Frequent Miler on the Air - First Class for 5: Gambling on Frequent Miler's 2023 Team Challenge | Ep187 | 1-28-23

Episode Date: January 28, 2023

Do you often read about the luxury travels of bloggers and think "That's nice, but it's not possible to do that with an entire family!"? This week, Greg and Nick decided to bet the Frequent Miler team's reputation as points and miles wizards on our ability to create an amazing trip for not one or two people, but for all five of us. Join our email list: https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ 00:00 Introduction 1:18 Mattress running the numbers: Bilt Rent Day Promo: 100% transfer bonus to Hawaiian Miles 5:45 Mattress running the numbers: Marriott promo for double elite night credits https://frequentmiler.com/marriotts-surprisingly-good-new-promo-earn-1k-bonus-points-per-night-double-elite-nights/ 9:36 Noteworthy news this week Bilt integration with Point.me https://frequentmiler.com/bilt-adds-free-point-me-integration-for-award-searches-with-partners/ 12:22 30 Million+ Amex points for readers https://frequentmiler.com/30-million-membership-rewards-points-earned-by-frequent-miler-insiders-on-referral-threads-in-1-year/ 17:08 Awards we booked this week, AKA... 17:24 Main Event: First Class for 5. Gambling on Frequent Miler's 2023 challenge. https://frequentmiler.com/ana-first-class-wide-open-award-tickets-early-2023/ 59:19 Question of the Week: Will Delta protect your booking if you're traveling on two separate tickets booked via Virgin Atlantic? Music credit: Annie Yoder

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did City do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event, Frequent Miler on the Air starts now. Today's main event, first class for five, gambling on Frequent Miler's 2023 team challenge. We've got a different type of show today we're going to be telling a story of some excitement that went on with within our team uh yesterday where yesterday is not yesterday compared to when you're listening but the day before we recorded this show earlier this week well earlier the week we recorded the show i guess you could be listening in the future yeah okay anyway there was some gambling going on.

It's yesterday to me and Nick right now. Anyway, before we get into that part, I will read one little quote that came out during our adventure, which is me saying, I think we have to do our team challenge in Japan. No choice, really. So we'll talk about what that means, why I said it later on the show.

Normally, we jump into the giant mailbag right now, but today's giant mail kicked off our whole main event, so we'll get to that later. What do we have next, Nick? So first, let's talk about Mattress Running the Numbers for this week. So this week's Mattress Running the Numbers, we got a couple of interesting things going on.

So first off, we've got Built is going to be offering a transfer bonus on February 1st. This will be one day only, so it'll only be February 1st. But if you have Built points, you may want to listen up because they're going to be offering a 100% transfer bonus to Hawaiian Miles. So you'll get two Hawaiian Miles for every one built rewards point that you transfer over. Now, Hawaiian Miles is a program we never, ever talk about because their award chart mostly stinks and their award availability is usually tough to find. However, with this transfer bonus, it becomes much more interesting. So for instance, if you could find Saver First Class from the East Coast of the US, that's usually 40,000 miles one way, you'd only pay 20,000.

But even if you don't pay or even if you don't find the Saver availability, the 65K, I don't know, it might be interesting to some people or the upgrade awards could be particularly interesting. Better yet, if you're interested in going through Hawaii to Asia, then I think it really gets interesting because Hawaii to Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, you would have to transfer 32,000 built points for a Saver Business Class Award across the Pacific. Or if you wanted to go to, say, French Polynesia, you're looking at, in business class, again, like 23,000 miles one way or so at Saver Availability or the big one. If you can find Virgin Atlantic

award space going to the UK, they charge one hundred and twenty five thousand miles round trip and much less in surcharges. So you'd be talking sixty two thousand miles round trip and really reasonable surcharges to fly Virgin Atlantic to the UK. So if you've got a lot of built points, you'll want to log in on February 1st and consider this. But of course, you'd have to find all the award availability and everything and be ready to rock and roll. I really wouldn't want to be stuck with a whole bunch of Hawaiian miles unless I knew I was going to be able to use them right away. Yeah, this is a really interesting one because there's so much pressure. You only have one day to decide to do it. And the downside, many transfers, like if there was a bonus to American Airlines or to Hyatt or something where you'd be pretty sure, hey, I'm going to get good value,

even if I don't know exactly why right now, you'd be pretty sure. But Hawaiian- That's not it with Hawaiian. Yeah, I don't think I would do this one unless I had something lined up. Yeah, you know, I think probably not. Although the exception, I tough to say, but the exception is that that Virgin Atlantic sweet spot I only recently found and wrote about in a post 125,000 round trip to the UK. And I think it's like $400 in taxes and fees, which is far less than Virgin Atlantic would charge you. And so that's the kind of thing that if you've got a lot of flexibility, I know I'll eventually find that available probably to book. Now, will Hawaiian

change their award chart before I get a chance to do it? I don't know. And gambling on one sweet spot is always like a poor idea. So I'd be hesitant unless I had a lot of flexibility and plans to probably visit Europe this year so that I could be reasonably confident that I'd use that before it's gone. So, you know, before something changes. Right, right. You know, come to think of it, if Virgin Atlantic still had flights out of Detroit, I might consider that as well. They don't. You've got them out of JFK.

And there's multiple a day. So the chance of getting award flights to and from JFK and between JFK and London is actually very high. So I could see gambling in that situation. Yeah. And I don't have built points, so it's easy for me to gamble the theoretical built points. I mean, I only have a couple thousand built points, so it's very easy for me to make that gamble. But if I were really in this situation where I had to transfer a couple hundred thousand or something to book my family, maybe I would be more hesitant than I am in theoretical speak. You know, I could also see people gambling if they're at an airport that Hawaiian serves

directly. Because even if you found standard award availability instead of saver, see people gambling if they're at an airport that Hawaiian serves directly because even if you found standard award availability instead of saver you know it's not a bad price to since you got your points doubled to write a book that way so I could see doing it that way as well so for some people it might make sense for most people do it only if you have an award in mind and you know it's available absolutely all right very good the other mattress running the numbers for most people. Do it only if you have an award in mind and you know it's available. Absolutely. All right, very good.

The other mattress running the numbers this week that's going to be of interest to far more people is Marriott's newest promotion. So the newest promotion, I think gives you 1,000 bonus points every stay, if I'm right. Every day, I believe. Every day, is that what it is?

Every night, yep. Okay, the more important thing than the 1,000 points is you get double Elite Night credits. And that's between February? Every night. Yep. Okay. The more important thing than the thousand points is you get double elite night credits. And that's between February 7th and April 23rd. That sounds pretty hot. What do you think, Greg? Have you registered for this? Will you? I have. I have. It's only paid stays. But other than that, it's pretty flexible. It doesn't have restrictions. I think it was last year, it had to be like a two night or longer stay. This doesn't have that kind of restriction.

So you really can, you know, hunt for the best deals. And it has me, it's, it's pretty exciting. I mean, because not that Marietta Elite status is all that exciting, but there aren't that many ways to get those, you know, extra nights cheaply, extra elite knights if you're going for a higher level of status than what, for example, your credit cards might give you automatically. Marriott Platinum status or getting to Titanium status, which also gives you United Silver status, then I think you have to pay attention to this. And personally, I'm looking at some stays during that time that I currently have booked with Hyatt and I'm wondering, should I change some of those to Marriott stays? It might make sense. Especially, there's Amex offers right now for some money off of Marriott as well. And Chase offer, I think, as well. So, you know, you could save money that way for the stay that is getting getting double elite night credit, then yeah, I think it probably would be worth switching stays over to Marriott. Because I mean, if you get the business card and

you have a personal card, right, you get one of each, then you've got 30 elite nights to start the year. So you're 20 nights short of platinum status, the free breakfast status that most of us would be after. So 10 nights during this period would get you there. Or if you know you'll have a few nights later on in the year, then you do a few nights during this period would get you there. Or if you know you'll have a few nights later on in the year, then, you know, you do a few nights during this period to get the double elite credit. I think it would certainly make sense to consider switching it over. I'm a little hesitant because I only have globalist status

through the end of February. So, like, right now I'm looking at Hyatt for February stays, and there's definitely part of me that's like, oh, man, but the double elite night, I don't know. We'll see what we do. But yeah, the key thing I think that is worth repeating one more time is that it's only on paid stays. So even though you get elite night credit on award stays, you won't get the double elite night credit unless it's a paid stay. Is that correct? That's right. Exactly. Only paid stays. You have to book through Marriott directly or

clicking through a portal to Marriott still counts as booking directly. We get that question a lot. So you can earn extra rewards by starting in a portal. Some, you know, usually if you go through things like Expedia and things like that, that's not going to work. You're not going to get any elite nights, let alone double. So just be careful with that kind of thing. know this is the type of topic normally it might have made our main event but we've got other things to talk about today um the the uh last thing i'll say here is i think we both should commit to switching our hyatt stays to marriott publicly because maybe hyatt then will respond with their own yeah hyatt double elite night promo i don't want that sweet respond with their own double elite night promo.

I don't want that sweet Hyatt. I want double elite nights with Marriott. Is that believable? I didn't believe it. Okay, so that's Mattress Running the Numbers. Let's talk about some noteworthy news this week because we've got a really juicy main event. But, man, there's a lot of stuff that happened this week. So what happened with Bill?

Yeah, there really is. Again, this is a topic that probably would have made the main event on any other week. Builds, which has a free rewards program, has added to their app a integration with a website called Point.me, which is an award searching tool that normally costs, what is it, $12 a month or $5 if you do just a 24-hour pass. They have that now integrated into the app for free. So you could sign up for Built for free, and then you could use PointMe for free. The only

main limitation really is that they'll only show you results from programs that Built can transfer to, but Built transfers to a lot of really good ones. So it's not really that much of a limitation. What do you think? It really isn't. And the fact of the matter is because they partner with programs that are in One World Star Alliance and Sky Team. If you know a little bit about award charts or study them a little bit, then you'll recognize when you see, oh, there's a lot Polish flight that's available through Air Canada and United. I guess that's probably also available through Avianca. So if you've got Avianca miles or you have Amex membership rewards points or Capital One points or City points to transfer to Avianca, you'll know that you can check that too. Even if you don't have the word charts memorized from the other programs, you'll at least know where else to check if you need to. But yeah, I mean, Built covers the programs that are going to be most familiar to most people anyway, I think. So yeah, I think this is an awesome value add. It makes so much sense. It's a great partnership for both sides. Like, I mean, I feel like I don't want to come across like I'm tooting Bill's horn too much here. But like, this is awesome. There's

like, there's no, I don't think that there's another perspective to be had on this other than this is an awesome value add, because it makes the program so much easier. and my goodness you think out all the people you've ever known that have been new to this game uh including you know you the listener at some point you were new right imagine how convenient it would have been if you had the ability to search all of a program's transfer partners right within the app and click a button to transfer your points i mean this makes it super duper easy and like like I said, great. Also for those of us more experienced that just want to be able to search it. Cause I love point. I mean, I use it all the time. So being able to get access for free, I mean, terrific. Great deal.

Yeah. Yeah. Great. Great enhancement. Excited about that one. All right. One more news item. Um, I don't have news really, but, but anyway, Stephen posted this week, I guess will be last week by the time you listen to this, that FrequentMiler helped our Facebook group, FrequentMiler Insiders members, earn over 30 million points by publishing Amex referral links for those group members. Holy cow. That's pretty wild. 30 million. That's amazing. And he's estimating there, but I think it's a very fair estimate based on all the comments that have come in from readers over the time.

I think he was conservative enough with that number. But yeah, I mean, 30 million, that's just unbelievable and an awesome thing. I mean, I think that it goes to show, first of all, how good the MX referral program is. I mean, if you have MX cards like that, what a great deal that is that you can pick up some nice, easy points. And I think that it's awesome that we've been able to, A, share the best offer with readers. So readers get the best offer for the card. Whoever wants to sign up is getting access to the best offer that they won't find on most other sites. And B, it's benefiting the loyal readers who enjoy our content and, you know, and hang out and participate in conversations.

So it's awesome to be able to provide that for people with something that we would link to no matter what. So great to be able to do that. So before you get too excited, I do want to point out a couple of things about this that the reason we were able to share these links because we always post just whatever the best offer is for any given card,

regardless of whether it benefits us in any way. And the reason offer is for any given card, regardless of whether it benefits us in any way. And the reason we were able to do these particular ones is that some Amex cardholders, but not all by a long shot, I would say a small percentage of Amex cardholders of platinum cards and gold cards, both the consumer varieties of each, have the ability to refer people to a better than usual offer. And so if you're one of those lucky people where right in your login, you see, you know, if you refer someone to this platinum card, they'll get 150,000 points if they meet the, you know the requirements. Or the gold card, if it says

right there that the referree will get 90,000 point offer, then you have one of these special offers that are available and you can, in our FreakMiler Insiders group, put your link in the right place and we'll get around to using it and you'll get all the referral points, which lately have been maxing out. It used to be they'd max out at 55,000 points, but a lot of people now are, the limit has expanded to 100,000 too.

So that's exciting too. It's very exciting, very exciting. And just to add a little bit of clarity to what Greg said, when he talked about your referral link offer, he means when you log into your American Express account, like your card account, and you go to the card page and it says like, refer friends. And there, when it describes the offer as your friend will get 150K, I'm not talking after you've clicked through, but before you've even clicked your referral link, it says

your friend will get 150K when you refer them. Those are the links that we're looking for. Cause the other ones, uh, you know, if you just take a link from some random Amex card, it will sometimes show the 150 K offer, but not a hundred percent of the time. And we can only use links on the site. They're going to show the offer that we're advertising every time you click on them. So, uh, so those people with the magic links, congratulations. I'm jealous. We haven't had one in my household that links to this. We've got plenty of platinum and gold cards in my household, but none of them with links to the 150K or 90K offers. But awesome that so many readers have been able to take advantage of that. Just great deal all around. And thank you. Thank you

for helping other people get the good offer and for sharing your links. And let me just say quickly, if you're not one of the lucky ones with one of these good offers, it may be that your friends, that you could still refer friends and tell them to try multiple browsers until they see the $150,000 offer for the platinum card or the $90,000 offer for the platinum card or the 90,000 offer for the gold card. Because often, we don't know why, but Amex sort of randomly targets these better offers. And so if your friend can get that better offer, then it would be a good sign-up deal for them and you would get the referral bonus as well. Yeah, very good. Okay, so that's awesome news this week. Lots of stuff going on. It's

been a wild and crazy week. Speaking of a wild and crazy week, we got to talk about awards we booked this week, or I don't know. Did we book anything interesting, Greg? That is our main event today is booking awards this week. So we'll jump right into it. First class for five gambling on frequent milers 2023 team challenge. That's our main event. It all started with our giant mailbag though. We got a tiny giant mail on Wednesday that said the subject line was wide open ANA first class multiple seats. And the body of it simply said SFO-HND-NRT. HND and NRT are the airport codes for the two airports in Tokyo. And SFO is the airport code for San Francisco.

So basically, the email was saying that there's wide open A&A first class awards between San Francisco and Tokyo. And the email also included an image from a program called Seat Spy that shows award availability. So now, Nick, you were the first to respond to that because your first surprise was that SeatSpy was showing an A award availability, right? Well, right. Like I started typing an email back to say, no, SeatSpy doesn't show first class A&A availability. But I recognize that this reader had posted the night before in Frequent Miler Insiders about having booked A&A first class. So I stopped myself and I said, well, maybe they know something that I don't because I can't imagine

that A, they would have booked a first class award and then B, sent this email about the wide open availability if they weren't sure it was right. So I went to SeatSpy curious what they were even looking at to kind of see and get an idea. Am I crazy or are they crazy? Because SeatSpy, if you're not familiar, is a tool for looking for available award seats on select airlines. And it only works with a handful of airlines. That handful has grown over time, but it's still only, I don't know, five, six, eight airlines, something like that. And so the basic gist of SeatSpy is you click one button and you can see a year of availability in both directions on a specific route, but you can only look one route at a time, only non-stops and only for saver awards, to my knowledge, on the airline

you've selected out of the dropdown. But what I noticed was happening, and the reader had hinted at apparently, or assumed I knew, I don't know which, was that when you looked at that route, it would show the dates with business or first class availability. When you clicked on them, you could see the price was 121,000 miles on the days that ultimately had first class availability. And that stood out to me because I know that United's, A, that the tool is only set up to show saver awards and B, United saver price for business class. They don't have a first class. Their saver price for business class to Asia is not 121,000 miles. I immediately recognized, no, that's the ANA first class price.

So what it turns out is, apparently SeatSpy, if you're searching a route, let's say you're using United Airlines. If you're searching a route that United serves, and they do serve San Francisco to Haneda and Narita airports in Tokyo. It's also served by one of their partners. It'll show the availability for both at saver level. And so again, by looking at the price of the seats, I could immediately see that they were going to be first class awards. And there's actually a slider you can play with that I didn't notice until this week when this happened in order to see where the seats come in or cut off. And so you could see immediately that if you went under 121,000 miles, none of those days had availability. And then all of a sudden, if you popped it all the

way up to 121, you could see tons of dates, especially in April and May. April and May were totally wide open, some in the beginning of June even. So that was an incredible tip because then, of course, I went to United.com to cross-reference and found that, yes, indeed, there were multiple seats. Not only was there ANA first class award availability, which is news in and of itself. I mean, they historically have released one seat on every flight. Somebody books it and it's really spotty and hard to find. But like finding more than one seat in a first class, I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen two. And so anything more than two would be like I just a never before seen thing. And not only were we seeing dates with two, we were seeing dates with three and four and five

seats in first class. Well, we're getting ahead, though, because we didn't know about the five at first. No, we didn't. You're right. So our award booking adventure started with a post to our team Slack channel where Nick wrote, was anybody else aware that Seat Spy would show ANA first class availability via United? I thought Seat Spy was only looking at United Metal. So that sort of just question about, did anyone know this, sparked a reply thread that is now close to 300 replies long.

But the bottom line is no, nobody did know that, right? Nobody knew that. Nick followed up by saying, four seats in first class on a lot of days. I don't know if they have the new product on that route or not. And after a little bit more back and forth, I wrote, holy cow, it is the sweet. The sweet. The sweet. Talk to us, what's that? Okay.

So first, when Nick wrote, I don't know if it's the new product or not. And when I said it's the sweet, I was confirming that it's the new product. What is that? On only a select few ANA airplanes, they have all new cabins with brand new first class, big first class seats that are named the suite. So each one is called the suite um and then they have a new business class cabin where i think the the those are called the the room the room the room which which is kind of weird because you'd think the room is bigger than the suite but um either way they they get incredible reviews. They look amazing.

And it's the type of thing I know I've been anxious to try flying either the room or the suite for quite a while. But it's been on so few routes. really hard with with my a and a round the world trip uh when when uh we were doing the three cards three continents challenge last year to get on a flight that had the new product that had it would have been the room in that case because i was flying business class um but the they had stopped flying that new product three days three days before I was going to be departing from California and I couldn't make it work to go earlier. So bummer, bummer. Yeah, no, I mean, I've looked to it and it's just, it's not widely available.

You know, ANA has historically been good about releasing a little bit of business class space right when the schedule opens. But then like my understanding of ANA has always always been they release what they're going to release, and then that's it. They're going to release more probably unless somebody cancels. Now, I did read that sometimes close in, they release some things, but it hasn't been easy, especially in the new product. Hasn't been easy at all, right?

So very hard to find the room. So the suite, even harder, because if they had award availability in the suite, it was basically always one seat at most. And once somebody booked that, then there was nothing. So finding the suite with four seats was a pretty amazing, exciting thing, right? Yeah, it sure was. And so from my perspective, Nick was busy trying to find availability for his own family for a particular trip he has planned. But at some point I realized, wait, these dates that have this wide open availability are overlapping with a time period where our entire team had blocked

off our calendars to reserve for our next team challenge. We didn't know and still don't know what our next team challenge will be exactly, but we knew roughly when we were going to do the challenge. We had that blocked off and so i was like oh my gosh this would make so much sense to book this incredible deal and we've got to do it fast because we knew when a word space like this opens up it disappears really quickly um so uh so what did you think my next um post to the to the channel once I thought of this was, and I quote, I think we have to do our going to get twice. And then you said that. And first of all, like Greg said, I was looking to try to make this work for a trip, a family trip that I'm taking. And it just like it wasn't working.

I couldn't make it happen. I was like, oh, my goodness, how am I going to let, you know, four seats in the suite slip through my fingers? So I was bummed already that like I wasn't going to be able to make it work for my own trip. And then Greg swoops in for the save and says, I think we need to do our June challenge in Japan. But of course, I didn't know if he was serious or not. I didn't know if he was just like we joke a lot. So I didn't know if he was being facetious or not. So so I had to ask, so are you serious? How are we doing it? Are you just going

to book it? Like, is this is this going to happen? Like, are you are you for real? Because like, this is something that, of course, Greg and I were going back and forth on Slack. But, you know, we're not the only people on the Frequent Miler team. So there are some other folks to try to consult with and whatnot. It was kind of a haphazard decision. Right. But that's what you got to do when you see availability like this. Because you do.

You do. You know, sometimes you just have to jump on these things. It reminds me of when I think it was 2013. was 2013, there was a mistake fair American Airlines. They had business class to China round trip for about 400 bucks. were disappearing. I just jumped on and booked something. And I booked like a Tuesday returning Friday because that was all I could find and that would fit in my schedule. And it turned out that it takes a really long time to get to China. So I ended up only having one full day in Beijing. But you got to the Great Wall. I had a fantastic day. Yeah. I did all kinds of things all in one day, thanks to a tour guide that took me around everywhere. And it was an experience I am so thankful I got to have. And so same kind of thing here that like, when are we going to be able to fly the suite, let alone fly as the whole team. Right. I mean, come on. Right, right. Like, I mean, if one of us flew the suite,

we'd be like, you know, how often are we going to have the opportunity for that? Two of us would be like, oh, wow, that's, you know, that's not going to happen twice. We have the free time lined up and the availability for two people. It would have been amazing to begin with. So, and Greg said, we knew it would go fast.

And, you know, dinner was ready and I was trying to write up the post and post it. And I'm jumping a little bit ahead. But when I sat down at the dinner table, and my wife was like, what's going on? And I kind of explained to her. And, and she got that it was a big deal. But of course, didn't quite get it either at the same time. And I was like, well, the post is publishing in one minute, and I give it about an hour before all the post is publishing in one minute and i give it about an hour before all the availability is gone and she's like really and i was like yeah probably about an hour and it's going to be gone sure enough that was about it it was about spot on an hour later yeah yeah um and and um so at this point so we we have have the four writers on the team and Carrie is our creative director. She was not planning, when we've talked about the challenge in the past and did some sort of pre-planning for it, she wasn't like to travel with us if we all go sort of the same place or

whatever. And, and she was open to it. It was sort of noncommittal, like, like she would be happy to do it, but, um, but it wasn't really necessary. So at this point, I was still thinking we were probably going to book just the four of us on a first class Class, because we hadn't yet seen five people at once. I started looking for flights to Japan from San Francisco, and I couldn't find, within the date range that was available to us, I couldn't find a single date that had actually more than two available

on the flight we wanted. Now, let me clarify that. The new product only went to HND, Haneda Airport, not to NRT. So I would find more availability on the flight to NRT, for example. I didn't want that one. I just wanted HND. Now, I didn't find four to NRT either. Um, but, um, but then I started looking from Japan back to the U S and I found within, I mean, earlier than we'd want to return, but, uh, sort of within the dates we had, we had held five seats, first class. I wrote it on, I wrote it on Slack. I said five seats on the return. Can we push up the challenge a little bit? And of course I was immediately like, uh, yeah, we can,

because, because of course I was bummed. I was like trying to book this thing. And then I was trying to write up the post and I was like, man, I'm not even going to be able to do this. And I'm writing up the post and then Greg swoops in for the save with five dates, you know, or five seats rather on a date that would work. And, uh, and so he wants to know if we can push up the post. And then Greg swoops in for the save with five dates, you know, five seats rather on a date that would work. And so he wants to know if we can push up the challenge a little bit. And I said, yeah, now we'd set some dates, like Greg said, and it took us a while to go through our calendars and try to figure out a time that worked for everybody. So I feel like there was probably some sort of conflict that led to where our beginning date was. And this return will make

it a little bit tight. But I think I said something to the effect of, well, you know, maybe a 12 or $15,000 first-class flight will give somebody the incentive they need to fix whatever the conflict is. Because yeah, that's I, I didn't have the conflict, but that would have maybe made me retool plants. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so one thing we didn't mention before that these flights first class costs only 55,000 Virgin Atlantic miles. So I know we're talking about flying ANA, but they're partners with Virgin Atlantic. Virgin Atlantic has this incredible sweet spot award, uh, where you could fly first class on ANA for as low as 55,000 points. Now, I have over a million Virgin Atlantic miles. So 55,000 per person, that's like nothing for me.

I'm very happy to spend that. So I was ready to call and book it, but we needed everyone's birthdays first. I knew we needed the full name and birthday. So at this point, only Nick and I were on the team Slack and we were like, okay, how do we get everyone else's birthday? So we had to scramble. We had to scramble. We had to scramble. We had to scramble. It was kind of fun doing our little treasure hunt. Nick and I, I think around the same time, remembered that we had both been invited to Stephen's 40th birthday party.

So we were able to find the old messages about that and find out exactly when his birthday was, including the year, because it would have been 40 years before the date of the party. So, boom, got Stevens. Carrie finally jumped onto Slack, and she had no idea what was going on, but she was like, I'll just give you my birthday anyway, because I know you're looking for that. Something interesting is going on.

I give her credit. I don't understand it. I give Carrie credit there, because she's like, didn't hesitate. She's like, okay, whatever. You're asking for my birthday. Sure. Here you go. Exactly. And then Nick and I were separately searching for Tim's birthday.

I think we found it around the same time as well. I found it. I realized I'm friends with him on Facebook and he actually had it in his Facebook profile. Where did you find it? You know, I Googled and I found these shady public records websites, you know, the type you'd Google somebody's name and you can find a bunch of public records. So I did that and I cross referenced on a couple. And now there was, you know, another Tim that was like 70 years old or something.

And I figured that's not our guy. So, you know, I don't know for sure, but I figured he probably isn't that old. He looks younger than that to me. So, uh, so I found a few that seemed to jive with about how old I figured Tim was. And so they all seem to have the same birth date and lo and behold, it matched the Facebook birth date. So we were boom, we had Tim. We did. And, and, uh, so we were all set set i got on the phone and i immediately got on a long hold listening to some upbeat music from virgin atlantic um and uh while while i was on the phone carrie carrie wrote i still only halfway know what this is about because i didn't read the full thread but i'm excited that's good I can appreciate that kind of enthusiasm and that faith, right?

That faith that this must be exciting. If we've got like 200 messages going on back and forth and we're asking for birthdays, then there must be something interesting. And I think she immediately got into the thrill of the hunt in terms of finding the information that we needed to. I think that gave it a fun dynamic. I think it wouldn't have been as exciting if we had all the information we needed right from the get-go. It really did. It made things more exciting. Nick wrote back to Kerry saying, for your benefit, Kerry, this is unbelievable first-class space for multiple passengers. That comes a week after Gary Leff, who writes a few from the wing, wrote about how ANA first- class was becoming impossible to book. So

the timing was ironic there. So I finally about 20 minutes into waiting on hold or something like that, an agent finally picks up the phone. I tell him what I'm trying to do. He understands immediately and then tells me he's going to need everybody's middle name. And he makes up a story saying that unlike other carriers, ANA won't let you fly unless your middle name is on the ticket. So, all right, next scramble, figure out everybody's middle name. Because if we didn't have everybody's birthday, you know, we didn't have everybody's middle name. Right. So. So. But the good news is at this point, you know, Greg knows his middle name and I'm on Slack. So I give my middle name right away and carries there. So she responds with her middle name. But there are two people who weren't around. Right. Right. Right. And so how did we find somehow we found Tim's or did you find that?

Yeah. So let me back up. I did say I did tell Greg, I'm gonna go on record right here. I did tell Greg, just tell him there's no middle name and it'll be fine. I gave him my middle name, but I said, just tell him I don't have a middle name or that people don't have a middle name because that happens, right? People, some people don't have a middle name. And I swear, like the vast majority of tickets that I book, I don't put a middle name. That's why Greg said that the agent made a big stink about how ANA is different because I think that they were trying to differentiate the fact that they recognize that usually if you don't put in a middle name, it's fine. It doesn't matter. But they were saying that for ANA, it would. Now I've flown ANA before and I was pretty sure I didn't put in my middle

name, but I didn't know for sure, for sure. So I gave Greg my middle name. Then. Yeah. I started, you know, right back with my shady records websites for Tim and I found a couple of different middle names, but there was one that was on a number of sites. And I was like, okay, this is probably his middle name. So let's go with this. And that was a good guess. It turned out to be right. Yeah.

And we went with no middle name for Stephen. We didn't find one right away. Stephen was sleeping in Mauritius at the time. And we had no way to wake him up. The guy is usually awake until like four o'clock in the morning, decided to sleep the night we needed him to be awake at four o'clock in the morning. Come on, Stephen. Where are you going?

Where are you going? Where are you going? Yeah. And so at this point, we already have, I'm starting to tell everybody, I'm starting to tell the agent, everybody's full names and everything, get it all finalized. And Tim finally jumps on and says, just catching up on all this. Holy Moses. And then a few minutes later, I wrote, it's booked with about 10 exclamation points. Which was an exciting moment.

I mean, like once I got that, that was like, because I was pretty excited. But of course, you got to get through to an agent. You got to get it booked. You got to give all the information. And little did we know at this point, but Gary at View From The Wing had actually posted about this availability before we did.

I didn't realize that until hours later after we had published it. So already there were people on the hunt booking things up. So there was a good chance that somebody might have gotten this booked up while Greg was on the phone, you know, trying to find our middle names, right? That's right. That's right. That's right. So anyway, it was exciting leading up to it. It was fun trying to figure out everyone's birthdates and middle names and then getting it booked. Whoa, what a huge, I don't know, I'm not going to say relief. It was just

very exciting to get that accomplished. We felt like, you know, we had already won the challenge. Well, yeah, I mean, because there were first class seats, right. Five first class seats. And then we had to gamble on, okay, are we sure that this is the right birthday and the right names? And like, you know, is this the passport say what we think the full name ought to be? And, you know, like, yeah, is Tim a Timmy or, you know, like, like, are we going to find out something we didn't know later on down the road? Or, you know, like, is Tim a Timmy or, you know, like, are we going to find out something we didn't know later on down the road? Or, you know, he goes by Tim, but that's not really his first name or something. We don't know those things. So we're gambling on all that stuff in terms of names and birthdays and that Stephen doesn't have a middle name because we don't know what it is if there is one.

So there's. Right. So a little. Yeah. A little. A little unsure. But at the same time, very excited. What what we believe 99.9%, it was all set. Uh, so I forwarded the, uh, confirmation to at it initially because I was like, I never really look at them. They always send them. And maybe sometimes I click on them. But even when I do, I don't really look at them closely. I think I clicked on the email, but I must not have looked at it closely. I went back to it later on. I don't even know why. And when I say later on, just a few minutes later, and I'm like, oh, no. Oh, no. My middle name is not spelled correctly. Not only is it not spelled correctly, because it's not spelled correctly, it's not the right name. So my middle name is Alexander. So Nicholas Alexander Reyes. And my ticket said Nicholas Alexandra Reyes. Right, right. So we only had two middle names we knew for sure going into this. And one of those two misspelled somehow. How does that happen? How does that

happen? It's like, it's Alexander. It's not a tough name to spell. It's not particularly challenging. And like Greg said, it was one of the two we knew. And I was the first person to respond with my middle name. I was like, did Greg get it wrong? I typed it like twice at least. The random middle name we found on the internet for Tim was right. Right, right. The one we knew 100% was put in wrong. When I scrolled back, I was like, did I type it wrong? And Greg didn't double confirm that Alexandra was really my middle name. I was like, wait, did I actually write wrong? And Greg didn't double confirm that Alexandra was really my middle name. I was like, wait, did I actually write Alexandra? Was it a typo? And he didn't double

check that with me, but no, I did. I said, I wrote Alexander. And of course you confirmed that you did tell the agent Alexander, right? Yeah. Yeah. So I said, all right, I'm going to deal with this in the morning. We'll, we'll find out whether Steven really has a middle name or not. Turns out he does. But in the meantime, we also confirm that ANA doesn't really check or care whether you leave your middle name off the ticket. In fact, I'm 99% sure when I flew with Maisie on ANA to Saigon from Tokyo last year that we didn't have our middle names on the tickets. So I knew from experience that that was fine. So Stephen was all set,

but I still wanted to get Nick sorted out. Right. So, yeah. So I called this morning as we're recording. It was this morning. I called Virgin Atlantic again, and I got an agent right away. It was pretty startling. Apparently, morning is the time to call from the US to get an agent in the UK.

In fact, she said that it was the end of a long day for her. So, um, and I told her what was up. Her first reaction was, was like, Oh no, we're not gonna be able to fix this. Um, I said, well, you know, it's only two letters or a little bit off. Um, can you at least, you know, uh, change them one at a time? Cause I've read that you can change names like one letter at a time. And she said something to the effect of, with any other airline, we could do that. But ANA has special rules. So apparently, the Virgin Atlantic reps believe that ANA was such that they can't make any changes to tickets once they're issued, even minor things like changing a letter on a name. And so she said, so I'm going to have to cancel it and rebook it. And I was like, wait, wait, wait.

No, no, no. I was very, very insistent. I said, no, no, no. I said, this is first class on ANA that never there's never availability. I don't want to take the risk of canceling and rebooking. Let's just leave it as is. I mean, you know, yes, check whether there's something you could do to change the letter, but but don't don't cancel and rebook. So she seemed to understand and put me on hold for a long, long time. Which is the time when Greg let us know that that's the agent's first response was that they'd have to cancel and rebook. And then he made it clear that that's not what we wanted to do. And I told him, I'm glad you did. Hopefully the agent took it more clearly than your pronunciation of Alexander.

Because I was worried. I was nervous at that point, if that's what she thought the solution was, I was nervous that, you know, she might try to go rogue and, and cancel that. And of course, we didn't want that. Because if you're not intimately familiar with award booking, when you cancel an award, sometimes it goes back in inventory, and you can book it again. But sometimes it doesn't. And there's no way to know for sure. Patterns change on that all the time. And sometimes it'll eventually go back into award inventory, but not immediately, maybe not until after midnight or something, if it even does. And so like canceling it was super risky, especially because, I mean, let's be real here.

I'm somewhat skeptical that ANA really meant to release five award seats in first class from the get go. There's only eight seats in that cabin and they charge like 12,000 round trip or one way they charge like $12,000. I'm not sure that they meant to release five seats to partners at 55,000 Virgin Atlantic miles, whatever, a couple hundred dollars, the Virgin Atlantic gives them for that. So I'm very much not sure that that seat would go back in inventory if she canceled it. So now I'm kind of on pins and needles and I'm telling Greg, you know, like, don't worry about it. Like, I'll just show up at the airport and they'll fix it. You know, like, I'll just show up. I got, we're taking it in first class. They're going to, you know, give us good service. I'll just show up. I'll like, who knows who's going to even question it. They might not even see it. And if they do, then I'm sure somebody is going to fix that. Right. So at this point, I'm almost regretful that Greg even called. Me too. And I, you know, there was nothing I could do. I'm on hold listening to music.

I even wrote in the Slack channel. I'm praying that she doesn't go rogue. I thought I was joking when I said that. But really, it turns out you were jinxing. I wasn't joking. The agent finally picked up the phone and said something to the effect of, I decided to take a gamble. And she said, she split off Nick's ticket from the rest of us and canceled it. Oh, my goodness. Exactly what you asked her not to do. Why do people have so much trouble following directions? Like, simple direction.

I don't know that I was ever closer to having a heart attack than that moment. But she followed immediately with, but she was successfully able to book it again. So at that point in the conversation, she had the award held again for Nick. And then the rest of the call was all about making sure that I would get refunded for the original Nick ticket. And then I had to give her my credit card again to pay for the fees on the new ticket

but it was actually it was it actually got issued we got the email confirmation right away uh for nick um then we had to check did she did this screw up right but luckily we're able to log on to manage booking and and um and see that that they're all intact. Um, thanks to Nick, um, explaining a tip that, that hadn't occurred to me right away, which was when I, when I went into ANA's website to manage booking, I put in my first name and last name and ticket number and, and the ticket wouldn't come up. But, um, uh, Nick, do you want to explain the trick in this case? Well, you might have noticed on your boarding pass in the past at times your name will come in all together first and last

name together as though it's one name the the given names get merged together into like one long name first and middle name or get that's okay you said first and last yeah first and middle is what i meant yes absolutely so i i just on a lark tried that when i tried to pull up mine i put in my first nicholas alexander all is one name for my first name and then my last name in the last name field and that pulled it up. So that worked for for Greg to pull up the reservation. Yeah. And, you know, it did it did finally occur to me like right before Nick wrote that that that might have been the issue. I so rarely put my middle name on any tickets that it's not something I normally encounter. But that in fact worked and our tickets are in place. So wow. Goodness. Like have

you know, like going back for a second to when she canceled it, like this is like Greg said, it's this is maybe the most frustrating part of award booking when you get to something like this and you really don't want the agent to mess it up, but it's totally out of your hands. You've got no control. You're on hold. And like that thing, that whole situation is crazy. And I look at it and I say, what was the backup plan? Like if she's put that off and canceled it, like, hey, the first agent misheard, like I'm sure you said, Alexander. And so the first agent made a mistake in typing. So it was Virgin Atlantic's mistake from the get go. And then if they compound that mistake by canceling the ticket, like what was the backup plan? What was she going to do with that money? I can't imagine what they could have done. I mean,

maybe she could have called ANA and tried to force the issue, but wow. I mean, the good thing is, I have to say, I had looked up in the meantime, ANA, what ANA says to do when you want to change a letter and a name like this. And oh my gosh, it's the most convoluted, complex process, which involves booking another seat on the same flight with the right name and then canceling the original and then somehow getting them to move the new one over to the old one. I don't know. It made no sense to me. I'm so glad we didn't have to try that. Of course, we wouldn't have had to anyway. Nick would have been able to board with being called Nicholas Alexander.

I have no doubt that that would have worked fine. I mean, really, when you just said it there, I couldn't tell which one you said for sure. So, you know, who would know, right? Who would know? And when you looked it up, you did find instances where people were like, the middle name was a little messed up and it was no problem, you know, getting through. So I don't usually, that's part of the reason I don't put in the middle name is because I don't want to make a mistake. And I figure anything extra that I have to enter, there's more of a chance that I make a mistake somewhere. So I try to enter as little information as I need to, whatever the bare minimum is, is what I put in. And that's why I usually don't put in a middle name. But it didn't

even occur to me that the agent would make a mistake. And this makes me a little bit more thankful. And I know a couple of people are going to roll their eyes out there, but a little bit more thankful for the way Turkish miles and smiles operates, because my goodness, they phonetically spell everything like eight times on the phone. And then they send you the confirmation of the hold so you can double check the spellings of everything before they go ahead and book it. And like here, that would have saved the day. But of course, after the fact, we had to sweat it out and hope that they got it right. And to their credit, Virgin Atlantic agents are usually good. Like in my experience in general, they're usually good at what they do uh but right scary scary it was scary it was scary um so some of some of the uh others on the team had some reactions

and we're gonna we're gonna take turns reading the reactions first i'll do i'll do carrie's reaction um she she wrote uh it took me a while to understand what was happening, but as I was reading the thread aloud to Drew, her husband, who, who used to have a major blog in points and miles. So he knows this stuff. Drew, he started reacting like, wow, you son of a gun. And then I could tell that whatever you were booking must be cool. That's great. I also have queued up. She made a little recording here. So I'm just going to play a little sound bite.

And so I'm still kind of playing catch up on what happened, but I think we all have some kind of first class ticket from Japan or something. Anyway, it's exciting. I love that. She has no idea what's going on. This was like in the moment when we were writing this, she recorded herself. Well, truth be told,

I mean, who does know what's going on? Because at this point, like, I mean, we mentioned how the agent gambled on canceling the ticket. We mentioned how we gambled on everybody's middle names and birthdays.

What we didn't really touch on strongly enough is that we gambled on the fact that we can even put together a challenge that works with us right because we like yeah we had some ideas floating for the next challenge none of them involved japan so uh so this was not on our radar and like we booked this because when are you ever going to be able to fly the entire team? Like Greg said in a first class. So crazy. And to be clear, we still don't know what the challenge is. All we know is that we have to be in Tokyo on a certain date in order to make this flight. So we have this, this new constraint on the, on the, on the trip. So that's fun. But you know what I like about that? That is the way that

I tend to book trips. If I find something with great availability, and this is something that I think is foreign to a lot of people that aren't used to booking trips this way. They're either new to award travel or just used to a traditional way of thinking about booking a vacation. You book the outbound and the return at one time, and you book your hotel and it's all done. And that's just not the way you have to do it. Sometimes with these like really rare and hard to find things, you find something like this, you jump on it and you're like, well, I don't know how I'm getting there, but we'll figure that part out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And for people without status with Virgin Atlantic, I mean, I think they charge something like $50 per ticket to cancel or to change. And so, you know, it was a minor risk from a cash point of view, but not really a big one.

Turns out I actually have gold status for some reason with Virgin Atlantic and I would get free changes anyway. So, you know, so there was really no risk at all for me booking this, but it still didn't, it still felt like a risk, but anyway, exciting, exciting payout. Yeah. So, so I was most interested too in, in Steven's reaction because he was the one that literally slept through the whole booking process. And it would be many hours later that he'd wake up and read this Slack channel thread that had like 300 messages in it. What does Steven say? So Steven tells us, I read it on Slack when I woke up. And by the way, I had messaged his wife beforehand.

And she said, oh, he looks at Slack and deals before he even says good morning. So I can picture Stephen in a fog in the dark, like looking at his phone. He says, I read it on Slack when I woke up. When I saw Greg's initial post had about 180 replies, I knew something had to be going on while I was sleeping. As I scrolled through, it became clear what was happening. So my reserved, subdued British reaction was, looks like I might be going to Japan for a few months. Sorry, Stephen, I tried. Not for a few months, in a few months. Looks like I might be going to Japan in a few months kind of thing, right? Kerry has the video. So maybe I'll splice

that in here. And so you don't have to listen to my accent. He said, I'm really looking forward to this. Only my second time flying first class, getting to try $500 whiskey, which is something that a, or a is known for in first class. They tend to serve this really rare whiskey now and then. So we can hope that it ends up being on our flight. Who knows? But he said,

getting to try it. If, if we can't anyway, it'll be awesome. And it'll be my first time going to Japan too. I can't believe I have a boss who books me a first class plane ticket just because there's a war to fail ability. And oh, my goodness. Like, yeah, whose boss books a first class ticket to Japan that would otherwise cost north of 10 grand? I mean, we're looking at a

trip that would cost somebody $60,000 to book. I mean, maybe if your boss is like jay-z like congratulations craig you're the jay-z of points and miles because uh that's what i've always been called yeah thank you like i mean that is pretty incredible and i was thinking that the entire time also that like who does this like who books their entire team their entire company in a and a first class like i can't possibly happen often it's gonna be like the first or second time in recorded history yeah yeah oh my gosh um tim also followed up with a a big thanks for booking this greg with exclamation points we'll have and then he says we'll have over half the cabin so i don't know how many are there what eight there's eight seats eight seats eight suites

and we'll have five of them wow yeah and he said he says i don't think i many are there. What? There's eight seats, eight seats, eight suites. And we'll have five of them. Wow. Yeah. And he said, he says, I don't think I've ever seen or heard of five seats in the suite at one time, which of course he means five award seats being booked.

Wow. That's amazing. That's pretty exciting. I'm, I'm still, I mean, the main reason I think I wanted to do the show about this today was because I couldn't really think about much of anything else.

I'm so excited about this trip. I have no idea what's going to involve other than this one flight, but it's going to be awesome. No, I mean, like how often do you get? So I think probably people have the sense of the Frequent Miler team. And you're right that we're like we're friends. We enjoy each other's company. We have a lot of fun. And so like when are you going to get the chance to fly an incredible first class product with four of your friends? Like that, like there's just no chance,

unless you live in an entirely different world where you're buying those things with cash, there's no chance that that's ever going to happen in life. So, so amazing that this happened. And I think it's a fantastic example of striking while the iron is hot, because I often say that we often say that, that you have to jump on these types of things when you get the chance because you're not going to get the chance all the time. Now, there's always a new deal coming. So, you know, I also caution people not to get, you know, the FOMO, the fear of missing out and do things that you shouldn't do or wouldn't do. But in a case like this, you know, when you're trying to book multiple people, I often say you just have to jump on that one way award availability. And so here we are, five of us.

We know we're going to book or we know we're going to fly in a first class from Japan to the United States. Pretty amazing. Yeah. Incredible. Incredible. All right. All right. That's that's the story.

That's the story. That was the adventure. And we're sticking to it. And so we'll figure out the rest of this challenge and you'll know when we know. So, you know. Yeah. Yeah. We'll let we know. So, uh, yeah, we'll let you

know. And we'll let, we'll let you know if, if they, there's always a chance that ANA will swap out the, uh, airplane for the lesser older one, which would be sad, but, but you know what, this point we'll do it anyway. We'll, we'll suffer through the old first class if we have to. Right. Right. Which if you look up the old ANA first class, I'm sure you'll feel horrible for us that we might have to suffer that instead of the new suite with the 43 inch television monitors at each seat. So the old suite was or the old seat was fairly nice. Awesome. All right, my friends, that brings us, I think, to this week's question of the week, though.

So this week's question of the week also has to do with award booking. And so it also has to do with Virgin Atlantic. So I thought this was a particularly interesting one to tie in. It's not anything to do with ANA, but Tim and our Frequent Miler Insiders group asked a great question. I'm curious to see whether you're going to know the answer. I do know the answer. Thanks to members of the group.

I'm curious to see if you'll know it. So Tim says, I have a Delta International flight round trip, JFK to Brussels, booked with Virgin Atlantic Miles. If I add a positioning flight, which would be also a round trip flight between Pittsburgh and New York JFK with Virgin Atlantic Miles. So again, this is going to be on Delta booked with Virgin Atlantic Miles. Would they later let me connect it all into one itinerary? The benefit would be protection on the return in case the flight is late. So what I'm gathering here is Tim is based in Pittsburgh. He booked because he found the availability, like we've said a million times before,

he found availability between New York and Brussels. So he booked that as a round trip. Now he's found separately a round trip also on Delta between Pittsburgh and New York JFK. And he wants to know if he can link. That's a miracle. All right. It is. It is. Delta releases award space to their partners so rarely that finding the JFK one round trip,

that was pretty good. But being able to link it exactly with another domestic one, amazing. So good job right there. Buy a lottery ticket, Tim. And this is not Tim on our team. This is a reader, Tim. But yeah, so the fear here is the flight from Brussels to JFK those reservations can be linked so that Delta will get him on the next flight to Pittsburgh if he misses that reservation. What do you say? our record locator that instead what they would do is add notes to the reservations telling agents that they're linked.

But in my experience with Delta, I don't know that anyone actually reads those notes. Anyway, that's my guess that that's about the best you could do. That's accurate. That's accurate. Readers confirmed and linked to a story elsewhere that no, they will not link them. And there's no protection on the separate tickets. So if you come in on a separate ticket there, you're just going to be out of luck if you miss the JFK to Pittsburgh flight. And because it would be close in, it would be the same day, presumably. I I don't think you'll get either benefit of being put on a later flight or get your miles back. You'll just be stuck at JFK looking for a way to Pittsburgh.

Well, I actually think that Delta would let you stand by for a later flight is what I think would happen. As long as you let them know right away what happened. Hopefully, you have internet on that late flight coming in and can contact somebody. I think they would, but can I guarantee it? No. I mean, Eric Canada didn't let me do a similar thing last year. Right. So American Airlines apparently does. And apparently as a matter of policy, according to view from the wing, as a matter of policy, if you have an American Airlines flight and a separate one world ticket back to back, and it can be, I think either order has to be one world, not one of their non one world partners. But if you have a one world ticket and an American Airlines ticket, separate tickets that are back to back, they will protect you on American. So so then you're you're OK. They'll

get you to your final destination. Uh, you don't have to worry about it, but a word in the street anyway, is that that will not, uh, be the case with everybody else. So maybe you're right. But standing by makes sense. Maybe they'll let you stand by for something, but, um, but they're not going to book you on the next available necessarily with a confirmed seat. So, so be aware of that. I was just going to say one thing you can do though, is, is if you're checking your bags, you can check your bags all the way through from your home airport, all the way through, you just show, uh, at the, um, check-in counter, both, uh, reservations and they can do that.

Okay. Well, good. That's good to know. Uh, now the other piece I would add to this, I don't know how you feel about this, but in my experience, because I would be somewhat concerned about that, I try not to make the positioning flights that tight. Like if I'm in a position, I would always prefer to have a night in between. And it's not always the most convenient because it adds a little more time to the trip and whatnot. Kind of a pain to get your bags and bring them to the hotel and bring them back to the airport and all the rest of that. But I would rather do that than end up in a situation where I missed the flight and I've got a headache now trying to get back home. So I try not to do that. Now, of course, I'm sure that Tim was limited by whatever Delta

actually had available to partners. And so I was booking this because this is the one flight that they had available. So I'm not, no judgment on Tim's booking there. But generally speaking, I'd prefer my positioning flights to be a day before on the outbound and a day after on the return. Yeah, yeah. And maybe he can book a day later award flight that's freely cancelable as a backup and then cancel it if he gets on his originally scheduled one.

That's a great point. Whether with Delta or with somebody else using miles because there's so many airlines now offering free cancellation, the United States, US based airlines all would offer free cancellation, I think, in that scenario. So booking could actually do it with cash, too. But, you know, the cash back would usually be in the form of a voucher credit with that airline. So if that's okay with you, that would be fine too. Right.

All right. Great points there. Unfortunately, we are at the end of today's show. If you've enjoyed today's episode and you'd like to get on our email list. So the next time that ANA releases five award seats in first class, you can book that right away. You want to go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe and just don't hold your breath that that's going to happen twice but you want to go to frequent miler.com slash subscribe to join our email list anyway get our posts in your inbox each week you can follow us on all the various social media wherever you're watching this or listening to this please give us a like

a thumbs up a comment uh enable notifications turn all that stuff on subscribe we appreciate all of that stuff and we will see you guys again next week. Bye, everybody.