Frequent Miler on the Air - Elite status from home | Ep 113 | 8-28-21

Episode Date: August 28, 2021

1:08 Giant Mailbag 4:41 What crazy thing...did Alitalia do this week? 11:10 Mattress running the numbers: At what price should you mattress run the new Wyndham promotions? https://frequentmiler.com/wyndham-earn-3000-bonus-points-when-booking-weekday-stays-check-in-sun-wed/ 18:52 Main Event: Elite status from home https://frequentmiler.com/shopping-for-status-airline-edition-inspired-by-passing-the-guc/ https://frequentmiler.com/shopping-for-status-car-rental-edition/ https://frequentmiler.com/american-airlines-platinum-pro-status-fast-track-via-world-of-hyatt/ 51:56 Question of the Week: Rental car prices keep changing. How can you make sure you're getting the best price? Subscribe to our email list: FrequentMiler.com/Subscribe Musiccredit: Annie Yoder    

frequent miler on the air starts now today's main event elite status from home you don't have to travel the world stay in hotels fly everywhere drive rental cars in order to get elite status wait what how does that work yeah well you know there are tricks and we're going to talk about them. But, you know, once you get elite status, we're talking about things like free upgrades, sometimes waived change fees and other goodies that make travel better. Do I get those goodies from home also? No. You have to travel to enjoy these things.

You don't have to travel to get them. You don't have to travel to get them, and that's the key. Who wants to travel as a non-elite in order to get perks in the future? What you want to do is get the perks up front and then go travel and enjoy them, right? Right, right. Exactly. Yeah. So that's what we're going to be talking about today for the main event.

First, we've got the giant mailbag. Today's giant mail comes from Charles. And this giant mail is kind of small because this is in reaction to the post we did about the AARP membership, which you can get five years for $45. So that's really, really cheap. Nine bucks a year, right? Nine bucks. Yeah. And if you ever paid any attention to AARP memberships, you'll know that you don't

actually have to be an old fogey to sign up. You could be 10 years old and sign up and get all the perks. Things like, things things we mentioned in the post, things like British Airways discounts. You can get sometimes hotel discounts. You can get gift card discounts, things like that. You can get a discount at Denny's. You can get a discount at Denny's, right? So, you know, what 10-year-old wouldn't want that? Right, right, exactly. It's a good time at the back of the day. But Charles just wanted to point out that he has saved hundreds of dollars with his home insurance annually by being an AARP member. So I haven't looked into that.

I don't know whether or not I personally could save by somehow applying my AARP membership, but it's just something to point out. There's apparently other ways to beyond what we listed in that post. And so there you go. There you go. And you can save, I don't know, I missed the post. So I don't know if this got covered in there, but you can save eight bucks on the ARP membership if you have the chase offer. So eight bucks back on 45. So you're really talking $37. $37, right? $37 is pretty good. You don't have to save. I mean, it's not many trips to Denny's to save your $37. That's all I'm saying. So it's worth it. I mean, I've had a card. I've had a membership for a few years already, and I really haven't used it. But with the low spend in order

to get access to it, I figure if I use it for one British Airways discount one day, I'll come out ahead of where I was. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, my thing has been to, I've, I've let my membership lapse and I'm sort of waiting until I need a discount and then the idea is then sign up then, but this deals pretty good. So maybe I'll go ahead. We'll see. And then you don't have to search and remember and think, is it up? Is it time?

Is it blah, blah, blah. You just get it for five years and be done with it. Not a critical spending decision at the $37 or whatever. It's really not. It's really not. Yet I still do things like I think, well, last time I signed up for one year and got some kind of portal reward that was worth as much as the sign up fee. So why not just wait till the next thing like that?

You know, which I mean, they did. They've run a deal around like Black Friday, Cyber Monday quite a few times over the last few years where it's sort of like that, where you're getting basically all of it back or close to all of it back. Right. back or close to all of it back. So if you want to wait and hold out for that, you can, or if you just want to be done with it and have it done for five years for like, what, $7 a year or something, then that's probably not bad either. So I'm probably going to do it because if I can do it, I don't know. Do you know, can you stack on to the end of one that's not up yet? My membership's not up yet. I don't know the details. Can I stack it on? I'm going to have to find out. There's my question of the week. Can I stack years onto? I'm going to have to find out. There's my question of the week.

Can I stack years onto my AARP membership well before my retirement? So we'll find out. You're not getting an answer in this show. That's right. Okay. I don't know what you thought you came here for today, folks. Our new motto. You're not going to get an answer in this show.

I'm going to get an answer here. Whatever your question. All right. So then what crazy thing did Alitalia do this week? And if you just listened to that last segment, you'll know that you're not going to find out the answer. That's right. And I certainly don't know the answer because I'm sort of vaguely aware that they are. You're not going to get the answer out of Greg, that's for sure. Their whole thing is going kaput, right? What's going on with Alitalia?

Their whole thing is going kaput. That is an accurate way of describing it. Okay, there you go. Alitalia is just going completely kaput and being replaced by a new airline, ITA something. ITA Matrix? Yeah, they missed a branding opportunity there, I guess, or a licensing opportunity. Probably a lot of listeners have no idea what that is. That's an old geeky system for looking at airfares and creative ways.

You can do all kinds of things to find airfare with creative routings and all kinds of great stuff. But that's probably not- Probably not where they got the name. It's taking over the airline. It probably has something to do with Italy and transportation and stuff like that. But I don't know what the letters stand for.

Let's not get too complex here. Come on, You don't get the answers on this show. We just went over that. But anyway, so Alitalia is going out of business. They're about to be done. They've already stopped selling tickets. So they're not selling tickets anymore and they're not going to be operating apparently past October 15th. So if you have a ticket between now and October 15th, you're going to be able to fly it. After October 15th, So if you have a ticket between now and October 15th, you're going to be able to fly it after October 15th, though. That's when things get a little murky so much, not so much. So you're going to be offered your choice of a refund or if you'd like to be rebooked, theoretically, apparently, possibly you can be rebooked. But that's a lot of different

question marks at the end there. A lot of, you know, upward inflection in my voice, because I don't think that's going to happen on the new airline. That's kind of taking its place. The new airline taking its place as ITA is going to be owned, I believe by the Italian government and separate. It's not like a continuation. It's like a separate new thing. So my guess, and that's the best I've got because that's the best they've given anybody so far, is that they'll try to re-accommodate you on other SkyTeam flights is my bet. So I assume maybe you'll be able to do something with Air France or KLM, possibly, maybe Delta if you're

flying just to Italy. If you're flying around Europe, though, it's probably going to be a little bit of a pain at best. Or like I said, they'll give you a choice of a refund so you'll be able to get your money back. But where it really gets murky is nobody has any idea what's going to happen with miles and award tickets. I mean, I'll tell you what's going to happen with miles. Miles aren't going to be worth anything because they've not been allowed to sell the loyalty program. Some murky European rule stuff. Again, not going to get the answer to that on here, but there's some reason why they can't sell the loyalty program. Well, just as an aside, aren't they the ones that have always had this weird thing of the program

itself expires like regularly. And then you had to like do something and renew it. It's always been bizarre. It's not like your miles expire the entire thing, the whole program. The entire program, yeah. It'd be like Delta SkyMiles saying, you know, the whole program is expiring, and so if you want the new Delta SpaceMiles,

you have to do something to renew. To the CloudMiles. BlueSkyMiles. So anyway, that's a little bit crazy because we don't know if you have an award ticket after october 15th what's going to happen i mean what does a refund look like are you going to get yeah it's worthless miles back there aren't going to be miles so what what will

what will it be i don't know i i think you'd be better off so i mean if you have miles already in the program that you haven't used i mean mean, a reader wrote to me saying, you know, he was trying to just redeem them for gift cards at pennies to the dollar, whatever. And, you know, I think that makes a lot of sense if you could make that somehow happen. But, you know, the other alternative, I guess, is to try to book a flight and then, and then have them, you know, change it to another flight.

I don't know. I mean, that doesn't seem even possible at this stage. I mean, you'd be crossing your fingers. It'd be a gamble. Yeah. I think, I think it's, uh, it's a lost cause probably. I feel bad for anyone who has the miles. Now, if you already have a tick, a ticket, so you've already used the miles for a flight. Theoretically, I guess they should be putting you on another flight to get you to the same place. Theoretically. It's very unclear to me because the information has been sparse. So when we say they should be putting you on another flight, it's unclear to me who they is because Alitalia is going out of business. So,

I mean, how hard do they have to work? They can't be too motivated, right? I mean, I wouldn't think so. Not only not too motivated, but I mean, what other airlines are taking their credit card right now? You know what I'm saying? Like, you know, how are they going to get you a seat on another flight when they don't have any money? I'm not really sure, but it's a position I wouldn't want to be in. And it's kind of crazy because, you know, we don't see this happen every day. People always worry. Oh, is, you know, Avianca going to go out of business or is Virgin Atlantic in a fold or whatever else. And we're always kind of like, eh,

it just doesn't happen very often. You know, most of the time somebody comes in to the rescue and swoops in and everything's better and blah, blah, blah. But that's not the case this time. It's not happening. Not happening. Yeah. Yeah. That's a crazy thought about Alitalia, you know, going to other airlines like Air France saying, I'd gladly pay you Tuesday for a flight today. And, you know, what are they going to say? Right. Sure. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So that's just not happening. Yeah. That's a really good point. Yeah. And it'll be just kind of weird not to see Alitalia planes anymore too. I mean, for some reason they're just a symbol of Europe in my mind. I feel like I picture the planes and

not seeing them around too bad, but I mean, I'm sure I say that and that's, you know, not to be lighthearted about it either, because obviously a lot of people are going to be out of work with that. But, um, but you know, hopefully they'll be able to grab some new careers in the new airline and, and hopefully things will turn around with travel here in the coming months and years. So, so if you've got an Al-Italia miles or you've got an Al-Italia reservation, best of luck to you, get on the phone. And I doubt you're going to get any answers there either very quickly. I doubt you're going to get anyone on the phone. So yeah, sorry. As we said earlier, we have no answers here. No answers here. So then let's talk about mattress running the numbers this week.

All right. We might have answers here. Mattress running the numbers. We see mattress running the numbers is not in question form. So there's less of a... That's true. That's true. We don't have to have an answer. We just have to debate things. So mattress running, that's where we book a hotel and get more rewards out of that than we spend. So we're not actually interested in staying there and it works out. And so what we do is we debate a certain promotion that's going on and say, is it mattress run worthy? So what do we have this week? Well, Wyndham rewards is out this week with some stacking promotions. So, uh, they have a promotion that's been out for a while now. That's good until September 30th, I believe, where if you stay two nights and they don't have to be consecutive after every two nights or after two nights, anyway, you get 6,500 points. So 6,500 points after two nights. Then they have another promotion right now,

where if you check in on a Sunday to Wednesday night, you get a bonus 3,000 points per second. Right. This one starts September 7th. That's right. September 7th. So there's a little overlap here. September 7th to September 30th, where what you could do is book two separate stays or two nights. No, they'd have to be separate stays, whether two separate one night stays.

OK, and stay on a Sunday, stay on a Wednesday, let's say, and pick up 6500 points for the two nights, plus 3000 points each for each of those stays. That's another 6000 points. So altogether, you're at 12500 points. And on top of that, Wyndham base points, you'll get your Wyndham base points for those days and Wyndham guarantees a minimum of a thousand points per stay. So you would get at least 2000 more points. So for your two one night stays checking in a Sunday through Wednesday between September 7th and September 30th, you'll end up with 14,500 Wyndham Rewards points.

Great. 14,500. Okay. Is it mattress run worth? Yeah, that's the question. Oh, you know, there's a question. So let's say you find a cheap Wyndham property nearby and after taxes and everything, it comes to $72.50 for a one-night

stay. What do you think? Would you pay a total of $145 to get the 14,500 Wyndham points? Trey Lockerbie I know you want me to say no, but I'm going to say maybe, but probably not because right now they're on sale, I believe still on sale now. And they have gone on sale three or four times this year already for just under a penny a point. So you've been able to buy them direct for about the same price, essentially for a penny each. Now, you've been able to, but the but here is that usually you can only buy 45,000 points per year. They did increase that cap in one sale earlier this year where they allowed you to buy like 120,000 points or something like that. That was the first time I think they've ever done that.

And the latest sale is still capped at 45,000 purchase points per year. So if you need more than 45,000 points, you can't buy them directly. You can't buy more than 45 K usually. So in that case, if you already have bought 45,000 and you need more points, maybe because Wyndham points can be good, right? I mean, they can be great for Vacasa vacation rentals because you can book a one bedroom vacation rental, potentially a whole house or a whole condo, a whole home for 15,000 points. So if you're paying a penny a point, hey, that's not bad. And I say 15,000 points, but it could be even a little bit better than that, right? It doesn't have to be a full 15,000. You could pay less.

Right. If you have one of the Wyndham earner credit cards, which as you know, I love the business version of the Wyndham earner collection because you get automatic diamond status and you get enough points every year to more than cover up the uh cover the annual fee for that card um if you have if you have but if you have any of the Windermere cards uh you get a 10 discount on all the awards so that comes to 13,500 points per night instead of fifteen thousand. So the fourteen five would be more than enough to cover a free night. Right. And so from from that perspective, yeah, if you can stay for seventy two fifty a night or less, it definitely might be worth mattress running. I say might because if you're not going to use the points, if you don't have any vacation rentals in mind, well, then I mean, I guess it's not mattress run worthy. But if you think you're likely to do that, I don't know. I mean, will you mattress run it? And if not,

what would the price have to be for you to be like, okay, yeah, you know what, I am going to mattress run that? That's a great question. Yeah. There's another question. Sorry, guys. No, I am not going to mattress run it. My wife and I both have the Wyndham earner business card. And so we have a bunch of points thanks to the signup bonuses, or she will soon have the 90,000 points from the current bonus. And I also have some points from those previous portal promotions they did. So anyway, so I don't, I'm not like right now needing them. And I'm also not, if I had an opportunity to get Hyatt or Marriott or Hilton points at what I consider a really good price, I might consider it. But because those points can be kept alive forever.

And if I'm pretty sure I'll use them eventually, great. Window points are harder be kept alive forever and you know if i'm pretty sure i'll use them eventually great window points are harder to keep alive forever so i don't want to do anything to buy window points unless it's a crazy good deal um like like we had with the portal back when where it was offering something like do you? It was like 145 points per dollar for certain things. Something insane. There I was willing to spend some money because it cost me well less than a penny per point to get those. And it's like, yeah, I'll give it a try.

But I don't know. What would my price be? Maybe around, I'll say three quarters of a cent per point to attract me to buy them prospectively, maybe. I think it would have to be a half cent per point for me to be like, oh yeah, I'm definitely doing that. And I don't think you could do that because if it was a half cent per point, it'd have to be half of what we were just talking, right? So it'd be $36.75 a night, but I'm pretty sure that Wyndham has a minimum of $40 a night in order to qualify for rewards. I think you'll have to double check the terms on that, but I'm pretty sure it's got to be

at least 40 bucks a night in order to earn points on the stay. So, although it's pretty close to the 3650, I'm not going to find a $37 property anyway. So I'm worried about that. Likely not, likely not. So, um, uh, although I, I bet, I bet I probably could find you one of those Greg, but, uh, but I don't know if you'd want to stay. So, so, so it's mattress run worthy. If, again, if you can use the points, I'm in the same boat as Greg and I got a bunch of Wyndham points now, uh, eight X gas stations and, you know, points for my wife and points in my account. And then they did that golf thing recently. We picked up more points there and blah, blah, blah. So I don't really need more Wyndham points right now. I've got enough, but if you don't, I think it's a good promo.

It's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, if you're looking, if you're looking to book a high value stay, like at a Vacasa vacation rental in Hawaii or whatever, and you know, it's available and you just don't have enough points and you can't buy enough for your whole stay yeah go for it definitely all right okay so that brings us to the main event oh main event time my favorite so elite status from home how do you get it you you have you published a couple stories so your own personal quest to get elite status from home. How do you get it? You published a couple stories, your own personal quest to get elite status from home recently. Why don't you just tell us about that, and then we'll go into other options people have. Well, so I wrote two different posts this week. One was about car rental status because my family has a family wedding to attend in the fall,

and my in-laws are going to need a rental car. Rental cars are pricey. They don't travel a lot, but I kind of feel like if they're going to have to pay an arm and a leg for a car, they might as well get a nice car, right? So the best priced option for what they needed was Hertz. And I figured, well, if they can get high level elite status with Hertz, then at least maybe they can drive off the lot in a nice car. And so I helped my mother-in-law sign up for Hertz rewards program and use her Amex platinum card to get a base level of Hertz status and then match that around. So she had Hertz five-star status. So we matched that from Hertz over to sixth platinum status. Very easy match there. That was like instant. It didn't even

seem like there was a review process. And then sixth platinum, I was able to match over to Avis. And I'm not sure that it will always go this way, but I specifically asked for Avis President's Club because I found that Europe was offering Avis Presidents Club for sixth platinum members, which makes sense because sixth has a bigger presence in Europe than they do in the United States. Avis Presidents Club is an invitation only status. It's not a published status level. So there isn't a certain number of rentals. It's got to be a lot of rentals usually. So hold up and say, I don't know anything about Avis's elite program, but doesn't Hertz have something called president's circle? Yes. I mean, this is president's circle, not to be confused

with president's club. Okay. All right. I won't confuse them anymore, but that is what I was going for because then once we got her to Avis president's club, the invitation only status, then we brought that back over to Hertz and said, okay, Hertz, show me the money. Give me Avis president's club, the invitation only status. Then we brought that back over to Hertz and said, okay, Hertz, show me the money. Give me a, this president's club, no president's circle. So you got me confused, Greg. And sure enough, got her matched back. So we started with Hertz five-star all the way back around to Hertz president circle. So, so now she hasn't left home, hasn't rented a car like ever. And, uh, and,

and just got the Amex platinum recently in order to earn some points. Cause I convinced her. I was like, listen, get the, get the platinum card. I'll help you use the benefits and get you all these points and show you how to cash them out. It's going to be a bunch of money back for you. Just come on, go ahead and do it. Give it a shot. And she did. So with no travel and no history, she's got top tier elite status in Hertz and an invitation only elite status in Avis. So boom, that was a pretty nice little move.

I love that. So you start with a lower level Hertz status and went around the world, basically. Back to the top tier status. status and went around the world basically. Back to the top tier status. And held out on national, by the way, because national we'll try to do down the road and see if we can parlay that into future years

of status. There you go. And that's because the status you get through these status matches is usually temporary. It's usually for some amount of time. Like a year or even only a few months, depending on which kind you match.

Right, right. So having a couple this way down the road, we'll match to national. And then when these run out, we'll see if we can match back. Right, right. Okay. So I love it.

It reminds me of an old Office episode where they're bartering for things and, you know, hopefully, because who knows, these days you could show up and there might be no cars at all, you know, or it could just be very run-of-the-mill stuff, or you could end up with something, you know, really cool in the President's Circle section from what I hear. So it just depends. She'll probably get there and she'll be told, congratulations, you were upgraded to a Lexus. Unfortunately, we don't actually have any cars, but theoretically, you got a very nice one. You got a beautiful picture of one that you would have had if you were here 12 hours ago.

So yeah, so that was pretty cool. That matched all the way around. And then also, as I did that, I realized, oh, well, you know what? I could use President's Circle. Why not? And so we were able to do some more matching because my wife and I still had National Executive Elite because Amex had some sort of a thing with National a couple of years ago where you get Executive Elite status with any Amex card. That's not valid anymore. But the

status has hung around. I mean, it's been a couple of years, I think, and the status has just hung around. So we matched that over to Avis President, or rather to Hertz president circle. And I heard from a reader that you might even be able to match Marriott or Hilton Gold to national executive elite also. So if you're looking for rental car status, it doesn't hurt to have the status. And one of the things that I really like about rental car status, if you're like, why even bother with this? What does this matter? Why do you care about rental car status? Well, to illustrate, we were planning on attending the same wedding and we needed a minivan because some other family members too.

And so the cost of renting a minivan for the week was over $1,000, but the cost of renting a midsize vehicle with National, for instance, was $750. Now, you know, since I have executive elite status, I can reserve that midsize car and then cross my fingers and hope that there's a minivan in the executive section when we get there. And nine times out of 10 in the past, before the rental car crunch, almost always is a minivan because people who have executive elite status are looking for something more fun. And here I could save a few hundred dollars and still get the car that I wanted. Or similar things with different kinds of vehicles. So it's useful to have that to be able to pick.

It saved me a lot of money because I didn't bother paying for the SUV. Because I knew I would find an SUV probably on the executive lot. And so that's why you do that. All right. So rental cars, out of the way. Airline elite status. So airline elites, I haven't flown since March of 2020. Right. So, and that was, I did one flight in March, one flight in February of 2020 and haven't flown since. And, uh, but. Something happened? Why haven't you been flying? Yeah, right. But on a dry spell here. All right.

But I need elite status because, I mean, hey, we need that, right? Because someday I'm going to travel again. Someday you're going to travel again, and you're going to want to be treated like royalty when you fly. For sure. You won't get that by having elite status, but you're going to want that, and you're going to at least think I should get that because I'm, you know, president circle diamond, whatever with, uh, with spirit. Spirit. Exactly. Exactly. Because my spirit elite status

is clearly worth a lot. So if you've been following along or if you followed along early this year, you know, that Greg and I have a Delta Global Upgrade Certificate Challenge of sorts coming up this fall where he gave me command, so to speak, of a couple of Delta Global Upgrade Certificates to plan a trip. And there were some challenges involved in that. And one of the challenges was to get meaningful elite status. And so I wanted to somehow get my hands on a good elite status using our trip, which of course we're using Delta certificates. So we're going to be flying Delta and or Sky Team partners. So I had to figure out a way to get elite status out of that.

And I knew the meaningful elite status to Greg is probably Delta elite status because I know Greg is a big Delta fan. So if I can show him that I can get his coveted Delta Elite status with very little effort, for sure, he's going to be impressed and award me lots and lots of points, right? Well, you know, let me just jump ahead to my poster. Yes. In that post, you said to Greg, meaningful elite status probably means Delta Elite status. And no, I mean, yes, that's one of the elite statuses I would give you points for, but come on. I would love it if you got one world emerald or star Alliance gold. So you got access to lounges when flying those alliances, but yeah,

not just Delta. I know. And believe it or not, my original aim was to try to find a way to get Copa elite status out of the deal because Air France partners with Copa. And I thought that if I could turn those Delta global upgrade certificates into Star Alliance elite status via Copa, that would be a story, right? But it turns out it wouldn't happen. You need to fly a certain number of segments on Copa. So anyway, before I get, I used to have COPA platinum status. Did you match that over from? I did. I matched it from something. They used to do a super easy match and they changed that. So I, so I had Star Alliance gold for, um, you know, a year or two and hardly ever used it in any meaningful way, but I had it.

Yeah. I mean, that's, that's part of the game here, right? You just want to have it, so. That's right. It's like collecting your, you know, trophies. Right, right. So, and I know I read about that old easy COPA status match and that's why I was like, ooh, maybe I can do something there,

but yeah, no, I touched it. So anyway, anyway. So, you know, I looked around and I said to myself, what do I have for elite status here? Because maybe we can turn this elite status that we have into some sort of a match. And Greg had reminded me a few times that Delta has a great status match challenge going on right now. It makes it relatively easy, especially with the different status boosts that Delta is offering. And so the problem with that was that I only had United Silver status only from Marriott titanium. And that didn't seem like it was going to get me very far because United silver only matches the Delta

silver and had a lot of fun there. And Delta silver is not worth a whole lot. No, no. And Delta wants to see some activity and I don't have any United activity. So I was like, well, it's nothing I can do there. But I had, well, I looked through the different options for matching to decent Delta status, Delta Gold or Delta Diamond. And so I was like, okay, well, if I can get status with one of these airlines in their list, maybe I can match my way around somehow, either from United Silver or from Spirit Airlines Gold status, because Greg and I are kind of lucky in that since we covered the Spirit, the new program, when it came out earlier this year, Spirit, unbeknownst to us, gifted us with Spirit gold status.

They didn't tell us they were going to do it. They didn't tell us after they did it. I just happened to notice it in an email one day and be like, oh, wow, I've got Spirit gold status. That's kind of funny. So I said, well, I'm going to try've got spirit gold status. That's kind of funny. So I said, well, I'm going to try to do something with this and make something out of this. So I tried to match it around. I tried Southwest because if I could get A-list preferred status,

that would get me Delta gold. But Southwest said no can do, no matches to A-list preferred. I tried Turkish Airlines, Miles and Smiles, because they've long been a nice status match opportunity for star Alliance gold and a great opportunity for requalifying. But Turkish said, Nope, spirit is not one of our partners. They said, so clearly not. So, so no, I read, I read your post on that. That's so bizarre because they don't usually match partners anyway. So why they, why I think they meant like maybe matching bizarre because they don't usually match partners anyway. So why they,

why I think they meant like maybe matching partners. I don't know. I didn't need to ask for clarification. I got, they weren't interested. I mean, I tried to, when I, when I sent the email, I tried to be like, you know, spirit, I've been, most of my travel has been domestic this last year and change of course. But you know, I'm looking forward to starting some international travel now and so i'm looking yeah now i figured maybe somebody would look at that and be like oh well he's been traveling domestically in spirit no they weren't they just said so i didn't think that was going to work but i figured i you have to again you have to be in it to win it right worth a shot why not why not right so and there were i looked at all of the different airlines you could match to try to figure out where I could get a match.

And there really weren't very many good options. So so I went back to the idea of matching to Delta and Delta status matching page. It does say they'll match other airlines that aren't in the list. And so I was like, well, would they match Spirit. And in the meantime, I noticed that the way that Spirit gave us elite status was kind of funny and different than what you would typically get with a promotional status, because Spirit actually gave us credit for the points for the SQPs, as they call them, the Spirit qualifying points, let's call them. I'm not sure if that's actually what they're called. So essentially, it's dollars like elite, like MQDs that you would have with Delta. So they gave us credit for having spent $5,000 on spirit flights. So my, my account shows that activity that I have 5,000 SQPs. So I said, okay, well, great. I've got the

activity to show. I've got the status. Let's give it a shot. Let's ask Delta for Delta gold status. And so, well, for, for a match anyway. So I filled out the status match request, waited to hear back, heard back. And they said, thanks, but no, thanks. We're not matching. You know, we don't match spirit. That's basically what they said. And so I was discouraged. I was down. I was in the dumps. I was like, Oh man, what am I going to do? Yeah. You know, I can't match anybody else. I'm not going to end up getting elite status. I'm going to lose all these points. Greg's going to be disappointed in me. So I decided't match anybody else. I'm not going to end up getting elite status. I'm going to lose all these points. Greg's going to be disappointed in me.

So I decided to take another swing. I was like, you know what? There's no harm in asking one more time nicely. Sure. So so I wrote back and I said, you know, I know they're not on the list, but your site says that you'll consider airlines that aren't on the list. And Spirit Gold requires $5,000 spend, which is very comparable to the $6,000 spend that Delta Gold requires. You got a lot of upcoming travel on routes where Spirit and

Delta compete. And I'd love to book those flights on Delta, but Spirit's going to give me a free carry-on and a free check bag. So are you sure? Could you please maybe match me to Delta Gold status? And sure enough, a day or two later, in comes the email that my status match challenge has been approved. And now I have temporary Delta Gold status in three months to earn many fewer MQMs and MQDs than normal

in order to maintain my Delta Gold status. So it seems that we're going to make this work out. That's awesome. So congratulations, Rish. So you awesome. Um, so congratulations for us. So, so you are, you are gold for a few months at least. And if you, if you make this work with the guck trip and whatever other flying you have, you're talking about having that status till end of January of 2020, 2023. Yes. That's right. So all through next year, through January of 2023, because the match, I guess if you did it after July 1st, you get it all the way through January of the following year,

not the next January, but the January after that. So 2023 and the nicer thing about that. And the thing that pushed me over the balance here. Now I should say that when I was looking at opportunities for going after elite status with our upcoming guck trip, I did initially think that I was going to go with flying blue because flying blue also has shortcuts to status right now. And it seemed like a good opportunity to pick up gold status there, which would be sky team, you know, elite or whatever that is the same as, as Delta gold status essentially. And so I thought I was going to go after that status, but what tipped the balance in favor of Delta was, I think I can hit what I need to for the Delta status challenge.

And those miles are going to roll over. The MQMs are going to roll over to next year and Delta is going to continue to count award flights for MQMs and MQDs through the end of next year. So I thought to myself, well, if I can get Delta gold status now and those miles are all going to roll over to next year, there's a decent shot that I can either requalify or maybe even bump up to platinum without a lot of effort. Particularly if I pick up a reserve card during one of those bonuses where there's 20K MQMs that we've seen a couple of times now. So there's definitely a lot of opportunities. So I figured, you know what, let's go after it. Let's see what happens here

because maybe I can turn this into a couple of years of Delta Elite status. Right, right. Yeah, no, that seems totally reasonable. And I wouldn't be surprised at all if Delta doesn't introduce more promos next year as well, like they have this year that will encourage people to get more,

make it easier to earn elite status, basically. So that combination of the rollover plus any promotions that come, yeah, I can totally see that happening. So that's pretty darn good. Now, let me ask you something else. So you mentioned you considered going for Air France status instead, which would meant crediting your gut trip flights to Air France instead of to Delta. Did you consider Alitalia? So they're another SkyTeam partner, right? Why didn't you think, oh, I want gold or super plutonium status with Alitalia?

What was your thinking? Mark Mosserino, Great question. Great question. I looked up the requirements and I don't remember what they were now, but it doesn't really matter, does it? So yeah, whatever the requirements were, I wasn't going to get much and I'm still not going to get much if I credit Alitalia. So that clearly hasn't changed.

So yeah, so no good news there. I looked at other programs too, actually. I mean, Vietnam Airlines, I looked at other SkyTeam partners to figure out where I might be able to get some status, but there weren't really any meaningful benefits. And that's the thing. I could have gotten elite status with other programs, but you didn't say get elite status. You said get meaningful elite status, right? Right. Right. And gold isn't platinum. I would have much rather platinum, but I didn't see a likely path to platinum. So- have much rather platinum uh but i i didn't see a likely path to platinum so yeah no i agree having

sky team elite status isn't all that but having delta gold is better because you're more likely to fly delta and when you're flying delta you get more perks than uh than you would flying other airlines with that SkyTeam status. Yeah, that's exactly it. I think that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, because I was looking into it and with Air France, I would have gotten that SkyTeam Gold Elite or Elite. SkyTeam Elite Plus, I think is what they call it or something.

But a lot of the benefits don't apply when you're flying Delta. So I was like, oh, well, I get all these benefits for SkyTeam, but it's only on international flights with other partners. And if I'm going to fly SkyTeam on an international flight, it's probably going to be an award ticket where I'm already flying in business class anyway. So I don't need all those benefits. I want them on a domestic flight. So that, again, like you said, that made Delta Elite status make sense. So here we are.

Here we are going after Delta Elite status makes sense. So, so here we are, here we are going after Delta elite status. So here's the guy who has not flown a flight in a year and a half, who is soon to have spirit gold status, United silver status, and hopefully Delta gold. So I already have Delta gold status temporarily, at least Delta gold status. And I could have had Southwest a list because they would have matched the spirit gold to a list. But I said, no, I only want a list preferred or nothing right now because I'll wait until I actually need the Southwest benefits. I don't even know what the difference is. What's the difference between preferred and non-preferred?

Preferred would match to Delta Gold. Oh, okay. But I meant literally when flying Southwest. Yeah, there is maybe something. I don't know. I don't know. So I doubt that it's very much whatever it is, but I'm sure a Southwest flyer will be happy to comment on the video. So if you watch this on YouTube, you'll find something in the comments as to what the difference is. Maybe your Delta gold can match to a list preferred, and then you can hold on to that till you need to match back to Delta or something. Well, you know, that's, that is part of the motivation here too, because this Delta status will go through January, 2023.

And like I said, with everything rolling over and award tickets counting, there's a decent shot that I'll be able to requalify for gold. And it's not, I don't fly Delta very often usually, uh, but that's fine because then I'll have that to try to match to United. Cause I fly United more often, or I fly Southwest the most often. So if they do run a match again, where you can actually get a less preferred, that would be much more enticing to me to have Southwest top tier status, even though neither one of us knows what it gets you.

Right. But also the great thing about Delta crediting award flights, giving you elite earnings for award flights through the end of next year, is that you'll be able to show activity even if you only book award flights going forward. So if you try to match United, for example, and they ask for activity, as long as you've flown some Delta award flights, that should be activity that would count in that. And that's not usually the case. Oh, no, that's right. No, usually those wouldn't count. You're right. And I think very astute listeners might pick up on one thing and wonder, well, why does that matter to Nick? Because you know that Nick doesn't collect Delta SkyMiles. So what am I going to transfer

membership rewards points to book Delta award flights? In a lot of cases that won't make any sense because you could just use membership rewards points. If you have the business platinum card for about one and a half cents per point after their rebate or use chase points at one and a half cents per point, you're not likely to get that much out of Delta sky miles, but, but, but I'm going to be earning a bunch of redeemable miles on this Guck trip. So I am going to use those at some point. And when I do, I'm going to get MQDs and also get the MQMs out of that.

So that's just going to stretch the GUCK trip a little bit further. And so that's one of the reasons I like it. And then the second one is if I open up one of the credit cards for the additional MQMs, well, then great. Those miles can also, again, get me more MQDs and more MQMs. Right, right. You could always also just turn to your friend Greg and say, hey, I don't have enough Delta SkyMiles for this trip. Could you book the trip for me with your SkyMiles? And I'll share the same number of Hyatt points or what have you with you. And Greg would be happy to make that trade, I'm sure.

I would be happy to make that trade, I'm sure. I would be happy to make that trade. That's right. Goodness knows Greg is flush with SkyMiles. I am. So that was my story and I'm sticking to it. That's a good story. That's how we're doing status here from home without leaving just a few clicks of the mouse, strokes of the keyboard. But there's lots of other ways to get elite status.

Yeah. So you talked a lot about status matching and a little bit about status challenges, which is similar to matching. It's just that so an outright status match is where they say, oh, you have this status with our competitor. We'll just give you equivalent status for a year. And, you know, and there you go. But a status challenge often requires that same kind of match part of the deal. But then, then they say, but it doesn't always require that. But then they say, okay, you have status for three months is the typical timeframe. And if you do this much flying, this much hotel staying or this much car

renting, whatever it is, then you can keep that status for, you know, another year or so. Um, that's the difference between a challenge and a match, but, and, and, and to be clear, what I'm talking about with Delta is a challenge. So that's why we're like, Oh, I'll get it for at least three months because there are requirements. I need to collect 12,500 MQMs and 1500 MQDs in order to keep my gold status. And the sneak preview is that I think I will. But if you're like, what do you mean you think you will? You don't know. Well, we'll find out after the trip.

So you'll hear why I thought I knew and what happened after it's done. Yeah. Yeah. That'll be great. Okay. So that's challenges matches. But there are other ways to get meaningful lead status from home. For example, there's a bunch of credit cards. Simply having the credit card gives you status. Like one of our favorites is the Hilton aspire card,

which gives you top tier Hilton status just by having the card. And lots of other great benefits, but you get top tier status. So that'll get you lounge access at Hilton's breakfast credit in the United States these days or free breakfast abroad. And then you have that status. And one of the good reasons to collect status is you've probably picked up from this conversation so far is to match to other things. So you may be able to match that Hilton Diamond status to national executive status, for instance, and have high level elite status in a rental car program with just that one credit card. Right, right. A couple other credit cards that just give you status outright, I'm going to mention IHG, the premier

card, I think it's called, we'll give you platinum status just outright, which is near top tier. Um, and, uh, another one to mention Radisson, the Radisson card will give you gold status, not quite top tier, but it's good for, I don't know. It's good for some of the welcome guests. I think I got a little tray of gummy bears last time. And the Amex Platinum card comes with a number of elite statuses. It'll give you like Marriott and Hilton Gold status, some car rental statuses.

And there's also some others from some foreign programs that you can check out our mx platinum guide to see all those options there uh there's other credit cards and we didn't list all of them but there's a lot of credit cards that give you some level of status usually well the windham card's worth mentioning again because oh yeah that's top tier status which you can also then match over to caesar's diamond status and get no no resort fee on your stays at Caesars and a diamond celebration dinner. You can read about that. If you were to just Google frequent miler Caesars diamond, you'd probably find enough information about that. So that's actually a really valuable one that you can get on. It really is a nice thing there. You don't have to go asking, you know, begging for a

match. It's actually just a button on the website where you click and say, match me to this. And that happens. I think it was instant or it was very quick. No, it was, I think. Well, no, you know what? No, no, no, no, no. Back up the truck. It takes about a week if I remember correctly. Really? A week? Yes. I don't think it took that long for me. 85% sure. It took about a week. And we've had reports of it taking some time. Cause you can't necessarily get that a hundred dollar celebration dinner like right away, right away. You got to do it in advance.

I remember having to do it before we went to Vegas. So I'm pretty sure anyway. So all right. But it is just clicking a button, like Greg says. So it's not difficult to do. You don't have to go anywhere or anything like that necessarily. Although I guess you need a Caesars account. So maybe you do have to have been to a Caesars before.

I don't know. You can match them over. So that's a good one to have with a credit card. Right. Okay. So there's a bunch of credit cards just give you status outright. And there's a bunch of opportunities to earn status through spend with credit cards. So for example, the Delta Platinum and Delta Reserve cards will give you Delta's MQMs, which are medallion qualifying miles. They'll give you those with very high spend on those cards. They'll also give you a MQD, a medallion qualifying dollar waiver that'll let you earn up to platinum elite status with Delta just through credit card spend if you do enough spend on those cards.

But Delta's not all. You also have JetBlue. you can earn their mosaic status with $50,000 spend. I think Spirit has a similar thing, gold status with $50,000 spend. Preston Pyshko, MD, MPH, Top tier gold status. Jim Collison, MD, MPH, That's right. Top tier gold status. Preston Pyshko, MD, MPH, Yep. Hyatt, top tier, which, yeah, which you know can be turned into Delta gold with enough effort. Jim Collison, MD, MPH, Possibly, if you're lucky.

Preston Pyshko, MD, MPH, Right. Well, that's pretty good if you're lucky right well you know that's that's pretty good if you can do it um marriott there's a couple cards that'll give you platinum status with 75 000 spend uh hyatt will give you two elite knights credit with every five thousand dollars spend on their card and so you can and there's no cap on that. So if you spend enough, you could earn any level of elite status with them. I think that's a pretty good sort of overview of some basic ones. And I think it's worth mentioning the carousel now, you know, you've written, there's a couple of ongoing loops that are pretty easy to do where you match from one program to another and then kind of back to that first program so that you can keep a level of status indefinitely. Do you want to describe that? Yeah. So a simple example would be if you

get Hyatt Explorer status. So Of course, Hyatt Globalist status is the one that you really, really want. But let's say that's out of reach. You can get to Hyatt Explorer status. You can match Explorist or higher over to MGM Gold. And that's another just click a button online. That one is instant as far as I recall anyway. So you can match over to MGM Gold. And the nice thing is that MGM and Hyatt run on different calendars. So once your Explorist status initially wears off, so to speak, like if you didn't re-qualify and you drop back down to a general member, then you can take your MGM Gold status that's still valid because it runs on a different calendar and match back to Hyatt Explorist.

Now you have Hyatt Explorist for a year. And so when your MGM gold goes back down to a general member, cause you haven't been in an MGM in years and years, then you match back from Hyatt Explorist to MGM gold again. And you just keep that merry-go-round going and constantly maintain Hyatt Explorist and MGM gold for years and years and years. And that kind of thing is also possible with Wyndham Diamond and Caesars Diamond. Same idea. They don't run on the same elite calendar. They're off by, like, a month. So when one drops, you match over and you just perpetually keep both. That's awesome.

Yeah, I mean, if I didn't have the… I was kind of disappointed it used to be that you could go from the ihg platinum status you get with the credit card or the hilton gold i guess you get from most hilton credit cards um to match to the um windham diamond right and then you go and then you could get on that carousel i didn't jump on early enough to do that because that match went away. But now I have the Wyndham credit card that gives me diamonds. And what Greg means is that Wyndham offered a match to diamond from Hilton. And the Wyndham Caesars won those two carousels, those two merry-go-rounds that we just went over.

That continues. Those just continue. But in order to get on that merry-go-round, you need to get one of the statuses. And you can get Wyndham status, like Greg said, with the business credit card. Previously, they used to match from others. So the nice thing about the merry-go-rounds is that there's no challenge. It's not like it has to be available. Those two programs are connected.

Wyndham and Caesars have a partnership. MGM and Hyatt have a partnership. And so unless that partnership ends, those carousels are going to continue to run. So you can stay on in perpetuity there with those two. So that's kind of nice. As long as they don't ever merge the calendars, the elite calendars, that would mess it up. Right, which there was some fear they were going to

with COVID and some changes, but so far they're still running on at least slightly separate enough calendars to be able to do that. Yeah. So I love it. Love it. All right. So you get, did we miss anything else you want to cover about status? That's pretty good. That's basically it. Yeah. Every, every now and then you might also get an opportunity to just pick up easy status, free status. Uh, you know, obviously the spirit thing was unique to us,

but we've seen other opportunities sometimes where you're just filling something out online or wherever else you've been able to pick up an elite status of some sort. So keep your eyes peeled. I always like to pick those up because you might be able to match them down the road into something more valuable.

And so if you keep your eyes peeled, maybe you'll get those opportunities. Okay, so that's status. So keep your eyes peeled, maybe you'll get those opportunities. Okay. So that's that status. So I guess that brings us next to brings us to post roast, except I already did the post roast. So I think we can move on to question of the week. Absolutely. Very good.

That's not what he was expecting. I did not expect that at all. He was waiting for me to jump in with my roast, but I, uh, I told Greg before we came on the yesterday ended up being a very late night. And so I did not get prepared for a post roast for you. So you're getting out scot-free this week. But we're going to move into a question of the week. And I'm going to take it easy on you this week with a question that I know you can handle.

So Carla asked a question because I know we already established that we don't have all the answers, right? No, I think we established we don't have any answers. So if we break that trend right now, who knows what will happen? We'll be proven as liars here. So I better be careful. Careful here. So Carla makes a statement in Frequent Miler Insiders that I'm going to turn into a question. So Carla posted in Frequent Miler Insiders, booked a car at Los Angeles for the end of October.

Medium-sized SUV was $1,018, which by the way, that is not a typo. I'm sure it was $1,018 or whatever time because car rentals have just been ridiculous. So $1,018. She said two weeks later, I checked and it was $765. So I made a second reservation, canceled the first. Today, I checked again and it's $508. So I changed it again. So annoying. Why do we have to do this? How does this work? How do they set prices? Same car, same date, same times, et cetera. So Greg, what's a person to do in the car rental apocalypse? How do you solve that problem? Well, this one's easy as Nick alluded to at the beginning. There's a great service called Auto Slash, which basically when you rent a car,

a refundable reservation with a car, which luckily most of them are, you actually just give them the rental car information, your booking information, and they'll watch it and email you when a better price is available. Sometimes they'll know of a better price right off the bat and you'll get an email right away, other times further down the road. And then, you know, when you see that, sometimes you could go in and book yourself if you want to avoid going through auto slash. And let me explain in a second why you might want to do that. But, but not always because auto slash often has like, promo deals embedded with like Priceline or whatever service they use. And so what they'll do is they'll show you a bunch of options and have you click through to, let's say it's Priceline to, to book the car.

These are not though, usually, even though it's a service like Priceline, they're not prepaid, non-refundable. They are usually reservations like you're used to doing where you just have a credit card on file and, and. Or you might not just have a credit card on file and and or you might not even need it but but the point is it is booked through this third party they do offer an opportunity that's kind of hidden or at least it has been in the past to add your loyalty number in there and that's that's the key make sure you get your loyalty number in there if you do it because you want to get these elite perks that we talked about earlier in the program.

It's a field you can't see without expanding it. It's like somewhere in there it says loyalty program, but you have to click on it in order to get it to expand so you can see the field where you enter it. So you have to look for it. And I've had great adventures trying to add my loyalty number after the fact. So you just don't want to be in that position. It is possible in some cases, but it's not at all easy. So make sure you do that up front. But yeah, Auto Slash, what a great service that is, I think. It really is. And the nice thing is that they will keep looking.

And so what you need to do if you have a reservation, it doesn't matter, you didn't have to make it through Auto Slash. You can make it through wherever you've made your reservation. You go to auto slash.com and up at the top, there's a link that says track your rental. And so that's where you put in the information, the dates, the price, whatever else. And then they'll just email you when they find better prices. And for instance, my in-laws rental that they're renting, there's like, there's some cheap rental car company. I don't know if it's Fox or something like that, that I'm not going to make them rent

with Fox because I, you know, like I've heard enough horror stories about Fox before and maybe they're great sometimes, but I don't, my, my in-laws are not regular travelers. They're not going to drop back 10 yards and punt very easily. So I'm not going to have them rent with that particular outfit. Uh, so out of slash has been emailing saying, Hey, there's a better price. And each time the cheapest has been Fox, but whatever. I just ignore that. I let the emails keep coming because they keep coming with other rental car companies too. So it's not the only company that's been coming in the emails. So, and their prices have fluctuated. So I haven't picked any of them yet, but been getting emails

like every few days, every week, every few days saying, Hey, this price is a little better. That price is a little better. And if it's just been a couple dollars better as has been the case with most of the services, I've got her sticking with Hertz for now because the, you know, president's secret circle, whatever it is, society that she's got, I'll hopefully get her a better car. So much than that, than saving 10 bucks. But, uh, but definitely that's a great service to use. Like Greg said, totally, totally worth it. And's a great service to use. Like Greg said, totally, totally worth it. And the nice thing is that auto slash in general, and let's be clear, they are not sponsoring this. We don't have any affiliate relationship with auto slash.

Like I knew that Greg would answer with auto slash when I saw the question, because that is the answer to the question. It's nothing to do with anything being in it for us. But Auto Slash is really good in terms of you can look, if you have a Costco membership, a Sam's Club membership, whatever, it's a bunch of boxes that you check to say what you have, and they'll look for the discounts or those various things. Now, I did once recently find a rental where it was still cheaper through CostcoTravel.com than Auto Slash. That was surprising to me because I haven't seen that before. So I've been meaning to take a deeper dive and take a look and see if that happens in other situations. But generally speaking, I've always found the best deal better than whatever it is at Costco travel.com in years past at auto slash. So right off the bat, usually the prices are quite

good. So in my experience, so the exception is that when rental car prices are very high in general, and there's not much competition going on, as is the case now in the US anyway, through my wife's work, we have a promo code for national car rental. And it kind of fixes the car rentals around $30 to $40 a day, depending on which market you're in. And that is way, way cheaper than you could get just about anywhere else these days. So, for example, a trip to Buffalo that I just took, you know, a quick kayak search of car rentals, just to get an idea of what car rentals were costing. It said, it said something like $132. And I thought at first, oh, well, you know, over four days, that's a really good price, but no, that was per day. And, you know, and with the discount code, it was 30 something dollars a day. So make sure you check out whoever you work for, see if they have any kind of employee discounts for these things

and find out what those codes are because it can be super valuable. Which reminds me, I've been wondering what the frequent miler code is for national and Hertz, Greg. I think the HR team needs to get on that. Offline here. Can't go having everybody using those non-existent codes. Right, right, right. But I do want to add that when I book with these codes,

I still put it through auto slash normally because often auto slash will, again, during normal times, will find better rates than even those promo codes are able to deliver. Totally true. If you've got access to a corporate code or a code through work, that will these days probably be your best bet. But if you don't have that, auto slash is the way to go. Yep. All right.

So that brings us to the end. If you've enjoyed what you've been hearing today and you'd like to get on our email list so you can get our posts in your inbox, you want to go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe. Again, that's frequentmiler.com slash subscribe. Join our email list. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Join our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group. Wherever you're listening to this, hit subscribe, ding the notification bell, share it with your friends, leave a comment, let us know what you think. And we love to hear from readers. So thank you guys very much for that.

And we will see you guys again next week. Thanks, everybody. Bye-bye.