Frequent Miler on the Air - Domestic flights for less | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep301 | 4-11-25

Episode Date: April 11, 2025

In this episode, we highlight the credit cards that are becoming "collectables", we had a heated debate about "Strawberry season", discuss changes from ANA and Alaska Airlines, and share tips for saving on your domestic flights. (01:29) - Delta Sky Club access with multiple American Express platinum cards in your name... (06:40) - Chase Sapphire Preferred 100K (Read more about this offer here) (07:58) - United Business 125K ... (08:59) - Citi Rewards+ no longer available new OR for product changes (12:05) - US Bank Smartly changes for new cardholders as of 4/14. Read about the US Bank Smartly card changes here. (18:50) - Strawberry Hotels Summer Pass 2025 (Read more about this Strawberry Hotels Summer Pass here) (25:14) - IHG increases top award rates at Intercontinental hotels to 200K+ per night (27:02) - Amex Biz Plat nerfs Dell credits (31:57) - ANA Round the World award tickets are dead as of June 24th (34:46) - More ANA news starting June 24 Read more about these ANA updates here. (38:32) - Updates from Alaska Airlines (40:29) - Tools/services to find cheapest cash rates (e.g. google flights) (42:30) - Tools/services to find cheapest award prices (e.g. points path) Read our "Which Award Search Tool is Best" post here. (44:58) - Saving miles with partner awards (49:21) - Credit card travel discounts/rebates (52:59) - Find our Amex Airline Reimbursement Fees post here. (54:46) - Companion tickets (1:03:26) - Pay w/ points through a bank travel portal (1:05:30) - Cardholder award discounts (Delta, United, JetBlue, etc.) (1:06:32) - Discounted Airline gift cards (1:07:59) - Membership discounts (1:09:36) - Change the way you book it (1:17:46) - Read more about skiplagging here. (1:18:42) - Choosing between the Amex Hilton Aspire card or the Amex Bonvoy Brilliant card: Do you think Bonvoy will listen to the negative feedback and will get better? And will Hilton get worse because they've been too generous? 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 – “Ocean Deep” by Annie Yoder

Today's show we're gonna highlight some cards that are becoming collectibles There's a heated debate about strawberry season both Greg and I agree on some of the big changes coming from ANA and Alaska And we'll talk about a grab bag worth of ways for you to save on your domestic flights Frequent Mylar on the air starts now Today's main event domestic flights for less On today's show we're gonna talk for less. On today's show, we're going to talk about a whole bunch of different ways to save money on domestic flights. Someone had reached out recently asking me personally how I was able to fly on Delta

from Detroit, which is a Delta hub. And instead of talking just about Delta, you know, I do a whole bunch of different things to get cheaper flights. And so instead of just talking about Delta, we're gonna talk about how to fly domestically for less with a whole bunch of different techniques. And I love to pay less. This episode is not brought to you by pay less, but uh Does he pay less this shoes even exist anymore? I don't know if they do, but they definitely didn't sponsor this episode

We'll talk about paying less today But if you would like to jump ahead or you'd like to come back to something later Don't forget you can always find the timestamps in the show notes So just expand the show description and wherever you're watching or listening. Don't forget to like this video, give us a thumbs up, leave us a review and some stars. We always appreciate all of that. All right, let's drag out this week's Giant Mail back. All right, today's Giant Mail comes from Adi. So before I read Adi's mail, I just want to remind people what P1 and P2 means.

So we talk about this hobby as a game often, where the person doing most of the miles and points stuff, signing up for credit cards, booking awards, all that kind of thing, is P1, player one. And player two tends to, is often the significant other of player one, but not always, it could be a friend or it could be whatever, but we refer to that person

as P2. And so with that out of the way let me read Adi's giant mail. Adi says, in one of the recent episodes about Delta Sky Club access you were discussing ways to get a guest in with you and you said that having multiple Amex Platinum cards in P1's name will not work. But I have a counter data point. I've tried this trick only four times at two separate airports, so take this for a data point and not a hard and fast rule. Since Delta Sky Club allows you to have a Platinum card added to your Delta app account

and then scan your boarding pass for entry without having to carry the physical card on you, I've had success with adding my second business Platinum card to my wife's account using her name. And although she's not an authorized user, this has worked for her to gain entry. It might be because we share the same last name or I might have just gotten lucky, or this might be a known trick, just not discussed, but I thought I'd at least share my experience with this team Very interesting very interesting and one that if it is a known trick

It was not known by me because I don't fly Delta very often So I haven't run into the situation where I've even needed to think hard about this But I'm actually now that I've heard it not surprised if this does work because Because of the fact that you can add the payment method to the Delta wallet. And that's a tip I had picked up from you a long time ago, Greg, that I think one time I did have a reason or potential to visit a Delta Sky Club and I didn't have my platinum card on me.

And then I found either through a post of yours or maybe you told me that, oh, you don't necessarily need the physical card. You just need to add it to the app and then to the Delta app to your account and to your wallet. And then you can potentially get in. And so anyway, that's, that's very interesting. Very. Yeah, you know, it's, it's, it's really cool for a number of reasons. One is, is that there's hasn't been recently a good way to get kids into a good way to get kids into the club. So for example, you and your significant other presumably are old enough to each get your own platinum card if you wanted to, or Delta Reserve card

to get into the Delta Sky Club. But kids under 13 I think it is can't get Amex cards. And, or is it even young? Is it, it's, well you can't get your own. You obviously can't get your own until you're 18, but you can't get your own until you're 18. But you can't get an authorized user one. Yeah, until you're 13, right?

So I think, you know, I think that this would probably work to, you know, if you had a card that you aren't using for yourself, that gives Sky Club access at it to your kids, Delta Wallet, and it may work. Now, Adi might be right that it might require that you have the same last name for it to work. I don't know, but awfully good trick.

And you know what? In a lot of these P1 P2 families P1 could it's surprising to a lot of people but it's not unusual to have a lot of Platinum cards and and that's because there are often opportunities to get great big welcome bonuses for another business Platinum card and another one and another one, or to do something similar with business green or business gold cards and then get an upgrade bonus to a business platinum card. And always the intention is like, well, it doesn't make sense to keep a whole bunch of

business platinum cards long term because annual fees are so high, but for the welcome bonuses it makes sense. And then the idea is that like when the next annual fee comes up, you cancel, but if they offer you a big retention bonus, maybe you keep it another year, that kind of thing. So anyway, those of us who play this game a lot, I mean, a lot of us tend to have quite a few of these in our wallet any given time,

but that changes over time. But so anyway, so this could be a great way to get your family members and friends into the Sky Club, maybe. It almost makes me wanna fly Delta just to test it out. Yeah. But I probably won't anytime soon. So I won't be at the data point I wanna see on that one.

But nonetheless, great data point for a lot of people. And let me erase the part where I said, or friends, because I don't think I would try it with a friend. I wouldn't put my Delta, I wouldn't put my credit card in my credit card rent wallet. You wouldn't put your credit card in my wallet, Craig? Maybe just for you. Okay, then we could test the last name requirement. Right.

Well, that's true. That would definitely answer that. All right. So that's a giant mailbag. Let's talk about card news because there's a lot of big card news out this week. The biggest of the bunch, of course, is that the Chase Sapphire Preferred is out with a new welcome bonus. The 100,000 point welcome bonus after $5,000 in purchases in three months is now available

online and not only is it available online, it's now also available via referral. So if you or your significant other has either a Sapphire Preferred or a Sapphire Reserve, I think, right? You can refer people to this new 100K offer on the Sapphire Preferred. Yeah, I mean, and that's just a fantastic offer. So, you know, if you're eligible for it, great. If you have friends that are, you know, kind of interested, wondering how is it that you're able to travel so much?

This is a great opportunity to recommend a great offer to them and maybe earn 10,000 points if you could refer them. So definitely get on that. We have a post that's the SAFR preferred 100K Q&A, which is like all the questions you might have about can you get approved? You've had the card before, can you product change and then sign up, all that kind of stuff.

We've tried to lay out in that post and we'll have a link to that in the show notes. There you go. All right, that's not the only news of the week. Also from Chase, the United Business Card is out with an offer for 125,000 points after $5,000 in purchases in three months. Plus, you can earn an additional 5,000 points just by adding an authorized user, right? Yep. That's all you need to do.

And now that's true. I think all the new, refreshed United Cards have this extra $5K for adding an AU, but I wanted to call out this United business card offer because that's a really good offer. And so even though we don't, we're not big fans of how United and Chase have couponized these United cards. The, I think the business card is the best of the bunch of them for most United fans or tepid fans of United that want a card to give you like a free check bag and other United perks. So that 125k offer is pretty awesome.

Very good. City's got some bad news for us though. Yeah, yeah. I think we mentioned on a previous show, I hope we did, that we had heard rumors that the City Rewards Plus card was gonna be going away. And we encouraged people to, if you want it, get it now kind of thing.

And- But get it then, not now. Get it then, that's right, get it then. So hopefully you listen to us, if I'm right, that we said it. Hopefully, hopefully we told you to get it then, not now. Get it then, that's right, get it then. So hopefully you listen to us if I'm right that we said it. Hopefully, hopefully we told you to get it then. Because you can't get it now. You can't get it now. So that's the news is that it's no longer

available for new signups. It's also not available for product changes. So if you have a different City card and you're hoping to product change to rewards plus card and you haven't done it yet, Sorry, the rewards plus card now has officially become a collector's item card, which is fun for collectors like us, but not fun for anyone who didn't already get it.

And there is the risk though, you know, we don't know for sure that they'll keep around the card for existing card holders forever But city tends to do that. I feel like more often than not. So yeah, my guess is it'll stick around I don't know. Yeah I mean I would think but boy it seems to me like the ship is getting tightened up and I know I said this last week and I'm gonna say it again I feel like they're tightening it up in preparation of whatever the launch with American Airlines is going to be. They've hinted that maybe there would be a transferability to transfer thank you points

to American Airlines at some point. We've picked up on that. We haven't heard anything official, but we kind of picked up on that in an announcement from last year where it wasn't the central piece of the announcement. So I'm just I'm guessing that this continuing continued tightening up of the inability to product change and now getting rid of this card that just encourages you to redeem your points and transfer them to somebody. I don't know. It seems to track with something happening now.

I want to be clear if thank you points do become transferable to American Airlines. I personally won't be shocked if there's a limit, if you can only transfer up to X number of points per year to American Airlines or something of that sort. I don't necessarily think they're gonna open the floodgates but at any rate, I think that this all is foreshadowing that something's gonna change.

Wow, all right, so that's very interesting. I wouldn't have thought about that in connection with American Airlines at all. And certainly that's a new one to me and to the Saudis, this idea that if they allow transfers to American, it might be limited. I mean, or may not be at a one to one ratio also. I mean, there's no guarantee here

that it's gonna be what we want. That's true. I'm gonna go on record though saying it will be one-to-one and it will be unlimited but of course I'm just guessing just as much as Nick is. I'm saying good but neither of us have particularly good track records so I'm not really sure who's prediction is I'm glad to have but hopefully we're not gonna jinx ourselves here. But anyway there is the rewards plus also in bad news, the US Bank smartly card is becoming significantly less smart than it once was.

Yeah. So the the high level is that the smartly card is the one where if you have $100,000 in investments with US Bank, the current or old first iteration of this card, it then earned 4% cash back everywhere. And so the news is they're coming out with a new iteration of the card, they're not changing the name of it. But internally, they're calling it version 1.1. That is significantly in many, many ways worse

than the original. So one of the worst parts overall is that only checking accounts are gonna count towards the $100,000 requirement or to any requirement to move up from a 2% card to a bigger earning card. And that's, yeah, that's a shame because it was really nice that you could do

your self-investing instead. And there wasn't really much opportunity cost there. So hopefully you like that smartly checking. I'm not gonna list all of the changes, but the other biggest ones, $10,000 per limit on how much you can earn at a higher tier. So if you got to the 4% tier, you would be maxing out the 4% at $10,000 spend. Any spend above that, you earn 2% cash back. And the higher rate, you only get more than 2% cash back on the first 10,000 for spend that is not in these categories.

Spend that is not tax payments, not business to business purchases, not insurance, education, tuition, third party bill payments, direct selling gift card sites, I don't know, some other things. Basically, I don't even know how you would know that you are getting, like, how are they gonna know something's business to business when, I don't know. Anyway, I categorically do not recommend the new version of this card.

But- Which we call the stupid Smartly card. Don't get the stupid Smartly card. Yeah, I guess, you know what, I shouldn't be that. No, that's harsh. That's harsh. Absolute about it. Because if you already have money in the Smartly checking account, getting better than 2% for

a lot of spend is still competitive with other things. So it's not that it's terrible, but it's terrible compared to what the opportunity that you had before. Now, if you're listening to this by April 13th, the news is that if you sign up for the Smartly card by April 13th, 2025, that you would be grandfathered in under the old rules. And so now there's no guarantee how long you'll be grandfathered in under the old rules.

And so now there's no guarantee how long you'll be guaranteed in, you'll be grandfathered in, but it's an opportunity. And so I'm so much on the fence here. It's like, this is, I don't really wanna go through all the hoops of getting this to a 4% card, but at the same time, it's like, maybe I just sign up now and if I decide later I want to go through those hoops I have then I have the original version card and I should be able to do that. So if you have the original version card you're not going to be subject to the 10k

per month cap on 4% earnings? Is that what you're telling me? That's right. So that that will be one of those rules. I mean that's and you won't be limited to only checking accounts counting. Right. You won't be limited to tax payments and other stuff not counting. Right so all that will be one of those rules. I mean, that's an interesting limited to only checking accounts counting, right? You won't be limited to tax payments and other stuff, not counting. Right. So all that will count. Yeah. I mean, it is an interesting opportunity. How long are they going to keep that around? US bank is not one that always keeps the old cards around where we mentioned a little while ago, we're talking about city and how city often keeps the old debt cards around for like years and years US Bank, I don't know if that's the case I mean, I know the Club Carlson card that became the Radisson card eventually just went away when Radisson got swallowed up by choice

But was that more a choice thing or more US Bank thing? I don't really know and there haven't been a lot of other compelling US bank cards to kind of go by the wayside For me to have a good barometer on what they're going to do with that long term. So, yeah. Yeah, we don't know. I don't know. But I want to point out one other thing that you didn't mention. You were like, oh, you know, I don't know.

Maybe this makes sense for some people. I think the thing that we left out of that is that you would need to keep $10,000 in the smartly checking to get 2 and 1.5% back. That's sort of the baseline. Now, the US Bank smartly checking account, at the time we're recording this on balances of up to $10,000 earns 0.001% interest, which is a super high opportunity cost compared to the kind of has an annual fee. If you got to keep 10 grand in that account to keep the two and a half percent, because you could be earning interest on that money elsewhere. And in some cases up to like four or 5% ABY. So, um, so that's a pretty high

opportunity cost to earn the two and a half percent and then be capped at only earning that on $10,000 and spend per month. I haven't done the math like live here as we're talking. I haven't done the math, but I'm thinking that probably doesn't work out to be better than a 2% card if it does, not by very much. Well, yeah, that's why I said, if you already have a Smartly checking account. So like, you know, lots of people have checking accounts

that they keep a balance in, so there's money in there to pay, you know, to cash checks. And so if you're using the Smartly account for that and you're keeping, you know, over $10,000 in there, then this card isn't bad, but it's still not. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something I'm excited about. But then I would tell you, take a look on the market

and look for some rewards checking accounts that offer better than 0.001% because you could probably still have your cake and eat it too. But anyway, you're right. If you're using that account might as well. Or maybe not might as well, but might not be a terrible card then. Overall, not nearly as exciting as it was. We're not going to be talking about that card anymore on this show.

That's it. That's the end. Right there. So there's no sense in you getting it, Greg, because we're not going to talk about it anymore anyway. So just leave it alone. And like I like I like having my collectibles and this this is an opportunity to get a collectible. Right. So then like hang in front of the rest of us later on down the road and be like, see, you didn't get it when you could have. Exactly. Exactly.

That's what I'm doing with my rewards. Bless card. Right. Right, right. I know. I know. I'm waiting for that. All right. Let's talk about the next thing on the list here. We got mattress running the numbers. Strawberry hotels.

Yum is out with their summer pass 2025. So if you're like strawberry, I like strawberries, but I don't know about the strawberry hotel thing. This is, as you may recall, the new name of what we used to call the Nordic choice properties. So like Clarion collection, Clarion comfort, whatever, you know, basically the choice type properties that are in the Nordic countries, they always had a slightly separate awards program. You could book them through choice privileges, but they always had like kind of a Nordic choice group. And they renamed that to strawberry a few years ago.

And so, so it's the same properties and still bookable through choice privileges, but now called strawberry. So anyway, they are back with the summer pass 2025. This is a promotion they've run a couple times last few years. I think they've, they've run this or some iteration of this. And so the deal is, I think you get five nights for 500 euros that are available at over 100 hotels. So if you were to use all five nights, you'd be paying 100 euro a night. So the way this works is you buy the pass for 500 euro, and then you kind of

pick and choose which hotels you want to spend which nights at you can spend up to five nights, right? Yep. Yep. Or then 10 nights you can buy for 800 euros and that's valid at 80 different hotels or over 80 different hotels, I guess. So essentially 80 euros a night. Yeah. Yeah. So my understanding, I haven't looked at this in depth, but I guess there are probably some of the pricier hotels that are in the hundred hotel list that are not in the 80 hotel list. I am assuming that's how that's working. And yeah, and it's valid every day in the summer from June 19th to August 25th of 2025.

So if you're planning to spend time in the Nordic countries, what do you think, Nick? Is it worth buying one of these packages and staying at these strawberry hotels, formerly known as Nordic Choice hotels. Yes. Yes. I mean, I and it's rare that I would give that strong of an answer. And I'm sure Greg is going to tell you, oh, you better make sure that your travel plans

line up with where one of the hotels is and and make sure there's going to be availability. I don't know how you figure out whether the dates are available or not to use this pass. All that stuff is true. But the bottom line is that hotels in Scandinavia tend to be expensive and the Nordic countries tend to be expensive. And so getting them for 80 or 100 euros a night is almost unequivocally going to be a good deal. Almost all of these properties. I'm sure you can find one that's a bad deal if you look hard enough. But, uh, but overall they're generally going to be a good deal. The Nordic choice properties are now what they call strawberry include free breakfast. So you're going to get breakfast for free, which again, if you travel to a Nordic country

before that's more than nothing, that's a, that's certainly something. Cause a lot of, a lot of times food can be pretty expensive eating out and just about everything in some of the Nordic countries. So then of course you also have some of those brands like clearing collection that in addition to free breakfast also have like a free evening spread that can replace dinner. And so if you're paying 100 euro a night and you're getting breakfast and dinner potentially

if you're gonna stay one of those Clarion Collection properties, I think this is a fantastic deal probably. Go ahead, tell me why I'm wrong. What if I told you that a lot of these properties can probably be booked for about 10,000 or 12,000 choice points per night? Then I guess it would depend on how many city points

you have. Or Wells Fargo, right? Right, true. Both of those programs have the ability to transfer one to two to choice, and so you could do really well just booking these same hotels with choice points. They vary, the actual prices vary. So you'd have to do some investigating into which hotels you're actually going to stay

at as to whether booking with choice points is a better deal than buying one of these packages. But yeah, my personal thing would be, I'd be looking first at the points because I have both a bank of choice points as well as city points that I could transfer one to two. But yeah, if you don't have either of those types of points and there's not a sale going on on choice points at the time,

then this makes a lot of sense. I'm gonna call you out on this, Craig. I don't believe you. What do you value your choice points at? Around, well, what do I value them at? If you were going to redeem for a hotel, what's the minimum amount of value you would accept? I'd say 0.8.

You really do 0.8? You think you do 0.8? I'm more of a one cent per point kind of guy. So if do.8? You think you do.8? Yeah. I'm more of a one cent per point kind of guy. So if you're looking at these and you're like, okay, a lot of these places can be had for, I don't know, about 10, maybe 10, probably about 20,000 choice points anyway. But okay, let's go with your.8. That's 160 bucks a night. You're spending worth of choice points at.8 cents per point.

Why wouldn't you pay 100 and keep your points? Wait, you're going with 20,000 points a night you're spending worth of choice points at.8 cents per point why wouldn't you pay a hundred and keep your points wait you're going with 20,000 points a night yeah yeah well I don't know if the 20,000 point a night properties are available in these lists but well that's true that's true I don't know if they're available with points either but I for that matter but I was gonna say the same thing with city points because if you're looking at again at a 20,000 point per night property and you transfer 10,000 city points to choice in order to have those 20,000 points, I mean, I would rather just pay the hundred dollars for the night if I had that option rather than transfer my city points and essentially

only get one cent per point in value. So yeah, I mean, for city points for sure, that would be the case. If you're booking, yeah, if it for city points for sure that would be the case if you're booking Yeah, if it's 20,000 points, but actually a lot of a lot of slotted slotted Hopefully unprepared for this particular matches running the numbers I like I like a little bit of I think we you know, I like this promotion. I'm just what what my hesitation is is that there are other good ways to get value from the same hotels.

And so I think it's just worth comparing. Very true. Yeah, yeah, and to that point, Capital One Shopping has had great offers for choice privileges. So if you trick that Capital One Shopping extension, you might find yourself getting 20 or 30% back at choice. And so then you also have to look at the cash rates and do some math. So a lot to think about there, but there you have our very inconclusive opinion about mattress running the numbers this

week. Let's move on to Bonvoit, where I think we can agree. So the things that Bonvoit us this week, IHG has increased the award rates at some intercontinental hotels to 200,000 points per night. What? Yeah, so I actually doesn't have an award chart and they don't Um, they don't have a single top point rate across all their properties the way, you know Hilton right now like the maximum any property would cost for a standard room is 150,000 points per night. But with IHG, they don't have that. But what they did seem to have is for some brands, they had a top rate. And with intercontinental hotels, not resorts though,

I think the previously they topped out at, I think it was 120,000 points, something like that. But now the floodgates have opened and they're priced, whatever they're priced. And so we're seeing some enormous rates for those. So that is a shame. Yeah, it's hugely disappointing. I don't get very excited about IHG in general.

It's just not my preferred hotel chain. But I'm really disappointed that Intercontinental has become that way because, man, 200,000 points a night, that'd be like the entire intro bonus on the best ever intro bonus, I think, at one of the IHG cards for one night. I mean, that's- Right now, the IHG business card, 200,000 point,

welcome bonus, yeah. So, yeah, that would be the whole thing for one night. Oh man. Yeah. That hurts. Ouch. Ouch. Thanks for that. IHG way to take up Marriott's, uh, you know, a mission here with Bonvoying us speaking of being Bonvoyed though. That's not it for this week. We've got AMEX has nerfed the business platinum Dell credits. How disappointed are you about this? I have mixed feelings about it

so currently and previously the Business Platinum card offered two hundred dollars back for all spend at Dell every six months, so That was certainly a nice, easy extra value you could get from your business Platinum card by just buying random stuff at Dell every six months. And you make sure you go through a portal and get some extra rewards when doing that.

And so that part was good. The part I didn't like is, as I mentioned earlier in the show, sometimes I have a lot of business platinum cards, and to have to keep trying to find stuff that I want to buy at Dell becomes increasingly difficult. So Amex to the rescue, they've solved that problem for me by, instead of getting a total of $400 back each year with a business platinum card, you'll get a total of $150 back in a calendar year.

Wait, that's $250 less. It is. Yes. Good math skills there, Nick. However, you could get $1,000 back at Dell. Oh, wow. Sounds good. I'm just going to say they increase the rebate quite a bit to a thousand dollars. In addition to the one fifty thousand dollars, but but there's a small little catch on the thousand dollars back. Oh, it's a small little catch. You have to spend five thousand dollars or more at Dell.

What? What? I don't want to spend another penny at Dell as it is. I spend five thousand to get one thousand back. That's like an Amex offer, a so-so Amex offer at that. Yes, very true. Well said. For businesses that actually buy a lot of computer supplies, it's probably fine. But for small businesses, it's not so great.

And so yeah, there we go. That perk has been basically nerfed from 400 to 150 is the way I think about it. But it's reduced the amount of Dell stuff I have to buy each year. So that's a good news. Well, that's a plus because I've really just about run out of things I want to buy at Dell. I'm buying Nintendo Switch games that I'm reselling at this point on Facebook marketplace because because yeah, there's just not much left that I really want at Dell. And then, you know, we've hung onto a couple to give us gifts to the kids over the years.

But but yeah, anyway, so not excited about the fact that it's decreased, certainly not excited about the rebate. How many small businesses are buying $5,000 worth of stuff from Dell every year? I just don't even know. I can't imagine. Well, Dell is certainly hoping that a lot more will be. I'm sure they are. Good luck. Good luck, Dell. Maybe people do it one time, but ideally if your stuff doesn't stink, Dell, then they won't need $5,000 every year, right? So. Yeah. Yeah. And now that's not all the news about the business platinum card if you were a fan of Adobe products Mmm, you are pre-zip previously getting $150 back Off a certain certain Adobe products now they've widened the net. So that's a good news

just about anything you buy at Adobe now is is Qualifies for a coupon of $250 back from $600 or more spent. Another coupon. Another coupon. Another coupon. Oh my goodness. Another coupon. Thanks for that.

Yeah, thanks. Well, so they've increased the rebate on that to 250. Long as you spend 600. Yeah, that's not worth very much to me because I don't really need to buy anything from Adobe. Of course, if you do, you know, great, all the more power to you than that just increased in value. Same as if you need to buy $5,000 worth of stuff from Dell every year, then I guess, you know,

great for you there too. I think that both of those groups are probably not tiny, but small. Yeah, I mean, I think the Adobe one is probably a wider net because they do, they certainly have products that probably cost over 600 or more each year. And so, especially if you have been buying one anyway

that didn't previously qualify, then that's all good news for you. But still, yeah, for most of us, not so good. So they must've added something since they essentially subtracted value here for many of our holders. So they must have added something since they essentially subtracted value here for many of our holders. So they must have added something, right? Not in this round.

They pre-added, right? You remember at the end of last year, they surprised us by adding the quarterly $50 rebates at Hilton Hotels, which is nice. I mean, that was just just total net ad before. So I think that's what they would point to. Hopefully something more is coming, but we don't know. Well there you have it.

Okay, so we can hope, we're left with hopes. Thanks, EmEx. Speaking of hopes, one of my biggest hopes for years now has been to take advantage of the ANA round the world ticket, which has been to take advantage of the ANA round the world ticket, which has been one of the best theoretical deals in miles and points forever. It's been like the dream to book one of these and ANA is trying to pour cold water on my hopes. Well, Nick, you have until June 23rd to get this thing booked and after that these will not be bookable anymore. So yeah,

ANA has had this excellent Star Alliance around the world award chart since, I mean they've just had the same one in place. What was that? Since the dawn of time more or less. Dawn of time, I was gonna say 1783-ish, but yeah either either way, it's been a long, long time, and so the award prizes are really good. That being said, I have done it. I have booked and flown the NA Around the World Award, and it was unquestionably a great value, but it is, it's painful and in many, many ways. So there's no point in me listening them all now, I don't think. I'll just real quick say like, you can't change the route

afterwards. And so, you know, let's say you have an eight month, you know, big around the world, you're going to be spending eight months around the world. The fact that, you know, you can't change the route, like something happens and you want to go somewhere else, you're just stuck with it as it is. You can change the date and time of flights, but it still has to be the same exact carrier. You have to avoid airlines that have big fuel surcharges because they'll pass that along to you. There's a lot of things that are very difficult with it. And so ANA is just trying to save you that kind of headache. Not to mention the fact that you'd have to find availability

on all the legs at one time and transfer and then wait for your points to show up at ANA because it's not instant from AMEX. So yeah, there's a lot of ins and outs there. So it's always been a complex thing. And that's why, despite the fact that I've been, you know, in the war travel hobby for more than a decade at this point, I still haven't booked one

and Greg has booked one, right? Just one for two people. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so it's, you know, one of those things that We love the idea. Unfortunately, it's dying soon so if you have no idea what we're talking about don't even disappoint yourself by seeking out all the information because Probably you're not gonna be able to get it all together between now and then anyway Yeah, I wish I'd be able to but I don't think I'm gonna get a chance to do this either. So yeah, so goes that

All right awards points and more. Let's go through this quick and a more ANA news starting in June 24th They got a whole bunch of award chart changes coming Although we say a whole bunch and it's that makes it sound worse than I think it really is the the new I think Benefit the new good news is that One Way Awards are finally, finally gonna be available starting on June 24th. That's huge. It really is. You know, before they only let you do round trip

or around the world. Now they let you do One Way Awards at half the price of round trip. And so that's great news. The negative news is that when flying ANA itself, as opposed to Partner, they have increased prices, but just for their peak season, their high season rates. So they've kept prices the same for low season and for regular season, but just for high season, which is like late spring and or I guess mid spring.

High season is spring, most of the summer and just during the holidays in the winter. Half the summer, half the summer. Yes, most of the summer. You're right, more than half the summer. Yes, you know, I always I always think that people probably misinterpret this to be more, to exclude more time than it actually does. Like if you want to go to Cherry Blossom Festival, Sakura, that's regular season. In fact, if you go after it, it's low season. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cherry Blossom season, depending on where you're going in the

country, starts usually late March. But yeah, it extends into the beginning of April and yeah, yeah. It's cherry blossom season, depending on where you're going in the country starts usually late March. But yeah, it extends into the beginning of April. And yeah, that's low season. So the high season dates aren't necessarily as restrictive as you'd think for people that are mostly traveling in the American summer. July 16th to August 23rd is a high season period. But if you're able to travel earlier in July or any of June,

I mean, depending on where you are and what your schedule is, there's certainly still a lot of regular season. A regular season round trip to Japan in business class is still 105,000 miles on ANA. Now you do pay surcharges, so it's not, you know, and those aren't nothing with ANA. They've climbed over the years, so they're not super low, but that's one of many good values. I mean, the one-way awards now on Star Alliance,

you're talking 50K one way to Europe in business class, which if you can find availability on a carrier that doesn't have surcharges, that's still a great deal. Asia, 65 or 68K in business class, again, one of the best deals to Asia in business class there on Star Alliance. Japan at 55K on Partners. I mean, there's just, there's a number of good deals.

So I think now with the One Way Awards, that's gonna make ANA way more appealing, but ANA, hello, if you're out there listening, gotta make those transfers from Amex instant. Come on, guys, like get with the program. Yeah, make the transfers from Amex faster and please stop this thing of points expire after three years without activity resetting the clock. I hate that. Those two things together are really bad because if you

see an award available, you initiate a transfer from Amex to ANA and then the award is gone by the time the points are there, you now, now the clock is ticking. You've got three years to use those points or they disappear on you. Yep. I'm just double checking when mine expire because I have some expiring soon too. So yeah, I've been in that same boat here for a couple of years. Nick's going to take up our time to check in his own accounts right now. I'm not, but I'm in that boat very much so, where I'm like, oh man, that stinks.

So anyway, that's that. That's it. So real quick, Alaska has some news out. Starting this summer, if you have a Alaska Airlines card that gives you a companion fare, you will be able to use that companion ticket on not just Alaska anymore but also Hawaiian, but it's limited to within North America. So the thing is, Alaska and Hawaii, Hawaii already has international flights like from Hawaii to Australia and other places see Alaska is starting to add

international flights using the Hawaiian airplanes and those flights those international flights to like they go across the Pacific will not be eligible for that. All right well but still that's overall a net win right? Oh, for sure. Expanding to the Hawaiian flights, I think opens up the companion ticket for a lot of uses. So I think that's terrific. Yeah, I think I'm much more likely to use it each year than we have been and that benefits. So that's great.

Also from Alaska and Hawaiian, we've got a promotion to earn, what is it? It's not a promotion. So elite members with gold 75K or 100K status promotion to earn what is it? It's not a promotion. So, so elite members with gold 75k or 100k status will be able to basically pick a extra comfort seat for free on so I think they can do that today on Alaska flights, but it's going to be expanded to Hawaiian flights. So that's something that would

have been happening eventually anyway, once they more fully combine the program, but they're inching that way with things like that. The question that anybody hearing this is going to ask, I'll ask it, any news on when transfers from Amex to Hawaiian might end? No news. No news. Good. I knew that question would follow that closely, but no, no news there yet.

All right, let's get into this week's main event. Main event time, domestic flights for less. How can we fly around the country for less? You know, airfare can be a big part of your travel expenses and sometimes, as we discussed on last week's show, sometimes it can cost more to fly a positioning flight from your local airport to an international gateway than it costs for flying around the world in business class

because you get good deals on your miles for those, and often there aren't good deals for miles for these short hops. So we have a grab bag of things you can do to save money, save miles on domestic flights. Yep. So let's start grabbing out of the bag here and start out with ways that you can get cheaper cash rates. How can I find cheaper cash rates? Well, you know, the simple thing,

get familiar with tools like Google Flights, which are that one in particular is a favorite. So many people and there's so many, you could use it to do obviously very simple searches that just say from this airport to that, show me the price on this date. You can drop down the calendar and see when it's cheaper. You can put your destination as United States

and have it show you, sort of go into a Google Explorer feature and show you where in the United States you can fly cheaper. So there's all kinds of tricks you can do with a tool like Google Flights. You can also set alerts on specific flights so that it'll let you know when prices drop. Very good. Have you had success with those alerts before?

I haven't done them very often. So I think I did once, but that was the only time. Yeah, I've got one that I didn't even think I set one, but it just started sending me alerts that maybe I clicked a button by mistake and it started sending me alerts because it saw that I kept searching a particular route. But yeah, so there you go. There you have one. How about finding cheap award prices?

What can I do to find better award prices? Yeah, so there's a lot of great tools for searching for awards. I'm going to just, we have a post, you know, which award search tool is best that you should check out, but the one I'm going to mention right now is Points Path, because I just talked about Google Flights and how good that is. Points Path integrates in your browser with Google Flights, so if you're using Google Flights anyway, Points Path will show you right next to your search results. You can book this flight with, let's say,

10,000 American Airlines miles. And it will also give you an indicator as to whether it's a better deal to pay cash or to pay with miles. And so I really like that tool for that. Yeah, yeah, it's a very easy set it and forget it. Once you install the extension, you just see the prices there. So that's really good. And there's the free version will show you a number of the popular programs, the number

of the US based programs that are going to be useful for you. So that's good there. All right. Now what about and of course, you can set alerts, you can set award alerts. So there are a number of different search tools like Greg said, and you can set award alerts with those tools to be alerted when flights become available.

So that can certainly be a useful tool for the bag. I've had some success with award alerts lately where tools have notified me to say, hey, there's an award seat available on this route you're tracking. And that's been useful for me to be, hey, there's an award seat available on this route you're tracking. And that's been useful for me to be able to nab some award flights that I may not have otherwise. But what about?

You can also use them to tell you when the price has gone down. So I did that recently with a Delta flight. And I was using PointsPath. And now I think it has to be the pro version of PointsPath, the paid version, but I told it to track that flight that I booked with Delta Miles, and sure enough, it told me when the price went down,

and I just went into the manage my flight within Delta, said change this flight, pick the same flight. It showed me how many miles it would give me back. And so I changed it to the same flight, got miles back. Boom. Yes, I want to change to the same flight for fewer miles. Thank you. Yeah, that's great.

That's an awesome feature. Now, what about paying fewer miles for the same flight by taking advantage of partner awards? How can you save miles with partner awards domestically? Yeah, you know, that's something that I think we talk about all the time and, but might not. People might not realize how much it applies to domestic flights. So a lot of times we give examples like, you know, use your, I don't know what's a,

use your American Airlines miles to fly Etihad First Apartments, you know, really cheaply kind of thing. But it also works domestically. So I'm just gonna run through a few examples. Using Alaska miles to fly American Airlines is one of the best right now, because for really short distance flights,

the prices are 4,500 Alaska miles to fly a short American Airlines flight, excuse me, an economy, or 9,000 miles in business class. Another one you can do, and I literally just booked one of these yesterday, is you can use Virgin Atlantic miles to book short haul Delta flights for 7,500 miles. That's economy. Unfortunately business class is a lot more. That's 21,000 for business or regional first class. If you want to fly United, you can pay as little,

few as 10,000 miles with Aeroplan, Air Canada Aeroplan, or 10,000 miles, no matter what the distance is on a United flight with Turkish miles. These are if you're flying United economy. Domestically, yeah, yeah, because of course we're talking about domestic awards. Yeah, so those are all great ways to save miles.

They're not always gonna be available. Of course, the flight you're domestic awards. Yeah, so those are all great ways to save miles. They're not always going to be available. You know, of course, the flight you're looking for may or may not be available, but it's always worth a look because sometimes they are. And when they are, especially at the prices that Greg was just talking about some of those shorter flights, these can be really good deals on some of those shorter flights, not uncommon to get four or five or six cents per point on one of these shorter flights or not uncommon to get four or five or six cents per point on one of these shorter flights

or more, potentially much more, with one of these partner airline programs. Of course, not every airline is great about releasing award space to their partners. So that can be a challenge at times, although keep searching, because you never know when things are gonna pop up. Yeah, yeah.

And I should also mention the other thing, which is that sometimes the American Airlines Delta United, their own prices might be even better than the numbers that I just recited. I don't think I've ever seen American Airlines less than 4.5K. I don't think so, yeah. Maybe you'll see 5K.

Yeah. But certainly it's not impossible to see like a Delta flight that would be 6000 miles, 6000 Delta miles, but it would cost 7.5 thousand Virgin miles, but Delta American United, they don't have award charts for their own flights anymore. So while you'll sometimes do better with their own program, you'll often do better with a partner program. And, you know, I'm going to go back to Points Path is how I found that Virgin thing. Because it just, when I was searching for

a flight yesterday, it showed me that I could book it, it would be cheaper to book with Miles, and it told me to use Virgin Miles. And because the Delta, I think wanted 21,000 or 25,000 something like that. Yeah, and to be clear, I think that Virgin is one of the programs that's only available in the paid tier with Pointe de Cote. So I think you need to have had the pro version in order to get Virgin. Yes, that is true. The free version includes Alaska, American Delta, JetBlue, and United. And the pro version right now includes Alaska, American Delta, JetBlue, United, Air And the pro version right now includes Alaska, American Delta, JetBlue, United Air Canada, Virgin Atlantic, Emirates, and Qantas.

And of course, they've been adding new ones pretty frequently. So I wouldn't be surprised to see more of those in the not-so-distant future. But yeah, yeah, that's a really good point that. And I think along with that, it's worth saying that it's not always only the cheapest flights that are

available through partners. You'll be surprised sometimes that Delta might be charging a lot more miles or money for a flight that happens to be available to Virgin Atlantic and then maybe a cheap flight isn't available to Virgin Atlantic. Sometimes it feels like there's no rhyme or reason. Yeah, yeah, totally true. All right, next up we have credit card travel discounts slash rebates. There's a number of different ways to use the credit cards that you may already have

in your wallet to get discounts or rebates on domestic flights. Yeah. So let's talk platinum cards, American Express Platinum cards. They come with those $200 per year in airline incidental fee credits. And what we found over time is those credits are supposed to be used for things like check bag fees. So you pay with your platinum card to, you pay for the check bag with your platinum card and they'll refund up to $200 per year if you pay, if it's with an airline that you picked as your preferred airline with American Express,

because this only works with the one selected airline. However, we found over time there are many things that are not on the official list of incidental fees that will give you these credits, and these things can be used often to reduce the cost of domestic flights. Yeah, for instance, if you load your United Travel Bank using your MX Platinum card, you can load that up 50 or $100 at a time. And those charges come through as incidental charges and at least as we're recording this, get rebated with

the credit if United is your chosen airline. Make sure you choose your airline by the way at least one calendar day before you try to make a qualifying charge because sometimes it won't go through until the next calendar day or the reimbursement won't come through if the charge isn't from the following calendar day after you switch. So always a safety tip there to switch first. But United Treble Bank is kind of like United gift card credit, but it expires after five years. So it's United credit that you can use for five years. You can only use it for United flights have to be United operated.

It can't be a partner code share kind of a thing. Can't use it to pay award taxes on an award ticket, but they can be used to buy tickets for travel on United. So it's a way to kind of bank that credit up to use it on a future flight. Yep, yep. And I'm gonna give another example with Delta. So Delta doesn't have that kind of travel bank thing, but what we have found is that when you use your Platinum card

to pay the difference in fare, so let's say you have some Delta credit or a Delta gift card, something like that, and use your Platinum card to pay the difference in fare, that difference in fare, as long as under a certain amount, I think $250, something like that, will be treated like a airline incidental fee that gets rebated.

So what you could do, if you don't already have any kind of Delta credit, let's say you're looking to book a $500 flight and you're hoping to get $200 of that rebated from your Platinum card. What you could do is find a $300 flight, book that with whatever payment method you want, and then go into manage my flight,

change the flight to your $500 flight that you do want, and pay the difference with your platinum card. And that $200 difference is gonna look like a fee, and that'll get rebated. So I do that kind of thing pretty regularly. That's a great way. As long as you've picked Delta as your preferred airline.

Right, that's the key thing. You gotta make sure you pick, and you can only pick one airline. It has to be a domestic US airline with the Platinum Card airline incidental credits. But we have an entire guide on what works to trigger a Platinum Card or MX airline incidental fee credits.

So we'll link to that in the show notes. Make sure that's in there so you can find what works for a variety of different airlines. That's just two examples. Next up, Chase Sapphire Reserve has a $300 annual travel credit. This one's really nice because any travel purchase automatically triggers the credit. So you can book a flight directly through an airline, you book a hotel, you buy a rental car, whatever you do, you just have to just have to pay with this and it

automatically credits up to $300 per card member year in purchases for travel. So Capital One Venture X also has a $300 annual travel credit except that one's not as easy. You do have to book your travel through the Capital One travel portal in order to see that $300 discount basically is how it works when you're but you can apply it you know if you see a $310 flight on through the portal you can book it and

pay pay with that $300 credit plus $10 extra and you've got your flight. Yeah one thing that's kind of nice about booking through the Capital One Travel Portal is that if the price of your flight drops, I don't know if it's within a certain period of time, but they automatically give you a credit for the difference. So I logged in at one point and I had more than $300 in credit after the new year started. I was like, where did that come from? And I realized that I got like $10 in credit from a flight I booked last year that dropped in price after I booked it. I didn't even realize it dropped in price. I didn't realize that they gave us a credit for it,

but there it was. Yeah. My wife had the same thing happen. And so that's a really cool feature. It's kind of fun just to get the magic magic money showing up. Magic money. Everybody likes magic money. All right. That's credit card travel discounts, companion tickets. A number of different airlines offer companion tickets. Of course, the most famous of this bunch is the Southwest Companion Pass because that's the only one of these that's repeatable.

I was going to say an infinite number of times. I guess you probably couldn't fly an infinite number of times, but you can repeat it again and again as many times as you can fly anyway. So the Southwest Companion Pass requires that you earn 135,000 qualifying points within a single calendar year and then you get a companion pass where the companion flies for free with you. All they pay is the taxes, which domestically are $5.60 one way, usually internationally you'll pay a little bit more. And again, you can add your companion, even if you've booked your ticket with your Southwest points or, you know, obviously if you've booked your ticket with your Southwest points,

or obviously if you book with cash or if somebody else buys the flight for you, you can still add your companion. You can change the companion up to three times per year. You can earn those companion pass qualifying points through credit card welcome bonuses. So strategically opening two of the right Southwest credit cards

at the right time of year, you could end up with a companion flying for free with you for almost two full years. Yeah, you know, as much as we've hated, like all the changes Southwest has made lately, they haven't yet nerfed this benefit. And it's so it remains among the top three, if not the number one, you know, travel deal that's ongoing. Yeah, I mean, I'm super unhappy with all these changes that Southwest has announced lately, but you know what? I'm flying Southwest this weekend, gonna fly them again the weekend after that, gonna

fly them a few more times this year probably because the companion pass just makes it a good deal in our household. We end up paying fewer points or less money when we're buying a cash ticket. So yeah, there you have it. Absolutely Alright the the next three companion tickets. We're gonna talk about are Just one time per year kind of use them use them or lose them opportunities Delta is

The only one of the three that doesn't require any spend to get the companion ticket if you have the Delta three that doesn't require any spend to get the companion ticket. If you have the Delta Platinum card or the Delta Reserve card, you get a companion ticket each year upon renewal. So you don't get it the year when you first sign up, but every year after that. And it's, you know, basically it's one, it's even beyond domestic. It's like nearby regional. You can fly to quite a few places, but you can't fly all the way across the Atlantic or the Pacific with it. There's some limitations,

like only discount fare classes work. So that can be really frustrating when those aren't available. But I just use, my wife and I just used our two companion tickets for two different round trips coming up. We didn't save like a ton, cause they were like fairly, we saved about 450, $500 per trip,

which is still really nice because both of our companion tickets come from the $350 per year platinum, this platinum Sky Miles card. So you got more than the cost of the annual feedback and value out of each of those companion certificates. Well done there. So nice that those don't require any spend. And of course, the ones from the reserve card can be used in like regional first

class or whatever they they call their forward cabin, right? That's right. That's right. That's right. Yep. Okay. So that's Delta. Then Alaska offers a companion certificate that requires $6,000 spend in a year in order to get the companion certificate with Alaska.

If you have an old, old Alaska card that you've had around for a long time, then you may get one automatically without having to spend. But if you've opened it last year. You've got a collectible. Yes. Yes. Which we have in my household. That's why I was like, is it 6,000 a year? Because we have the one that it's automatic, still doesn't require any spend.

The Alaska Companion Certificate is interesting though, because both the primary user and the companion earn redeemable miles and status miles the same. So if you're earning one mile per dollar flown, or rather per dollar, one mile per mile flown, then you could potentially earn quite a bit depending on your routing with Alaska, because they also allow you to do

some pretty interesting things in terms of your routing choices. You can only go west kind of once and east kind of once, but you can really kind of take a roundabout routing. You can have a stopover in there. You could use them on a one-way. So it's as in the terms round trip, but they work on a one-way. Much more flexible than the Delta tickets for all those reasons, which is great. Yep. So that's a fun one. And then finally, American. and so which is which is great.

Yep. So it's a fun one. And then finally, American. Yeah. So American, there's there's several different cards where if you spend twenty thousand dollars or in some case, thirty thousand dollars in a year, you get a companion ticket good for either one companion or two companions, depending on which one you get. And Nick, you had some really good luck with this recently. Yeah, just recently we had gotten one from the Aviator Silver card. So that one actually allowed for two companions for $99 each plus the taxes.

And yeah, we were looking at a situation where the first person's flight, I think actually was like $600 and changed what it was, like about $660 or $650, something like that. And so we were able to add the two companions for altogether around 850 or so. So we ended up paying an average of about 280 a person is what it turned out to be, I think. So I'm estimating all those numbers,

but it was about 280 a person for flights. It would have cost us more than $600 a person. So that worked out really well. That's awesome. But there's a ton of black out dates. Yeah. Yeah. So there's, there's some big limits limitations here. Now they're not limited like Delta, like they don't require certain fare classes, right? But in all these cases, they do, but they're most of the, yeah, I'm sorry, go ahead. Sorry. In all four cases,

I think it's economy only unless you have the Delta Reserve companion ticket, but we're mostly talking about economy flights. Now, American also, in addition to blackout dates, tell me if I'm wrong, I don't think they allow upgrades, like elite upgrades. No, they don't. And like Alaska, on their companion certificate, if you've got, like if you're an elite member and you've got upgrades and guest upgrades to use, you can apply those on the companion certificate booking.

Same with Delta too. Yeah, but with American, no, there's no upgrades on companion certificate bookings, period, end of story. And it is limited to certain fare classes, although it includes almost all of the economy class fare classes. So it's effectively almost any economy class fare works for the certificate. But I think if I remember correctly, I'm making this up off the top of my head. So you'd have to check my post. But I think there were like 53 blackout dates, which doesn't necessarily sound like a lot until you're

like, well, that's four every month. And at least, you know, obviously some months are going to be more than others. But a number of people complain that it cut out weekends, like half the year basically, with the American Airlines companion cert. So again, you have to check the post for all the details on how many black updates and which ones and everything for this year and next year. But it's much more restrictive than the others. I got lucky that I found a trip that it just magically fit into perfectly because American was the airline. We had to fly. We were stuck with specific times. So it worked out really well,

but I wouldn't bank on that working out well. Right. So I kind of listed these sort of in order of my preference of these certificates, because Southwest companion pass, of course, is a whole nother league from all the others. Delta, at our time, you know, decided to do it, but Delta first or Alaska,

I put Delta first because it doesn't require spend and because just Delta has such a much bigger route network than Alaska for where you could use them, but it is more restrictive. So that's why that one, you could go either way. And then American, it just has so many restrictions that I've never actually used one of these in my points life.

They used to be going way back. I think they were US Airways. US Airways, yeah. It was a US Airways benefit. In their original incarnation. Yeah. And I had those at a time, but I never used them. Yeah, I had the US Airways cards and never used it either.

So same. Because I think it used to come with a card. I think first year used to get one for free or something. If I remember, I'm sure I never spent $20,000 on a US bank card. No, so that's there you have it on those. Let's talk about other stuff. Other ways to save on your domestic flights. You can pay with points to a bank travel portal. Of course, if you have the Chase Sapphire Reserve card, you get one and a half cents per point in value when you're booking travel through Chase Travel. The US Bank Altitude Reserve card, which is no longer available to new applicants and I'm not sure whether you can product change to it or not.

So this might be if you have it, this sure whether you can product change to it or not. So this might be a, if you have it, this is where you can kind of dangle it in front of people. I should take my hat and dangle it right here. The collectible. So yeah, anyway, if you have it though, the real-time mobile rewards. Well, first of all, you could book travel

through the US bank travel portal at one and a half cents per point, or with real-time mobile rewards, you could potentially book through any US based travel travel provider and then maybe redeem those points at one and a half cents per point with a text message. It's a very odd system but basically think of it as one point one and a half cents per point in value towards travel with either the Chase Sapphire Reserve or the US Bank of America's premium rewards.

Yeah and in very similar ways the Sapphire Preferred Card, the BILT card, and in very similar ways, the Sapphire Preferred Card, the BILT Card, and US Bank's, no, Bank of America's Premium Rewards Elite Card all let you get 1.25 cents booking through their travel portals. Finally, another opportunity to get 1.25 is if you have the Chase Aeroplan Card. So that one, you don't have to book through a portal or anything, you don't have to do text messaging.

You can use your aeroplan card to book any travel and use Chase's pay yourself back feature and get 1.25 cents per point value, paying yourself back with aeroplan points. So I know people who have done that a lot, that there's now a cap on how much you can do that, but there used to not be. And so I know people that would wait

for a big transfer bonus from Chase to Aeroplan. And then, you know, by using your pay yourself back, it worked out to a lot better than 1.25 altogether in that way. But anyway, that's that. All right, get card holder award discounts. So with Delta, United and JetBlue and probably a few others,

there are exclusive discounts for credit card holders. So you can pay fewer miles. I am more familiar with the United one here than the others. United offers the basically expanded Saver level access, slightly better pricing on some flights for United credit card holders. And JetBlue, I think it's 10% or 5%.

JetBlue is a 10% rebate. So it's not a discount, but a rebate. United actually, it's not just the saver economy anymore. They also have like, sometimes you will see, even for like business class partner awards, you'll see a, you know, it's 100,000 points instead of 110,000 points as a card holder discount, I believe.

So that's pretty good. And Delta is the 15% rebate or not 15% discount, discount, upfront discount on all Delta zone flights. Yep, very good. You can buy discounted airline gift cards to save money on booking flights. So Costco very frequently offers discounted gift cards for Alaska or Hawaiian sometimes in in store. I think too

They'll offer a $500 gift card for one of those airlines for $450 pretty frequently also Southwest again Same discount most of the time although occasionally Southwest goes as low as $430 We've also seen the Southwest gift cards on sale through Sam's Club every now and then a $500 card for 430 So it's worth keeping your eye out for those, because you could potentially save 10% or more on your flights that way. Of course, keep in mind, if you're paying with a gift card and that's covering the entire cost of your flight, you're losing out on potential credit card protections

and, of course, flight-related rewards in terms of whatever your credit card offers for a bonus category for travel. But at the same time, the money savings could be worth it in the right situations. Yeah, I mean, I would think that would be pretty good savings, probably worth it.

So, I mean, what a great combination to have the Southwest Companion pass and pay for your tickets with discounted gift cards, and you're just stacking savings on savings, and that's terrific. Yeah, we've occasionally seen deals oned gift cards, then you're just stacking savings on savings, and that's terrific. Yeah, we've occasionally seen deals on Southwest gift cards other places too. It's not as commonly anymore.

It used to be a PayPal digital gifts, used to offer them from time to time. Best Buy every now and then, we'll run a sale on them, so keep your eye out. Okay, another category of things are membership discounts. There's some sort of random memberships that you can get that may give you discounts off certain flights. I don't have firsthand knowledge of these, but I've been told about something called We Salute, which used to be called Veterans Advantage,

apparently gives you 5% off United flights. And Founders Club has a United flight discount as well. Yeah, Founders Card, it's similar. I think they say up to 8% maybe, but in my real world tests with it, it was closer to 5%. So similar type of a situation there. In recent, so Founders Card has been spamming me nonstop trying to get me to, first to expand my membership or to upgrade my membership

and now to renew my membership, which I let lapse, which I got for free through JetBlue. The version of that membership was terrible. But anyway, in one of those spam emails, they said something about they had enhanced their United discount. So I think it's different now. Now when rewards programs talk about enhancements, that's usually not a good thing.

That's sort of like how Amex has enhanced the Dell credit to give you $1,000 back now. Right, right. Well, you never know. I guess, you know, don't know until you know. So maybe if you're already considering Founders Card or already have it, you can check and let us know how much that ends up being. All right. Those are some options.

Then also we've got potentially you can book a flight and then make some sort of a change to do better. Yeah. So there's a number of ways that you could save points or money by thinking differently about how you book things. So one way is to take advantage of same-day change opportunities and so those happen in different ways. Basically what same-day change is is a free change even if the ticket price is different. So normally like most domestic airlines now allow free changes at any time to your tickets but in that context what a free change means is you know if you paid

$300 and you want to switch to this other flight, which is $350, they'll charge you the $50 difference, which makes sense. There's just no fee on top of that to make the change. That's what a free change is. But a same day change is where they let you change to that $350 flight within, it's usually like 24 hours before your originally scheduled flight or the different airlines have different rules about when that change can be made. Like I think Southwest, it has to be made at midnight.

After midnight, yeah. Something like that, after midnight. So same day, literally same day change. And so if you're willing to kind of live on the edge, what you can do is, you know, you have to get yourself familiar with what the same day change rules are for your airline. Some to do it for free, you have to have elite status,

or you might have to book a certain fare class, like with Southwest, I don't even know if that's gonna continue. Wanna get away plus, yeah, we don't know if that's gonna continue, right? Yeah, anyway, so you have to be familiar with all that, but once you understand it, then you can look at things like, oh, look, the 5 a.m. flight is half the price of the flight. I

actually want I'm going to book that and hope that I can same day change the flight I really want. And if not, you know, actually fly the original. And the reason I say hope is, is, you know, obviously, if the flight you actually want is sold out, they're not gonna let you with some airlines, the same exact fare class has to be available to same day change. So it depends on the situation as to what you can do. But the amount of savings possible are big. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Great technique there. Booking Saver Business Class instead of Standard Economy.

How can that save your miles? All right. Let's go back and talk about an example. I mentioned how sometimes you could use Alaska miles to book short haul American Airlines flights really cheaply. So they charge at the shortest distance flights 4.5k for economy or 9k for business class. Well, it's not unusual for economy not to have any partner award space available, but business may have award space available. So you might be looking at a flight where American Airlines itself might charge,

I'll make up a number, 15,000 miles one way for economy and more for first class. But Alaska, in that example, if first class was available, would charge 9,000 points for that flight. So even though you were fine flying economy, you could actually in those circumstances, save, in that case, points by booking the first class. Love it. Love it. Fly up front for less than it would have cost you to fly an economy class. You know, every now and then to I've seen this and it sounds farfetched, but I've seen it happen a few times just recently,

even in searches, where some of these programs that are now using dynamic pricing just doesn't make sense. I've seen American Airlines in some cases where they charge less, fewer points for like their, what I call business class, what they might call regionally their first class product, less for that than for economy or premium economy. Every now and then the pricing just doesn't make any sense. So it's worth looking at all of the different things to see what's available. I've seen that often also with Delta.

Might see their premium economy costing a lot more than their Delta one and it's just crazy. It's like, why? It doesn't make any sense, but that's the way it is. So make sure you're checking all of the prices and not just tunnel visioning on economy class, for instance, sometimes might be worth looking at the others. Book round trip instead of one way. This doesn't work with all airlines. The many airlines, domestically, the price is the same, whether you book one way or round trip for each individual

leg, but that's not true with everybody, right? Um, right. And it kind of just varies by situation. There's, there's not really a hard and fast rule of when you're going to see this, but sometimes airlines, um, do. Price differently for round trip. I've certainly seen it with Delta. I think I've seen it with American airlines as well. Um, where under some circumstances, the round trip is cheaper than booking the two one ways independently. Now, the other the other side of that is also probably even a better tip

to look at booking two one ways instead of a round trip. Because it could be that you're the best combination of price or points price is to fly one airline one way and a different airline back or Even if it even if it's just one airline there and back Maybe the best deal is to use miles in one direction and use cash on the way back And so it just depends on the situation, but I'd say More often than not being flexible with two one ways is a better deal than booking a roundtrip But we did want to just call out that there are certain situations where round trip you will see that as cheaper.

You know, now that you mentioned that that made me think of something else. So a couple months ago, I went to Atlantic City for some matching. And when I was looking at flights back from Atlantic City, I was by myself. So I was just looking for one passenger, which is usually my habit, just to search for one. Even when the whole family is traveling, I usually just look at the price for one passenger initially. And sometimes when you put in multiple passengers, the price can go up because there aren't enough seats and whatever the fare bucket is. I don't want to get too confusing. But this was the opposite effect. So one passenger from Atlantic City to my home airport

was something like $432. But when I put in two passengers, it was like $200 each, one way. So I've been in the habit of usually searching for one until I narrow down options. And then I put in the actual number of passengers. But I realized that I shouldn't do that all the time. Sometimes when I'm going to be traveling

with multiple people, I should put in at least two because sometimes they price it differently for one person. I assume because they think that as business travelers putting it on an expense report that don't care about the cost. Yeah, yeah. That's a really bizarre one, but yeah, I remember you finding that and showing it to us

and it was totally reproducible for certain markets. It's like not everywhere, but there's certain ones. Like this is where it happens. But that reminds me of another trick that we didn't have in our notes, which is the opposite of what Nick said, which is like, especially if you're booking awards, like maybe you can't find, you're booking for four people,

you can't find four seats bookable for 4.5 thousand Alaska miles on an American Airlines flight. But maybe you could find two and you book it that way and then pay for the other two with American miles or with cash, whatever the deal is. At least you've gotten half the ticket really cheap. Yep. All right.

Some good tips there. And then finally, book throwaway segments. Tell us what that's all about. Yeah, so this is one you have to have in any conversation about how to save money on flights. But it's one that it's kind of fraught with potential problems. But this is sometimes called hidden city ticketing. It's sometimes called skip lagging.

It's where you book a flight that goes past where you want to go. So I did this once when flying from, I think it was LA to Detroit, and the ticket price to go from LA to Detroit to Kansas City was way cheaper. And so I booked that longer flight and just got off in Detroit. There are all kinds of cautions. I don't wanna, this is already a long show, so I don't wanna get into that.

Before you do this, read the post skip lagging for the best flights at the best price. We'll have the link to that in the show notes. Make sure, be careful about that. Very good. All right, so I to that in the show notes. Make sure, uh, be careful about that. Very good. All right. So I think that's a pretty good collection of ways that you could maybe save on domestic flights. And so don't forget to look through all of them the next time you're struggling to find that positioning flight or a good deal on the positioning flight you want, because there are lots of different ways to potentially save. I think

that brings us to this week's question of the week. This week's question of the week comes in via email. Let me move it so I can actually read it here. It comes in via email from Harrison and he asks, hey there, relatively new listener. Love everything you guys put out. I'm deciding on a hotel credit card and I've landed on either the Amex Hilton Honors Aspire card or the Amex Bonvoy Brilliant card. So these are the ultra premium cards for Hilton and Marriott that are issued by Amex. Hyatt points seem great but they're so hard to earn and the welcome bonus on those on the Hyatt cards isn't terribly advantageous. With the Aspire and the Brilliant I seem sort of split. Point value seems relatively comparable debatable property reach seems comparable justifying the cost is

pretty close benefits of status seem close I think I'm leaning Hilton because of disappointments in the Bonvoy program over the last few years my question is this do you think slash predict Bonvoy will get better in the coming years because of all of the negative feedback they get from so many people who follow them closely? Part two, do you think there are any signs Hilton will get any worse in the coming years? Thanks. So between the aspire and the brilliant, which would you recommend? I think that's one question. And

then the secondary question is, do you think that Bonvoy will get better because people are unhappy? Do you think Hilton will get worse because they've been too generous? **Matt Stauffer** I'm going to answer the second question first, which is no, the Bonvoy will get worse because their Bonvoy-ness seems to feed on the negativity and it just snowballs. There is no sign of it stopping and I do not predict it's going to reverse course. So no. Hilton, I mean, I have no reason to think they're going to get worse. They've been on an upswing and they seem to be doing the right things for us points and

miles hobbyists. So I would certainly be more interested in betting on them. I mean, I would, to some extent, unequivocally recommend the Aspire over the Bonvoy Brilliant. There is one hesitation of that, which is that in a lot of my personal travel, I've often found that Marriott has been more likely to have a hotel that I wanna stay at at at random places that I want to go to than Hilton has.

And so if that's true for your travel style, it's possible that Bonvoy Brilliant is a better pick. But overall, the Aspire, it gives you, you know, credits, total number of credits that you can get back worth more than the annual fee. The free night you get is completely uncapped. You could use it literally any Hilton or SLH property in the world, well, any participating SLH property in the world, as long as the standard room is available, it's just so much better than the brilliant 85K Certofia. Yeah, I think that was the thing that jumped out at most to me, because the line justifying the cost is pretty close.

I disagree pretty strongly with that. Justifying the cost of the Aspire card is way easier, in my opinion, than justifying the cost of the Brilliant cardire card is way easier in my opinion than just finding the cost of the Brilliant card. That's not to say the Brilliant card isn't good. I have it, but it's much easier to justify the Amex card. Now only have the Brilliant card until I reach lifetime platinum status, which will happen next year and then I'll be done with that card.

But I will keep the Aspire. So I think that that's a no-brainer in my opinion between the two cards. If you're asking me which card is easier to justify, hands down the Hilton Aspire. Greg's point about if Marriott's got good properties where you wanna go, it might still make sense to go with the Brilliant card

because of the properties you wanna stay at, but not for the card itself. And then the question about Marriott, Greg's totally right, it's gonna get worse. And the reason it's gonna get worse, before it gets better, is because Marriott is very concerned with customer service, it's just that we're not the customers they care about.

The customers they care about are the hotel owners. Those are the people that are paying Marriott, you know, to be in the Marriott system. And Marriott has made it very clear that they are much more interested in appeasing the hotel owners than they are the people who stay at their hotels. They like they just very much look at it as though that's the hotel owner's job, not Marriott's job. And so that's why I think yeah, Marriott is very likely to continue to get worse for a

long time before there's any, you know, any hope of it getting better, if it ever does. And Hilton, who knows? You know, I don't know. Same with Greg. I have no reason to think they're gonna get worse. They seem attuned to what people like, but I don't have any reason to, well, I don't know that either, I guess. No, no, but we, you know, we continuously see more and more SLH properties being added to the program and that's such a positive thing. Hilton seems to get it. It's looking good, it's looking good. Obviously, yeah, we can't know what the future is,

but the same team that put this into place a year ago is still in charge. And they seem excited about the, when I say our excitement, I don't mean Greg and me specifically. They seem excited about the excitement about Hilton. I think there's a genuine interest in keeping people excited about Hilton.

Whereas Marriott, I don't think cares whether you're excited about Marriott or not really. As long as hotel owners continue to pay them, they're pretty happy. And so there's not much of a focus on the member experience for Marriott. That's unfortunate, but that's just the way it is. Yep. Yep. So Bonvoying will continue. There you go. All right. That's the end of today's episode. If you enjoyed this and you'd like to get more of this stuff in your email inbox each day or each week, you want to go to frequentmiler.com

subscribe again, that's frequentmiler.com slash subscribe, join our email list, follow us on all the various social media, join our frequentmiler insiders Facebook group where people ask questions like this one all the time and get lots and lots of opinions. And if you have a piece of feedback to be considered for a giant mailbag or a question to be considered for a question of the week, you can send that to send it to mailbag at frequentmiler.com. Bye everybody.