Frequent Miler on the Air - How to get amazing value from American Airlines miles | Ep227 | 11-4-23

Episode Date: November 4, 2023

American Airlines miles can be used to fly some of the fanciest airlines in the world. They can also be really handy for buying domestic flights to/from non-American Airlines hubs. On this week's episode, we discuss some of our favorite ways to get awesome value out of American Airlines miles. 00:00 Intro 01:23 Giant Mailbag 03:50 Card Talk 03:55 New Citi Application Rule https://frequentmiler.com/possible-citi-5-day-rule-causing-denials-for-too-many-inquiries/ 07:04 Plastiq news https://frequentmiler.com/plastiq-once-again-accepts-amex-cards/ 11:28 Card Talk: Delta Reserve cards https://frequentmiler.com/dlrsv/ https://frequentmiler.com/dlrsvbiz/ 22:46 What crazy thing . . . did Dollar Dig do this week? 26:55 Mattress Running the Numbers: Capital One Premier Collection promotion https://frequentmiler.com/amazing-deal-get-200-off-capital-one-premier-collection-potentially-free-hotel-stay/https://frequentmiler.com/how-to-find-hidden-capital-one-premier-collection-hotels/ 31:15 Award Talk: Hyatt / Mr & Mrs Smith promo 42:17 Main Event 42:30 How do you earn American Airlines miles? 44:51 Using miles for American Airlines flights  44:52 Close-in bookings  48:28 Flying from non-AA hubs 50:14 "Roll the dice" flights 52:16 American Airlines partner awards 53:07 North America to Africa (Great for Qatar Qsuites) 55:55 Europe to the Middle East (Great for Etihad apartments) 58:19 Middle East / India to Asia (Great for Etihad first or Qatar Qsuites) 1:00:08 Africa to Africa (get a lot of Qatar biz for a low price) 1:02:53 Asia to South Pacific 1:05:11 American Airlines partners 1:14:17 Question of the Week: Have I opened too many new accounts? Should I slow down? Music credit: Annie Yoder

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did City do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event. Frequent Miler on the Air starts now. Today's main event, how to get awesome value from American Airlines miles. We'll tell you how to do it in our main event. You know, I went years without redeeming American Airlines miles at all, basically. And then we got a whole bunch of them. And I was like, oh, wow, let's do this trip and that trip and the other trip, because there are just some really cool redemption possibilities. So if you've only been looking at one or two things with your

American Airlines miles by the end of today's show, I think you'll have like 15 different things that you'll be thinking about the next time you go to look to use your miles. But before we get to all that, be sure to like this video. If you enjoy our content, give it a thumbs up, leave us a comment, let us know what you think about it. So we always appreciate that kind of stuff. Don't forget to subscribe, enable notifications wherever you're watching or listening to the show. We appreciate that very much. Also keep in mind, we always put the timestamps in the description. So whether you're watching this on YouTube or listening to it in a podcast platform, you can always find the timestamps in the show notes. So you can jump right to the sections that matter the most to you. Or if you're going back to review an episode, you can find the parts of it that you want to

listen to again. On that note, let's get into today's giant mailbag. Drag out the giant mailbag. I'm dragging it out right now. All right. Today's giant mail comes from Josh in response to last week's show. The last week's show was when can you get the same card and welcome bonus again? And in that show, one of the things we said was that usually with most card issuers, if you get approved, like they all have different rules about whether you can get a card again and get the welcome bonus again. But we said if you get approved, you're probably going to be qualified for the welcome bonus. Josh said, and this is echoed by quite a few other readers who who chimed in uh josh says on two separate occasions i got approved for a city card but didn't get the bonus because i'd gotten the card 23 months earlier gotten the bonus 23 months earlier so

uh yeah so you know josh has not just one, but two data points. So that same mistake. Eating our words on that one, aren't we? We really are. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess we I guess now that's that was a good data point to know. And like you said, we heard it from quite a few other folks, too, specifically with Citi. Right. I think that was the issue that everybody had noted. So that's good to know. You know, in relevant news just today, I well, I should back up this week. The annual fee posted on my Barclays Aviator red card. So this is Barclays different issuer. But people had wondered, can you get the bonus again? Because they have terms that make it sound like it's a lifetime thing. And there's a welcome bonus tracker that shows that I've completed some of the steps.

And then the final step would be to pay the annual fee. But it took like almost a month or maybe even more than a month for the annual fee to actually post. It finally did this week. I paid it yesterday, the day before we recorded this. And then today, the day we're recording this, the tracker updated to show that I've completed the requirements with today's date. And it says that I've earned the welcome bonus as of today's date. So I fully expect the miles to post, but it does say they'll take four to six weeks. So it does seem that Barclays, if you get approved, you are going to get the bonus again, but with city, you got to have good record keeping. So pays to have good record keeping and to down all your

eyes and cross all your T's and make sure you're following all of the rules properly. And that's a good one to know, uh, for the future. All right. So that's today's mailbag. Let's talk a little bit more about Citi as we get into card talk. So today's card talk, we've got a couple of things, but first up is a bit of Citi news. So Citi is, or perhaps has, an application rule that we hadn't previously known about. So we had a data point from a reader who applied for and was approved for a Chase card. Five days later, he applied for the city premier card and was turned down and didn't get approved for the city premier card. When he called

reconsideration, the representative told him it was because he had an inquiry from another bank within five days and they won't approve you if you have an inquiry from any other bank within five days of applying for a city card. So he asked me if I'd ever heard of this rule and I hadn't. And I told him what I frequently tell people that phone representatives often get these things wrong and just kind of make them up as they go along. So I was pretty sure that probably wasn't true. I'd never heard it. So he called again and the next representative cited the same five day rule, which in itself, I still would have been a little bit dubious. It's, you know, it gives it a little bit more credence, but still I would have been,

I don't know, is that really real? Did they see that that's what the previous rep said because it was in the notes and just follow along with the same? However, this representative eventually offered to pull his credit again, saying that if they pulled the credit again, since it was now more than five days since the last pull from another bank, he would probably be approved. And they did, and he was approved. So that gave it a lot more weight to me, the fact that the rep knew that pulling the credit again would make the difference. So it does seem that this is probably legit. I reached out and Frequent Mailer Insiders for more data points. And the only entirely relevant one was someone else who also

was declined exactly five days after applying for another card. I have not found any data points of anyone who was approved within five days of applying for a card from another bank. Now I say that, and I mean to say with an inquiry on the same credit report that Citi pulled, of course, they won't see that inquiry if it's on a different report, but we're talking within five days of the, an inquiry within five days of Citi's inquiry on the same credit report. So moral of the story here is give yourself a cooling off period, wait more than five days before applying for a Citi card, it seems. Yeah. In a way, this is fantastic news because we've been hearing over and over and some of our personal experiences too,

that Citi has become much harder on approvals lately. But a lot of us tend to sign up for cards in batches like you know signing for a few cards around the same time and it could be you know that this rule is what's given us that impression that it's so hard to get approved these days because a lot of us have done that and and been within the five days so uh yeah i'm definitely going to try this next time next time around for city cards and and see if it's easier that'll be great yeah all right so keep that in mind and of course we always have links to relevant posts in the show notes so if i just explained it and you were a little confused which is fair because i didn't do the best job explaining it there then you want to see the post and the link to that post is going to be in the show notes. But that's not all of today's card talk.

We also have news from Plastic. Yeah, so Plastic, the bad news is they've started adding a small fee, small fixed fee on top of their percentage fee for paying bills with credit cards. So the idea behind Plastic is you could pay bills like your rent or sometimes even your mortgage with some cards and just different things like that. Things that normally you couldn't pay with a credit card, you can pay with plastic, but you have to pay the fee. Plastic had stopped taking American Express altogether a while back. Now they are again. And the reason that's newsworthy is not because you'd want to do this all the time, because the 2.9% fee alone is so high it's going to wipe out the value of your everyday rewards.

But when you're working on something like a big welcome bonus for a new card or you're trying to hit a big spend bonus that various Amex cards offer, it can be a great opportunity to do that. So just for example, often Amex business cards have like $10,000 or even $15,000 required spend to meet their welcome bonus terms. And if you have big rent payments to make, for example, it might be worth it to you. Pay the fee and pay your rent through plastic as an example. Absolutely. All right. I'm going to challenge you on one thing you said there, because we had a reader who commented, I think maybe on Facebook or maybe it was the post. They commented and they said at the 2.9% fee, then you're paying around 1.4 cents per point. Somebody else figured that out saying, well, you earn points on the fee also. So around 1.4 cents per

point if you are using it like all the time, right? And they said most of its value- If you're using it with a card that earns two points per dollar. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Like the Blue Business Plus. Thank you. Good point. So if you're using a card like the Blue Business Plus that earns two points per dollar spent, and so you're earning two points, you're paying the 2.9% fee. So it's around 1.4, 1.45 cents per point. And the reader said, I think all of us value Amex membership rewards points at more than 1.4 cents per point. So shouldn't I use this as much as I can?

What do you say? I say no. That's a short answer. No, I mean, the goal here is to if you're going to be doing something that that's buying points, you want to buy for as little as possible so that when you redeem, you're getting a great deal. But think of it this way. points. You want to buy for as little as possible so that when you redeem, you're getting a great deal. But think of it this way. Suppose you end up redeeming your Amex points for 1.5 cents per point value, and you've been buying them all this time for about 1.4 cents through these plastic payments. You're not coming out much ahead. Plus, all those fees could have been in a bank earning

interest, and then you're actually probably behind by the time you use those points. So no, I mean, I'm not saying you're not throwing away your money. And if you are going to be redeeming for much, much better value and you don't otherwise have enough points, it could be worth doing. But I think for most of of us we're better off earning uh amex points in particular with great big welcome bonuses and uh then you'll find all bonuses by referring your player to you know and the category bonuses and there are so many ways that that was my thought exactly there's so many ways to earn amex points at lower cost than 1.4

cents per point that that just wouldn't interest me very much. And like you said, I mean, maybe a little bit. Really, I think that exactly what Greg said, this is most useful for meeting welcome bonus spend. If you wouldn't otherwise be able to meet the 10K or 15K or whatever, or you just need to meet it quickly because you need those points relatively soon for something, then I could totally see it being worth paying the 2.9% if you're earning 100,000 points or 150,000 points. And that's going to make the difference on a trip. Then by all means, pay your 2.9%, but I wouldn't do it on an ongoing basis either. All right. So that's card talk. Card talk. Number two. Wait, this is really card talk number three, isn't it? The show notes say

two, but it's more Card Talk. We're going to do a little more Card Talk, right? More, more Card Talk. Today, we're going to talk about the Delta Reserve consumer and business cards. Last week, we talked about the $250 Delta Platinum cards. Today, we're going to be talking about the $550 Delta Reserve cards. Why the heck would you want to spend $300 more to get more Delta cards? Well, let's go through what these cards offer. First of all, they both, the consumer and the business version, earn three Delta SkyMiles per dollar spent on Delta and one point per dollar everywhere else. With small exception, the business card throws in 1.5x earnings on all spend after having spent $150,000 in your calendar year.

So I think most people are not too excited about that little caveat. The cards offer the same 15% off flight awards that the Delta Platinum and Delta Gold cards offer. So that's good, but it's not better than the others. Now we get into some things that are better. Just like the Platinum card, you get every year upon renewal, you get a companion certificate that's good for mostly regional flights. And what's better though about this one is it works even with first class, not just economy, which the Platinum card, the Delta Platinum card offers. So that could be really useful. And in fact,

I've found at times when using mine that like sometimes the price of, you know, first class is not that much more than the price of economy. It doesn't always happen, obviously, but then of course you're, you're saving saving you're getting the second person basically for free other than paying the small amount of taxes so that can be a fantastic deal all right just like the delta platinum and delta gold cards you get priority board boarding you get your first check bag free uh and then unlike the other two you you get Sky Club access. So you get Delta Sky Club access every time you're flying Delta. Now, starting in February of 2025, so this is quite a ways out from when we're recording this anyway, you're going to be limited to 10 visits per year unless you spend $75,000 on the card.

Then you have unlimited visits again. And all right. So then the card also offers two one-time guest passes to the Sky Club each year. So that's a nice add-on for bringing a friend. It also gives you Centurion Lounge access when you book your Delta flight with your reserve card. So again, you have to be flying Delta same day to get into the Amex Centurion Lounge.

Now, the card also offers elite status, sort of. So I call it elite status light. It's very much like first level delta silver status. You qualify for upgrades and get sort of the basic things that low level elite status gives you. But your priority for things like upgrades will be below anyone who has silver status. So your chance of getting upgraded with this elite status light

is low, or at least chance of getting upgraded with this elite status light is low or at least chance of getting upgraded first class anyway you probably have a good chance often of getting upgraded to comfort plus maybe a middle seat and comfort plus but sweet better than nothing little extra leg room a little less elbow room for those with with uh higher level elite status than this elite status light uh the card also gives you a tiebreaker on uh upgrades so if if you're if you're competing against someone else on the same flight and have the same level of elite status the same fair class all that stuff this will be a tiebreaker and put you in that upgrade. Gives you $100 global entry fee credit every four years or four and a half years if you do TSA pre-check

instead of global entry. And then starting in 2024, just like the Delta Platinum card, you'll get 2,500 MQDs as a head start towards elite status. So this is with the new elite program where it's all going to be based on MQDs, which are medallion qualifying dollars, basically how much you spend on Delta. So just by having this card, they'll act like you've spent $2,500 on Delta in order to get you closer to elite status. So that's really nice. Also starting in 2024, you can earn one MQD for every $10 you spend on the card.

So again, two ways to get a headstart on elite status with this card. Very good. Interesting. Well, all right. So I have a lot of questions, but I guess the first question everybody's going to have is, is it worth it, Greg, or who is it worth it for? Yeah. So, you know, first of all, if you're interested in Sky Club access, you fly Delta enough to want to spend time in the club. It's still, I think, the cheapest way in. And certainly it gives you unlimited access until February of 2025. So at least for the next year plus, it's unlimited. But

even for 10 visits, that could give you good value. Maybe not worth the full 550 of the card, but still good value from that, I think. And the guest passes are good. I mean, you can't get that from an Amex Platinum card. I'm not talking about the Delta Platinum card, but the Amex Platinum card, which gives you Sky Club access as well, does not give you guest passes. So those are both valuable perks. And the companion ticket can be really valuable. And so that really depends on how often do you fly with a companion? It has to be round trip. It has to be, they call it domestic, but it really applies also to some sort of near international flights. Like I say, I think you could go to the Caribbean or sort of Northern South America, even as long as it's not a Delta one flight,

there's various rules, but anyway, um, you know, if you can get good use out of that every year, you could easily exceed the, the cost of the, the card and,

and get more value from it. Um, finally, if you're interested in elite status with Delta, you kind of need this card. I mean, the Platinum card gives you that same $2,500 MQD head start. But if you want to earn additional MQDs from spend, this one earns twice as many MQDs as the platinum card does. So the Delta platinum card does. So you need this one for that. And I know that we've addressed this before, but for somebody who is unaware,

do the MQD headstarts stack? They do. So you could get both the Delta Reserve consumer card and the Delta Reserve business card and have 5,000 MQDs each year. So you'd have silver status right from the get-go each year. You could even get the Delta Platinum consumer and business cards as well and start the year with 10,000 MQDs. So gold status automatically

until Delta raises the MQD requirements again for each tier, which they're pretty certain to do, uh, for in 2025, I think. Um, but at least for next year, um, you could have gold status just by having those four cards. Yeah. Pretty cool. Now, my final question is one that we don't usually talk about during card talk because it relates to the welcome bonus, but not the current welcome bonus. Now, my final question is one that we don't usually talk about during card talk because it relates to the welcome bonus, but not the current welcome bonus. My question is on strategy. Does it make more sense to open this card early in the year or even the middle of the

year? Does it make less sense, perhaps, to open it at the end of the year? Are you smarter to open this at the beginning of the year and time out your spending? Or maybe it just depends on how close you are to elite status, because whatever the minimum spending requirement is, that spend is going to earn you MQDs, right? So you need to kind of time out when you're going to do that, right? Yeah, that's a great point. There's another consideration here. If you're not interested in getting all four of these cards, the best strategy may be to start with a Delta Platinum card and get your $2,500 MQDs early in the year in 2024 and wait at least 60 days and then upgrade to the Delta Reserve card. Sometimes Delta will, I mean, Amex will even offer an upgrade bonus when you do that.

And I think from the terms and conditions, we haven't tested this yet. We can't test it until next year. But I think based on the terms and conditions that you'll get another 2,500 MQDs when you do that upgrade. Now, the terms and conditions explicitly say you won't get another 2,500 if you downgrade from the reserve to the platinum. But I think that's why I like this, get the platinum first, then upgrade and see if you don't end up with 5,000 MQDs. And then it'll be into 2024. So do your welcome bonus spend then. And all that spend will also give you additional MQDs because it will. Very good.

The final point I want to make that we haven't addressed is the family language now on the Delta cards. So the MX Delta cards now have family language indicating that if you have had essentially one of the more expensive cards, then you won't qualify or may not qualify. Not won't, but may not qualify for the welcome bonus on one of the less expensive cards. And so what I mean by that is if you get the Delta Reserve card later on, you decide you want the Delta Platinum and you don't want to downgrade, but rather you want to apply outright for it and get a new card, a new card bonus, well, you need to know that the terms say you might not qualify for the welcome bonus on the Delta Platinum if you have or have had the Delta Reserve before. So if you haven't yet had the welcome bonus on the Platinum,

the better strategy is probably to apply for the Delta Platinum card first, because you are still eligible to then separately apply for the Delta Reserveinum card first because you are still eligible to then separately apply for the Delta Reserve if you want. So whether you want to upgrade or you want to separately apply, applying for the Delta Platinum first makes more sense. But if you've had the Platinum before, then by all means, this reserve may be the answer for you.

All right. There you go. That's Card Talk. Crazy thing. What crazy thing did Greg and Nick do? They did three Card Talk, crazy thing. What crazy thing did Greg and Nick do? They did three Card Talk segments. No, what crazy thing did Dollar Dig do this week? Dollar Dig.

What is Dollar Dig? Yeah, right? So Dollar Dig is a cashback portal that, you know, when you shop at regular merchants online, if you click through from a portal, you can get cashback or other rewards. And I use Cashback Monitor. So if I'm shopping at a store like Macy's or whatever, I'll go to Cashback Monitor and see what portal is best. And usually I'll stick with a portal that I know and trust like Rakuten or TopCashback, unless the cashback rate is wildly better at another one.

And so recently there've been a few times where DollarDig has had much better reward payouts. And so recently I got a email saying your cash is ready to be withdrawn. So I logged on and withdrew to PayPal. And at 12.05 a.m. that night, I got an email saying your cash out request was paid. Please leave us a review. And I confirmed it was in fact paid at that time. So I got it in PayPal. But then at 12.17, so less than 15 minutes later, yeah, I got another email. The subject heading account terminated.

And what was funny was the contents of the email. It says, that was pretty slick referring yourself until you hit $25, but it's still a violation of our terms and conditions. So your account, well, it says accounts, are being banned. What? Yeah, what? And sure enough, I couldn't log into Dollar Dig. And I wouldn't have actually cared that much, except that I have $75 pending from referrals. And so now I had not referred myself ever, but I guess in the past, we've put my,

my friend referral on the blog when there's been a good deal at dollar dig or something. I don't actually remember, but, um, I had tried writing back to this email saying, you know, what are you talking about? I haven't done that. But then this morning I, and that didn't result in anything happening, but this morning I found on their website, like a contact us thing. And so I put in there what happened and I pretty immediately got a response saying, hi, Greg, we have a new staff member that may have been trigger happy. I'm reinstating your account now. Sorry for the inconvenience. So all's, all's well that ends well. I was, I was ready to, I was ready to swear off dollar dig, but I actually am pleased with their quick turnaround on this. So I'm not going to stop digging for dollars.

That's right. I'm not going to stop digging for dollars when the opportunity is there. Very good. Well, I'm glad to hear that you will dig on. I have not used dollar dig. I don't think myself, but I think the moral of the story here is don't be afraid to push back, right? I mean, you know, if something like this happens, sometimes it does require a little effort and it shouldn't. I mean, let's be clear. It shouldn't be an issue, but whatever things happen, people make mistakes. You get a trigger happy employee banning accounts. That kind of thing can happen. So it's worth reaching out again and being like, hey, but that's not what happened here. And I'm sure that it was a roll of the dice. Greg didn't know that it was going to get reinstated. And you don't know how those things are going to work out. But it's probably worth a shot, especially over the 75

bucks that you got pending. So whether or not that'll ever materialize, who knows? Because I have some of those portals. I have referrals that have pended for years. Who knows if people ever did the whatever shopping they had to do or that kind of thing in order to trigger the bonuses. But there's our crazy thing. Let's talk quickly about Mattress Running the Numbers. So this week's Mattress Running the Numbers is, well, I don't know if it's a mattress one, but then it sort of is, right?

So Capital One Travel is out with a cool deal. So Capital One Travel is, I don't know, Capital One has been adding all these things over the last few years, ever since the launch of the VentureX, particularly, they've added the Capital One Entertainment and Capital One Travel, which has hotel bookings and flight bookings, of course, but they also have their version of Amex Fine Hotels and Resorts, which is the Capital One Premier Collection. And it's different than FHR in the sense that there are different properties, whereas a lot of other luxury booking platforms have the same hotels. Capital One has somehow created a differentiated set of properties. So that makes it mildly interesting, at least. And what's really cool here is they've run a bunch of promotions. And this one is awesome if it's still alive when you hear this, because it's $200 off of a Premier Collection booking.

Now, you have to be a VentureX cardholder in order to have this. But if you are a VentureX cardholder, you log into Capital One Travel and you search for Premier Collection hotels, and it just legit takes $200 off. So if you find a cheap one, you can earn 10 X miles, get the a hundred dollar credit that comes with your premier collection, booking daily breakfast for two room upgrade, et cetera. Although I guess you're not going to get 10 X miles on that $200 because that just comes right off the top and it can make for some really cheap hotels days. Yeah. Yeah. It's really great. So especially, you know, if you're looking at a one night stay, you might be able to find a hotel that's around $200 and basically get all that for free and you know, if you're looking at a one night stay, you might be able to find a hotel that's around $200 and basically get all that for free. And, you know, the free breakfast, potential for early check in, late checkout, all that stuff is pretty nice.

So that's terrific. And, you know, I think it's just worth pointing out, you do have to book by December 31st. And as Nick sort of mentioned, they have a sort of while supplies last caveat without saying how big are the supplies. Like, we have no idea. But I think this is more, I more wanted to bring this up during the show as a way of saying it's worth logging into your Capital One account fairly regularly, going into the travel, like book travel section, seeing what the deals are. And sometimes you'll run across a deal like this. This one is terrific. But every now and then there's other terrific ones as well. Yeah. There were a whole bunch this week that I saw. I was like, wow, some of those look really good if you're traveling to any of the places that are included, I saved 100 bucks on a flight

not that long ago. So there's a bunch of different things like that. Also worth a mention here is that when we first posted this, when I searched after Stephen posted this, most of the Premier Collection hotels said they weren't available on the dates that I checked. And I assumed it was because I was a little slow in logging on and taking a look and they'd already gotten booked up or whatever. But then this morning, as we record the show,

a couple of days before we released this, we got some reports from readers saying, hey, there's a lot more hotels available now than were available when it was initially posted. So if you looked right at the beginning and you're like, ah, there's nothing available, it's worth maybe taking a second look. And also the final thing I should note about this is that the search results populate really weirdly in the Capital One Travel Portal in that they don't all populate at once.

So if you just do a hotel search just in the plane, not even the Premier Collection, the plane hotels, it'll load like 30 or 40 or 50 initially. And then if you just wait a few seconds, it'll all of a sudden have 60 or 80 hotels. You wait a few seconds more, it'll have 130 hotels. You wait a few seconds more, I have 150. It keeps going up like that. I don't know why it populates weirdly like that,

but I have found that sometimes there's a Premier Collection hotel that's available. You just need to give it a few seconds to finish loading the results. It doesn't always show up first. So that's just a tip for using their wonky search tool there. That's really good to know. Wow. It doesn't, I mean,

it's not going to happen all the time, but a few times while I was searching, it did happen where I just, I happened to leave it open. Cause I looked at my phone and then I looked back and I was like, Oh, Oh, there was something available. Look at that. Uh, so then I started to get a little bit more patient with it. And then a lot of times that patience didn't pay off, but you know, Hey, it's a tip to keep an eye on. So there we go. That was mattress running the numbers. Check that one out. There'll be a link in the show notes. Of course, let's talk about award talk. What's up with Hyatt. Yeah. So if you remember Hyatt bought a Mr. And Mrs. Smith, which is a, it's really a marketing company for independent hotels. So there's independent hotels all over the world. And if you book through Mr. and Mrs.

Smith, you get some benefits like a welcome drink or whatever. And I was very excited about this acquisition because I thought maybe it would turn out a lot like Hyatt's acquisition or partnership, sorry, with SLH, Small Luxury Hotels of the World, which is also like an independent hotel marketing organization. I love the SLH partnership because you can book hotels with Hyatt points, often at very reasonable rates. You can earn elite nights from your stays. You get other benefits automatically by booking through Hyatt. And so I was expecting more of the same with Mr. and Mrs. Smith. But what we got was an email talking about the ability through March 31st of 2024 to buy Mr. and Mrs. Smith gift cards and get some Hyatt benefits out of that. And so it seems like they are doing this very, very loose integration instead of full integration like they did with SLH. And the optimist in me says, OK, well, they're just doing that until April of

2024 when they'll be fully integrated and the pessimist in me says they can't figure out how to integrate, so they're just doing this instead. And so we don't know. We don't know what the answer is. But let me let me describe what's on offer here. Through March 31st of 2024, you can buy Mr. and Mrs. Smith gift cards. You'll earn five points per dollar. Plus, for every $300 you spend, you'll earn one tier qualifying night. What does that mean? With Hyatt, when you earn tier qualifying knights,

those count towards elite status. Hyatt has multiple levels of elite status. The one worth pursuing is globalist status, which requires 60 knights. Hyatt also offers like various perks at different thresholds uh so at i think where where you where it gets really interesting is at 50 nights when you get your first uh sweet uh sweet upgrade awards so um buying these gift cards can help get you to elite status. And if you do the math here, so you get one elite night per $300 spent, since 60 is what's required for globalist status, you do the math, you could buy globalist status for $18,000

worth of Mr. and Mrs. Smith gift cards. Well, if you tend to travel a lot and stay in expensive hotels, that might not actually be horribly bad. It has some interesting sort of – there's some interesting things to be said about this. So first of all, I can't think of any other case where you can pay money now and get elite credits now, like in 2023. So to apply towards your status earnings in 2023 for travel that you won't do until future years, potentially, because these gift cards don't expire. So you could do the travel whenever. Another thing to say, I thought when I first read it that this would be potentially a double dip opportunity. So my thought was you buy the gift cards now, you get elite status now, and you wait until Hyatt merges appropriately with Mr. and Mrs. Smith and where you book through Hyatt and you get elite

nights and then pay for your stay with these gift cards and you'll be able to double dip that way. But you can't because when you read the terms, these gift cards can only be applied online at Mr. and Mrs. Smith, not at the hotel property. So if in some future world, if we are able to book through Hyatt, we won't be able to use these gift cards to pay through Hyatt, even at the hotel. That stinks. That stinks. For lots of reasons, but at least one of which is that I would imagine, well, you know what? I shouldn't even ask. I was going to say, I imagine that booking online with the gift cards would mean a prepaid rate. So I mean, I guess it must.

And so is that what I don't know is, does that mean a non-cancellable? Yeah. So maybe there's still a cancellation policy. Not nearly as exciting as I thought. When I took in what you said a minute ago about the opportunity to essentially buy global status for $18,000 worth of gift cards, which you then can also use to stay in future years. There was initially part of me was like $18,000. Forget about it. And then there was the part of me that said, Well, I mean, I guess if you're planning like a honeymoon stay or something where you were already going to spend 10 or 12 or 15, I mean,

some people do spend $18,000 on hotel stays. So if you're already going to do that, getting those stays and high globalist status as a side benefit, yeah, I guess I could see where that could be appealing. But man, I would really hesitate to commit much money when you don't know what's going to happen in the future and there's no real tie-in. So like you said, you're not going to, at least as things stand, you're not going to get elite credit when you use them. You're not going to earn any high points when you use them. So you're just getting those things up front that you would normally expect to get later on. And that is less appealing to spend, uh, let's say $900 or $1,200 next year on hotels and, and they need a few more nights, uh, more elite qualifying nights, either to get to a useful tier bonus milestone bonus with Hyatt or to get to the 60 nights for globalist, then that's pretty cool. It's sort of like prepaying for those stays.

And Mr. and Mrs. Smith does have a ton, ton of properties around the world. So depending on where you're going, I mean, it's not really locking you out of much, I think, by doing that. Flip side is then you're not using your valuable Hyatt points. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it does not like you out of much except for using your Hyatt elite status at the nice Hyatt property in those places or, or all of the other hotel programs that might be available. And it locks you into whatever price Mr. And Mrs. Smith happens to be charging in the place you're going, whether that's competitive or not. So, I mean, there's, I feel like it's awfully limiting. I mean, I made it sound much more broadly applicable,

I think that it's there, but yeah, I'll give you that. But yes, I mean, if you're just a couple nights short and you're thinking about staying in a Mr. and Mrs. Smith, then of course, I mean, it seems like very easy ways better than doing a mattress run and throwing away points that you're not going to get a stay that matters to you out of. Instead, you're actually going to get a stay that matters potentially. So yes, if you're a few nights short, I can totally see this being worthwhile. Personally, I didn't find it exciting once I dug in all those details like you. I was like, oh, two elite nights for the cost of one initially.

And I was like, oh, man, come on. Yeah, do better. One less one last thing I want to say about it. You can use Hyatt points to buy these gift cards, but you shouldn't. You'll get 1.2 cents per point value, which is very low for Hyatt. And you won't earn the elite nights. So even if you get $300

worth of gift cards, if you pay with your points, you won't get elite nights. I don't understand that decision at all. It doesn't make any sense to me at all. Yeah, you always get elite nights when you use them for hotel stays. Right. So why wouldn't you get them?

Yeah. That's bizarre. Well, you know, they say there's no it in Hyatt. So that's, uh, you know,

probably an it limitation is my bat more than anything else, but all right, real quick, Nick, what do you think is a longterm? Is this, is this the future of Hyatt's integration with Mr. Mrs.

Smith longterm, or is this a, a stop gap? Gosh, I hope not. I mean, this, like this is what Marriott would do. This is not what I expect Hyatt to do. Marriott would have like 19 different brands with different policies and different ways of booking them and different numbers of points you can earn on each one. Hyatt, I mean, come on, Hyatt. The whole advantage of your program is that you keep things very simple and you make the program really valuable.

You're already complexifying things too much with the all inclusives. I think the ABCD chart or whatever for all inclusives, I already think over complicates the program in a way that's not necessary. And we started to divide into the timeless collection and this and that. That doesn't really make any sense to me either. Boy, I don't like the direction things are going. So, yeah, if I were predicting things, yeah, I would predict that this is unfortunately the way that it's going to go. But I'm hopeful that it's going to be better in the long run. What do you think?

All right. You heard that, Hyatt. Nick is not pleased with the latest stuff going on. Yeah, yeah. Hyatt has mostly... Historically, in recent years, they seem to be one of the few chains that understand the value of their loyalty programs and how

good it is to preserve value. So I think at the very least, so here's what I think is probably happening. My guess of what's happening is that they put out this deadline on this because it was like a compromise made between the people running the loyalty program who wanted something good and the accountants who didn't want something good. And they put it out there to basically get real world feedback. I think they're going to hear a lot of negative feedback from this. And I think it'll go back to the drawing board. And I hope and pray they'll do a SLH type of integration and not a, not this. Let's be clear.

I hope so too. I mean, I would love to be proven wrong. Yes. Okay. I hope so too. That's what we're all expecting when they, they required this.

I have to imagine how I was expecting it to. Right. I hope so. Hopefully you're right. I think you're right. There's a little negotiating that has to happen, but hopefully that gets done before March 31st. All right. That, my friends, brings us finally to today's main event.

It's main event time. How to get awesome value from American Airlines miles. So quickly, before we talk about how to get value from them, how do you earn them? There's several credit cards where you could get welcome bonuses, like both from Citibank and Barclays. There's American Airlines shopping portal. So you can earn miles for shopping. And there's Simply Miles, which you can earn miles for shopping and there's simply miles which you can connect to your any master card you have and and earn additional american airlines miles when when shopping um then there's all kinds of other partnerships american airlines has did i miss anything important nick i mean you know those are the main ways that most people

can earn some from flying too yeah you could and them from the Hyatt partnership and, you know, like three from the partnership with Shell Rewards. But, you know, there's there are a few other things that you can earn from. But the majority of miles, yeah, credit cards, shopping portals, simply miles. Those are the main sources, I think, for most of us. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's talk about how to get great value. Now, we're going to divide the conversation into using your miles to fly American Airlines and using your miles to fly partners. Those are the two big topics. We're not going to be talking about using miles to book rental cars or hotels or to buy chess sets or anything like that, because you can do all those things uh but you're not going to get great value you're not even get good good value you're not even going to get okay value um not even marginally acceptable value yeah awful value and it's like why did you collect them if you're going

to throw them away i mean you know it's nice free stuff but it's not real free if you were dealing for low value right so don't do that um But do encourage your neighbors to do that because when people use their points to bad value, that helps supplement the ability for programs to give good value for other things. So. You're right. You're right. Thank you. Please get the chess set. Go ahead. Get the chess set if you want. Only the neighbors that you really dislike. That guy that's mowing the lawn at three in the morning. I mean, he totally deserves to get that chest set. And then don't forget to compliment him on his fantastic, really handsome looking

chest set. It was only 500,000 American Airlines. It ties the room together. That was an excellent choice. All right. So how can we do better than the chest set that ties the room together. That was an excellent choice. All right. So how can we do better than the chess set that ties the room together? All right. So for using them for American Airlines flights, close in. So as flights get closer and closer to departure, airlines tend to raise prices, raise cash prices. But American Airlines tends to offer still great award prices, sometimes better award prices close in when they know they're not likely to fill the airplane. And so I just did a random sample. I took like three routes and just like randomly looked at some flights that are within the next few days. And I found I would get from 2.4 cents per point value to 3.9. I mean, anytime you're getting substantially over one and a half, I think you're doing pretty well.

When you're getting over two, that's very good. So just completely random few routes I looked at. And let, let me just give you one example that I thought was kind of neat. New York city to Los Angeles nonstop. So it's, you know, a flight you'd,

you would want to pick not, not one that's bouncing all over. The last minute economy flight, $422. The last minute award price, 13,000 American Airlines miles. So that's 3.2 cents per point value. Here's where it gets even more interesting. So business class, this is lie flat. You know, these are, these are nice seats, lie flat seats. Uh, you pay last minute for this one way flight, you're going to be paying over $1,200. Uh, if you pay with miles, it's 31,000 for this one-way flight, you're going to be paying over $1,200.

If you pay with miles, it's $31,000 for this particular flight that I looked at. That's nearly $0.04 per point value compared to the cash rate. And that's six hours of live flat flying. That's as good as flying from East Coast to Europe. And for 31,000 miles, that's a great deal. That's fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. Anecdotally, I found this to also be the case that many times close in from my small regional airport, flights are a much better deal with American Airlines miles. Now, it's not true, usually close in like a holiday week or something like that. But close in on like an average weekend or average weekday or whatever,

it could be great deals with American Airlines miles. So, yeah, I think that that is a potentially good use. And if you have something that comes up last minute that you need to get to, whether that's, you know, an event that you want to go see or, you know, you have a death in the family and you want to get somewhere to be with them and that sort of thing. I mean, they could be great

when you need a ticket at the last minute. So that's certainly one to keep an eye on. And I think that Transcon sweet spot is a particular one that's really notable. I mean, it used to be that they had an award chart. And so that was what, 25,000 miles. So I think for a long time, many of us had trouble accepting a world where it costs more than 25,000 miles. But I think your comparison to Europe was a really solid one. Like from the East coast to Europe, many of us wouldn't think twice about redeeming 50 or 60,000 miles. It's essentially the same distance from New York to LA and 31,000 miles for that is pretty good. Even if you do have to fly American airlines to get it.

Yeah. Yeah. Now, if I remember right, even when they had an award chart, I think at some point they added a higher rate to these particular types of flights. Yeah, you're right. But it was still. I think it was 30 or 35. Yeah, you're right. Fairly good value. And keep in mind, when I give examples like this 31,000, because they don't have an award chart, it's just sort of the random amount they happen to be charging for the flight I looked at. You'll find different things. Sometimes it'll be much more. Sometimes it might be less. So another category of American Airlines flights that can give great value are flying from places that are not American Airlines hubs. So people in their

hubs or flying out of their hubs, Dallas and what is Chicago and Charlotte, Charlotte, of course. Yeah. Charlotte's a big one. Um, they often find really bad pricing, unfortunately. Um, but those of us flying from, from off airports. So I fly out of Detroit, which is a Delta hub, very much not an American hub. And Nick flies often out of Albany. We often see really good pricing and it just seems like they prefer to give lower pricing for flights that don't originate at hubs and have connections. That's where I guess almost by definition, they'll have connections because the only nonstops are going to be to a hub from these airports. Anyway, just one random example I pulled up, I looked at flying from Flint, Michigan to Los Angeles and often. So I looked at their calendar and 6,000 points often for this one-way flight versus a low of $162, which isn't that bad either, but still that's 2.6 cents per point. And first class, 16,000 points one way versus about $560. So that's like three and a half cents per point value. So

yeah, fly out of places where American Airlines is not dominant and you can do really well. Absolutely. Very good. So what about this roll the dice AA flights? I saw that on the notes and I was like, what are you talking about here with roll the dice? what i'm talking about there is because they don't have an award chart what you'll often see is prices just fluctuate and it seems like almost random and and um you know we've had experiences we we've each nick and i've had experiences where we see a certain price and we say oh that's too expensive so we don't book it but then do a search like an hour or two later or the next day. And, and the price is really good or vice versa. Maybe, maybe we didn't book when we saw a really good price and then we, we regret it later because now the price is, is bad. And so I just, I think of it as like, it's like a slot machine. Every time you run that

search, every time you run the search, you don't know what you're going to get. Sometimes you'll win with a really good award price. Sometimes you won't. Yeah, no, that's a great point. I realized as soon as you started talking, I was like, oh, that's right. We had that situation. I was booking my flight back from our party of five trip where I checked and then like 10 minutes later, the price was way higher. And then like 15 minutes later than that, it was down near where it was initially. So yeah, definitely a roll the dice there. So you may get really lucky and find a good deal on American Airlines flights. Also, I mean, we mentioned for domestic awards there. But as I was just saying there, that was an international award. And I have occasionally

found really good deals on some of the international awards on American Airlines metal. I recently booked four of us to Australia. I don't know if we're actually going to take the trip, but 72,000 miles per person from New York to Australia and business class on American flying there, Los Angeles to Sydney route. So that's not the best price ever, but it's awfully good for summer vacation, school break time to get to Australia. So again, I don't know whether or not that was a speculative trip I was booking, but the bottom line is it's worth searching now and then because sometimes you'll be like, oh, wow, American has four seats. This is great. So take a look. But of course, I get most excited about American Airlines partner awards, and they still have

a partner award chart, unlike their own flights, which can be any price on earth. Their partner awards still priced according to an award chart. And that award chart still has some really good sweet spots. It really does. And, you know, even even where it's not like a great sweet spot, they're generally good compared to most competition. And so and I should caveat that business, international business class, especially like there's no, there's no particular, like really outrageous outliers where, where they charge way more than, than competitors. I mean, they just have good business class award prices when booking their partners. So we'll call out a few examples. One of my favorites,

flying from North America to Africa, anywhere in Africa. So let's say you want to go all the way to South Africa, 40,000 points in economy, 75,000 in business class. That's where it gets really interesting, I think. I mean, you're talking about like you could fly Qatar Q suites all the way from anywhere in the U S through Doha to South Africa, only 75,000 miles. Fantastic value. Yeah. I mean, that's not even double the price of an economy redemption. And I think anybody who's been in Q suites will tell you that it is definitely double the experience of sitting in economies. So, uh, or more than double the experience of sitting in economy. So, or more than double the experience of sitting in economy. So yeah, that's a great one. Solid, solid redemption there.

Not the lowest price ever to Africa, but you can get one of the better experiences. I mean, Cutter Q Suites is often regarded as the best business class out there, or at least among the best couple. So getting that for a decent award rate is pretty good. I mean, not to mention 40k might also be great in economy, depending on where you're starting and where you're going. Cash prices to some parts of Africa can be really expensive. And Qatar has decent reach in Africa. So that's a good option. Another one, Japan, Korea, 60,000 miles one way in business class. That's Northern Asia is what they call it,

the Japan and Korea section of the award chart. But yeah, I mean, 35,000 in economy, already not bad from a lot of smaller airports, especially in the US, and then 60,000 in business. Again, less than half the cost of an economy redemption for a business class redemption. And so you could fly Japan Airlines for that and get a pretty good business class experience for a really reasonable number of miles. Yeah. Yeah. That's terrific. And then if you want to go elsewhere in Asia, it just goes up a little bit in economy to 37.5 thousand. So 37,500 points one way to anywhere else in Asia from North America or 70,000 in business class. So that's 10,000 more than to go to Japan or Korea. But still, that's that's a good rate when you can find it.

Yep. And another thing I think is worth mentioning. So these are all from North America to those sections, those areas of the world. And I think it's worth mentioning that the welcome bonuses on their credit cards, one welcome bonus is often enough to get yourself a business class flight to almost anywhere in the world and frequently on airlines that you would be happy to fly in business class on. So I think that's notable, too, that one single welcome bonus could very easily get you to most places. Yeah. Yeah. All right. I'm going to talk about one particular award from Europe. So that is business class from Europe to the Middle East or India is $42,500 one way, or first class $62,500.

The reason I want to talk about that one is because Etihad flies London to Abu Dhabi. And so that counts in this. They are a partner of American Airlines and you could fly Etihad first-class apartments for as few as $62,500. I flew this exact route, Abu Dhabi to London way back when, and it was absolutely incredible. You get your own room, basically. And incredible service, incredible food, $62,500. You can't beat that. No, that's very difficult to beat. And even the $42,500 business class price, if you can find Cutter Q Suites on a route between the Middle East and Europe, that can be a great deal. And keep in mind, we've mentioned this before probably, but Qatar markets a lot of their shorter flights within the Middle East as first class, even though they're only a two cabin plane at times. And so you're

actually flying in business class and you're paying the business class price, at least in some cases. So for instance, I did this, if you fly from Dubai to Doha, and then Doha on to Europe, you'll pay the business class price if you're booking a business class award 42,500 miles, but that flight from Dubai to Doha may and frequently is marketed as first class, which gets you into the first class lounge in Doha. So that can be a neat little trick to get yourself at least part of the first class experience. And if you find a route that's served with a Cutter Q suites plane, you also get a great in-flight experience. All that said, I think that if you can do apartments between London and Abu Dhabi for $62,500, I would still take that over the business class suite spot. But I think the business class suite spot is also pretty cool. The economy class one at $20,000 may be be a good deal although there are a number of low-cost carriers operating between europe and the middle east so it's worth checking cash prices to see whether or not that's a good deal because i think it'll really vary so uh so there's you're up to

that now speaking of the middle east i think one of the best sweet spots or most interesting or coolest ones, in addition to that one you just mentioned, is Middle East or India also is included in that to Asia for twenty two thousand five hundred miles an economy. OK, or maybe twenty five thousand miles an economy. I think it depends on where you're starting. Right. But more interestingly, it depends whether you're going to Japan or Asia. One or Asia, too. Right. It's so close. Yeah, basically the same in economy. But whether you're going to Asia one or Asia to business class is 40,000 miles.

So already a very good deal because some of the flights, I mean, you're going Abu Dhabi to Tokyo, which I did before 40,000 miles in business class would be excellent. First class is only 50,000 miles on this. Yeah, 50,000 in first class. be excellent first class is only fifty thousand miles on this yeah fifty thousand in first class you can go from middle east so i for example i went from cairo to abu dhabi to tokyo for at the time it was 45 now it's fifty thousand miles one way in first class that's an amazing deal it really is imagine if ed if Etihad starts flying the apartments to Japan, for example, that 50,000 points for that, that would be just insane. And it's amazing. And we often kind of see this. So this is like an American carriers program with an award chart covering this award chart example is covering two regions that are very far from the united states and so we often see that where where the best sweet spots don't touch the country the home program that the program is from for yeah the home turf that's a good way of putting it so uh it's probably potentially the best sweet spot on their on their uh award chart but yeah i mean

potentially it depends on how you use it but you know even i i flew i had first class not in the apartments and it was terrific so still yeah yeah i would be happy to to fly that for 50 000 miles again oh my gosh an opportunity think about it like um're happy. It's not unheard of, but we're happy when we could find 50,000 point business class to Europe from the East Coast U.S., which is, you know, what, a six hour flight, depending on where you're going. And this, I mean, it could be much longer flight even. And we're talking about first class 50,000. That's that's nuts. That is great. All right. 50,000. That's nuts. Yeah, it is. Great sweet spot. And so, you know, when you

go over to your neighbor's place and you play chess and you enjoy that chess match, I want you to move that piece and think, for the same number of miles I can fly first class on that dad, right? So, don't get the chess set. Don't get the moral of the story. Congratulate your neighbor, but don't redeem for the chess set because you could

redeem for much better. Now, what else? What other sweet spots are there? All right. So from Africa to Africa, 17,500 miles economy or 35,000 business class. Why is that interesting? Mainly because they let you book some carriers that will route you outside of Africa even. So you can book, you could go all the way across the length of Africa through Doha in the Middle East by booking Qatar Business Class and for only 35,000 miles one way. And that's just crazy. So it'll take a lot of time, but you can get a lot of excellent, excellent service and food on those flights. Yeah. You know, that's an interesting point because I think sometimes people will look at something like that and say, well, it's not practical. You're going to fly way

more. And why would I want to do that? Well, I mean, if you enjoy the experience, I think for a lot of us, the in-flight experience is part of the trip. But, you know, when you're redeeming for something like that or Carter Q suites, you're going to say, OK, well, to me, that's part of the enjoyment of traveling is checking that out. If that's you, then this is a fantastic sweet spot. If you're the type of person that's like, I don't want to waste any extra time in the air. I just want to get from A to B. Well, this sweet spot won't be the right one for you. But for I think a lot of people, it's pretty cool to be able to do something like that. Yeah.

Plus, I mean, within Africa, the route networks aren't very strong, especially for using points. So depending on where you're going from to, it might not actually be that much worse than your other options. So, and you'll get a potentially much nicer experience for far fewer points for certain, for sure. All right. Then we've got also Asia to the South Pacific is another particularly good notable one. And to be clear, we're not mentioning every single sweet spot here, right? There's a whole bunch more.

We're just highlighting some of the ones that we think are ways to get amazing value out of your American Airlines miles. But it's worth noting that even very good value out of your American Airlines miles can be really good. There's a lot of other sweet spots that we're not including in this particular show that you still could redeem for. But speaking of one of the other really good ones, I think is Asia to the South Pacific for 40,000 miles one way in business class. I've used this one a few times myself. I find it particularly useful because we've often said that getting to the South Pacific, Australia, New Zealand, et cetera, can be challenging from the United States. There are usually not very many options to get there directly. You're usually going to have to go via somewhere else and the somewhere else is usually Asia. And so more than once before, I have booked one flight to Asia and a

separate flight from Asia to the South Pacific for 40,000 miles each way. So that I think is a good value because you're talking about a lot of distance. You know, if you just quickly look at the map, you might be like, ah, no big deal. But when you start to look at the flight distances, 40,000 for business class seems really good. It really does. Yeah. And so, and I think in my limited experience looking at that, award availability tends to be better between Asia and the South Pacific than trying to fly from North America to the South Pacific for sure. So that is a really good way to go. And especially if you could fit in like an interesting stop

where you actually want to go to wherever you are going in Asia, then you can make a bigger, you know, great trip out of that. That's a great point that's worth hammering home that word availability, oftentimes on routes

that are not to or from the United States is far better than what you may be used to if you don't look at those types of things often. But when we talk about flying from the Middle East to Asia or from Europe to the Middle East, and it sounds like a pie in the sky kind of a thing, do some searching because you may be surprised that award availability is much better than you might expect on a lot of these regions that connect outside of the United States. Yep. Yep. All right. Let's talk about American Airlines partners. Like which ones are we excited about? Which ones are really worth discussing here? And first, I mean, you can't talk about American Airlines partner awards without

kind of groaning a little bit about British Airways. And here's the problem. If you're flying from North America, especially from the East Coast to just about anywhere, but especially to Europe or Africa, and you're looking for awards on AA.com, you're going to see awards that are flying British Airways. And you're going to see often, usually outrageously high surcharges on those awards. That's not good. No, it's not good. It's not good. That said, I mean, British Airways can be really nice to fly if you can fly their new Club World suites. Those can be really nice.

I'm not a fan of their old business class product too much, but their new one is nice. You can avoid. There's various ways of avoiding these fuel surcharges. One easy one is you'll have very moderate surcharges if you fly from Europe, not England, to the US. Then even though you're flying British Airways, the surcharges are fairly reasonable. Much more reasonable, that's for sure. I mean, I departed Europe earlier this year, about $300 in surcharges departing Europe, but far more reasonable than departing the United States. too. You could book with American Airlines miles. Japan Airlines, they have a number of routes between North America and Japan. So they're really good. Qantas, if you want to fly to down under. Qatar, if you want to fly to the Middle East or beyond, like we talked earlier

about flying all the way to South Africa and Qatar, that's a great way to go. Etihad, similar. You can fly them to Middle East or elsewhere with American Airlines. You may have to look out for a couple things there. American doesn't do a good job of consistently showing award availability on Etihad. It seems to come and go. That's true of Qatar, too, for some reason. But there's also, American has routing rules that apply differently to different partners. And so depending on where you want to go, you may or may not be

able to book it the whole way with a single award. But still, that's a great partner. They have great in-flight products and great service and everything. And then we've got a couple sort of interesting ones because of where they bring you more than because of how nice they are to fly. So both Air Tahiti Nui and Fiji are partners of American Airlines. Yeah. And so Air Tahiti Nui, you can fly to, well, Tahiti, of course. And so the award rate isn't amazing at 80,000 miles one way. That's not your best for business class. Yes.

Not your best option to get to Tahiti necessarily, although it may be your only option because sometimes there's award availability to Tahiti can be difficult to come by. So it's an option anyway, to keep in mind. I do want to mention for anybody who's not considered Tahiti before, not looked at it closely, that there are two different airlines with almost identical names. There's Air Tahiti Nui, which flies intercontinentally between the United States and Tahiti. And then there's Air Tahiti, which flies domestically within Tahiti. And those are two different airlines. So if you want to fly to Tahiti, Air Tahiti Nui is what you're going to potentially fly with American Airlines miles. But once you get to Tahiti, if you really want to go to, say, Bora Bora or one of the other outlying islands, you're going

to have to book a separate ticket on Air Tahiti. And Air Tahiti doesn't partner with anybody. So there's no miles use on Air Tahiti apart from using perhaps the chase portal to book your flights to the chase portal at one and a half cents per point or something of that nature. So keep in mind that Air Tahiti is only going to get you to Papeete. So that's and that's true whether you're flying Air France using Air France miles or using American Airlines, that's going to get you so far. And you'll have to get the rest of the way if you're going to another island differently. Of course, you're going to Morea. I think you can take a ferry.

So different options there. Fiji Airways is another one that actually Fiji Airways. You'll do better booking via Alaska Airlines. You'll pay far fewer miles via Alaska Airlines. It's only 55,000 miles one way in business class on Alaska Airlines. So actually, I take that back. Maybe if you're only flying to Fiji, it could be more. If you continue on to Australia anyway, it's 55,000 miles, which is a better deal, I think, than paying 80,000 American Airlines miles. Neither of these airlines are renowned for their amazing in-flight experience,

but they both have pretty nice looking business class anyway. So they can be a good way to get to the South Pacific. And then from there on your way back, you may use 40,000 to fly Fiji Airways anyway to get your way up to parts of Asia to catch that flight home that you found. So I think the nice thing here

is that these are good airlines in general. I mean, certainly British Airways, Cathay, Japan Airlines, Qantas, Qatar, Etihad are all pretty well respected for good in-flight experience. And that's particularly true, I think, when you're flying in business class or first class, which are the redemptions I tend to get most excited about because they yield amazing value for the number of miles required. So it's nice because you can use your American airlines miles to fly airlines that are generally more highly regarded than American airlines. And, uh, and no, that's not so much

a knock on American airlines as it is a, uh, you know, a recognition of the fact that these airlines all offer a pretty superior, pretty consistently superior in flight experience. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, overall American Airlines, you know, I hear people who are frustrated because they look up awards for the specific place they want to go for that specific date and they see the prices are astronomical and that will happen often. But if you know how to search around, you know how to use word search tools, you know how to use the calendar tool on AmericanAirlinesAA.com, you can find these great values we're talking about. They do exist and, yeah, you can get great value.

And that's why a few months ago i wrote that american airlines my new favorite airline uh miles to have i mean because i just keep finding great value with these miles and uh you know um it just it keeps happening that they're the ones i'm booking with you know and yeah and so so there's a lot a lot of value to be had there. There certainly is. And to that last point, if you know what you're doing, one tip that we mentioned a lot of times when we talk to award booking newcomers is look for your long haul flights first. So you know, if you're in Grand Rapids, Michigan, don't try to search for Grand Rapids to Johannesburg, start with a route that you know is going to be served

by one of these airlines you want to fly like JFK to Doha, and Doha to Johannesburg, start with a route that you know is going to be served by one of these airlines you want to fly, like JFK to Doha and Doha to Johannesburg, and see if you can find those routes, the days when those things are available, or maybe JFK all the way to Johannesburg, and then figure out the Grand Rapids to JFK separately, or see if you can also find availability for that. But rather than locking yourself into having to find availability on a maximum number of connections all on the same day, start with finding when those long haul routes are available and then work your way backwards kind of to put the pieces together to find the flights that are presumably less important to you than those long haul flights that you want to make

sure you have a good experience with. Right. And that's when you want to fly their partners, American Airlines partners. And when you want to make sure you have a good experience with. Right. And that's when you want to fly their partners, American Airlines partners. And when you want to fly American Airlines itself, start from Grand Rapids. I bet you'll find better award prices than starting from New York. Absolutely true. Yes. No, you're right. You're right about that. That is a really solid, solid point. Depends on what you're looking to fly. All right. Well, so moral of the story, you can do really well with American Airlines miles. Both of us have gotten, I think, unexpectedly excited about American

Airlines miles over these last couple of years because we've found so many good ways to get great value. I just keep redeeming them and I'm running out of them. And so we recently signed up for those aviator red cards because we're kind of scratching the bottom of the barrel here. And so how can you earn American Airlines miles? Keep in mind, there's a whole bunch of credit cards. So we mentioned at the beginning credit cards, but there's a bunch of them because Citi and Barclays both issue them also built rewards transfers to American Airlines one to one. So worth keeping that in mind, too. All right. I think that brings us to this week's question of the week. This week's question of the week comes in from Christopher. Christopher wrote an email and said, hey, I'm a frequent or a fairly new rather

to the Frequent Miler world, but I've been obsessively reading and listening to all your content the last few months. I've been spending most of 2023 chasing signup bonuses and I thought I was doing it responsibly. I started with five cards, four chase and one Bank of America, closed one chase card. It was a business card

and I don't have the side gig right now. And the Bank of America, it was an airline. I wasn't flying. So he opened five cards. He closed two of them. It sounds like over the last six months, I've opened four new cards across Chase Capital One and Citi and got some nice bonuses. Unfortunately, over the last month, I've had three cards rejected. They all say that Experian is reporting too many new accounts opened, but I have no other info to offer. My Experian FICO score is 771. And here's what they report. It looks like new credit is dinging me.

Should I hold off for a few months? Is there anything I can do with Experian to have them stop reporting this as a negative? So when he shared a screenshot of the things factoring into his credit score, one of the things, 10% of the score, says amount of new credit is poor because he has a number of new accounts. So what's your advice for someone in this situation? What do people need to be aware of and think about when they're planning out strategy? Does he need to slow down? Yeah. I mean, if you're brand new to this, then you probably don't have credit cards on your credit reports that are older to help drive up the average age of accounts. So that is something to keep in mind. And I would say when you have cards you're not using anymore,

rather than canceling, see if you can downgrade to a no-fee card and just keep it around forever. When you cancel, it eventually drops off your credit report. And so you really don't want that to happen because what you want is the average age to go up over time. So that'll help a little bit. A bigger part of your credit score though is your utilization ratio. And it could be that regardless of what they told you about why your account was rejected, it's possible maybe you had a lot of spend on your cards in the month before you applied. And so that would make your utilization ratio high, which is bad in their opinion. And so having more cards open and keep them open helps your utilization ratio stay low because you have a bigger amount of credit allocated to you. And so even when you're spending more, it's not looking as bad overall because it's a smaller percentage of the total.

Another thing I would say is, so if you're at a point, which you are in this case, where you're thinking about slowing down, think about just focusing on business cards. So most business cards, with exception of a few Capital One business cards, most of them don't report to your credit report at all. And so assuming you pay. What's that? Assuming you pay them. Assuming you pay them. That's true.

That's true. If you don't pay them on time, then those negative marks might appear. But try applying for business cards. I find like Amex business cards, for example, to be very easy to get approved for in general. And it won't affect your credit. And then you could wait a while to sign up for more personal cards as well. Do you have any other advice that I missed, Nick?

No, I mean, I would just say that too many new accounts open to my first thought. OK, you've had this three times, so there's probably some credence to it. But my first thought is that I've mentioned this before. And a lot of times the reason in the letter is just like it's so boiled down that if it was that simple, then Experian would have nothing to sell the banks. Right. If it was so easy as just it's too many new accounts open, they wouldn't have an algorithm to sell the banks. And whatever person you get a hold of at the bank a if they knew the entirety of the reason why you were rejected they probably wouldn't tell you because they don't want gamers to figure out the system but the key there is they don't know because it's too complicated the algorithms between experience algorithms that they're you know looking to make big money selling

to the banks and the bank's internal algorithms. They probably don't know why you are ultimately declined apart from whatever the computer says. And so it might say too many new accounts open. And sometimes that's relevant. Other times it's not. We've had people report getting that reason, even though they didn't have new accounts. So I don't put tons and tons of credence in that for whatever reason, though you did get

rejected three times. And so, yeah, I think it probably is wise to slow down a little bit. That said, I also think that it's wise to not take it too personally. I think sometimes people look at it and they say, you know, oh, my goodness, I have a good income and a great credit score and they still rejected me. I'm never going to do business with that bank again. I can't believe it. They're ridiculous. And, you know, I think that that's just a short sighted way to look at things. If you've got a good credit score, a 771, whether it's 771 or 781 or 791 or 801, it's all basically the same at that level.

Once you get above a certain level, it's all basically the same thing. So you've got good credit. And if you have good income in the long run, you're going to get approved for a lot of cards. So if you get rejected from one or two here or there, it's really not a big deal. Wait a little bit. Try again. So, yes, I probably would not a big deal. Wait a little bit, try again. So yes, I probably would slow down since you've had three cards rejected, assuming there are

three cards from three different banks. And then as Greg said, I would let my existing accounts age for a while and focus on those business cards. His advice was spot on in keeping cards open for a long time so that the new credit seems to have less of an impact over the long run. So good luck to you, Christopher. And I hope that that helps a little bit, helps frame things for people a little bit too. Unfortunately, we are out of time for today.

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