Frequent Miler on the Air - Game Changers: Alive and Dead | Ep100 | 5-29-21

Episode Date: May 29, 2021

3:34 Giant Mailbag: The Captain catches his white whale 4:15 What crazy thing....did Hilton do this week? https://frequentmiler.com/hilton-replaces-breakfast-benefit-for-elite-members-in-the-united-states/ 9:18 What crazy thing....did Marriott do this week? https://frequentmiler.com/marriott-now-limited-points-advance-holds-to-no-more-than-60-days/ 12:06 What crazy thing did...Cardless do this week? 14:40 Mattress Running the Numbers: Red Roof Inn stay twice, get points for a free night. Is it mattress-run worthy? https://frequentmiler.com/red-roof-stay-twice-earn-a-free-night-stay-5-28-21-9-7-21/ 17:43 Main Event: Game changers: Alive and Dead Simon Mall's $1K gift cards in-mall: https://frequentmiler.com/week-in-review-07132019/ Citi Double Cash 1 to 1 transfers to ThankYou points: https://frequentmiler.com/will-citi-really-satisfy-did-denali-prep-greg-for-40k-our-takes-and-more/ Rakuten starts allowing Membership Rewards instead of cash back! https://frequentmiler.com/week-in-review-11022019/ PayPal Key: https://frequentmiler.com/defending-yourself-against-amexs-war-on-gaming-more/ Capital One adds partners and 1 to 1 transfer tier: https://frequentmiler.com/capital-one-steps-up-to-the-plate/ Hacking Asia Miles: https://frequentmiler.com/week-in-review-jan-2020-week-3/ Turkish Miles & Smiles: https://frequentmiler.com/publishing-the-sweetest-spot-new-turkish-intel-a-failed-experiment-and-more/ Chase Pay Yourself Back: https://frequentmiler.com/is-the-chase-csr-1-5c-a-compelling-cash-out-also-using-airline-credits-more/ Shop Your Way Points now convert to merchant gift cards! Citi xfer to SYW 1 to 1.2. https://frequentmiler.com/has-citi-sears-iously-improved-much-this-week/ Airlines eliminate change fees: https://frequentmiler.com/is-the-sapphire-reserve-king-for-life-or-is-it-on-its-last-term-this-week-at-frequent-miler/ Wyndham Vacasa 15K: https://frequentmiler.com/mileage-running-delta/ Hyatt Premium Suites: https://frequentmiler.com/the-suite-life-friends-with-benefits-and-more/ Marriott top-tier properties for less: https://frequentmiler.com/huge-marriott-win-spg-cat7/ 1:07:03 Host Roast / Post Roast https://frequentmiler.com/best-offers-for-low-spenders/ 1:12:10 Question of the Week: Does a Delta Platinum upgrade make sense right now? Don't forget to like & subscribe! Join our email list here: https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ Music credit: Annie Yoder

So you listening out there? Hello. We got some fun stuff going on here at Frequent Miler. Big news of the week from Frequent Miler. We have big news on the blog today. Terrific post you wrote about Cafe Pacific Asian. Super exciting. Hyatt has just, they like blew the roof off this whole Mobla thing. If anybody didn't see it this week, we got this crazy upgrade at Domes of Alunda. The cost of vacation rentals, 15,000 points per bedroom per night.

United Airlines eliminating change fees. Marriott's up with a brand new resort in the Maldives. And they classified it as Category 5. What? Until I heard your news, I thought Singapore Airlines miles were the best way to get to Hawaii. Hello. Talk about easy points. Simon Malls is going to be selling $1,000 Visa gift cards. Really exciting. Get one X at giftcards.com or giftcardmall.com.

Then because you paid with your Rakuten Visa, you're getting another three X. City Double Cash is going to gain the ability to convert cash back to thank you points. It's like you get that kid in a candy store feeling again. Woo! Frequent Miler on the air starts now. This today is our 100th episode of Frequent Miler on the air. Woo! You believe that, Nick?

100! And people are still listening, Greg. People are still listening and Greg. People are still listening. And apparently more than ever, like our podcast numbers are going up and up and up, which is great. It is. It's fantastic.

Every single month, month over month, keeps getting bigger and by bigger and bigger margins too. So that's terrific. We appreciate having people out there. Thank you for doing lots and lots of yard work. Thank you very much for making your kids listen in the back seat. This is amazing. It's really been a lot of fun. It's nice that we've been enjoying this and enough other people have to keep us going for a hundred episodes, a hundred episodes of earning like

nothing, but having a lot of fun. Right. Right. Not you guys. We don't mean earning. You guys are earning lots of miles and points. We hope he means us or nothing on the show. Right. right. Not you guys. We don't mean earning. You guys are earning lots of miles and points, we hope. He means us earning nothing on the show. Right, right. Now, we did turn on some ads on YouTube, so we do earn like a dollar or two a month or so, I think. Right, right. Well, we're not doing ads yet. Buy yourself a coffee, Greg.

Anyway, so today, what our main event is going to be for our 100th episode is we're going to review the game changers we've discussed over the last 100 weeks and talk about each one. Are they still alive? Dead? Somewhere in between. That's today's agenda. Big game change. We've had some game changers in this show, so I'm excited to talk about this a little bit. Yes, actually, we've had a lot. Going through the 100 episodes, it was amazing how many we came up with that were like potential talking points for the show and we narrowed it down to a large list so we'll go through them pretty quickly but but we're still going to do our regular segments of the show it, I will point out that I wore for those watching on YouTube anyway, you'll see I wore my 100th episode shirt with the collar and everything. Dancy, Dancy, you showed up dressed up and here I am in my like, you know,

Silicon Valley casual sort of long sleeve t shirt. So yeah, I'm expecting better for our 1000th episode. So keep that in mind. I will keep that in mind. I'll try and be home for the thousandth episode so that my wardrobe is appropriately prepared. Okay. All right. That sounds like a good plan. All right. Let's get into, we're going to do our regular features. We're going to get into the giant mailbag and I've got the giant mail right here in front of me. This one is from Captain Greg, who is excited about, we posted about a targeted offer for the Blue Business Plus card, 50,000 point signup offer. And Greg was very excited that it showed up in his Platinum Cards Amex offers. So when he was logged in, clicked on his Platinum Card, he saw it there.

He signed up immediately. He says, I finally captured my white whale. Aye, aye, Captain Greg. Aye, aye. Enjoyed that. Okay. Moving on. To what crazy thing did everybody do this week? Because we got a lot of craziness, right? Right, right. Well, we have to address. When we recorded last week, we were too late for the, or we recorded too early for the news about what crazy thing Hilton did. Hilton took the one feature that we often talk about how great Hilton is because of this one feature, and they took it away. Unbelievable. unbelievable unbelievable so we've often talked on the show about how we love that if you're if you have hilton gold status or higher you get free breakfast at all hilton hotels and how that's so

much better than like marriott where you need a chart to know which is which but now you still don't need a chart as long as you're going to a hilton in the united states, before the end of this year, you're not getting free breakfast. No chart necessary. They're just simplifying, right? No free breakfast for you. Instead, they're going to replace it with a credit. And the amount of the credit is going to differ by the property and the market. So I guess you do still need a chart, except nobody knows what the chart's going to be. So there's no chart to make. It's like, you need to get somewhere between 10 and 25 bucks a person for up to two people. I guess the plus side is you don't have to use it on breakfast. You can use it on something else. Yeah. Yeah. Minus side is it's probably not going to be enough to buy you breakfast. So that's why or anything else or anything else. Right. So big time bummer there. Although I don't know, are you disappointed? Do you think

this is a devaluation? Do you think it's a long-term thing? Is this, I mean, this is going to be Hilton's direction. And before I actually even get your answer on that, we should make it clear. This is only for properties in the United States from July to December of 2021. Now, whether or not you actually believe it's July to December of 2021 only, I'm skeptical. I'm curious about your views on that. But if you are staying somewhere overseas, you should still get breakfast as you always do. Right, right, right. Yeah, I'm disappointed personally because I do have a stay booked in September with a place that has a nice restaurant. And I was looking forward to eating my breakfast out on their balcony, looking out over the ocean.

Oh, you still can. I still can, but I'm going to have to pay for most of it because the leaked information about how much we're likely to get for this property would be $12 per person for up to two people. That's not enough for a complete breakfast. So yeah, I'm not too happy about it. I can absolutely see why some people would be and I would love this absolutely love it if Hilton would just make it a choice at check in your your offered one or the other and you say which one you prefer, something like that and that would be great, because there are some times where, you know, even I who loves breakfast time, and I like to just like like you, you do, as you wrote in your post,

love the convenience of getting breakfast in the hotel so that then you can go back to your room, get ready for the day and enjoy the day. You know, even for us, there are times where it probably makes sense to forego the free breakfast and use the credits instead. So that's what I hope will happen. But yeah, we'll see. We'll just have to wait and see. I don't have a prediction there. So here's the silver lining, so to speak. I don't know if maybe it feels like a stretch to call it that, but not really a silver lining. If you're somebody who books cash days at Waldorf or Conrad type properties, here's your one, I don't know, positive trick to play with this one.

And that is this week, today as we record this, this week, I published a post about Hilton Impresario and the fact that they're now offering a twice the perks promotion. So at select properties around the world, they're offering instead of $100 credit. Now I should back up. Hilton Impresario is like Amex Fine Hotels and resorts or Hyatt purvey. It's one of those programs where you're booking with an agent who is affiliated with the program. And then you get a bunch of extra on property benefits. And normally one of those benefits is $100 property credit, but at select places, they're going to give you a $200 property credit. And one of the benefits is breakfast for two people. And unlike elite status, this is a full breakfast for two people. And I'm told that it's still going to be a full

breakfast for two people the rest of this year, because this is not an elite status thing. So if you do have gold or diamond status, what I think you should be able to do is book one of those properties through an impresario agent, get a free breakfast for two people, plus get your breakfast credits from elite status because they aren't only for breakfast anymore. So you could use them for dinner or lunch or something else, plus your $200 property credit when you book a stay of two nights or more. So that's something that could be stackable if one of those properties happens to line up with your needs. Right, right. So by taking away free breakfast for elites, they made those free breakfasts through other means more valuable, basically.

Absolutely. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. All right. So that's what crazy thing they did, but that's not the only crazy thing. That's what Hilton did. But of course, Marriott is like, I want to get in on the show too. So Thursday morning, they know we record on Thursdays and Thursday mornings. They said, okay,

we got to do something to get on the show today. That's right. That's right. Now, you know what they did, the big picture of what they did doesn't actually sound crazy to me. It's, it's that they announced that their, their whole points advance feature where you're able to book a hotel,

even if you don't have enough points there, they scaled it way back, meaning you can't reserve for as far out in advance and you can't, I don't know. What are, what are the new rules just really briefly about that? Yeah. So now when you make a reservation using points advance, which again means you don't have enough points in your account to cover the cost of the stay. So you're booking it and promising to get the points later on, so to speak. Now you have 60 days to earn enough points in order to cover the stay. You have until 60 days after making the reservation or 14 days before check-in, whichever comes first. So if you're booking a points advance for next month, you're going to need the points 14 days before check-in. Nothing has really changed there. But if you're booking a stay for next year, you're going to have to have the points within 60 days from the day you book

it. So rather than being able to get an advance 12 months in advance and not need to come up with the points for 11 and a half months, now you'll need to come up with the points within the next two months after you book it. Yeah. So the part that struck me as particularly crazy is that they're going to apply it to existing bookings, if I'm understanding this right. So once this starts'm going to have enough by the time of the stay. Well, that's strategy is not going to work anymore. And I, I find that pretty disappointing that Mariette would do that. Because at the time we, you know, book those points, advanced things, we were told this holds your, your spot, you know, until 14 days in advance or whatever. And so now they're changing the rules on you.

So the overall picture, I understand it. People were booking up these awards. And so some of the popular hotels were impossible for people to book if they were really going to stay. And a lot of people were just booking them just in case and then canceling them and at the last minute. And so that hurt other guests who are their potential guests. It also hurt the resort itself if they were not full when they otherwise would have been not full because a lot of people canceled, you know, 14 days, I guess, beforehand. So yeah, I've got one more. All right. One more crazy thing. crazy thing did cardless do this week yeah so this is just really uh wrapping up from last week we joked about how the cardless credit cards are

not really cardless at all you actually get a physical card in the mail and i got mine in the mail just yesterday. And obviously it's not cardless, but it is numberless. There are no credit card numbers on the card. What? How are you supposed to shop online, Greg? That's where you need an iOS device capable of showing a 16 digit number. Crazy. Because apparently Android devices can't do that yet.

You know, tell me that one comes with like primary CDW too. That won't do you any good in one of those places where they still do the little thing where they need the impression of the card, right? You're going to hand them a card with no number on it. No, it's not going to do you any good, right? Can't use this card. There's no numbers on it, right? Imagine if a cashier asked you yeah i mean

it happens to me every now and then where a cashier wants to see the card because they're supposed to verify the last four digits or something or other it's happened to me in store now and then and like you hand them a card with no number on it i mean come on try and explain that to the average cashier no it, it's numberless cardless card. Right. So I'm not sure why, why a cardless didn't name themselves numberless, except maybe it's not as catchy or maybe, you know, someone a little more direct dealing is, is use that, that name already. And yeah, I don't know. I mean, you may as well be cardless. You have a card without a number that's about the same, right? I mean, maybe, maybe that's the thinking. Striped. I know that. Yeah. I know I'm not cardless, but I am numberless with, with my

Manchester United card, which when I, which, when I activate it, activated it, it said, congratulations on activating your Cavs card. Oh, nice, nice, nice. Technology is their thing. Good to see. Always great when your bank doesn't even know which card you've got. That's right. Especially when the only way of accessing the card number

is through their app. Through their app. Yeah, that's encouraging. Very encouraging, Cardless. Keep up the good work. So I just said something and then I was like, oh, wait, does it have a magnetic strip or does it only have a chip?

No, chip. Just a chip. Chip only. Yep. Interesting. It's a future man. That looks, that looks real legit. You got to show that to somebody real legit. Oh yeah. This is your credit card. Sure. All right. So that's the crazy thing. And so the cardless card is numberless and kind of fun. All right. So then let's talk about mattress running the numbers this week. Red Ruth Inn is out with an exciting new promotion to earn. I don't know. You stay two times and you earn enough points for a free night at the red

roof in, I mean, what do you think, Greg? Two times free night. It's pretty good. I was going to kind of make fun of this, but, but, uh, so according to Steven's post, almost all red roof in, uh, charge 7,000 points a night that it's like a flat charge for all except for two i think he said um so so here's the deal you get 7 000 points after two uh stays okay and so i think it actually makes sense in this scenario if you're looking at a very expensive red roof in, if there is such a thing, which it

seems to me like, you know, the ones next to a popular national park or what have you could very well be very expensive, especially during certain times of year. Then here's a way of getting a night cheaply at that hotel, because you could probably stay at a $45 red roof nearby, stay two times. So $90 to stay at what might be a, I don't know, $250 stay, something like that. So there's a scenario where I could see it making sense. But let me caution you. I'm pretty sure when I wrote about Sinesta recently, I'm pretty sure they bought Red Roof Hotels. Really? Am I remembering that wrong?

I thought so. Anyway, I probably should have done my homework and double-checked this before, right? Maybe they did. I don't know. I'm skeptical. Call me skeptical on that one. So assuming they did, I don't know that these Red Roof points will, ready points or whatever they're called, will stay in that form.

And what a shame it would be if you end up with points other than Red Roof end points. Right, right. Worst case scenario there that I just can't face. But the point is that, you know, that, that red roof in that you were hoping to pay 7,000 points for might end up being a Sinesta something or other that might cost more points. I don't, I don't really know. True, true, true. So there's some risk. So the key is if you are interested in this promotion, get out there, stay at your two red roof ends Inns as soon as you possibly can and make sure you lock it in that 7,000 point booking at your desirable Red Roof Inn property. So, and, you know, I'm smiling, but I've stayed at a Red Roof Inn once or twice before and they were fine.

Yeah, just like a Best Western or, you know, there's a lot of those middle tier sort of chains that are inexpensive. So it might be an easy way to pick up a free night like greg said so so i would say yeah i think we're both kind of in the it's mattress run worthy if you know what you're doing and if you don't know red roof in and don't want to stay at one then why didn't you skip past this segment what's wrong with you all right so you know next week we'll talk about you know which red roof fins actually don't have red roofs but for now we're going to move on to the main event all right we've got a lot to cover here a lot to cover because we're going to be going over all the game

changers that we've talked about over the last hundred weeks, a hundred episodes and talking about, are they alive or dead? So I, we grouped them. So we're first going to be talking about the, the earning points and miles game changers. And then we'll talk about the spending because the spending ones are kind of more fun. So we're,

we've got more of those to discuss in a way. Should we take turns? Why don't you kick it off? Let's kick it off then. So earning points, one of the biggest things I'd say in the last hundred weeks, stories that we kind of broke the news on initially was that Simon Malz was saying, hello, manufacturer spenders, come on in. We got thousand dollar gift cards for you up to $25,000 worth at a shot first in the mall, right? In the beginning, you had to go to the mall

and you had to kind of establish a pattern with a few purchases and then you'd be able to walk out of there with 25 000 gift cards and then eventually they launched it online and we also were able to kind of break that story and and be a couple of the first people to be able to place orders and test that process out so so that's something that's a potentially great way, or at least it has been a great way to earn points. What do you think? Was it an exciting development and is it still alive? Yeah. I mean, at the time it was very exciting and we hadn't seen thousand dollar gift cards readily accessible before that. And now they were not only readily accessible, but you could spend as much as you wanted, pretty much.

And the other thing that was very interesting was that Simon Wall explicitly welcomed manufacturer spending. You know, they explicitly told us that. They told people when you're filling out your form, say you're doing it for manufactured spend. So we know you're not doing something illegal, basically. And so that was great and that was a game changer in itself to have a major organization supporting manufactured spending um it's still alive it's still very much alive the thing that's that's put a little damper on it that's made it maybe a little bit ill is uh the fact that it's gotten harder and harder to liquidate those cards. It has. And, you know, in a lot of nationwide store chains, it's particularly

difficult. Now you may be limited to swipes of no more than $99 at a time at a lot of stores. Although I will say that for the last month or so, I've been visiting family. I've been away from home. I've been trying different places and man, am I still finding lots of places where that's not an issue? So, okay. That's great to hear. So, so I think it's going to be very regional in terms of what options you have locally. It's not, you know, it's going to be a pain at Walmart, but if you look for your local chains and things and you may, you may find some good stuff. So I think it's definitely still alive. It's been a lot of fun. It's been a little nerve-wracking sometimes walking out of the mall with that much in gift cards.

I got to say, like, one time we were there at a customer service. There's a couple different malls we bought at. But one, the customer service, there's, you know, people around. And the one day we went in to buy and the cashier was like, okay, that'll be $24,000, blah blah, blah. And I was like, a little louder, the person waiting for the bus didn't hear like, you know, come on, my goodness, like, let's keep it down here, please. So that's, that's been kind of the weird part when two of us are walking out with a lot of gift cards. But anyway, that that's been, I think, a positive for people that need to hit spend quickly. It's a cheap way to hit spend quickly, right? That's right. All right. Next one on our agenda is Citi Double Cash that surprised us all by suddenly deciding that they would allow cash back to be converted to Citi Thank You Points. And that meant if you had a Citi Premier or C or city prestige card, you could then transfer those points to airline miles. And'm remembering, it was the blue business plus Amex card, which is limited to $50,000 spend a year. This one was, is uncapped. And so, you know, theoretically, if you had unlimited, um, you know, ability to liquidate gift cards,

theoretically, you go to sign wall and do $25,000 a day for a whole year. And you'd have like an infinite number of points. Right. Right. Theoretically, let's be clear. When I tell anybody to do that or either you're going to get your card shut down and you start doing that. Well, plus liquidating that much is going to be a heck of a challenge. Yeah. Yeah. So, so don't go do that. But yeah, I mean, that was a game changer and I think definitely really interesting thing, but man city can't get no respect. Right. I mean,

I don't think anybody is is particularly excited still about that. I shouldn't say anybody, nobody's talking about it really. I don't hear people talking about it very often and I still think it is a big deal. It is a great opportunity, but I feel like in the time since there've been so many good cards with great category bonuses that have launched that it's kind of gotten lost in a forest of cards that are offering three and four and five acts and categories that they didn't use to. And then capital one kind of eating their lunch by, you know, taking,

or taking some of their transfer partners and obviously improving their program, which we'll talk more about in a minute. But, so I think it's still, obviously it's still there and I think it's still there. It's still live. Yep. It's still very much a game changer, I think. But as you said, you know, maybe its impact has lessened over time. Yeah. All right. The Rakuten portal. Rakuten portal started letting you earn membership rewards points and they launched, well, they had a Visa card already, but that Visa card then effectively started earning three additional

membership rewards points per dollar spent whenever you were shopping through the Rakuten portal. Still alive, exciting, interesting. So that was just incredible, especially when it started because not only could we now, whenever the Rakuten portal has those 10X or 15X deals, which they do pretty often, that where you shop through their portal and you get 10 points per dollar or 15 points per dollar. Now it was membership rewards points instead of pennies. And we value those a lot higher than one cent each. So that was awesome and remains awesome. That's totally alive. The other component of it though, that was awesome at the time was that Rakuten Visa, you could use to buy gift cards through the Rakuten portal. So you would get 1% or 1X through the portal and an additional 3X from your Rakuten Visa card.

So you get a total of 4x points for buying Visa gift cards online. Membership rewards points. Membership rewards points, that's right. With your Visa card. With your Visa card, right. So the Rakuten Visa became the best card for earning Amex membership rewards points,, gold card to get 4X at grocery stores at the time, because I was like, I'm getting 4X from home, just my gift cards. But unfortunately they, they put an end to that, uh, sometime later. And, uh, so now, you know,

I guess you still get 3X for most shopping portal things you do through the Rakuten portal, but not for other stuff. Not for giftcard.com or like, you know, what are the places that we're discussing here. Exactly. Yeah. So, you know, the Rakuten part is still live. The Visa part only sort of partially. The most exciting part is not the life. And it's still exciting because you can cash those points out for 25% more than the cash back component if you were earning cash back. If you have the Schwab card, yeah. If you have the Schwab Platinum card or get it at some point in the future. So that still makes the Rakuten portal itself more interesting than the numbers.

It's still a big deal, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, just recently we had a one- thing where Dell and, and Saks, I guess we're both like 15 X through their portal. And if you have certain Amex cards, you're also getting rebates for them. And so the, the point potential and savings at the same time were, were really amazing. So that's, that's great. Next one, PayPal key. So PayPal brought out this, this technology where they basically give you a, a, a master card debit card number that you can use for online purchases. And behind the scenes, whatever charge is charged against that debit card gets charged to your credit card. And initially that meant a lot of places where you could basically pay bills

or do other sort of like money-like transactions with debit cards. You were able to do all those transactions as if you were paying with a debit card, but behind the scenes, you'd actually be charging your credit card, including Amex cards, whatever it was, it was counting as a purchase or your earning points. And it was initially really easy to run up huge amounts of spend that you were really getting back or using, you know, just like cash, basically. Amazing. Amazing. As long as it worked and did work for a while. And then, of course,

most of the most interesting uses of that died because, of course, people were surely taking advantage of that. And, you know, like all things, I think nobody expected that was going to last forever, but it was fun. It was a fun run. Right, right. And so all things, I think nobody expected that was going to last forever, but it was fun. It was a fun run. Right, right. And so thanks for the fun PayPal. So it's still alive in a sense. So you can't connect it to Amex anymore, but you can connect it to other cards. The problem is there are a number of things that it doesn't allow you to do. And so like you can't use it through plastic for bill payments. I don't think you could use it for tax payments anymore. So there's a number of things that you would want to do that

you can't do. But if you have a sort of a unique use for a debit card, or even for a master card, when when what you want to put spend on is a Visa card, it might work. So I think it's still worth trying in a number of situations, you know? So it's something to keep an eye on. And it can be useful for when you want to just be able to switch up the card backing it. I wrote recently about a US Mint coin deal where it wasn't going to be charged for a few months,

but you had to provide the credit card number now. And I saw, well, PayPal Key could be a good use for that because then, you know, you pick up a new credit card two or three months from now and you need to hit the spending bonus. And oh, this US Mint purchase is going to post soon when they ship the coins. So now I can just switch the backing card on the PayPal key and earn a new card bonus. So I mean, I feel like that's kind of a niche thing, but there are some of those niche uses for PayPal key, I guess. Sure. Yep. All right. All right. Capital One. Capital One has

just changed things up, right? I mean, so both on the earning side and on the spending side, for PayPal key, I guess. Sure. Yep. All right. All right. Capital One. Capital One has just changed things up, right? I mean, so both on the earning side and on the spending side, but on the earning side, there's been a few huge things because A, they've expanded transfer partners. So they added more transfer partners. They added Turkish, they added British Airways, they are adding choice privileges. So added some new stuff. They also made a number of transfer partners one-to-one. And some of the most valuable ones are one-to-one now. So Asia Miles is one-to-one. I believe British Airways, maybe British Airways isn't. Etihad is one-to-one. Avianca Life Miles is one-to-one. So they, they improved the program Wyndham,

of course, one-to-one now and Wyndham we'll talk more about in a little bit too. So lots of awesomeness there. Then also we discovered the fact that you could transfer your cash back rewards to miles. So if you're have a capital one card that earns cash back, you can convert that cash back to miles. Very similar to the double cash move,

except the capital one offers some cash back cards that have category bonuses that might make that even more interesting. So that was big. And so I mean, that's all interesting news on the earning side, right? Absolutely. You know, Capital One just keeps improving their product where we started when we started a hundred episodes ago we we barely talked about them and they they kept uh adding more and more more things to where we're actually talking you know about them on par with like the city thank you program and and so on and so they're a legitimate uh contender for your transferable points earnings. And that's pretty exciting to always see, especially since they're still appear to be on an upward trajectory. So not only is it live, it's an opportunity that's growing, I think. Yeah, I definitely think so. I think we both

expect, and I think for good reason, that Capital One is going to continue to improve. They're going to open airline lounges now. And then after they open those airline lounges, I really strongly suspect that we're going to see an ultra premium card at some point. So I think that that's been, obviously, it's been rumored for a long time. I think it's becoming more and more likely because I think they really are interested in competing. But they're also interested in competing in a slightly different way. A lot of the things that they're doing differentiate them.

And I think that makes it interesting for us. And it's been fun to discuss for us because it's not exactly the same as what everybody else is doing. So capital one, keep up the good work there. You're kind of making things interesting anyway. Right, right. Okay. So, so that rounds up the, the earning points section. So we're going to talk about spending points and all the sort of exciting game changers we've encountered or found ourselves and discussed on this show. So first one-

You should kick off the first one because that one you know most about. Go ahead. Sure. So first one up is Cathay Pacific's Asia miles program. So, uh, while back I was, I was looking at, uh, spending my Cathay Pacific miles on, on a flight to, I think it was, I was probably looking to, um, South Africa, maybe, I don't know. Um, something like that. That sounds right. Yeah, that is what it was. And I discovered a very interesting thing, which is that if you fly first class from, let's say, Chicago to Hong Kong, where the first segment is first class, and the second segment is business class, you pay less for that total flight. So you go further,

you go further, and you pay less. And I did more research, I figured out what was going on. And what's happening is that for very long flights, you're hitting up, they average the price based on the distance you're flying in each cabin if you're flying different cabin classes. So in the example I just gave, let's just pretend that it's exactly equal, the distance between Chicago and Hong Kong and Hong Kong and South Africa, then what you're doing is you're paying half the business class price plus half the first class price to get to the final price. And so it's reducing the overall price that you would have paid just for that one segment. I found that you can reduce

it further by, you know, booking that second segment in coach. I couldn't find a way to book that online like that, but I called and verified that it's in fact a lot cheaper if you do it that way. Um, so a lot of sort of exciting opportunities, especially because Cathay is a transfer partner from a lot of transferable points programs. Yeah, I mean, just about everything, I think, is partners with Cathay Pacific Asia Miles. So yeah, that's really interesting. And also, if you find that interesting, then I think another post to go back and check out that if we talked about it on the show, it would have only been briefly, I guess, was the Hacking Asia Miles post, or you wrote a

post toward Hacking Asia Miles that I reviewed before as we were prepping for this episode. And I was like, wow, there's actually some other interesting stuff I had forgotten about. And I ran into it recently on an award booking, and I didn't realize why until I read your post about how sometimes an indirect routing on Asia Miles on One World partners will not price as high as you might expect it to, because they calculate the distance instead from your start to your finish,

from your origin to your destination, rather than all of the segments together. And so I wonder if there aren't some extra hacks to be had there too, but, but yeah, so Asia miles really interesting for those medium to long range situations, you know, the longer,

the better. So, at least for, for the hack I was talking about. The hack you're talking about, it sounds like maybe somewhere in between. That's true. That's true. All right. So then if we're talking about amazing award chart finds,

we got to talk about Turkish Airlines and Miles and Smiles and how we found and discussed at length how you could use 7,500 Turkish miles and smiles transferred from city thank you points are now from Capital One. You could have 7,500 miles get you anywhere in the United States on United when they have economy class saver availability, 7,500 points each way. I mean, that's way less than anybody else charges for a low-haul economy flight, right? So this is your legacy. I mean, that's way less than anybody else charges for a low-haul economy flight, right? So this is your legacy. I mean, if you do nothing else, you'll always be known for this find and

it's deserving. I mean, it's an amazing deal. I mean, probably, if not the best deal in award redemptions, it's got to be top two. I can't really think of anything better. It's got to be up there. And it's 7,500 each way in economy, 12,500 each way in business. I mean, that's just unbelievable. We're talking trans cons for 12,500 in business class, if you can find it, all the way to Hawaii or Alaska, like coast to coast and then across the Pacific Ocean, 7,500 points in economy, 12, five in business, still, still amazing. I can't believe it's still around. I think when we first wrote about it and talked about it, people said, Oh, hush, hush, shut up. Stop

talking about it. It's going to die. You know, what are you trying to do? You want to kill it tomorrow? And here we are almost two years later, still working. Right. Right. And, and it, it's going to stay alive longer because it's so difficult. That's probably part of it. Yeah, it is a pain. It can be a pain anyway for a lot of people for booking it. If you can't just easily find the itinerary online, such a pain getting an agent either via phone or email who can actually book it for you. And then if you need to cancel it, well, may the force be with you because some people

have had a lot of difficulty canceling. I, on the other hand, have had no difficulty canceling. So it's definitely been a mixed bag in terms of how it's worked out, except for the fact that lots of people have flown all the way to Hawaii for 7,500 points. And from that perspective, still an amazing, amazing deal. So glad it's still going and enjoy it while you can. I am looking already for next year for trips to book with that because I definitely want to take advantage of it a few more times

before it's gone, so to speak, because I don't imagine it'll last forever. But like you said, maybe it'll last longer than we expect. Right, right. And I'm just going to point out one thing that, you know, before we used to say you had to have city points in order to transfer to Turkish miles and smiles. At least that was the best way to do it. Now you have another option, which is Capital One also supports the transfers. It's not a one-to-one transfer, but it's like 1,000 to 750. So you're talking about 10,000 Capital One points instead of 7,500 points. It's still an incredible deal either way. An incredible deal. I mean, 10,000 Capital One points would ordinarily erase $100 in charges.

And certainly a ticket to Hawaii is going to be more than $100 for most US airports. So terrific deal still going on there. All right. So that was Turkish. Tell us about Chase Pay Yourself Back, Greg. Yeah. I mean, we've talked a lot about this,

but Chase came out with this pay yourself back feature where what you could do is erase certain types of charges with your points. And what's special about it, that's not really unusual at all, but what's special about it is they're giving you the extra value of points that they normally reserve for when you're paying for travel through the chase portal so for example right now you could use your sapphire reserve buy something at the grocery store because grocery store is one of the categories and then you could get online to your ultimate awards account and and erase that grocery charge and the value of points you get is one and a half cents each, which is, uh, it, it, it's, I guess it's kind of hard to explain why it's such a game changer. Just trust me. It is. It is. I mean, it's a great deal. It's a great deal. It's a, it makes me look at redemptions differently. You know, I just recently made a redemption and you know and it was a 70,000 point redemption. And I looked

at it and said, wow, that's like a thousand dollars. Would I pay a thousand dollars for that 70,000 point redemption? And so it definitely makes me think more about all of those things. So for better or worse anyway, Chase has certainly made it a lot different there. Made me look at my ultimate rewards points, more like cash, even though they already were like cash. I look at them more like cash now than I ever did. I know. And we've talked about before how that unfortunately takes away a little bit of the joy of free because it doesn't feel like it's free anymore to spend them because, because, oh, I could have turned them into cold, hard cash so easily and at good value. So that's the downside is sort of the feeling,

but the upside is that suddenly when you're earning, let's say 5X at an office supply store using your ink cash card, that's really 7.5% cash back if you also have a Sapphire Reserve in the family. That's amazing. When they run those fee-free visa gift card deals. And you can buy now they make it really easy before you had to be lucky and have a store that was willing to sell you a bunch. Now the ads always say you can buy five of them. You can buy a thousand dollars worth a day per person. If you're earning seven and a half percent cash back, I mean, hello, that's not a bad deal, right? That's what, 75 bucks a day, right? That's an incredible deal, yeah. It's crazy.

Crazy. All right, so that should be a crazy thing. No, we won't put it in a crazy thing, but it's definitely something still alive. All right, shop your way gift cards. You're gonna have to talk about this, Greg, because you were the king of Sears shop your way gift cards. And so you should talk.

Okay, so an interesting thing happened about a year ago, which is, which is that the Se only spend at Sears or Kmart, now you had those same points could be used to get, let's say, a $100 Walmart gift card, just as an example. And the reason that was exciting, well, for anyone who has a lot of shop your way points, it's exciting because you probably were struggling with figuring out what to do with them. Now you have a lot of good options. But the other thing that was super exciting is that the Citi Thank You program had the ability to transfer thank you points to shop your waypoints at a 1 to 1.2 ratio. So you got like a 20% bump in value. And so all of your thank you points were worth 1.2 cents each uh if you if you use them in that way you transfer them from thank you to shop your way and from shop your way

to get a gift card to get something you really want um you combine that with like city double cash where you're getting 2x everywhere that's's like 2.4% back everywhere. Then throw in the Rewards Plus card, which gives you a 10% rebate on rewards. And the value is growing and growing. So we wrote about that. We were all excited about that. And Citi was like, wait, what? And they quietly took away the 20% bonus on that redemption,

which had been there forever and ever, and they made it a one-to-one, and so now there's just no point in it at all. So I'm going to call that one dead, even though the ability to redeem for gift cards is still there, but the value of it is all gone. Not interesting anymore, unfortunately. It's too bad.

It's wah, wah, wah, wah. Bye-bye, shopping. It's too bad. It's bye-bye shopping. If you have one of those shop your way credit cards, then you're probably excited about it still. All right, let's move on. Good point. All right, so airlines. Airlines have gotten rid of change fees, and this has been huge because for years and years I have been a big fan of Southwest because of the flexibility. And in fact, I was writing a quick deal this week about the new Southwest credit card bonuses. And in that, I started to write a sentence about one of the things I love about the points being the flexibility, the ability to book and cancel up to 10 minutes before departure and doesn't cost you anything. And I realized, no, that's not relevant anymore. That doesn't matter anymore, right? Because nowadays you can do that with just about everybody, right?

Yeah. Certainly all the US-based airlines jumped in and copied each other. And so they almost all work this way where as long as you're not buying a basic economy ticket, you're going to be able to make changes for free, whether it's a cash ticket or an award ticket. And I'm particularly excited about the award ticket things because I think it makes our miles more valuable. It makes it so that if we see an award that we might want and it's available, we just book it and you're not worried about what happens later because if you decide you're not going to take it, in most cases, you could cancel for free and get your miles back,

get any taxes you paid, you get that back. So I find that just a really exciting change. And I do think it's a game changer overall. It really is. It really, it makes it easier to position for awards. If you think you're going to need to fly out of a particular airport, then you can easily book that positioning flight. And if plans change, no biggie, not going to cost you anything. You see a great flash sale or something, you can book it and say, okay, great. I'm going to lock in these dates. And then later on, try to figure it out and see if I can make it work.

And if I can't, no big risks. So that I think is just a really, really powerful. It's great to see. Right. And all these airlines, they have the same, there's the same benefit as we've talked about in the past with Southwest of using miles rather than cash to book flights, which is if you cancel a cash-based flight, you get back a voucher, which is only good for a year. That's true.

That's been true with Southwest for a long time, but now it's true with all these guys. And, but with miles, you get back your miles. And so, you know, they're good for as long as you keep them alive, which in most cases should be forever. Forever, pretty easily. Yeah. So, you know, it's a great change. And I hope that sticks around. I mean, obviously, it was inspired by the pandemic situation. it's going to be hard for the airlines to walk that back because the first one who does that

is going to be looked at very negatively and people are going to avoid booking on them. So I think it's going to be hard to walk, walk back from there. It is going to be, I think it'll take quite a long time. I mean, I don't think it's impossible that eventually that'll change back, but I don't think that, I think that'll be one of the later things to finally go back if it ever does. So I think it's going to be a while and that's great news. Great news for all of us. Bad news for Southwest because they lost one of their big competitive advantages there. But good news for all of the rest of us. So for sure. Great for that. All right. Speaking of great news, Wyndham-Vacasa, we've talked a lot

about it in recent weeks, so we don't need to belabor it here. But Wyndham added this partnership with Vacasa where you can book vacation rentals for 15,000 Wyndham points per bedroom per night. And we found that there are many nice one bedroom or zero bedroom, which prices out the same way, properties around the country that you can book an entire vacation rental, condo, a house, a cabin in some cases for 15,000 Wyndham points, which you can transfer one-to-one from Capital One, or you can get out there and get one of those Wyndham credit cards. The business one earns eight acts at gas stations. And the personal ones earn nice bonuses at the grocery store also. So the Wyndham cards suddenly became a lot more valuable if you like vacation rentals. Amazes me that you're able to do this and it takes away all those pesky fees, the cleaning fee, and then the taxes and that, and it's just 15,000 points per night. That's it. No gotcha. It seems so far. And I was even

able to very easily add another night to a reservation. So window of a cost a huge, if you're into vacation rentals. Absolutely. Absolutely. And they have such an extensive inventory within the United States that, you know, wherever you're planning on going, it's worth jumping onto the vacas website and see if they have properties there. I'm still excited about it, even though I haven't personally booked one yet, but I know you have Nick. I have. Yeah. And, and I gotta say, you know, this is news that

came out and it was one of those press releases and you sent it to me, Greg, and you were like, oh, this looks kind of interesting. And I looked at it and I was like, I was excited. I didn't write anything about it. And then, you know, when I sat on it for like a week and didn't do anything with it, Greg was like, all right, I'm going to look into this. And and so, you know, he took the bull by the horn, so to speak, and just broke things wide open when he found that it was possible to do this. And at first, of course, you were like, I think maybe it's possible, but it's probably going to be a big pain. And then of course, you were able to follow up and say, oh no, it definitely is possible. And so thanks. Thanks to readers who told us how to get ahold of Lizzie

so that you can book these things. So, so the key is there's basically, if you try to go by phone to book these things, forget about it. It's going to be an unfun adventure. But if you have the email address, you just email and chances are good that Lizzie will write you back. But apparently there's another person now. And they will help you back, but apparently there's another person now. And also, yeah, they will, they'll help you get set up. So it's not really that hard. And Lizzie hasn't quit yet because I did get an email from Lizzie this week. I'm glad to hear that. We need to send Lizzie flowers. I'm not sure, you know, where to send them to. All right. So another really cool thing that you broke wide open that, you know, I think that

these, these fines between the Wyndham, the Casa thing and the Hyatt premium suites, two of the most exciting things to happen in hotel points and miles and bookings and to the most exciting fines to have kind of dug into. So you really dug into this and discovered that we can book some out of control suites with Hyatt using points. Yeah. So Hyatt changed their program at some point in the last two years or so, where they made it so that they always had an option to book suites with points, but those were like base level suites, often junior suites. They added a new thing where you could pay double the usual room rate in points to get a premium suite. And depending on the property, a premium suite, it could be just a

regular one-bedroom executive suite kind of thing, or it could be a massive, massive presidential suite. And so different properties have different things available. And one of the things very interesting about that too, is that some of these properties are like category one or category two. And so we had fun like going through the Hyatt's, you know, directory of Hyatt's and looking for these category one, category two hotels that normally charge 5,000 or 8,000 points per night for a base room. That means they only charge 10,000 or 16,000 points for a premium suite, which as we showed in a number of posts are, could be things like these massive presidential suites. And so sometimes you're getting thousands of, you know,

a room that would have been, would have charged, they would have charged you a thousand, 2,000, $3,000 per night. You're getting for like 10,000 points or 16,000 points. Absolutely crazy. You know, and it's funny, I just ran into one of these yesterday. My wife was saying that she'd like to visit a friend of ours that lives in Europe. And it's a part of Europe place I've never been. And so I just out of curiosity pulled up the Hyatt app. We were in the car. She was driving and pulled up the Hyatt app. And I was like, oh, well, there's a category one Hyatt in that city. And oh, look at that. They've got a pretty nice premium suite for 10,000 points a night. I was like, let's go, let's go move in for a month, you know? So, uh, so yeah, it's, uh, definitely there's some great opportunities there in terms of booking premium suites at double the rate of a standard room, but also Greg recently reminded me. And, and this was actually something that, uh, I found in a follow-up sort of a post another, I don't know, it must've been a little bit after that, where I think Charlie at Running With Miles

maybe had first sort of written about the ability to upgrade a paid reservation to a premium suite. So you can use, I think it's 9,000 points per night to upgrade a paid reservation to a premium suite. And in some cases when paid rates are very low, that can be an awesome deal. I also found a number of those where I just booked one the other day, actually.

I mean, I booked some thousand plus dollar suite for a hundred bucks and 9,000 points. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. So those point upgrades to paid stays, that's best to use when the hotel category is higher. So let's say the standard room rate is like 20,000 points, then it would cost you an extra 20,000 points a night to book a premium suite as an award. But if you get a low cash rate and then you only pay 9,000 points on top of that cash rate, that's a great deal. Now, I think in that case, you can't just use like the cheapest cash rate you could find, right?

That's right. You have to use the standard rate. Standard rate. It's not the member rate. Not even the member rate. That's too bad. Can't use the member rate. Sometimes there's like a member save more rate that's even cheaper than the member rate. So you do have to kind of shop it around and determine whether or not it's a deal still. But yeah, you do have to use the standard rate. And in some cases, the difference isn't very big between the standard rate and the member rate. So it's probably still worth it. But either way,

booking those premium suites, pretty cool. And in some cases, you found that those premium suites came with like butler service or they came with breakfast and lounge access and things that if you're not a globalist, you might not have access to. So I mean, I found, I think I found one that was like a three bedroom suite. And so, you know, if you're going with a large family or a group of people, you're paying double the base room rate to put up, you know, to get three bedrooms and a living room and a dining room and sometimes a butler, you know, these kinds of things are, are, uh, amazing deals. And, uh, you know, I don't know. It's, it's fun. It, I find it like really fun to explore and, and, and find those things. So, um, if anyone listening, you know, if you come across ones that are

pretty exciting, please reach out to us and let us know what you found because, uh, that's, uh, that's just so cool. All right. I agree. All right. Another thing we, we kind of broke the story on there. Yeah. Uh, so Marriott Marriott. Yeah. So when Marriott merged with, with SPG, they took over SPG. They told us that the, the, there were,

let me back up. There were SPG had these, these all suites properties that were off the charts. And by that, I mean, literally they were not on SBG's award chart. They were like on a separate list and they charge way more, like way, way more for these properties to the point where, I mean, you had to have an insane number of SBG points to afford staying at them, except when they did these special sales. But Marriott told us during the merger reveal that they were going to charge the standard rate for these things.

Yeah. And people didn't believe us. And we double checked and triple checked because when we heard them say this, we were like, wait a sec, are you sure about that? And, and so we asked and they were like, no, yeah, there's going to be standard rooms at every property. And so even the all suites properties were going to be bookable. And in the beginning they made them all bookable at a max of 60,000 points per night, which of course has changed. And we knew it was going to change, but we knew short term that these properties in some cases, I mean, I called to price a few out. And in several cases with like the St. Regis Maldives

and Bora Bora and that sort of thing, some of those properties were pricing at the equivalent of like 270,000 Marriott points per night. And so I understand why some people were skeptical. And we said, no, Marriott says that these places are going to be bookable for 60,000 points per night. And if you book a five night stay, the fifth night's free. So you're only going to pay 48,000 points per night for a room that was costing 270,000. So people didn't want to believe us, Craig.

No, no, they didn't. And I mean, I'm not going to name any names, but some blogs, you know, actually posted about how it's not going to happen. But it happened. And in fact, I mean, I had some reservations, but I ended up having to cancel them all. But you stayed in Bora Bora. Yeah, the St. Regis Bora Bora. That was the one of those that I stayed in. So it was a terrific stay.

A lot of fun. St. Regis Bora Bora is where they filmed the movie Couples Retreat, if you've ever seen that. So very scenic, beautiful. They play that movie on loop on the TVs, by the way, which is kind of weird and strange, but fun. So anyway, it was a fun time. And for 48,000 Marriott points per night, I was in paradise looking at a fantastic view with my own little private beach and my beach villa with its pool. And I was just kicking back and relaxing and smiling and thinking, yeah, we got it right. And it was a lot of fun also, because not only did we break the story on that and people didn't believe us and it turned out we were right. But also while I was there at the St. Regis Bora Bora, somebody came up to me and

they said, are you Nick? And I said, yeah. And they were like, just want to say thank you. You know, we're here because you guys wrote about this. And so we knew about it and we were able to book it and blah, blah, blah. And so they were there. I don't know if it was honeymoon or what it was. I can't remember the occasion. But at any rate, they were able to book that because, you know, we had helped to find that story.

And that was awesome to see readers putting that into action and meet somebody who was doing it and to be able to take advantage of it ourselves. So that was an awesome one for us to have found and talked about and been right about. So what do you think? Would you call this one dead or alive or somewhere? Oh, totally dead. No, I shouldn't say totally dead. No, I take that back. I guess you're right. Go ahead. Go ahead. Make the point. Well, what I was going to say is, is certainly the,

the part where it was capped at 60, obviously that's dead. But the standard rate is still significantly cheaper than SPG charged before. If you account for the fact that SPG points converted to Marriott points one to three. So whatever they charged before, let's say they charged 90,000 SPG points per night that that'd be like 270,000 Marriott points per night. But they're, they're charging at most a hundred thousand points per night, um, today. So, and, and you, and standard is 85,000. So it's still compared to what it was, it's still a deal. And it's still like, it's at least, you know, it's, it's not an order of magnitude more than like the next level hotels where whereas it was that way previously. Well, in truth be told, if you can manage to find one of those off peak, off peak, they should be 70,000 points per night.

And if you can find a five night off peak stay, that comes out to an average of 56,000 points per night after the fifth night free, which is still absolutely amazing for those. That's right. That's a really good point. I don't know how often those show up, but that probably not very often, but maybe more now that they've kind of nerfed the points advance. Right. So maybe, maybe you'll be able to find that. Who knows? Maybe big stretch. But speaking of that and speaking of the fact that, all right, we found that hotel deal. We found a lot of hotel deals. I mean, we reported a lot of different things that we talked about on this show, properties that we talked about and said, hey, you want to book this one now because something is going to change. And one of those that comes to mind is the Domes of Alunda.

We wrote about that property because you found that one was at 45,000 points per night, going up to 85,000 when the new program debuted. Right. So Marriott's old award chart, this was a Marriott property, not an SPG property. Marriott's old award chart, if I remember, I topped out at 45,000 points. And that was probably because they didn't have that many sort of ultra luxury properties the way SPG did. And this was one that, you know, really struck me as like, wow, this one is special. And, you know, the fact that we'd be able to lock in that 45,000 before the new award chart kicked in was a great deal. It was. And that was another one where I was able to take advantage of it and go and stay. And so I booked a seven night stay there because I used one of

those Marriott seven night certificates before the merger. We had also written extensively about why you wanted to get one of those seven night certificates before the merger. Greg had a lot of speculation about how you might be able to leverage that and it might turn out to be much more valuable than it really was. And of course, if you followed along, that was one where we didn't necessarily knock it out of the park in the sense that Marriott definitely was not as generous as we hoped. And it turned out to be a poor deal in some cases initially, but Marriott made up for it when that got pointed out pretty extensively across the blogosphere. They fixed that and made everybody whole so that it turned

out to be still a very strong deal comparatively. So I was able to book a seven-night stay and get a whole bunch of airline miles for a very reasonable number of Marriott points at the time. Yep. Yep. My recent Ritz stay, Ritz-itz Carlton dove mountain was from a travel package I bought way back then. Cause I bought a number of them speculatively, like thinking that, you know, they could become way more valuable and, and they were super valuable for things like what you did. And as you said, it just kind of depend. It didn't turn out to be as amazing as we had hoped, but it was still a good deal. All right. A key point there is that that was all speculation as to how good it would be. So it wasn't that we we we had any, you know, it wasn't we were predicting it per se. We're just saying maybe it would. So, you know. Right. Right. Yeah. All right. So go ahead. OK, so another one that we found was there was a brand new Hyatt in Budapest and it was going for only 8,000 points per night. So it was category two Hyatt in Budapest and it should have been categorized much higher. We knew that. So, you know, we people, jump on this now. And one of the cool things about it, going back to what we talked about with the premium suites, is that this hotel has some extraordinary looking premium suites. So you could get them for 16,000 points per night.

And of course, a few months later, actually probably less than that, maybe a month later, they upped it to, it's now a category five. So it jumped quite a lot. So now it's 20,000 points per night. But that was standard room in 40,000 for a premium suite. Right, right. Now, you know, for Buddha, with Buddha Press prices, that's probably not a very good deal anymore, is my guess. But it was an amazing deal back then. While it lasted, it was.

And the suites looked really unique and interesting. And that was the cool part, that they looked really cool. So that was an interesting one to have found because it was unlike any other hotel. It's an unbound collection. So not a cookie cutter Hyatt there. So certainly not cookie cutter suites. So that was a cool find. Another cool find that kind of developed over time was this Marriott and Kawhi that was a category four. So that was 25,000 Marriott points per night. It was a courtyard at the time and not in great shape.

And there was construction and everybody was unhappy. Terrible recent reviews. But you found the good news that it was actually going to improve. Right, right. So they were working towards renovating this thing and it was going to become a Sheridan. We knew that. So we knew that the category was going to go up. But at the time time only 25,000

points per night, a lot of us had these old, um, certificates for free nights that were only good up to 25,000 points. So they were usable there. You might've had a travel package that was good for that. Um, so there were a lot of reasons to book that for the future, like for the near future for, um, you know, I think we wrote about it in like the summer and we said, don't book it before December, you know, cause, uh, they're probably still gonna have construction, but book it for February,

you know, let's say February, March. And if you did that, you came out really, really good because they did, they finished the renovations and- And in October, they increased the price. They did. They did indeed. And so today it's standard 50K or 60K peak pricing. And in Hawaii, most hotels are peak most of the time. So that's what you're gonna be seeing is 60,000 points per night versus what was 25,000.

That's a heck of a change. It is, it is. And what stands out to me about these is that these were phenomenal standout values that we uncovered and talked about. And the readers who listened and booked them got amazing deals because I mean, whether it was the 25,000 points a night for what became a Sheraton in Hawaii, we knew in advance again, that it was going to become a Sheraton. And we said, Hey, it's going to be a Sheraton. Book it now. And the people who did came out well ahead of the game, so to speak.

Same with that Hyatt and the Domes of Alunda and the Marriott All Suites properties. We uncovered quite a few where we told people with plenty of time to take advantage of them, you know, that you want to be able to do this and do it now. So I hope and I know that a lot of readers were able to take advantage. That's kind of fun. And that's been exciting about the show that we get feedback regularly from people who do actually do these things. And we love hearing from you.

So if you do book these things that we talk about, let us know because we do love to hear about your success stories and doing this stuff. Oh, definitely, definitely. All right. So I think that wraps up our main event. And let's go into post-roast time. The post-roast. You have a post-roast for me this week, Greg?

What I have is a host roast. Uh-oh, a host roast. Right. So as of last week, we were on our 99th episode, which means you've had a lot of practice setting up your equipment. It does mean that I have had a lot of, a lot of experience setting up your equipment. Um, but you didn't actually, um, use your microphone. You had it in front of you. It was, it was right here. Not on, but right here. Instead, we recorded the tinny sound from your laptop. So that was a shame. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It was a bummer. As soon as I hit play, like I went to edit this and put it all together. As soon as I hit play, I was like, oh no. And I knew right away what it was. I said, oh, this is going to sound horrible and there's nothing I can do about it. And there was for a moment, there was a moment where I was like, you know what? Could I just listen to it in my headphones and rerecord the audio? Oh, that's funny. For a moment I did think about it, but no, it just wasn't going to happen. Oh my gosh. That would be so funny. Yeah. Yes. Funny for you.

Yes. So yes, I will take that roast because I deserved it. So all right. So post roast for you. I don't know if this is a post roast exactly, but more of a question. So you wrote a post this week on the best offers for low spenders, right? And so you wrote about the best credit card offers that have low spending requirements. And I read about these deals now and then when new cards come out, we just had the, what, the Priceline card in the last week here, I think, where you only need to make, what is it,

$500 in purchases or something, or maybe it's a single purchase. Single purchase to get your hundred, yeah, I think that's what it is. Single purchase and get your $150 back. And so there's a bunch of those types of things. But I mean, come on, Greg. Who here is a low spender? Because if you're listening to Frequent Miler, you know how to spend because we have the complete guide

to manufactured spending. So should anybody listening to this actually be opening any of these low spend offers when there are lots of... we just talked about Simon Mall. You can walk into the mall, walk out with 25K gift cards for four bucks a gift card. Should anybody even be bothering with these low spend offers? Who cares about those, Greg? Oh, come on.

You know very well. Probably the vast majority of our listeners and readers don't actually manufacture spend. And so those who are on tight budgets or just don't spend a lot on credit cards for whatever reason, I think are going to find those attractive, especially, you know, I specifically republished that post because the best of those low spend offers

is actually a no spend offer. American Airlines gets 60,000 miles after first purchase. So buy a no spend offer. American Airlines gets 60,000 miles after first purchase. So buy a latte or something and, you know, 60,000 miles. And what's changed about it, but that's not even what changed. What changes that first year annual fee is waived. And that's what changed. So that's a phenomenal card if you're eligible for it.

It really is. It really is. And that's, you know, and I joked about that there a phenomenal card if you're eligible for it. It really is. It really is. And that's, you know, and I joked about that there a little bit, but yeah, I mean, 60,000 miles for basically doing nothing. I mean, hello, that's a huge bonus. And, and so some of those, they are, you're right. Some of them are worth it. I think that, you know, if you're listening to the show though, I think you should be taking a look at some of those ways to increase spend so that you can hit some of those spending offers on the cards with slightly better offers. But that said, when I

looked through the list, I was also surprised at how many of those offers were worth a good bit, three, four or $500 with very little spend required. So, so there are some good deals out there. What I thought you were going to roast me about is that if you, if you kept scrolling down on the, on the no spend offers, you get to cards that have no signup bonus. I didn't even go that far. And the reason, yeah, the reason for that is that we just pull from our database of cards. And, and so, you know, I, I, I in one section of that post, I limited to all the cards that have zero spend requirement.

And of course the ones that have no sign of offer, of course, we have in our database as zero spend required. And so they showed up on that, in that list, they, they got sorted to the bottom because I sorted it by first year estimated value, which is zero or negative on a lot of those cards because some of them have annual fees that you have to pay right away. So you actually do worse than nothing by signing up. So that's kind of funny. And I have to get around to figure out how to filter those out. But that's not my highest priority thing to do. Probably not. Probably not. All right. So that brings us then, I think, to the question of the week. And this week's question comes in from another Greg.

And so Greg in our Frequent Miler Insiders says, I have a 50,000 mile plus $200 upgrade offer for the Delta Platinum card for $3,000 spent. So we can assume he's got the Delta Gold. And so his offer is to spend 3,000 bucks to upgrade his card. And then for spending $3,000, get 50,000 miles and a $200 statement credit, right? He says, I know I can probably get a better offer as a new sign up. I can find 75,000 points, but I'm wondering if I should take the upgrade offer. I've had problems with the pop-up in the past and taking the upgrade wouldn't burn a 524 slot. Also with so many credit cards out there, I may never get around to signing up for this card until the Amex clock resets in seven years anyway. I keep going back and forth, but would love to hear any other thoughts or consideration from the group. Thanks.

So as the Delta person, I was curious what your take would be on this. Yeah. Yeah. It's a really good question. And I think clearly Greg has thought through the, I think the correct things that are the sort of pluses and minuses of taking the upgrade offer. Um, you know, we recently had some, I think it was a 90,000 point, uh, offer for the platinum card that was available. So you're, you know, by accepting it, he's, he's potentially missing out on much, much bigger offer, but the flip side, as he said, like it doesn't cost him a 524 slot. He doesn't have to risk not getting approved for the 90,000 mile offer because of the Amex pop-up. Well, it's not even not approved. It's like, you don't even get to apply really. So, I mean, I think in his

situation that that's a good offer and I think I would take it, but. Interesting. Well, I'm interested to hear you say that, you know, I am, I thought you might say it, but I'm still finding it interesting to hear it on the last. So, you know, no, I don't think I would. And here's why. And it's going to sound funny coming from the guy who always talks about how I don't bother chasing airline elite status. But what I'm going to say is I can't imagine jumping on the Delta Platinum card with no MQMs, especially not in 2021 when they've made the path to elite status even easier. But I'm going to say this. He mentioned the seven year clock. And so, you know, Amex has this once per lifetime rule where you can only get

the welcome bonus once per lifetime. And anecdotally speaking, it sounds like a lifetime is about seven years from Amex's experience or their perspective, I should say. So that's what he's saying. You know, maybe I won't get it in the next seven years anyway. But what I would say is, I don't know what the next seven years are going to hold. And if suddenly Delta Elite status becomes important for you two or three years from now, you may end up being pretty sorry that you missed out on the chance to be able to get the MQMs. So unless you really value those Delta miles and really want the Delta miles for a specific purchase now, I think I'd hold off because it's not like a once in a lifetime sort of an offer. It's not enough of an upgrade for me to feel like, okay, you have to jump on that now, unless you need those 50,000 miles to

book something you really want to book. That's worth a lot to you right now. I don't, if you've got to ask about it, then I don't think you want the miles badly enough or need the miles badly enough to burn that bridge, so to speak. Cause who knows, maybe three years from now you take a new job. You're flying Delta all the time. You want Delta elite status. No, boom, there goes that Delta platinum offer with 20 K MQMs or something like that. I think you made great points. You convinced me. There you go. We're going to, we're going to, we're going to go with, with Nick's answer,

not Greg's answer. And, uh, that's unfortunate because this was like the Greg episode because we started with Greg in the giant mailbag. We had a Greg all through the middle mixed in with some Nick. And we ended with a Greg question. Right. Lots of Greg today. But Nick still comes through with the winning answer.

We try. We try. we try. All right, well, we hope you guys have enjoyed what we've been talking about today and for the last hundred weeks. And we hope for another hundred thousand, et cetera, et cetera, moving forward. If you've enjoyed it,

you want to get on our email list so you can read our posts, which I promise are at least as good as this show, if not even better. So you want to go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe. Again, that's frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to get on our email list. You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook and join our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group where Greg got that question answered by a whole bunch of people. So you can get some input from other folks too.

Thank you guys very much for being out there with us for these last hundred weeks. Like I said, here's to a hundred more. Thank you all very much. See you next week. Thank you for listening to our first triple digit episode.