flights, not for partners, but still that's mostly what you're going to be using your Delta miles for.

So it makes sense, I think, to bump up what you think the value is a little. bit. I think there's also a bit of a hidden question in there, which is that I think that a lot of people look at a Delta offer, let's say it's 100,000 miles, and say, we know we've heard people talk about how bad sky miles are. You can't use them for, you know, super high value, which is generally true. You're not going to be getting two, three, four cents per point value most of the time with Delta. But getting 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 cents. is the norm. And so if you're looking at a thousand,

you know, a hundred thousand point offer, you're looking at somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,200 of Delta flights. And so, you know, you might, as long as you recognize that that's not going to be getting you business class to Asia or something like that,

it's still $1,200 worth of flights. And so it is very valuable. even if you just use it, you know, for just these kind of very fair, normal average redemptions. So I think that's worth considering because $1,200 flights will get you, you know, on Delta to, you know, Tampa and back. All right. If you want to go to Tampa. Never underestimate strong power of Tampa. If you have a Disney card, I mean, why not?

All right. He heard it from our Delta Corpola. My other son is a big Buccaneers fan. So shout out to the other day. Sunday we're going to have to go down. game. Right. Nothing against Tampa.

Okay, Stephen, moving along. Do you think of city transfers to AA as the best transfer option from city similar to Chase and Hyatt? In terms of like everyday transfers, then probably, like in terms of its usefulness for a lot of people in the U.S., I'd say that's definitely one of the most useful transfer partners. Only thing is we'd be pretty good with transfer bonuses, or at least they have been the last couple years. Like last year, I think they might have had more transfer bonuses and kind of like better ones than the other transferable currencies. And so although American Airlines could be a good option,

if you can get like a 30% transfer bonus to an Avios program or to Virgin Atlantic or to like some other program that they transfer to, then that might be a better option. And I do like the choice, like one to two transfer ratio and things like that. But at the same time, time Wells Fargo has that. So if you have any Wells Fargo cards, it might be better to use your Wells Fargo transferable points for that just because Wells Fargo doesn't have that many other like worthwhile partners in that respect. Like it's just kind of like a lot of common things that they have. But yeah, I'm curious what you guys think. Like would you say like A.A. is kind of a good everyday one, but not necessarily what you'd be saving all of your points for? Like what's

your plan with your thank you points at the moment? Yeah. Anyone? Well, I'll say, I sort of read the question more as like, is it, is it an anchor transfer partner that makes it makes city thank you points super valuable? Just like we point at Hyatt is the reason that Chase and built points are super valuable. That's how I read it too. So what's your take? Yes, then 100%. That is, it's an anchor. I looked at it and I said, no.

No. We can always count on you guys to. No. That's hilarious. All right, Tim, you're the tiebreaker. No, I wouldn't say though. And actually, I read the same way. I would write it the same way.

Now, Stephen, if you read it that way. And I should say that I didn't necessarily. So I think about like what are unique transfer partners of city. And in that sense, A.A. is marvelous. And if you can use the A.A. points, great. If you can, if that's something that you can maximize. and incorporating your travels, that'll be terrific. A.A. can have some great sweet spots.

But in the same way, like, I do think there is a bit of a difference because to my mind, with Chase Ultimate Rewards, there's Hyatt, which is excellent value, and then there's everything else. Whereas with City, there's A.A., which is very good. But then for airlines, if you want to get to Asia, EVA is a pain in the butt, but it has some excellent value. But to my mind, and this is where I think about for city points a lot, there's some incredible hotel value, not just with choice at one to two, but with preferred hotels and resorts at one to four, which is, again, unique among anywhere. Nobody transfers to perfect hotels into resorts at that price, and you can get some insane value for that. not always, but some insane value.

And then it's also the only one that transfers to leading hotels of the world, which has some marvelous kid-oriented properties. I don't know if you know that, Nick. But there are several kind of unique little jewels that it depends on what you kind of, if you need lodging, like, like, you know, if you went to Hyatt and said, like, if you're like, hey, I'd stay at 500, I spend 100 nights a year at Hilton. So I'm going to use my chase points for Hyatt. Well, that's not so good for Chase Points.

if you don't need the Hyatt points, right? But I do, but I think the reason why we all tend to think of Chase as being, or to use Greg's point, I really like that word, that Hyatt is sort of the anchor of ultimate rewards, is because we all use Hyatt a lot, and there's great value there, and the rest of Chase's points aren't quite to that level in terms of what you can get from them on a regular basis, in my humble opinion.

Whereas I think there's a little bit more variability, or a little bit more, there's a little bit more that's interesting across the board in city. I don't think we're saying different things. I'm thinking of it as an anchor sort of like when you think about how malls used to be, like they'd have certain anchor stores that would draw people in and then lots of other stores. City happens to have a mall that's pretty darn good. It has quite a few good options.

Chase happens to have a mall that's got like one good anchor store. Yeah, exactly. So it's different. And everything else is George Julius. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Cinema. So, sorry if you already went over this, but are there lots of other options for transferring to AA? Like, because isn't one of the...

No, no. Okay, so it's similar to... Yeah, it's similar to high end that way. Okay, I see. All right, well, that's plenty of good thoughts on that. So we're going to move on to Tim. What are your thoughts about the revised Bank of America Air France, KLM visa card? I have thought that that card is actually better for Skyline Visa card.

team than any Delta Airlines related card. Air France KLM versus Delta cards. And maybe Greg wants to weigh on on this too. We'll start with Tim. I'm actually going to punt to Greg. Greg is the authoritative voice on Sky Team when it comes to. Sky Team correspondent. All right. Well, I like the refresh. I think it's a it's much more interesting card than it was before. The bigger question, it's so hard to say because it kind of depends what your goals are in getting into Sky Team. So if you're someone who rarely flies Delta, but you do fly Air France or Aero Mexico or whatever Sky Team partners are not Delta, and so you're just looking at, you know, what's going to get me,

what's sort of the easiest path to Sky Team priorities status? then, yeah, I think the Air France card makes a lot of sense. If you mostly fly Delta, though, you know, the Delta, the Delta platinum card, I think is such a sweet spot card where for $350, you automatically get sort of elite status light. You get the companion ticket each year. You get, if you get the business version, $200 off of hotels every year, you get, you get, at 2,500 MQDs towards elite status to you're halfway to silver just with one card. So, yeah. So again, if you're a Delta flyer, the Delta card is far superior.

I think you had a recent Coffee Breaker podcast or something on that, but if we find it, we'll put in the notes. Okay. Tim, we're going to do a redo question for you. Is it possible to change which airline is credited to a flight after your bags are checked, but before the flight departs? I'd like to get my free AA bags, but have the flight credited to Alaska. Is it possible? Yes. Is it always possible? No. And I would say it also, based on this question, I'm guessing it's because you have an AA credit card and not AA elite status and that you want to check in and get the benefits of your AA credit card, but then credit it to Alaska.

and I'm going to do a little bit of kicking this around because I'm not sure about this. But before that, I just want to say it is a pain in the butt and make sure that whatever you're getting by doing this is worth it. You know, like, because that, I've known people that have done this over the year, primarily for lounge access. And it's inconsistent. And sometimes they're having to fight with the airlines afterwards to make sure that it. So if you're just doing it for miles and you want Alaska miles.

versus AA miles on one flight, the difference may not be worth the headache that you may be causing yourself. Other than that, my question is, and again, under the assumption that this is because they have an AA credit card, if you have an AA credit card, do you need to have your AA number on the A, on the flight in order to get the free bags? Or do you need to, but I mean, like in terms of when you check in or was it when you buy the ticket? that's my question no no when you buy the ticket it just needs to be on the on the reservation i think there's a it's in our our our guide to getting free check bags by credit card i think it's seven days

before the flight but i could be don't quote me on that you'd have to check our guide and when your boarding pass prints out it says a card member on the boarding pass so but it's not departure but it's not check in though right like there's some amount of time beforehand yeah yeah yeah so i don't know yeah Anyway, I don't know the answer to this question. Yeah, I mean, theoretically, yes, it's possible in terms of can you, the answer, yes, theoretically you can change your frequent mile or your frequent flyer number to a different program post check-in. But it doesn't always track and it can be a pain of it. I know on a recent Saturday selection, one of the major airlines just made it so you can't do that, but I can't remember which one. So there's a small chance that this person does have a AA elite status to get free check bags,

but booked an award ticket with their Alaska miles and wants the award miles to get credited to Alaska because you won't earn any elite benefit from flying American with the with American. But what we've learned is that you can, after booking through Alaska, change the, on your ticket. You could change it to your AA number. You can't do that through Alaska. You have to contact American to do that. Put your American Airlines number on that reservation, and then you will still get the Alaska elite qualifying miles for that award flight. well and the reason why i i specified that if it is indeed because the person has elite

status you then would get a free check bag with alaska because i think it's gold has one free check bag like an aa gold if you're flying of alaska and you have your aa number on it you would get the free check oh but they need they're flying a i think yeah yeah well yeah either way uh regardless we're not certain um okay um Greg Best use of Wyndham now that Vacasa's gone and no Caesar match in Vegas. Any other options like Vacasa? Well, you can, they still have the cottages.com relationship. So you can do a very similar type of award in the UK to book a vacation rental in the UK through cottages.com.

Otherwise, I think that the best use of Wyndham points, in my mind, It's just there's actual Wyndham properties that, you know, often are, or not often, but can be a good deal. And so you can find them. They are out there. Well, in Windham Vacation Club would be somewhat similar to Vacasa in the sense that those are condo properties like, you know, like times as a type of property. Sure. Yeah. If that's what you're looking for.

Yeah. All right. And they can be very good. Internationally, Windham properties tend to be much better than the ones in the U.S. So like days in in the U.S. isn't great. days in here in the UK is actually like a bit better like it's not luxury um but it's generally kind of like cleaner and nicer um and then like the remada that we stayed at in munich during the challenge last year um for october fest like that was a perfectly nice remada and it's not at all what i would expect for

romada like in the u.s and then also although you can't status match to caesar now you can transfer I think it's, is it 30,000 Wyndon points to Caesars each year? And those are then worth one cent per point with Caesars. I don't know like all the ins and outs of how that works with Caesar's rewards, but 30,000 points can be worth $300 with Caesar's rewards. So it means you're getting one cent per point of value, which is still like fairly good, like especially now that FACSA's not around. So that's another option for getting some value from your points,

especially because they're currently sending their points for, I want to say like 0.7 cents a point or something like that. So if you need Caesar's points, then you can actually make an instant profit effectively by buying 30,000 wind and then transferring them over to your Seasons account that way. Also worth you mentioned, they have a bunch of all-inclusives in the Caribbean. And some of those could be a really good value compared to cash prices, particularly around the holidays.

Man, prices shoot up around Christmas and New Year's. Cash prices do. And the award availability is still sometimes decent. that they're all inclusive. So take a look at that. All right. Nice. A bunch of ideas there. Nick, my friend wants to transfer 100,000 city points to me. I know that's the yearly limit and they expire 90 days. My question is, if I get them, then transfer them do my thank you points transfer first or the gifted thank you points? The points that will expire the soonest will be used the first. So presumably the gifted ones are going to expire. I say it that way because if you,

you canceled a different city card within the last. There's a possibility you could have some other points that are transferring sooner. But yes, if you have no reason to think that any of your other city points are expiring anytime soon, they will use the gifted ones first. Okay. Great. Good to know. I see easy answer there. Greg, you're going to get this one again.

And this will probably be our last question unless it's an easy answer somehow. Since Delta is crazily underwhelming, how do you guys maximize SkyT? Do you agree with this assessment and how do you maximize? Yeah, I mean, well, there's a lot of ways to interpret that, but I'm going to just say that if you're looking to get good value booking awards on Sky Team airlines, there are other miles that can be valuable. The ones I usually go to the most often are Air France-KLon Flying Blue and Virgin Atlantic. And both of them have different sweet spots and can be used to book a wide array of sky team partners. And often it's the case that if you want to fly Air France, then Virgin Atlantic might be a better deal. And if you want to fly Virgin Atlantic, then Air France might be a better deal.

Easy to remember at least. It's not 100% true. But that kind of thing often happens. but yeah, those are my go-to to maximize value of award redemptions, I guess. And then something that's kind of unique to three of us is that SAS can potentially be a good option for crossing the Atlantic, but because they don't have any major transfer partners at the moment, that's not going to be widely useful. But being able to redeem, is it, I forget, is it 60,000 one way in business last now? Because I think it went like 50, yeah.

then that's like a potentially great deal if you can find award availability. Yeah. Yeah. And of course, Virgin Atlantic too has some great sweet spots for flying itself to London. So that's definitely worth checking out in both economy, premium economy, sometimes business class as well. Yeah. Final mention, Japan Airlines Miles. Don't forget using Japan Airlines Miles for Air France because they have a partnership that I would forget about three times a week.

if it didn't happen to come up now and then. So you could book Air France business class to Europe from the United States for 60,000 miles one way. No surcharges. So that's a potentially great deal. If you can find the availability, you can transfer one to one from built. Capital One is not one to one usually, but with the current transfer bonus at the time we're recording this anyway, it's almost one to one. All right. Great.

I think we have time for one more quick one. Everybody, this is an all play, but we'll go one at a time. Do any of the Frequentweiler team ever get denied for credit cards? Anyone ever been in pop-up prison? How do you avoid denials? Greg, have you been denied? And maybe like give an idea of how common an occurrence that is or uncommon. It's not unusual to get denied at first.

And then often I will call reconsideration and get it reversed. Sometimes it's as simple as saying, you know, I don't need more. credit, can you move, you know, decrease the credit line on a card I already have open in order to be able to approve this one, that kind of thing, has helped in the past. So, yeah, that's my basic thing. And if I still don't get approved, I just move on to the next thing and try something else. Nick, how about you? Yeah, sure. I just recently applied for the built palladium, and I didn't get it. My wife did.

She transitioned over from the old built card to the new one. I'll probably try again because the whole thing has been a mess there. And so I'll give it another shot in another 30 or 45 days or whatever. But yeah, I mean, it happens sometimes. Or then other times it's super simple like Greg said. I mean, I had applied for the Sapphire Reserve just the day before the palladium. And I didn't get an instant approval. But later that day, I realized I had missed a call from Chase.

So I called back. And all they wanted to do is verify that it was me and verified my information and they said, okay, you applied for this and you meant to kind of a thing. And I was like, yeah, they put me on hold for a couple of minutes, came back and we're like, okay, congratulations, done. So it didn't even have to shift any credit line around. So sometimes it's really simple, those phone calls. So I would encourage you not to get discouraged.

So as far as that goes, in pop up prison, I have not, I don't know why, but luckily I have not run into that at all yet. Yeah. Stephen, how about you? Yeah. like I've been declined for a few cards and my wife has as well, like especially recently, like she tried to get the Strata Elite card and was declined, the Alaska Summit card she was declined for.

And then weirdly, she's never been able to get the Hilton business card. And she's applied for it a few times. And every single time she's been declined for that. So it's almost like she's in pop-up prison for that specific card because she can get like a business platinum, like business gold and like other business cards and things like that. But for whatever reason, the Hilton business, they're just ridiculously strict with her. And I want to say she's tried like three to five times or something. And every single time it's been a no, but other Hilton cards you can get.

So, yeah, it's just really random sometimes. And yeah, like Greg said, sometimes all you have to do is just called up and ask with reconsideration. We have been able to get cards approved where it seemed like they were previously declined. So, yeah, it's a bit of a mixed bag. And Tim. So quickly, I'm really glad Greg, my first thought was, no, not very often. But then when Greg said,

Mint brought up reconsideration, it's like, oh, yeah, fairly frequently. And I think that's the big thing is that not, like I don't necessarily assume that because I was auto denied, that I'm denied. Right. Yeah. Especially with Chase.

I think Chase is a big one for that. And there's times it's like, if I had just said, oh, I was denied and walked away, I would never have gotten the car. But then I call up and just like Nick said, they're like, oh, was this you? Yeah, it was me. oh, well, good. Here's your, here's your card.

You know, like, but there's sort of a disconnect between that. And so because of that, I would say that it's not very often that I can't get a card that I want and know that I'm eligible for, like in terms of not being over 524 or something like that. Yeah. But reconsideration is sort of the magic bullet when it comes to that a lot of times. Yeah. Good advice. All right.

That takes us to the end of our Ask Us Anything. So if you want to join us next time, we do this once a month, the first Wednesday of every month at 9 p.m. Eastern time. Make sure and join us. And everyone, everyone remember to like this video if you have visited a Kroger in the last two days. And then if you haven't visited a program in the last two days, you should give it a thumbs up. That's right. Then also give it a thumbs up. Yes. But thanks for joining us, everybody. You want to go to frequent myler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media. Join our frequent miler insiders Facebook group where you can ask and answer questions like this all the time. We appreciate having you guys here. And hope

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