Frequent Miler on the Air - How to Amass Citi ThankYou Rewards | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep274 | 9-27-24

Episode Date: September 27, 2024

We've been talking a lot lately about unique uses for Citi ThankYou points  such as transferring to Leading Hotels of the World, but how do you accumulate these points? That's what we'll talk about in today's episode of Frequent Miler on the Air. (01:20) - During Ask Us Anything, Greg said that Amex to Hilton transfer bonus would have to be 70% to match standard Chase to Hyatt transfer value. One reader thought of a situation where a 1.7 cents per point value could be reached via Bilt to Virgin Atlantic 125% transfer bonus for Platinum members. Watch our recent Ask Us Anything here. (07:53) - Hilton Aspire resort credit-eligible hotel list shrinks Read more about the Hilton Aspire resort credit eligible hotel list changes here. (09:29) - Targeted 120,000 Membership Rewards points Business Platinum upgrade offers Read more about the 120K Membership Rewards points Business Platinum upgrade offers here. (13:36) - Venture X and Venture X Business Cards: Hertz President's Circle status NOT ending 12/31. Read more about the Venture X card here, and the Venture X Business Card here. (14:50) - What crazy thing did Nick and Greg do? (They missed the 70K Hawaiian card bonus change to 50K, hours before discussing it on the podcast.) (15:10) - Listen to our conversation about the Alaska / Hawaiian merger here. (17:21) - What crazy thing did Barclays do? (21:15) - Targeted IHG double elite night credits on up to 2 stays through 12/31/24 (Read more here.) (28:01) - Wells Fargo Rewards® points now transfer to Virgin (29:02) - Targeted Avianca LifeMiles sale - 200% bonus (through MONDAY 9/30) (Read more here.) (31:46) - AA Targeted promo to get Loyalty Points when spending AA miles (32:37) - Melio business bill payment service now has paid membership tiers Read more about Melio here. (35:28) - Pepper Rewards adds point history and pending point information Learn more about Pepper here. (39:23) - Spirit updates, including removing redemption fees and free wifi for Gold members (40:55) - ThankYou Rewards quick overview and basics Find out about unique rewards you can get with ThankYou points here. (46:23) - Welcome bonuses Learn more about the Strata Premier card here. Learn more about the Double Cash card here, and the Custom Cash card here. (50:54) - Earn through spend... (1:01:02) - Targeted Bonuses (1:02:44) - Retention Bonuses (1:07:19) - 2 person (or "2 player") strategy (1:10:10) - A reader won 50K American Airline miles from a work event and is considering accumulating more...

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 Liler on the air starts now. Today's main event, how to amass City thank you rewards. We've been talking a lot lately about unique uses of CityPoint,

such as transferring to leading hotels of the world. And so today we're going to talk about how to get lots of points. And next week, we currency that doesn't get talked about as much in part because there are fewer ways to earn the points. But that's where this show will come in helpful, hopefully, by telling you the ways that you can earn a bunch of city points. But before we get there, don't forget, I want to remind you that you'll always find the timestamps in the show notes. So if you want to skip ahead to the main event or you want to return to one of these segments later on, you can always just expand the description and see the timestamps there. Remember, wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to like this. Give us a thumbs up. Leave us a review. Leave us some feedback. Tell us what you think. Tell us what we got wrong and what we got right. We always love to hear from you in the comments. So thank you very much for that. Okay, let's drag out this week's Giant Mailbag. Yeah. Today's giant mail comes from Richard B. I'm not going

to read Richard's email of verbatim, but he had a really interesting point that I'm going to explain or try to explain. It's a little bit complicated, but we do these monthly Ask Us Anything shows where we live stream on YouTube, the whole team, all five of us, and people jump on live and ask us questions. And we were talking in a recent one about the Amex to Hilton transfer bonus. And I guess during the show, I talked about the reasonable redemption values that when you transfer normally from American Express to Hilton, since our reasonable redemption value, the average amount you could expect to get for Hilton points is about half a cent. The normal value of your Amex points when you do this one to two transfer is only one cent per point. With the 30% transfer bonus, that goes up to 1.3 cents per point. And I guess during the show, I said, if we wanted to get to 1.7, which is the value for Hyatt

points. So when you transfer from Chase or Built to to Hyatt one-to-one, you're getting 1.7 cents per point value based on our reasonable redemption values. In order to get that 1.7, we would need a 70% transfer bonus from Amex to Hilton. And I said, well, that's very unlikely to ever happen. We've never seen any transfer bonus from Amex that high. Richard B. writes in and says, but wait a minute, there is a situation that could happen where you would be able to transfer to Hilton and get that 1.7 cents per point value from your transferable points. And his scenario is not from transferring from Chase, but transferring from Bilt. Not transferring from Amex in this case, you mean, but rather transferring from Bilt. Yeah. I'm sorry, Amex to Hilton, but rather transferring from Bilt to

Hilton. From Bilt to Hilton very indirectly. So here's Richard B's idea. If you transfer, if there's a 125% transfer bonus to Virgin Atlantic. Which we've seen. Right. Which we've seen. We've seen as high as 150%. So he's saying if we see 125% transfer bonus from built to Virgin Atlantic, then each built point becomes 2.25 Virgin Atlantic points. And he invokes like a little known thing, which is it's possible to convert Virgin Atlantic miles to Hilton points at a 1 to 1.5 ratio. So you grow your points basically by transferring to Hilton. So again, one built point would equal 2.25 virgin

points in this scenario. 2.25 virgin points multiplying by 1.5 becomes 3.4 Hilton points. And so that transfer then brings you to a reasonable redemption value of built points transferred to Hilton points becomes that 1.7 cents per point, a reasonable redemption value of built points. Transfer to Hilton points becomes that 1.7 cents per point, a reasonable redemption value. So I realize this is like way complicated and ridiculous. I more wanted to point this out, not for people to understand the math, but to sort of congratulate Richard on his creative thinking there. Yeah, no, that was really creative thinking that I wouldn't have considered. And it really is interesting. And, you know, I would, for some

reason, I would still hesitate to transfer to Hilton. And I don't know why, because in that case, that's really good use of your built points, right? I mean, I guess I say it's a really good use. If you're able to get 125% transfer bonus to Virgin Atlantic, I would think you could do better with the Virgin Atlantic miles and with the value of Hilton points. And that's why you don't generally hear about people doing this, right? People don't recommend, oh, transfer to Virgin Atlantic and then transfer to Hilton and you can get a 50% transfer bonus, you know, any day of the week, so to speak, over a one-to-one transfer that is not over the typical Amex transfer. Anyway, so the reason people don-one transfer that is not over the typical amex transfer anyway so the reason people

don't talk about that is because normally airline miles are worth more but boy if you need hilton points that is a really creative interesting way of looking at it and and i think it's interesting because i heard people kind of mention that before when the built transfer bonus was on but i didn't really give it much thought and now looking at the numbers, like Greg said, a little hard to follow the math, maybe if you're just listening, but trust us, it comes out to that 1.7 cents per point. And at that ratio, I mean, Greg said he would consider transferring Amex points to Hilton. So I guess you would consider transferring your built points that way, huh? Or would you hold out and hope for a better airline i i wouldn't i don't think because the virgin points are worth so much more than uh you know 50 more hilton points and so i don't know

i i think i would have a hard time doing that but i would too i mean maybe yeah yeah really needed the hilton really needed yeah because you look at something like we've talked about before that uh you know with virgin you can fly business class to europe for instance with air france or klm flying blue you can fly from the east coast on off-peak dates for 48 500 miles one way plus the taxes so let's call it 50k that used to be the price for virgin for delta one also to europe but let's call it 50K. That used to be the price for Delta One also to Europe. But let's call it too right we talked right before about you can you can book cruises with virgin points you can you can book uh virgin limited edition properties stay in like some of the best uh you know hotel resorts in the world um with virgin points not at a great

value but better value than transferring to hilton i think think. Yeah. Yeah. But nonetheless, great point. And congratulations on giving us some good food for thought on that one, Richard. Well done. So thank you very much for that. All right. Let's talk some card news because there's big card news this week. Speaking of Hilton, the Hilton Aspire card comes with a twice annual resort credit. You can get up to $200 in credit against certain Hilton resorts once from January to June

and once from July to December each year. So up to $400 in total resort credits, quote unquote, per year. And when I say quote unquote, because it's statement credits really for resort purchases, but those resort purchases are based on a list of eligible properties, which used to link to a page on the Hilton site with like a map and a search tool and stuff. And there were lots and lots of places on there. And they've created a new link. And so there's a link now that links to the eligible properties for that Hilton Aspire Resort Credit, which is smaller than the list was before. Now, it's not tiny. It's not like they dropped it to like 10 or 12 places. There's a ton of places on there still, but there are definitely fewer places than

there used to be. And it's a pain. It's not easy because you can't look at a map and say, okay, well, I'm going to go to Europe. So where in Europe is it? It's just going to be a pain to go through one by one and try and figure things out. So that's annoying and unfortunate. Again, there's still lots of places, some places that don't seem like resorts, like the Conrad Abu Dhabi, for instance, is not a place I would have thought of as a resort, but it's on the list of eligible properties. On the flip side, there are tons of places that have resort in the name that are not eligible for the resort credit. So you're going to want to check that list. We've got a post. We'll have a link in the show notes. All right. Good to know. Good to know. Next up in card news is there's a

targeted offer for people to upgrade from either a Amex business green or a business gold card to the business platinum card. It seems like a lot of people are eligible for this offer. In my family, both me and my wife, but not my son, were eligible. And the offer is you get 120,000 points after $10,000 spend. So that's pretty nice. Yeah. I mean, that's better than pretty nice. I mean, that's as good as most of the best welcome bonuses out there, right? I mean, that's on par with a new card bonus on some of the better cards on the market. So obviously, it is still a hefty amount of spend. There's plenty of cards on the market with a spending requirement that's significantly less than that three or four or $5,000, let's say. So it is quite a bit of spend. But that's really good for not having to open a new card, not needing to worry about being eligible for a new card welcome bonus and taking one of the cards that you have lying around and doing something with it.

No pop-up prison for this situation, which is really, really nice. So I love that. I also, at first, I loved that. I was like, yay, I don't have to worry about spending $20 every month at office supply stores to get that business gold credit. Then I realized, wait, now I have to remember to spend $10 per month with my AT&T to get that credit. Right, right, right, right. So it's just a whole new coupon buck, but a whole new can of worms there. But it's still a pretty good deal. If you're in the middle of the year, I think it'll prorated the annual fee will be prorated so i think if

you're in the middle of a membership year that's going to make this potentially an even better deal right because if you're only paying half the annual fee and you're getting the calendar year benefits that that's a pretty good deal there's still plenty of time to get 200 in airline fee credits for this calendar year and then of course you can do it next year, uh, before you, you know, if you cancel or downgrade at the end of 12 months with this, um, you'd have plenty of time to get both of those. You have plenty of time to get your $200 in Dell credits this year and next year, and maybe even twice next year, uh, depending on how you're timing it. Assuming that the Dell credit sticks around, by the way. Oh, right, right.

As we know it, it's supposed to end at the end of this year, but they haven't announced any replacements. So FYI, at this point, we only know for sure you'll get the Dell credit this year. Yeah. Anyway, cool offer. Anyway, yeah, definitely a good offer and probably one that we'll look to take advantage of. I think this time of year is especially good to see this kind of offer. The timing, I think, was excellent because people are going to be doing holiday shopping potentially, or there's a lot of sales if you're a reseller or you do any kind of

buying clubs, things like that. This is a great opportunity to get a good bonus for purchases that you might already be making. So that's a pretty good deal. And just for everyone in my family to know, you're all getting stuff from Dell for the holidays this year. You know, I was pretty excited recently. I found that. So the Insta360 was a camera we've brought on

in the last couple of challenges and gotten some cool video with. It's a little hard. I mean, it takes some practice and I think it would take a lot of time to master editing the videos, but it's a cool 360 degree camera. And I didn't realize that Dell sells it because Dell has stopped selling most third party

accessories. If you don't know that already, know that now that most of the third party accessories that you used to be able to get on Dell, I'm talking like Bose headphones and things like that are no longer available through Dell. So I was surprised that I found the Insta360. So I was glad because I was able toa360. So I was glad because I was able to use three business platinum cards that each have the credit because Dell will let you split tender up to three ways online. So I was able to use 200 on each of three and actually

I loaded an Amex offer for 10% back on the last one that I used. So that more than covered the cost of the camera and the selfie stick. I'd add something else to in order to spend enough to use it all up. So so that was something that was a good surprise for me. So I was happy. It just came in the mail yesterday. I'm excited about that. Yeah, cool. Okay, next up. We got the Venture X and Venture X business cards. So those cards have had a Hertz benefit. So if you are a primary card holder or an authorized user, I think, right? And you get Hertz. Or is it just the primary? I think it's the authorized user.

I'm pretty sure it's the authorized user also. So I'm going to say that and somebody correct me and we'll do a we of Copeland next week if I'm wrong. But anyway, Hertz President Circle Status is one of the card benefits. And that was scheduled to end December 31st of this year. And then all of a sudden we got word that, no, actually, it's not going to end December 31st this year. It's going to continue on. So if you thought that you weren't going to continue to have Hertz President's Circle status, surprise, you're going to keep having it, at least for the time being.

They didn't give us any new end date on that. So it seems like they worked out a deal. It hurts so good. And before you expect the Wea Culpa to come next week, note that by the time you listen to this, I am on vacation for a couple of weeks. And so do not expect a Mea Culpa or Wea Culpa for about three weeks. For a while, for a while. And we'll have completely forgotten by then anyway. So look to the comments. Don't even worry about it.

Leave a comment. There you go. There you go all right so that i think wraps up our sort of card news segment let's talk about what crazy thing in this week we've got a crazy thing double header so what crazy thing did nick and greg do yeah so uh last week's show we talked all about the alaska hawaiian show, we talked all about the Alaska-Hawaiian merger, and we talked about whether it made sense to apply for the Hawaiian Airlines cards now before it might be too late. And we kind of concluded that a good strategy was to apply for the 70K business card offer now and wait to see about the personal card offer. But what we didn't do was check the current offer before we recorded that show

because I think the day before maybe, the 70K offer had died and we weren't aware of it when we recorded. So we're left with, at least as we record this right now, there's only a 50K business card offer for the wine card. And so if you're interested in that, I would recommend waiting to see if that would go back up. And really the personal card offer is the one

that's more interesting at the moment because we have on our site an offer for 70,000 points after first purchase, at least as we record this. I don't know if it'll still be there when you listen, but it probably will be. Whereas the public offer that most people see requires $2,000 spend. So the one you'll find on our site, it doesn't pay us anything, but we got this one. And you don't have to pay anything. So that's a good offer. And especially since those miles will become more valuable Alaska miles very soon.

Well, okay. So you said you don't have to pay anything. Just a quick correction because I think you do have to pay the annual fee. I think you first purchase an annual fee before you get that bonus. But you don't have to spend anything. There's no minimum spend other than first purchase, I think. Yep, yep, yep, correct. All right, so our mistake sort of,

I mean, it had been 70K for a long time. So in our defense, it was one of those things when we don't have an affiliate link for a card, oftentimes we're not going to know until we discover. And we do make an effort to make sure that we are staying on top of all the offers on

the site but that was one that must have changed hours before we recorded and so we hadn't received any notification about that but but next time we'll we'll let you know when that that offer increases again when it goes back up to 70k hopefully fingers crossed all right but that's not the only crazy thing what crazy thing did Barclays do this week? Yeah, so you know how when you apply for Hawaiian Airlines cards, it asks you what your Hawaiian Airlines account number is? Yes, I do. Yeah, it turns out that they're just asking out of idle curiosity. In the case of both me and my son, even though we put in our Hawaiian Airlines numbers in the applications, one of us for the personal card and one for the business card, we both got assigned brand new Hawaiian Airlines accounts. What?

Yeah. Oh, that's a pain. Now we get to go through the fun of calling and trying to get those accounts merged. Probably won't even bother with my son's because he only had like a few hundred points in the other one. But for me, it does matter. And so, yeah, that's a pain. That's a pain. That's too bad. Yeah. Well, you know, that's Barclays is kind of a strange animal. I feel like that's the type of thing that you run into more often with them than with others. Although I think we've probably both over the years at some point run into that once or twice before. So do make sure if you have your loyalty account number handy, you put that in while you're doing the application because nine times out of 10,

that's going to work the right way and it's going to get transferred over. But then also do check after the fact, like Greg did apparently to find out that he was assigned a new Hawaiian Airlines number. So the irony for me is it happens also every time I apply for a new Alaska card. And so it's ironic because of Hawaiian Alaska merging. I think it happens to me on the Alaska side because of the stupid hyphen in my name. And the computers can't handle a minus sign they don't know how to do that calculation in the middle of a middle of the name they're like wait a second there's no numbers in this equation right right well that that certainly could be the issue and keep in mind actually that's a great safety tip so this is probably one that might apply to more people

than you realize so if you've changed a name at some point, or if you have like one of those names where sometimes you put down Kathy and other times you put down Kathleen or whatever else, make sure that you get in the habit of all of your credit cards and loyalty accounts using the same exact spelling and all the rest of that of the name and change anything. If something you have to update a name at some point. Make sure you change everything because otherwise you're going to run into problems transferring points. That's a really good tip. Also, I'll mention that the Hawaiian Airlines cards do show your account number, your Hawaiian Airlines account number right on the card.

So you can quickly check when you receive the card. I didn't notice that. And what I noticed was that when logging into Barclays, it said I had earned miles, but logging into Hawaiian Airlines, it didn't show those miles. So I was like, what's going on here? And that's how I figured out that they were different accounts. That makes sense.

That makes sense. Well, another one final safety tip on that before we belabor this segment is if you're doing the Wyndham card, the Wyndham earner business card in order to start the ball rolling on all the status matching for casinos and free cruises. I recommend that you make sure that you sign up for a Wyndham rewards account first before you apply for the card and put that number in. And the reason I say that is because the process of like getting approved and then actually getting your Barclays Windham or business card in the mail can be slow and your status online will update to diamond probably well before you receive the card. And if you don't sign up for the loyalty account first, you won't know what your Windham account number is until you receive that credit card in the mail. And then you have to figure out how to create a login for an

account when you have the number, but no password or anything else. And so make sure you sign up for the loyalty account before you sign up for the credit card. That's the moral of the story. OK, that out of the way. Crazy thing done.

Let's talk about Mattress Running the Numbers. What do we have for this week's Mattress Running the Numbers? Yeah, IHG is out with a targeted offer to give people double elite night credits on up to two stays through the end of the year.

And you can earn up to 14 bonus Elite Knight credits. It only works on cash rates. You can't redeem points for stays and expect to get double Knights. But cash rates, as long as the cash rate is $30 per Knight or more, you can earn double elite nights. So if I could find a place that's $30 a night, is it worth booking a stay even if I don't intend to stay so I can get these elite night credits?

That's the question, right? And you don't have to do individual nights. You know, sometimes these mattress run things like they're optimized by spending like single nights at different hotels. You don't have to bother with that here because you could do, you know, one, you know, multi, one seven night stay and get your all four. No, that would give you seven bonus nights. You need a 14 night stay. So, 14 nights, yeah. Anyway, so, yeah, that's the question, right? So why would you do this? So there's two reasons you might do this, right?

One is because you want to earn diamond elite status where you get free breakfast and some other benefits through IHG. The other reason would be to earn milestone rewards. So at, and the big ones, the valuable milestone rewards are at 20 nights, you can get a suite upgrade certificate. And at 40 nights, you can get, I think, both a suite upgrade and a club lounge membership, which means for a whole year, you can have free access to club lounges, which probably mostly makes sense at intercontinental hotels if you're staying at those a lot or maybe regions. And you could actually make that last for two years. Because if you earn the 40 nights near the end of this year,

and you have some time to pick your milestone selection, if you wait until like January 2nd or later to pick it, then that club membership is good for the rest of that year. So the rest of next year and all of the year after that. So you can have it for two years. Interesting. So if you're close, if this would get you to 40 nights, it seems like it would probably be worth it. Okay. So if you find a very cheap nightly rate, it might be worth mattress running some number of nights, depending on how far short of 40 you're going to be. And i think that how many

nights really just depends on the cash rate but if you found a place for 30 a night i would think that maybe even i mean would it be worth mattress running like 10 nights greg would you put 300 dollars into if you're only going to be at 20 nights if you were staying 20 nights this year at ihg properties would it be worth spending say three hundred dollars to get the other 20 elite nights by doing a 10 night mattress run through this promotion like for me personally no but it's because my stay patterns but i would think that if you knew you're going to be staying at intercontinental hotels or other ihg properties that have club lounges that the, and you're interested in having access to them, that, you know, the amount you'd be saving by having membership for two years could be easily worth the $300 or whatever. I mean, it would have to be worth a lot more than

that though, right? For it to be worth doing that work, but still I could see it being worth a lot more, but that would be under that sort of unusual situation where you know you're going to be staying a lot at IHG hotels and you're not already near at 40 nights from having stayed that much this year. All right, let me back up and ask it differently now. I don't have any nights. I don't think maybe I have one night with IHG this year. Let's call it zero nights. I have no nights with IHG this year. So would it be worth it for me to book a 10 night mattress run for about $300 if I was able to find that in order to get a suite upgrade? 300 bucks for a suite upgrade. How long can I, is the suite upgrade good for only a one night stay or I can use that for a

multi-night stay, right? Multi-night stay. I don't remember what, what you know if there's a limit to how long there must be a limit how long the stay can be but um no i well i i don't know how much how much is it worth how much is an ihg suite upgrade worth i mean help me figure it out how much would it be well reasonable to spend if i was close how much would it be reasonable to spend to hit that 29 milestone yeah i mean it's natural trying the numbers greg take a position here come on depending on where you're gonna stay where you need the suite upgrade it could be well worth it sure i mean i could totally see you know a hotel like if you if you booked if you booked a regular room at a at a uh at a high-end hotel and you and you contact them and say how much would it cost me to upgrade this to a suite? I could easily imagine them saying,

you know, $300 a night or, you know, somewhere in that range, right? Right. It could be anywhere, depending on the property, from $100 to $1,000 a night, but $300 is probably what I would guess a lot of places would say, somewhere in that range.

So that's per night. So if you had, let's say, a five-night stay, you're talking about it would cost you cash $1,500. If you would do that, if you really value the suite so much that you would actually do that, then yeah, then this mattress run makes a lot of sense. I do have to caution, though, that people have written reports about having trouble applying these suite upgrades. So you can't apply them till 14 days before your stay. Not all agents know how to do it sometimes. Anyway, so it's not a lock, you know?

Yeah, I think that was an important. I was hoping at some point we'd get to that. Yes, it's only 14 days in advance. So it's not like Hyatt suite upgrades where you can apply it at the time of booking or even Marriott suite. Well, no, I shouldn't even Marriott's worse. Marriott doesn't actually confirm until three days in advance. But with IHG, you know, 14 days in advance, a little bit better than Marriott, not nearly as good as Hyatt in terms of using those upgrade awards. So it's not even a lock. Even if I had a high end stay next year, I don't know that I'm going to end up getting this suite. So yeah, I would have a hard time pouring too much into mattress running many nights here.

A couple nights. Yeah, totally not, not more than a couple probably. Agree. Okay. There we go. Let's talk about awards points and more what's new in awards points and more

this week. I want to retitle this segment yet again. I's talk about awards points and more. What's new in awards points and more this week? I want to retitle this segment yet again. I'm just changing it up every day. I just pretended like nothing happened. I was just going to move forward as though we've been calling it that. Yeah, yeah. Okay, a lot of stuff going on. So we don't have to spend a lot of time on each one.

Wells Fargo, if you remember, they fairly recently introduced transfer partners to their autograph cards. And just now, well, as we record this, they just announced that they added Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Red as a transfer partner. So that's nice. It's something that was sort of glaringly missing in their initial list, and now it's there. Yep. Not unexpected, I don't think. I think we expected that was going of glaringly missing in their initial list, and now it's there. Yep, not unexpected. I think we expected that was going to happen. It was a matter of when. But it's good to see that we are correct, that Wells Fargo is intending to expand on their transfer partner base,

and that one of the programs we assumed they would get, they did. So good news there. All right. In miles and points news also, we've got a targeted Avianca Life Miles 200% bonus on buying miles. So if you're going to buy miles, you can buy for 1.1 cent per mile, but only through Monday, September 30th. So hopefully you're listening to this soon after it publishes because you're only going to have a couple of days to do this. 1.1 cent per point. That's cheap. Is this like a buy, Greg, or what? Yeah. I mean, that is dirt cheap. You know, yeah, LifeMiles devalued a bit not that long ago, but their prices are still decent. they're not the easiest program to work with um but you know if i'd be very if i needed miles like so i already have a lot of transferable points so i'm i don't think i'm a buyer here but

but i mean 1.1 cents per point for points that can be used for star alliance awards which star alliance is the biggest alliance so you have the best chance of finding award space. They do not impose fuel surcharges on awards. So you could book like Lufthansa business class, for example, and not pay any fuel surcharges. It's a great deal. Yeah, it really is. You know, I'm also kind of looking at it the same way. If you see the expression on Greg's face, if you're watching on YouTube, that pained, man, I don't think I'm going to do it, life miles in the next year. And so I probably wouldn't be redeeming life miles until 2026. And so that's why I'm like, I don't know.

I mean, a lot can happen between now and 2026. So I'd be a little hesitant to buy for that far out. But boy, if I were planning a trip for next year, still at this point, I would have a hard time not buying here. 1.1 cent per point i look at that and i say well like if you if i would ever consider cashing out points with the schwab card at 1.1 cent right then it just makes more sense to buy these than to transfer to avianca so so yeah i don't know i i think i'm not going to buy probably either but man i kind of want to just because i feel like that's such a great opportunity to take some of the cash back that I've earned on cash back cards and turn it into miles at a really attractive rate. Yeah.

Yeah. And we only have a few days to decide for sure. This goes through Monday, September 30th. So depending on when you're listening to this, it could be really soon or in the past. Okay. All right. could be really soon or or in the past okay so next up we've got let's see the targeted promotion to get loyalty points when spending aa miles so if you're targeted i didn't get targeted for this but some people uh that were targeted are able to earn loyalty points towards elite status when

they redeem american airlines miles yeah uh So people have been getting different offers, but it's kind of exciting if you are into earning American Airlines elite status and you have any American Airlines awards that you can book before the end of the year. Now, this is actually flying American Airlines, not partners, I think. But anyway, the chance to earn loyalty points when spending the miles, that's great for those seeking AA status. Very good. Very good. Okay. So let's talk about Melio. So Melio is next up and they are a business bill payment service that now has some changes. So Melio is sort of like if you remember Plastic or Plastique with a Q at the end. Melio is a similar type of a service that allows you to pay business bills using a credit card. So what's changed here? Yeah. So I was worried when they contacted us to say that we've changed things up.

They've added membership tiers where you have to pay for advanced tiers of membership. And first question was like, well, what about the ability to pay your bills with a credit card for 2.9% fee? And the answer was no, that hasn't changed. You get that on every tier equally. So the free tier, you still can just pay that 2.9% fee to use your credit card to pay bills. So that's cool. What has changed that's material to our audience is the welcome bonus. So we have an exclusive welcome offer for Frequent Miler listeners and readers of $200 when you sign up new for a Melio business account. And the requirements for earning the $200 have changed. Before it was something like, I forget,

like after your first bill payment, something like that, you get the $200. But now you either have to make $2,000 worth of bill payments in 30 days or sign up for a paid membership tier and don't cancel before the free trial ends. In other words, both of these require you paying some amount of money to Melio for them to give you the $200 basically is what it comes down to. So that's not unfair. Yeah.

So if, I mean, I think if, if you don't have $2,000 of bills to pay, I think you could just sign up for a monthly membership and, and, you know, cancel it after one month and still get your $200. But, um, so anyway, so it's, I don't think it's too hard to, uh, to get that. And, uh, you'll see other sites uh will have just a hundred dollar bonus um so uh so that's pretty cool look in the um note show notes for a link to details about that offer and within that blog post uh you'll find the the link to sign up yeah very good all right so that easy200 there for a lot of folks. So seems like a pretty good deal. Okay, Pepper, Pepper Rewards, not talking about Steven Pepper,

but Pepper Rewards, which is an app where you can buy third party gift cards. So you can buy Amazon, Best Buy, whatever type of Airbnb, whatever type of gift cards you're looking to buy, you can buy them in the Pepper app and earn points back that can then be redeemed for more gift cards. And so we've written a fair bit anyway about the Pepper Rewards app, or we certainly did when they first started out. And then things got a little confusing and it got a little tough to keep track of stuff, to be honest. I had a hard time knowing how many points I was due and when they were coming. And especially as I bought more and more gift cards, then it became really hard because they would all be posting at different times and in different amounts. And it wasn't easy to track the value of those points. So I actually started to kind of shy away from using pepper rewards because it was just too hard for

me to keep track of it. And I'm not usually somebody who keeps meticulous track of stuff like that, but it was just too confusing. But we have good news. Now they have added point history and pending point information. That makes it way easier. So I think I probably will go back to using it some anyway, maybe not as much as I had once, but I'll go back to using Pepper Rewards some because now I can easily see how many points did I earn or am I expecting to earn on a particular gift card purchase. And it's much easier than to track and make sure that I get the points that I'm expecting. So that was a huge improvement, very simple improvement, but it made it much, much better for the user. So that's great. And if you sign up as a new user, I think you still get double points for 15 days when you first sign up. We'll have our affiliate link in the show notes

so that you can get the double points for the first 15 days. And so the value of that double points kind of just, I think, varies depending on what kind of gift cards you're buying, since they used to all be the same amount that you'd get back, but now it varies a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Now there are a lot of apps, a lot, there's a handful at least of apps that where you can kind of buy a gift card at the time of purchase for exactly the amount you need.

And I find myself using Pepper mostly for those situations. It's just so easy, you know, because like other ones like like flues for example has minimum amounts on a lot of them and i don't and i find that app like really confusing too like i don't know why it's kind of bewildering but um pepper uh they do their they do try to make it confusing with like what points are worth makes this really hard to understand um also remembering to use your

points can be a little tricky but but that said you know you want something like a uh you know i'm checking out at cvs online for 14 and 12 cents i just type that into pepper get my gift card instantly put it into the website and and pay that. So I earn extra rewards and use the rewards I've already earned to make that purchase. I just find that pretty nice and easy. It is. And I did use the Pepper quite a bit for resale as well, for reselling gift cards and things like that. So I did a bunch of that. And then I had a bunch of points accumulating. And like Greg said, it's hard to understand the value of the point. So I ended up just cashing out all my points, I don't know, a month or two ago for Amazon gift cards and loading them to my Amazon account.

And that was really super simple. And so that's what I've been doing now with the points is I just put them in there because I spent enough on Amazon anyway. And but yeah, you're right. It's very good for that type of thing. I do find the app very intuitive to use apart from the value of the points. I find it really easy to use. So I totally agree and understand what you're saying there that I think it's the easiest of those sort of instant gift card deal type apps to use. Yep. At least of the ones we've tried. Yeah. Of the ones we've tried. Yeah. I find it very intuitive and easy. Yep. All right. Spirit. What's up with Spirit? Spirit added some new stuff or subtracted, maybe?

Is that a better way to say it? Yeah. Spirit has a few updates. First of all, they took away the redemption fee to use their points to book awards. They were listening. Yeah. Nick talked about that recently, right? You had a situation where points would have been really valuable,

but there would have been- But then they weren't because of the $50 redemption fee for booking within 28 days of travel. And I was like, oh, this is garbage. I can't even use it. They're not worth anything if I have to pay the $50, not worth much anyway. Actually, no, they were not worth anything because it would have been more expensive, I think, in order to pay that $50 fee than just paying cash for the ticket. Mm-hmm. Yep. And then for those who have gold status with Spirit, you'll now get free Wi-Fi, free high-speed Wi-Fi.

So that's a pretty nice gold benefit. Yeah. Yeah. I think eventually we're going to see most airlines offer free Wi-Fi for most members, but Spirit probably won't be the most airlines. They'll probably still charge for it, I bet, for a while. So this is a decent perk, like Greg said.

You want Wi-Fi on the plane. And Spirit does have the youngest fleet of any of the airlines out there. So I don't think I've been on a Spirit flight that didn't have Wi-Fi, whereas I have been on flights with other airlines in the last year that within the United States didn't have Wi-Fi. I did not know that they have the youngest fleet. That's interesting. They do. Yeah. Yeah.

Yep. All right. So that's Spirit. I think that wraps up our points and everything else. And that brings us to this week's main event. Main event time. How to amass Citi Thank You rewards. So city points, not as easy to earn in huge quantities as like Amex or even Chase points, but we're going to tell you about the ways that you can start to amass a decent

amount of points anyway. Before we jump into that though, just a quick overview that Citi Thank You Rewards are best used by transferring to partners. And we'll talk a lot about that in next week's show. But let me just summarize here and say that they have solid options for transferring to airline programs, with one really notable exception, they don't have Air Canada Aeroplan, which is, I think, a big miss. But, you know, they do have LifeMiles, so they do have Star Alliance covered. It's also become, in recent times, a really good option for booking unique hotels because they transfer to leading hotels of the world. They transfer to Choice 1 to 2. They transfer to Wyndham and they transfer to Accor. So you've got a lot of selection there with hotels. Yeah, I think that's kind of a standout because when people ask about how to use points to book hotels, the options are somewhat limited. I mean, yeah, obviously you have the hotel currencies themselves, but many of those are hard to amass in a usable quantity at a reasonable rate on ordinary purchases, right? Basically, short version of the story is you don't earn enough points using their cards on most everyday purchases to make it worthwhile to use a hotel

card in most cases. There's some exceptions, but Citi provides plenty of worthwhile to use a hotel card in most cases there's some exceptions but city provides plenty of opportunities to earn a reasonable return on spend and then use them for unique interesting hotels you know it's not going to be the marriott's of the world or the hyatt's of the world but some pretty unique interesting places are possible between leading hotels of the world choice windham and accord so that's kind of cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Why don't you tell us just basic information about how points work? Well, okay.

So first, obviously, you earn them from welcome bonuses from spending, and we'll talk more about that in a few minutes. But there's some interesting features of the Citi program, one of which is that you can move points from one account to another. And it doesn't have to be a member of your own household. You could send points to one of your friends. They don't have to be someone in your family even. You can freely move up to 100,000 points per year to anybody else that has a Citi Thank You Rewards account. But there's a couple of buts here.

So the first one is the limit, of course, the 100,000 points per year, which makes that somewhat unique. Whereas with Chase, you can transfer points to a household member and there's no limit, for instance. Or with Capital One, you can transfer points to anybody else that has a card that earns miles with no limit. Citi has the 100,000 point limit. They allow you to transfer anybody, but they limit you to 100,000 points.

But the bigger catch is that once the points are moved this is unique to city they have to be used within 90 days or they expire so if i send some points to greg he's got to use those points within 90 days or those points just evaporate into thin air and they're gone so you got to make sure that you when you move them you're ready to use them exactly also knowing, you can pool or combine your points. So, for instance, if you've got a City Strata Premier and you have a City Rewards Plus, you could pool the points from those two cards and put them together kind of in one pile. But that doesn't make your points safe.

And what we mean there is if you were to close one of those two cards, points would still follow City's ordinary expiration policy for points from a closed card. Closing your card there is not going to, rather, pulling your points is not going to keep your points safe or alive in the event if you cancel that card yeah those points will will go away um and the fact that you pulled them all together to make it look like you know they should be safe because you have another card still open it just doesn't work that way so if you really want to cancel a card because of the annual fee um and there's any points still alive that you haven't used yet, just downgrade to a no annual fee thank you card instead so that the points won't go away. Yep. Yeah. And if you keep them pooled, then you'd still be able to presumably transfer them to partners.

Right. So you're not losing anything by downgrading, whereas you are losing something if you cancel. So, yeah yeah don't cancel yeah and you do need um one last thing here in order to get the full transfer powers um so a lot of the fee-free thank you cards offer some limited ability to transfer points but um what you really want the only card that is is available new that will give you the full power of thank you rewards for transferring to airline and hotel programs is the City Strata Premier. So you definitely want to have one of those at the time when you're ready to use your thank you points. Yep. So speaking of the Strata Premier premiere let's talk about welcome bonuses and your

opportunities to earn new card intro bonuses for opening new cards because that's always the fastest way to accelerate your pile of points you know accumulating fastest way to earn more points is through new card intro offers and the strata premiere tends to have the best of the bunch as far as the city cards so that that card, as we record this, offers 75,000 points after $4,000 in purchases in the first three months, or at least the link on our best offers page, I should note, is good for the 75,000 points after $4,000 spend in three months. So that's a pretty decent standard sort of a bonus for that spend in terms of transferable points on par with what

you'll get at other banks for a similarly kind of marketed card. So the Strata Premier is option number one. Option number two, the double cash or option number two and three, the double cash and the custom cash. Both of those cards offer 20,000 points after $1,500 spend in six months. Now, you might see that marketed as $200 back, but it's really 20,000 Citi thank you points. So you may say, oh, I thought I could earn 20,000 points, but this says $200 in cash back. It's the same thing. It's 20,000 Citi thank you points that you could redeem for cash back if you only have that double cash card, for instance, or if you have the Strata Premier, you can pull them so that you can transfer those 20,000 points to partners.

Right, right. And then another card that's available also with 20,000 point welcome bonus is the Rewards Plus card. That also requires $1,500 spend, but this one in three months. For some reason, this one, the other two fee-free, no annual fee cards give you six months to spend the $1,500. Rewards Plus only gives you three months, but still it's only $1,500

spent, so not that high of a hurdle. So based on the current welcome bonuses that you'll find on our best offers page on our blog, frequentmiler.com, you can get up to 135,000 points from welcome bonus offers. Yeah, and that's not a bad pile of points.

It's a good start anyway, but it's not probably enough points for somebody who wants to redeem for a lot of stuff. So we're going to have to talk about more ways to earn points in a couple of minutes here, because that's a good start. But we can we can add to that. However, we have to understand probably before we get into other ways to spend and earn the application rules if you're going to apply for new city cards, right? Yeah, so so unfortunately, these 135,000 points wouldn't be bad if you could do it every year. But unfortunately, Citi has the 48-month rule on most of their cards, including all of the ones we're talking about here, which basically says you have to wait 48 months

after having received the welcome bonus before you could apply for that same card again. So you are not going to get a welcome bonus more than once every four plus years. So think of it as five years to just, you know, make it easier to do the math. But so, yeah, so the sort of repeated welcome bonuses is just not a thing with Citi. Similarly, also, you don't have like refer a friend offers. So the types of things that make it easy to earn a lot of points with Amex and Chase are just not a thing with city unfortunately it does make it harder they're they are a harder currency to earn from a transferable currency standpoint they are one of the harder ones i say one of the harder ones because capital one is also kind of tough to

accumulate tons of car tons of points from you know they do have a few decent welcome bonuses i should say that but but, but they also have more limited ways to earn points and some other issuers, but they still have referral bonuses. And so, yeah, this is, this is a tougher one, a tougher one because of the, the 48 month rule. And then of course, also the velocity limit, you can only get a max of one personal card in eight days and no more than two personal cards per 65 days, business cards one per 90 days. So you've got just different limits in terms of how often you can get these. So that's a little challenging, isn't it? It is. It is. But for those who want to earn points from spend,

maybe you're a big spender. I think Citi has actually a fantastic lineup for that. So let's start with the Strata Premier card. This card earns three points per dollar in a whole bunch of categories. Three points per dollar at grocery stores, restaurants, gas stations, EV charging, flights, hotels, travel agencies. So a whole slew of things. And you could even earn 10x by booking certain types of travel through the city travel portal. So great earning power in select categories with the Strata Premier. And then you could supplement that with getting 2x everywhere else by adding on the city double cash and making sure to use your double cash card wherever the strata premier is not earning at least 3x so just right there just with those two cards that's a really

powerful combination it is yeah for somebody who mostly wants to earn their points from ongoing spend and wants a pretty simple setup this is even if you didn't think you wanted a simple setup this is a very good simple setup i mean you're earning a minimum of two points per dollar everywhere and three points per dollar at probably the places where you spend the most money. So, you know, obviously, it's having to juggle 15 different cards to make sure that you're getting all of the welcome bonus or all of the category bonuses covered. That's nice. And then it gets a little bit better yet if you get a rewards plus card. Yeah.

Yeah. So rewards plus card is the purpose of getting that isn't to increase the earnings on spend, but it's to increase the value of your point redemptions. Because just having that card and pooling it with your other cards, you get a 10% rebate on point redemptions each year up to 10,000 points back per year. So that's a really nice extra there. Now where things get complicated is the 5X earning potential. There's another fee-free card, the custom cash, which earns five points per dollar up to $500 in spend per billing cycle on the top category of spend each billing cycle. So- Okay. What does that mean?

All right. So first let me just, I'm going to list off these categories really quick. Here are the categories where you can earn 5X in. Restaurants, gas stations, grocery stores, select travel, select transit, select streaming services, drug stores, home improvement stores, fitness clubs, and live entertainment. So pretty much much anywhere lots of places anyway lots of places so the idea is that you know if you spend let's say you spend three hundred dollars at restaurants and two hundred dollars at gas stations in one billing cycle you're only going to earn the 5x on the restaurants because that's the one you spent the most on. And the gas stations and anything else you spend on, you'll only earn 1x.

So that for the average person is just kind of meh. But if you know how to play this, it can become really good. And here's my advice for how to play it. First of all, ideally, you'll get multiple custom cash cards, and we'll talk through that in a second, how to get multiple. And rather than carrying these cards around for your day-to-day spend and trying to figure out, have I spent up to $500 yet on this one or that one at this store or that store? The idea is to bring the card once a month to a store that you know you're going to be spending that much. So for example, let's say you spend $1,000 every month at your grocery store. Bring two of your custom cash cards just once a month to that grocery store, buy two $500

gift cards from that grocery store, and then leave your custom cash cards at home after that and just use those gift cards whenever you shop at that store. You could do that at your favorite gas station chain. You could do that at your favorite restaurant. But you could also, in the grocery store, buy gift cards for other merchants. You could also do that at some gas stations. So you could buy a $500 gift card to maybe you know you're going to be spending a lot at Home Depot or whatever and get five points per dollar once per month on up to $500 that way. So there's a lot of ways to just convert these into gift cards in one shot once a month. Right.

Of course, if you know you're going to spend $500 a month at Home Depot, you could use Home Improvement Stores as your 5X category on the card. But the example- So that was a bad example. Well, I mean, it was an example. Just an example to show you what you could do. So you could very easily go in once a month and buy five $100 gift cards for other merch on Amazon

or whatever it is that you're going to spend your money. Or I think it's the whole $500 gift card to the local grocery store would be a really simple solution for me to use one of these and not have to juggle it because we are saying that you'll do best with one of these and not have to juggle it because we are saying that you'll do best with multiple of these custom cash cards. But man, I wouldn't want to have to like

label three or four or six or eight different custom cash cards and then figure out, oh, I've spent $438.62. So I've got another 60. I don't want to have to do that. Once a month, go get that gift card and then it's done. And as long as you're able to do that and manage that and keep track of the gift card. And I always have a credit card in my pocket in case the gift card doesn't cover whatever I'm buying at the grocery store. So I'll be okay if, you know, whenever I run out of that gift card money, I guess. So that's a much easier way to me to manage the situation. Yeah, for sure. So how would you go about getting multiples of these cards? The application rules for this card say that you can't get, you can't apply for a new one if you already have one. Yeah. And so you can't, to my knowledge, apply for a new one if you already have one.

But Citi is very liberal with their product change policy. So they will generally, once you've had a card open for a year, they'll generally liberal with their product change policy. So they will generally, once you've had a card open for a year, they'll generally let you change product change to any other currently available Citi consumer card, assuming you've got a consumer card you're looking to change. So if you get an American Airlines card, for instance, right now for whatever the intro bonus is on the American Airlines card, and you sock those American Airlines miles away, then a year from now,

you can call Citi and tell them that you don't think you want this American Airlines card anymore and ask if you can product change that to a Citi custom cash. There's a very high chance that they're going to say sure. And so if you get a few other Citi cards like that, then you could down the road product change those to custom cash cards. And then eventually when you hit your four years from your last welcome bonus on your city strata premier, you could downgrade that to another custom cash and apply new for another strata premier. And so over time, you could accumulate a bunch of these custom cash cards.

Yeah, that's exactly how to do it. So the custom cash card does have a weird limitation that the other city thank you cards that have no annual fee do not have this limitation. We mentioned before that you could, with thank you points, you could transfer your points to another person, and then the points will expire in 90 days if they're not used right away. You can't do that with a custom cache. They don't allow transferring points to other people, but they do allow pooling your points. And so the way to make those airlines and hotels um that way and um so that that is worth mentioning mainly if you're uh going to be playing two-player mode we'll talk about

that in a in a couple minutes yeah the custom cache is a bit of a thorn in the side of a two-player mode person because it makes it more challenging or just at least different than playing in two player mode with other issuers. So but overall, that could be a great strategy. And when you consider that when you say, okay, well, if you could get to two or three or four, however many custom cash cards you think you need, then you're talking about earning a minimum of two x on all purchases, 3x on several categories with your Strata Premier, and 5x on almost anything that you want, depending up to the limit of custom cash cards you have in their capacity to spend. So all of a sudden, the city

ecosystem starts looking really good. Because if you can earn 5x, I mean, let's say you had four custom cash cards, and you're able to spend the full 500 a month on each of those, then you're talking about, what, 10,000 points a month. And so over the course of a year, just from your custom cash cards, you could earn almost as many points as you could from all of the city welcome bonuses combined. That's right. That's right. And it's repeatable year after year. Right, right, right. And cool thing, I don't think we really even talked this much about this, but the cost in annual fees for having all of those cards is only a total of $95 a year because the City Strata Premier is the only one in this lineup 5x earnings everywhere for a $95 annual fee. That's pretty amazing, actually. Yeah, it really is.

It's a great strategy for someone who does not want to pay a whole bunch of annual fees. I mean, it's hard to beat this. Yep, yep. Okay, that's not all, though. You can earn points also from targeted bonuses. Every now and then um you have so so then you'll think oh up to 2500 points since i'm earning five points per dollar that means i can spend up to 500 but no what's really going on there nick well because you you'll earn five total thank you points per dollar spent, not five extra

thank you points. So considering the fact that probably your card offers one point per dollar as its base earning rate, you're really earning four extra points per dollar spent. So 2,500 bonus points divided by the four extra points per dollar spent means that you're going to get 5X on a total of $25 dollars or 625 dollars will max out your your 5x rather right right so yeah so city likes to make us do difficult math to figure out how far you could take these these targeted bonuses and sometimes i this example of 625 is a nice like roundish number sometimes it comes up to like really weird,

weird amounts when you try to do the calculations to figure out how much you can spend. Make sure that either you can't figure out how to maximize it or that you, well, yes, that you can't figure out how to maximize it. So you either undershoot or way overshoot and, and earn one X on some extra spend.

That's, I think that's the strategy. Yeah. So another thing you could do is look for retention bonuses. And what that means is you call Citi to cancel your card and you're transferred to a specialist

who will then see if there's any offers linked to your account that they can offer you to convince you to keep the card open. Some gotchas there. Sometimes if you get the computer and tell it you want to cancel the card, it might just go ahead and cancel it. And you'll be like, whoops. So make sure you talk to a person. Make sure they don't cancel until you're ready to. Make sure they transfer you to an account specialist. sometimes agents have the

ability to see bonuses and sometimes they don't so hold on and then the last safety tip on that and this is something you probably won't ever run into but if you do that and you call and somebody transfers you to speak to one of those specialists and you're waiting on hold forever and you're like i don't have more time for this i'm just going gonna hang up and call back later don't do that because if you do they may well go ahead and cancel that card as you were asking to do ask me how i know oh boy i forgot that story that's uh yeah wow that's crazy that's that's that's why city you know used to be the title of her what crazy thing what crazy thing just fishing for a retention offer, and I caught something, all right? That was a mistake.

It was a mistake. I certainly shouldn't have hung up, but I couldn't wait any longer. It had been too long, and I couldn't wait any longer. I would have never guessed they'd do that automatically. But anyway, yeah. All right. So historically, it used to be that we'd frequently see offers that say you'll get an extra two points per dollar on all spend up to some amount of spend, $70,000 spend, $30,000, whatever. And it depended on what card you were asking about or what have you.

And what you can do when you hear one of these offers, historically, you could also say, are there any other offers? Because sometimes the accounts loaded up with multiple and you might feel kind of ridiculous to keep asking, is there any other offer? But if you keep asking,

you'll get the whole list of them and you can pick which one works best for you. It's worth knowing that it doesn't have to be a card with an annual fee to get a retention offer on it. I've gotten retention offers on a lot of cards with no annual fee. And so when they ask you why you want to cancel, you could just say, well, I'm just not using the card anymore or whatever. And they'll look up on your account and see if there's any offers. I called this morning

before recording this so that I could offer some fresh data. For science. Good. For science. Yeah. Yeah. Right now I have two custom cash cards. I think that's been varying over time, but neither of them had any offers on them. So I don't know if they're not that interested in keeping people with the custom cash cards or not. But my double cash card, I was offered 10,000 points after a $3,000 spend in six months. And that's not like an amazing amount of points, but it's better than zero.

So, yeah. Well, plus that card earns two points per dollar base, right? So essentially you're earning more than five points per dollar on 3K spend. On 3K spend, yeah. Yeah, it's a no-brainer to accept that. And I also have the old, no longer available new City Prestige card.

That got the same offer, but I have to make that 3K spend in three months instead of six months. So basically 20,000 bonus points for a phone call. So pretty good. You know, I used to get offers that had bigger upside because of the plus two on like a lot more spend was possible but um but these are really easy to to knock out quickly yeah i think it's hard to complain about those retention offers on cards that you're using anyway and and probably we're going to keep anyway so if you can get extra bonus points anyway, then why not, right? If your ongoing business is worth X to the bank, who are you to argue that, no, it's only worth Y?

Let them give you the X. So anyway, that's great. And that certainly can be a good way to earn some more points. So that's all good. What about people who want to play in a two-player strategy? So if you have a husband, a wife, a girlfriend, a boyfriend, a partner, brother, sister, cousin, whatever it might be, you got somebody else you're playing the game with, what's the ideal strategy for a two-player system? Yeah. So if you've got two people working together, obviously both people can earn all the

welcome bonuses. Both people can apply for each of the cards. Both people can take advantage of targeted bonuses when you get emails, letting you earn, you know, 5x or whatever per dollar. And you could both call to ask about retention offers and do those kind of things as well. So all those point earning opportunities are available to two people. So you could theoretically double amount of points being earned in those ways. And when it's time to redeem points, typically with most two player households, there's like one person who tends to have uh manage most of the like loyalty accounts and i know that's not true everywhere but just assuming that's the case let's call that person player one then when player one is ready to redeem points maybe you want to transfer to an airline program or to a hotel program uh what you just do is you have player two move that number of points from their account to player one's account, and then player one makes the redemption right then. And that way, that 90-day clock that started when you move the points doesn't matter because you're using those

points right away. There is a situation, though, where player two is going to be the one... There's going to be a few situations actually where player 2 is the one who should be redeeming the points one is if player 2 has a custom cash card then player 2 can't move those custom cash points

to player 1 so player 2 is going to have to do the redeeming there if player 2 has both the premiere and rewards plus card then um or i should just say if they have the rewards plus card pulled together with their other points then um you could potentially be earning two rewards plus rebates each year up to so player one could be earning that 10 000 point rebate on uh redemptions

and player two could be as well so that's a reason to redeem out of player two's account i should say because moving points to player one does not count as a as an award redemption that was the question i was gonna i was gonna ask you because that was the next thing i thought some people would be thinking about that that does that count as redeeming but it does not yeah yeah now unfortunately player two cannot transfer points to player one's loyalty accounts so unlike you know uh mx for example which you can do uh if you if you're an authorized user you can't do that with City. So what you're going to want to do is either book the travel right out of Player 2's loyalty accounts, which you can usually do. Like airlines, you can always book an award flight and put in someone else's name. I mean, there are some challenges with that with some Asian airlines, but it's almost always possible to do. Or in some cases, you could transfer to a program that allows points pooling. So for example, British Airways has a household account thing. So player two could transfer, now you can't transfer directly to British Airways, but you could transfer it to Qatar Avios,

then move those points from Qatar to British Airways, pool your points with player one's points, and then player one would be able to redeem those points out of their account. JetBlue allows family pooling, so you can transfer your points to JetBlue, and player one would be able to use them, assuming you pool with Player 1. And final, I'm going to mention a kind of trick. I don't really recommend this because it's not great value,

but if Player 2 transfers to Virgin Atlantic, Player 2 then could transfer those Virgin Atlantic points 1 to 1.5, or 10,000 points to 15,000 Hilton points. So you could convert those points to Hilton points and then Hilton allows points pooling so it'd be easy to move the points from player two to player one with Hilton.

Those are all the ones I could think of. I don't know if there might be other opportunities. I know the answer to this, but I'm sure somebody will be thinking it, so I'm going to ask it. Could you then move them back from Hilton to virgin atlantic to get them all into player one's virgin atlantic account so player two moves to virgin atlantic to player two's virgin atlantic account and then player two moves from their virgin atlantic account to player two's hilton account and then pools points with player one's hilton account can you then move them back to player one's virgin atlantic account you probably could them back to Player 1's Virgin Atlantic account?

You probably could, but I think you would lose most of your points in that transition. I don't know what the transfer ratio is from Hilton to Virgin Atlantic, but I promise you it's not good. Right, yeah, you would quickly lose almost all your points that way, so you would not want to do that. You'd only want to do that move that Greg just explained if you actually ultimately want Hilton points. And like you said, we wouldn't generally recommend that. Okay, so in a two-player household, there are ways to amass a number of points

and to be able to redeem them. But it sounds like both player one and player two are probably going to want to have a Strata Premier, assuming that player two is going to carry to have a strata premiere assuming that player two is going to carry custom cash cards anyway yeah i mean i think that most um two-player households are better off like having player two have um you know focus their their point earnings in other ways and you know unless you really need um more of if you could use a lot more of that 5x potential i guess it maybe it would be

worth um doing all that actually so i'll back off that yes what next there you go there you go so overall the city ecosystem is pretty good if you're if you want to earn a lot of points without having to spend a lot in annual fees if you want to earn a lot of points from your ongoing spend without paying many annual fees and you're willing to go over the hurdles to get a bunch of custom cash cards, or a few of them anyway, then I think this ecosystem could certainly make a lot of sense. I know this is pretty popular with people that are interested in keeping their annual fees very manageable and their card system pretty simple because overall this is a pretty simple kind of a wallet if you're if you're in a city sort of wallet ecosystem right yeah i mean uh it it's especially when you think about just the the base part of it being you put all

your spend on the strata premiere for where where 3x is in effect and all the rest on the double cash where 2x is in effect and think of think of the 5x custom cash thing as like a separate bucket of stuff to deal with you know like right like your day-to-day your day-to-day what what cards need to be in your wallet is really just those two because the rewards plus which we recommend getting can sit at home that never has to be in your wallet you know and so so really it's just those two that need to be in your wallet all And so really, it's just those two that need to be in your wallet all the time. And that's really simple. Very good. And keep in mind, of course, that Citi does share a number of transfer partners with the other major transferable

currencies. So this could also be a good strategy just to supplement and put points together with points you have from other currencies. If you're transferring to, say, Virgin Atlantic, you can now transfer to Virgin Atlantic from basically all of the major transferable currencies, I think. So it'd be a really easy one to kind of pull your own points, so to speak, and get good return on a number of categories here with Citi. Yeah, and they do have frequent transfer bonuses to select transfer partners as well.

So you can sort of grow your points that way by waiting for good transfer bonuses before transferring. Great point. Okay, final question for you before we head to the question of the week. In the hierarchy of transferable points systems, where would you put Citi? I mean, are they, you know, if you were to say,

okay, well, which one do I want to focus? And I mean you, Greg, the frequent miler. So not necessarily a recommendation for other people, but is this like, you know, what are your top one or two programs? Number three, where do you put this in terms of how it ranks against other transferable currency systems?

Oh man, that's really tough. So, and it's tough because I have to think about not just how I'd use the points, but how I'd earn them and, you know, sort of together as like all in combination. And so, I mean, I'm loving Citi as an option for getting hotel rewards and especially sort of niche hotel rewards like leading hotels of the world um but uh i'm earning points much faster on uh with chase and especially amex um and both of them have great hotel plays these days uh with with amex i it's not necessarily a great hotel play transferring to hilton um during a transfer bonus but I've been excited enough about small luxury hotels of the world, which you could book with Hilton Points, that I've done it. I've done that transferring Amex to Hilton.

And so, you know, before that happened, I would have put Citi higher on the list. But right now, I'm kind of thinking of Citi after those two. And I don't really know what to do with Bilt because my earning ability with Bilt is dropping, has dropped a lot because there are new rules about strict limits about how much you could earn on rent day. So Bilt is one of those where it's a great to have points in but really hard to earn a lot of points in so uh so so i put them above so i put them above built i put them above capital one um which we're laughing about because capital one doesn't seem to like Greg very much. Right, right. They shut me down. So yeah, yeah. So I think third.

Yeah, and I find it so interesting because there are opportunities to get good numbers of points. But yeah, it's also very much and also ran sort of a program in my mind, not a main feature for me either. And so that makes it kind of awkward and the reason

is mostly because it's easier to earn points much faster with the other major transferable currencies. Although this has good point earning for ongoing spend, there's lots of other ways to earn points with the other currencies. And so that's why I'm more likely to recommend Amex or Chase to somebody in terms of an ecosystem to get involved in than I am Citi. However, for somebody who does not want to chase after referral bonuses and new card welcome bonuses and upgrade bonuses and all of those other things, somebody who just wants a simple system to make sure they get rewarded well for everyday spend with just a couple of cards, Citi is a great solution for that. It really is. And it doesn't

it doesn't have any of those like coupon book complexities that amex has everywhere it has really low annual fees you know a base 2x earning rate which you're not going to get at chase at all um so it yeah it really is a really good option and if if you're in that camp wanting things simple then i think your comparison is is really capital one or or city capital one you could do 2x everywhere and just be done um but anyway so that's where the that's where the um the comparison is better i think and um uh personally i i would still pick city over One, even if they didn't hate me, because of the unique hotel options that Citi has over Capital One.

I might rather pick Capital One for access to Aeroplan, so I give you the other side of that, because you could still earn the 2x base earning rate with one of the venture cards, and then earn 3 points per dollar with a safer one with no annual fee and a breath three points per dollar on grocery and dining and entertainment with that card. So yeah, you know, it's a it is it's a good comparison point. Yeah, they're actually pretty simple. I mean, similar. Yeah, the pluses and minuses of the programs are pretty simple. I mean, similar. The pluses and minuses of the program's pretty similar. They are. Yeah.

Right. I think that wraps up our main event and brings us to this week's question of the week. So, this week's question of the week came in via email from Alex. So, short story is that Alex won 50,000 American Airlines miles through a drawing. It was something through work. So, won 50,000 American Airlines miles and didn't previously have American Airlines miles. So, Alex said he never considered accumulating American Airlines miles until now, but now he's suddenly, he or she suddenly has, he, I think Alexandria, suddenly has 50,000 miles that they didn't anticipate. So, Alex says, I'm currently at 524 and will dip below in January,

then to 324 around March. I'll be eligible for another intro bonus on the Sapphire products at that point. And I was holding off on new personal card applications until then. But considering my new stash of miles, now 50,000 AA miles, would you consider opening any of the personal American Airlines cards and pushing back that welcome bonus on a new Sapphire card? I know the relationship with Barclays may disappear soon. We've talked about that recently. And the welcome bonus on their Advantage Aviator Red card looks appealing considering the low spend requirement. This plus the city card down the line may lead to a nice dash of some AA miles.

So that's essentially the question. Should Alex go for an Aviator Red card if it means pushing back the chance to get a new welcome bonus on a Sapphire card by a few months? Yes. Yeah. We don't know how long the Barclays Aviator card is going to be available.

It has a great offer with available available you get the points after first purchase if i remember right and go for it now while you can and that really has nothing to do with alex having won 50 000 a miles i i think doesn't you're right i think you're not right um but um a miles at least right now, are very valuable, especially when booking partner awards. But also, they're kind of randomly valuable for spending on their own flights. Yes, sometimes you see terrible prices, but sometimes you see great prices booking AA's own flights. And so I'm a big proponent of if you have an opportunity to earn AA miles easily, go for it. They don't currently transfer from any transferable points program.

So best way to get them is credit card signups. Yeah, well, and so I agree. It doesn't really have much to do with whether or not Alex just recently won the 50,000 American Airlines miles, except for the fact that I guess now accumulating more is always more useful, or at least for a long time anyway, in the beginning, it's more useful. So 70,000 plus 50 of the 120. Now we're talking about enough for a roundtrip business class ticket to Europe or Asia, probably between the 50 that you won and the 70,000. So I can kind of see maybe where it becomes more appealing. But all that does is highlight the fact that, yeah, I mean, you're looking at the chance for 70,000 miles now and you're saying, oh, you know what? Maybe I just won't get those so that I can spend $4,000 later to get 60,000 chase points that can potentially get, you know, two months later down the road than that.

But I would totally take the 70,000 miles after first purchase. Now, I think people overvalue those 520 force thoughts quite often. When you look at the value of the miles compared to the amount of spend you have to do for them, you just have to pay the $99 annual fee. Totally worth getting the aviator red now if it pushes back a card by a few months. So what? Right, right. And, you know, Barclays isn't always the easiest on application approvals.

But I think since you're going through this winning streak, Alex, I think you're you have a goodmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. You can follow us on all the various social media. Join our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group where you can ask and answer questions about this stuff all the time. And if you have a question that you'd like to be considered for a future question of the week or a piece of feedback that you'd like to be considered for a mailbag segment, you can send that to. Send it to mailbag at frequentmiler.com.

Bye, everybody.