Frequent Miler on the Air - How to get insane value from your Amex points | Ep201 | 5-6-23

Episode Date: May 6, 2023

Amex Membership Rewards points can be incredibly valuable when used properly toward flights (with airline transfer partners), but they are awful for those looking to redeem for gift cards. This week, we discuss how you can get so much more value with award travel than you will via redemptions like gift cards, Amazon purchases, etc. Join our email list: https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ 00:00 Intro 01:14 Giant Mailbag 10:34 Mattress running the numbers: Numerous transfer bonuses https://frequentmiler.com/current-point-transfer-bonuses/ 10:53 50% transfer bonus to Marriott from Chase 11:27 25% transfer bonus from Chase to Flying Blue 14:50 25% transfer bonus from Amex to Flying Blue 16:57 15% transfer bonus from Amex to Avianca LifeMiles 19:19 30% transfer bonus from Chase to Virgin Atlantic 22:00 Award Talk 29:22 Seats.aero adds Qsuites finder https://frequentmiler.com/seats-aero/ 30:52 Nick's quick hit JetBlue Mint review 34:33 Challenge Update 37:37 Card Talk: Amex Gold Card https://frequentmiler.com/amxgoldcard/ 48:28 Main Event: How to get insane value from your Amex points 50:10 Paying with points can offer acceptable value only when paying for flights with the Business Gold, Business Platinum, or Business Centurion card 54:18 Domestic US: 7,500 BA Avios to fly on AA or Alaska on short nonstop flights 56:38 Domestic US: Delta via Virgin Atlantic for 7,500 miles on short flights 58:15 Domestic US: Avianca LifeMiles to fly United for 7,500 miles on short and medium-distance flights 1:02:03 Star Alliance economy class to Europe: Avianca LifeMiles for 20K one-way to Northern Europe 1:03:06 SkyTeam economy and premium economy class to Europe via Virgin Atlantic 1:04:46 oneworld premium economy to Japan with British Airways Avios 1:06:43 Business class to Europe on Delta using Virgin Atlantic miles 1:07: 18 Business class to Europe using Iberia Avios 1:08:32 Business class JFK to Lisbon for 35K LifeMiles 1:11:13 Anywhere in the US on Qatar Airways to Doha in business class for 70K 1:12:51 Air Canada Aeroplan examples 1:15:00 ANA Round the world business class award 1:17:51 Lufthansa first class to Europe with Avianca LifeMiles (including how to hack it) 1:20:02 Hacking Cathay Pacific Asia Miles for first class (if it comes back) 1:21:50 First class on ANA via Virgin Atlantic miles 1:34:39 Question of the Week: Nick, did you get elite credit for booking The Signature at MGM via Airbnb? 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 Liler on the air starts now. Today's main event, how to get insane value from your Amex points. American Express membership rewards points can be used towards fantastic value

but we often hear from people who did things like uh they called up amex and said i want to book a hotel and they use their points that way and we know they got terrible value with that uh sorry hopefully you enjoyed that trip or we hear from people who say i i like i have these amex points but i can't figure out what to do with them they're not useful to me and and so that's the other thing that if you've ever felt like you've been in that situation or you are in that situation there are ways to get crazy value out of these points that's right there's ways to get crazy good value there's ways to get crazy bad value. There's ways to get crazy bad value. We're going to cut through all that noise and tell you where you should be using your points and give you real life examples of how you can get fantastic value. First, of course, we have the giant mailbag. So today's giant mail requires a little bit of background, not a lot, but a little, which is that we need to talk about transferable points. So Amex points, Chase points, City points, Capital One points,

they're all points that we love to accumulate and use because they can be transferred to transfer partners to like airline and hotel programs. And often that results in far better value than any other option with them. With that background, Kevin writes in and says, I'm a huge fan and loyal reader slash listener, but I wanted to challenge you on the never speculatively transfer mantra that I think is too universally preached in the miles and points world. I generally agree that flexible points are more valuable than points in a specific program. And I would describe the main reasons as being one, specific programs are less stable as they could devalue at any point. And two,

with flexible points, you can jump on a good value when it arises, when there's flash sales, et cetera. You can then, I'm just adding a little ad lib here that you could then like, for example, sometimes Delta has a great flash sale and we wouldn't normally tell you to transfer points to Delta because Delta miles are usually worth less. Not worthless, just worth less. Not worthless, but worth less. But if there's a great flash sale, it could make sense. Anyway, back to his story here. And by the way, this was really long, so I heavily edited down the rest. The party line mantra of never speculative transferring downplays, the huge value that I think people should consistently be getting from

transferring into programs that they are likely to use when there are transfer bonuses. Let me walk you through a specific hypothetical example that I think closely resembles my actual situation. Let's say that I'm pretty savvy in the miles points world, and my family of four likes to go to Europe once a year, typically an economy, but I'd love to jump on business class opportunities when they rise. My favorite programs are Avios, Flying Blue, Life Miles, and Virgin Atlantic. And I've used each program multiple times to go to Europe. And I'm pretty certain that I'll use each program again in the next one to two years. And then he has a whole bunch of hypothetical details to try to prove his point about how transferring speculatively during transfer bonuses is a good idea. And then he comes down to, so here are my two choices. And again, this is a hypothetical scenario. I could either keep 1 million Amex points or I could transfer and have

1.24 million points. 200,000 would still be Amex transferable points. Plus he'd have 280,000 Avios, 260,000 Virgin points, 250,000 Flying Blue points, and 250,000 Life Miles. Assuming he had transfer bonuses when they came about for all of those programs. That's exactly it. So his hypothetical scenario was like, there's a 15% Life Miles transfer bonus, 25% this, and 30% that. If I were to summarize the main point, I'd say that most people should be keeping a stash of miles in each of the programs that they regularly use, taking advantage of transfer bonuses to restock when they're low while maintaining a healthy stash of transferable points. What do you think, Nick? I thought this was really interesting.

I read it and I spent some time thinking about it. And I actually feel like it's worth a post of its own probably because all of of the detail in the hypothetical it was very well written so i thought it made some excellent excellent points there um i struggled with a few things so one of the things about this is that when you speculatively transfer there's obviously some risk of devaluation and kevin kind of downplayed that by saying that there probably won't be a big devaluation in any of those programs but the trouble with that is we don't know when it's going to happen and so for, for example, one of the programs that Kevin mentioned in there was Virgin Atlantic. And so he mentioned the concept of taking advantage of a transfer bonus and having

270,000 Virgin Atlantic miles or something of that sort. And that's great and wonderful as long as they continue to charge 50,000 points each way for Delta business class to Europe. But if tomorrow they change that to 150,000, which sounds ridiculous, but isn't when you look at some of the other devaluations they made without any notice last year, during the pandemic and the ones to ANA also, that could very conceivably happen. And if that happened, all of a sudden, you didn't get good value, you got really poor value now for your MX points, if that's the sweet spot you're counting on. So I feel like if you have a really narrow sweet spot, I'd be more concerned about this. At the same time, I use LifeMiles so much that I can understand the thought of, well, why wouldn't I take advantage of the transfer bonus? I've got a lot of these points. I don't need them all right now. So maybe it does make sense to take advantage

of those transfer bonuses. So I have very mixed feelings on this. I don't really know that I can fully support either side of it. But I think it's a good point. It's one that other people have made to me before, too, that they like to take advantage of these transfer bonuses when they come around. There are a number of problems, of course. You got to keep in mind expiration policies. I just mentioned Avianca Life miles. And if I took advantage of a transfer bonus, I better darn well make sure that I'm going to transfer in something else every 12 months. Otherwise those miles are going to expire and then there's no bonus at all. So I don't know. What did you think about this, Greg? Yeah. Here's what's super interesting to me. The day before we were recording this show,

we did a live Ask Us Anything on YouTube. We try to do those the first Wednesday of every month on YouTube. And one of the things we talked about during that show was how when you have transferable points, once you have over a certain number of points, they become less valuable after that. As long as you keep a stash of points so that when there is a good opportunity that you want to take advantage of, as long as you have that amount, and that's going to be different for each person. I personally have come to a number of about, I want to keep at least about 150,000 of each type of transferable points per person I regularly travel with. So for my wife and I, that means 300,000 Amex points

minimum in my account at all times. The points that I earn in my Amex account, as an example, above that amount are less valuable than the points below it. So I would consider less valuable uses of those points that are above that amount, like cashing out for 1.1 cents each. So why wouldn't I consider transferring to Air Canada Aeroplan or British Airways Avios, things like that, to make sure my balances are big enough so that in those programs, I can take advantage of the opportunities that will come around eventually when those programs are the best to use for whatever my purposes are. So I actually really like this. Yeah, that makes sense to me.

But I think the key is here that it needs to be a program, in my opinion, I think in my mind, it needs to be a program with more than one potentially valuable use or more than one use that I'm somewhat likely to use. So the Virgin Atlantic one is a great one because really the only thing I'm probably going to use that for is Delta Business Class to Europe. Now I say that, and you'll give us another example that maybe I could use in just a few minutes here in the main event probably. But that's the main one that I would ever consider doing with Virgin Atlantic. So that to me is too narrow. Like British Airways, obvious. I know that there's going to be

either a short or medium haul flight at some point that would work for me with a one world carrier. So I would feel more confident with a program like that where there's uses all over the world where I could use that to piece together a spot on one of many different types of trips. So I'd be more likely with things that have multiple uses rather than a single use. Yeah. Now, keep in mind, Kevin was talking about flying economy and Virgin Atlantic has a lot of economy and premium economy deals, like good opportunities, both with flying themselves as well as their partners. And so if that's your, like, I wouldn't expect that to devalue much. So I think for him, it totally makes sense. You know, for me, I've already transferred so many points into Virgin Atlantic that it's not really a question. Like, I'm not going to do more at this point because for years I was trying to build up enough to go back to Necker Island. And anyway, that's a whole nother story.

Let's not get into that. But yeah, interesting, interesting points there, Kevin. I think that that, perfect, Greg, perfect way to tie that into what we talked about on the live, because that is so true. I was thinking that as I was saying it too, like I might do that with a certain number of the points I have because I don't need them all. So, yeah, that's a great point. Yeah, yeah.

Okay. So great, great note from Kevin. Let's move on to mattress running the number. What do we have this week? This week's mattress running the numbers. That's a great question. What do we have for this week's mattress running the numbers? I looked away.

Oh, we have the transfer bonuses. We got a whole bunch of transfer bonuses going on this week. So let's figure out which ones are worth speculatively transferring over for Kevin. Okay. So exactly. So first up is the chase transfer bonus to Marriott. So there's a 50% transfer bonus to Marriott through May 15th. Right.

What do you think, Greg? Is this a speculative transfer or what? No. So chase ultimate Awards points. You could transfer, you know, any day of the week, one to one to Hyatt and be sure of getting great value. One to one point five transfer to Marriott. You know, you could get great value, but I I personally wouldn't do it. No, no, no.

Two thumbs down. All right, Chase, 25% transfer bonus to Air France KLM Flying Blue ends May 15th. So ultimate rewards to Flying Blue. This is one that's directly relevant to Kevin's point, right? Because he mentioned liking Flying Blue. Is this the time to transfer speculatively to Flying Blue? So on this one, I would say only if... So here's the thing.

Because Chase transfers to Hyatt are such a good deal, if he has other points that transfer to buffer his flying blue account during transfer bonuses, I would do those other points rather than Chase personally, unless he's just not into the Hyatt transfer, in which case an airline transfer can make sense. And Flying Blue is like, I don't know. I think it's like a solid program for getting decent value. It's not going to give you like, usually, except during certain promos, it's not going to give you the most amazing value, but sort of on an average thing for going to Europe, it gives

decent value a lot of the time. Yeah. Yeah. It's very acceptable. It's a non-offensive, acceptable, middle of the road surcharges. So yeah, I agree with you on that. And probably easier to find availability in many instances because of their dynamic award pricing.

And while I can't bring myself to pay like 80,000 points for a business class flight to Europe when I know I can hunt out something that's 70,000 points or whatever it might be, I think for most people that have set dates in mind, like 80,000 points to Europe, if that's what's available through Flying Blue is a good deal. So I would be like, no, I know sometimes they only charge 55. So there's no way I'm going to pay the 80. I want the 55. I think for the average person, probably that 80K is a really good deal still. And again, I'm making up a random example. And with a 25% transfer bonus, I think that becomes really reasonable. So I agree,

but I wouldn't do this speculatively myself because I don't have enough chase points to example. And with a 25% transfer bonus, I think that becomes really reasonable. So I agree. But I wouldn't do this speculatively myself because I don't have enough chase points to meet my high needs as it is. Exactly. Now, as an aside, we have a page on the blog, on the frequentmiler.com blog, that's called Current Point Transfer Bonuses. And that's where you can go to always find what are the current transfer bonuses that are available. But importantly, it also shows all of the expired bonuses. So we've been tracking this for years now. And the reason that's important is because if you want to know, is a 25% transfer bonus to Flying Blue the best I'm likely to find,

you could go to the expired bonuses and see how often do those kind of transfer bonuses come and how often are they bigger than 25%. And then you could get an idea. Is that a good one or not? And so I just want to mention that. And it's a really good specific example

to mention the Air France Flying Blue because you're going to see that just did 100% transfer bonus to them. But don't think that that's something you're likely to see or don't compare this to that because we've never seen anything like that 100% bonus that just expired.

Right, right. And it was just for one day. So it's, and we've never seen anything like that and don't expect to from other transferable points programs. Right, right. 25% is pretty standard for Air France Flying Blue. Speaking of which, Chase isn't the only one offering a 25% bonus.

Amex is as well. Now, I would be more likely to consider this in light of Kevin's message, really. I'd be more likely to consider this from Amex because I've got way more Amex points than I currently need. So I think that that's one I might consider if I were in Kevin's shoes, where I'm like, oh, Flying Blue is one of the programs I like to use. They do offer good values for economy pretty frequently to Europe. So I think that's an interesting option. Yeah. My wife and I had a very specific, have upcoming, a very specific, uh, trip to Europe where we have a specific city,

uh, destination. Um, and only one day we can leave from, from here and only one day we can come back. I was able to find via Air France, uh, 57,500 miles for each of us each way on the best possible flight. Like, and by that, I mean, it's one stop to our destination city from Detroit, which is our home airport. Um, there are no nonstops from our home airport to this, to this city. We're going to Copenhagen. Um, and, um, and the timing was great great. I'd previously had a Lufthansa flight booked with United Miles. The timing was awful. It departed Detroit at like 4 p.m. and got in early in the morning, which because of the time zone differences, that means by the time we were ready to fall asleep, that's when we're arriving in Germany. And so I hated that.

So this one now we're leaving at like 10 p.m. You know, we can actually sleep on the lie flat seats, land in Paris and then fly on to Copenhagen. Anyway, my point is, it's, you know, in real world situations, you could get real world great value from Air France miles. And I just did so. Yeah, there you go. All right. So that one's a good one to take advantage of if you can mx 15 to avianca life miles ends may 31st i didn't mention by the way

the mx to flying blue ends may 22nd uh so different the chase bonus ends may 15th the mx bonus ends may 22nd now we have mx to avianca life miles which ends may 31st 15 transfer bonus to Avianca LifeMiles. Speculative transfer? What do you think? Yeah, I mean, maybe. No, actually, no. Avianca LifeMiles, there are transfer bonuses to LifeMiles frequently, and I would wait for a higher percentage. Yeah, well, you know, I feel like 15% is kind of what we've been seeing for a while to life miles. I think I haven't looked at the historical. So if you have, feel free to hop in and correct me.

But I feel like 15% is about what we've been seeing to life miles in the last year anyway. But I don't know. I would struggle with doing this speculatively because they rather they expire after 12 months of inactivity. So it's really easy to mess that up and end up having your miles expire. So that's number one. Number two, difficulty on this is my difficulty all the time with Avianca Life miles. And that's that they sell their miles pretty frequently for pretty cheaply. So you're not getting amazing value with the transfer necessarily. And I say that as somebody who's transferred a lot of miles to Avianca and redeemed them this year,

because I would rather transfer them when I know that I'm like, okay, this is the situation that I need them, rather than boxing myself into having them and looking for a way to use them. So I probably wouldn't transfer speculatively, even though I use a lot of Avianca life miles. Now, I said that out loud, and we'll see what happens, but it's, I may be the first that rolls around. So while Nick was talking, I looked at our, at the expired offers for LifeMiles and, and he's right. A lot of the recent ones were like 10% or, or so, but we had a Citi transfer bonus this year, 20%, and then 25% last year from Citi. And so that's kind of interesting, and also from Capital One, 20% last year. So that's kind of interesting because that kind of tells you, you know, if you have points in all those programs, maybe what you should, and you're really interested in LifeMiles, maybe you should wait for Citi or Capital One transfer bonuses rather than

Amex, because Amex has a lot of good transfer bonuses. They're just not the best with this one, at least historically. There you go. All right. Perfect. All right. And then the last one we've got is Chase that has a 30% transfer bonus going to Virgin Atlantic that ends June 15th. So this is another

one that Kevin mentioned, Virgin Atlantic. And you just mentioned there are good options with Virgin Atlantic beyond the Delta sweet spot to Europe that I mentioned would be my main use, right? There's other good uses, particularly in economy class and maybe premium economy. So what do you think? 30% transfer bonus time to transfer. Yeah. My answer is here pretty much the same as before that I personally can't see So what do you think? 30% transfer bonus time to transfer speculatively? you know you can use Virgin Atlantic points and you're not going to use your chase points for better use, this is a good transfer bonus. Yeah, it definitely is a good transfer bonus.

We do, though, keep in mind, see 30% bonuses from Amex also. So it's just a matter of which program you've got more disposable points and whether you anticipate a very near-term need of Virgin Atlantic miles or you're looking more long-term. Personally, in my situation, I would wait until Amex offers one if I were tempted to transfer over speculatively. Yeah. Not only does

Amex offer them, so again, I'm looking at expired transfer bonuses. Let me just real quickly tell you the 30%. They're all 30% in recent times, the transfer bonuses to Virgin Atlantic. We had Capital One this year. We had Citi last year. We had Amex last year. We had Chase last year. We had Capital One again last year. We had Amex multiple times last year. again, multiple times. So yeah, these are very, very common 30% transfer bonuses to Virgin Atlantic. Yeah. Without even like looking at it, I would have told you, I was pretty sure that there were three from Amex last year. So yeah, no, no.

I think based on what you said, yeah, I was pretty sure. Cause I remember looking this up recently, specifically for the Virgin Atlantic one curious cause I was like, man, it seems like there's always one on the Virgin Atlantic, but that's cause like Greg said, everybody seems to offer them to Virgin Atlantic. So yep. Again, I probably wouldn't jump on it because I know it'll come around again.

Sometime soon. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. All right. So those are some good transfer bonuses nonetheless, and it's great to see transfer bonuses continuing to come around. So that's always exciting because you do have a chance.

And by the way, keep in mind, again, we were talking about whether or not we would transfer speculatively. If you have an award, you want a book, perfect. I mean, take advantage of it and take advantage of the savings for sure. All right. So that's the mattress running the numbers. Let's talk about award talk. So award talk had some news this week out of Hyatt. Greg, what was the big news out of Hyatt?

They sure did. The news actually came out last week, but we weren't on top of it for our show because it came out after we recorded. Hyatt announced that they are acquiring Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Now, if you don't know that couple, Mr. and Mrs. Smith is basically like a hotel travel agency, but they have a curated selection of hotels that are like a combination of boutique slash luxury. Not all of them are luxury, but they're all like boutiquey um and uh basically if you book those hotels through mr and mrs smith you get some extras like like um and it depends on the property like one property might say if you book through mr and mrs smith you get like a bottle

champagne on arrival another might say free massage you. It just depends. So that's what they are, but Hyatt buying them is very interesting. First of all, Hyatt points to book many, not all SLH like at the top, you know, most expensive hotels for, um, a capped amount, 40,000 or 45,000 points per night. Places like where I stayed at the Iker hotel and in New Zealand, that was like a $2,000 per night, um, hotel, or you could stay at Kalala Island, which is a entire Island, uh, where, where there's like four rooms and you could stay at Kalala Island, which is an entire island where there's like four rooms and you could book one of them for, and it would normally go for over $3,000 a night. You could book that for, I think it's 45,000 points, higher points per night and so on. So you could go on and on about some great values that are out there with SLH. And what, the reason I'm so excited

about this Mr. and Mrs. Smith thing is I'm expecting to see similar types of things out of that, that they have unbelievable properties under their umbrella. And if Hyatt makes available through points a decent percentage of those, it's going to be very exciting what opportunities we suddenly have for booking with Hyatt points. And you might ask, but wait a minute, I've heard that IHG points can be used to book Mr. and Mrs. Smith properties, which is true. You can book some Mr. and Mrs. Smith properties with IHG points, but IHG doesn't have an award chart. And so the most expensive ones are also very, very expensive with IHG points. The reason I'm more excited about Hyatt doing it is I expect it to be capped at 40 to 45,000 points per night for the most expensive properties. Yeah. Yeah. I still am not yet excited about this i know you're

excited about it and i can see why because i've looked at some of these properties it's a branding issue mr and mrs smith does not sound exciting to me it's like what like no offense to any mr and mrs smiths out there but could you come up with a more boring name here mr and mrs smith i mean come on it just doesn't exude uh you know theude the image of luxury to me necessarily. So I've never been interested in these properties yet. But I say that and I have looked at, I shouldn't say I've never been interested. There was one recently that caught my eye and I said, wow, that looks amazing. And I had mostly ignored the Mr. and Mrs. Smith properties because I never find them available with IHG points. I feel like I see them now and then very rarely available with IHG points. But like you said, if they

suddenly become more widely available with Hyatt points, I'm sure that I will look more closely because I was also not particularly excited about the SLH partnership in the beginning because I'm not really a boutique hotel guy myself. I like the cookie cutter, predictable hotel experience. So I've never been a big boutique fan, but every SLH property I've stayed at has been really, really nice. So I'm moderately excited about this, not as excited as everybody else yet. We'll see. I look forward to being won over. Yeah. And I'm hoping that you know some people are worrying that this is going to lead hyatt to make their award chart bigger like add extra categories for the more expensive hotels so we have to hope that doesn't happen that would

be very disappointing if that happens um and the the other sort of negative is it's likely that IHG is going to be forced to stop, you know, um, uh, offering Mr. and Mrs. Smith. So for those who, uh, you know, like the IHG program and booking that way, um, that might come to an end. I think that's very You know, so I know you're not going to have an exact answer, but just ballpark it. What's like the most expensive number of IHG points you've seen for these Mr. and Mrs. Smith properties? Because I feel like the most I've seen is like 120,000 points per night for one of these. Have you seen far more than that? Yeah, I don't. You don't know.

I've seen very expensive to where I kind of laughed at it, but I don't remember what those numbers are. Because I think about it, if it was 120, one that I saw at some point, that's $600 worth of points. Am I going to be wildly more excited if that's available for 40,000 Hyatt points per night? I mean, not wildly more excited, no. So I don't know. I'm not sure whether this will be – I'm not as convinced yet that this will be. Yeah, no. I mean, I think that's a very good point. know i'm not sure whether this will be i'm not as convinced yet that this will be yeah no i mean i think that's a very good point plus the fact that you know ihg if you have the right credit cards

gives you fourth night free and hyatt doesn't have any kind of fourth night free or fifth night free opportunity so there there are actually uh some good reasons to prefer uh to be able to book these through IHG. I don't know if this is irrational, but I'm more optimistic that some of the higher end properties are going to be unlocked through the Hyatt situation. That makes sense.

Plus, it's not just a partnership. They actually bought Mr. and Mrs. Smith. So I could see deals being made on the back end where Hyatt finds properties that are willing to basically give them a great rate for these award bookings. And there'd be kind of a win-win because these exclusive properties don't want to advertise sales, but this could be a way for them when they're not full to get some revenue anyway, without looking like a discounter. Yeah, exactly. So I think there's

great potential there. So let's hope it happens. Very good. All right. Seats.arrow added QSuites, a QSuites finder, right? What can you tell us about this? Yeah, yeah. So Seats.Aero, I talked about before, it's this kind of nerdy tool. If you know what you're doing, it's great for finding award flights. And it was already a good tool for helping to find Cutter QSuites, which is considered one of the best business class things you can fly in the sky. A lot of people who've flown it say it's more like flying first class. And there's just all kinds of good things to be said about it. But it's not always that easy to find award space.

So you can book it. Seats.aero added a tool. So you just click on the QSuites finder and you pick, for example, from North America to anywhere and boom, it's going to instantly show you all of the Cutter business class award availability from North America to Doha, which is where all the North American flights go to on Qatar. And I wrote a whole post as well about how you can start with that information, but then figure out how to book where you really want to go. Let's say you want to go to the Maldives.

This tool is going to help you find that first part, getting from the US to Doha, but then how do you connect to the rest of it? And there's a whole step-by-step guide that I posted on the blog. There you go. Excellent. All right. So then last but not least in award talk is my JetBlue Mint experience. So I booked JetBlue Mint. I needed to get home from Las Vegas. I got stuck in Las Vegas for a couple of weeks with my kids being sick on and off. So that was not a lot of fun. But I had to get home and what better way than JetBlue Mint class? Well, it wasn't necessarily on my mind initially, but I was searching for awards through American Airlines. And I saw that there were four seats in JetBlue Mint bookable via American

Airlines miles. Not an amazing value, 50,000 points per passenger. So when I say not an amazing value, kind of a painfully bad value So when I say not an amazing value, kind of a painfully bad value, I would say. Maybe not painfully bad. How much would it have cost? Well, that's exactly, that's why I say maybe not painfully, but like 2000 bucks or something. It would have been expensive per person. I mean, it was ridiculous because I was booking last minute. So it would have been quite expensive further in advance, more like 1000 these days for Mint from Vegas to New York. So about

two cents a point, which is far better than what the points cost me because anybody who's been listening to the show for a long time knows that I made a donation to Conservation International a couple of years ago for points, American Airlines miles. So essentially the miles cost me less than half a cent per mile. So we're talking, I don't know, I worked it out. I can't remember exactly what it was, but less than $200 a passenger. Yeah, exactly. So we're talking, you know, I worked it. I can't remember exactly what it was, but less than $200 a passenger. Yeah, exactly. So, so very little investment for me to be able to fly that. And I wanted to, because I haven't flown JetBlue Mint before. So I flew that from Las Vegas to New York or rather to JFK, New York, JFK. And the food was terrific. The food was really notably

good, I thought. And I asked my wife before I said anything after the flight, I said, so what did you think of JetBlue Mint? She said, the food was surprisingly good. It was the first thing she said. So that was a positive for both of us. Service was, I would say, above average. Not amazing, but above average, what I usually expect when I fly domestically in the United States. The seat itself, I'm not as excited about as everybody else. I was kind of like, meh. Now, I got to say, the setup here is there's a throne seat and then there's pairs of seats. So it's like a 2-1-2 on each side of the plane. Okay. So there's direct aisle access for the throne seats and then the aisle seats, but there's window seats that don't have direct aisle access.

And of course, my wife and I were traveling with the kids. So we took a window aisle on the side of the plane. So there was cramped, like those seats, those two seats together, I thought were really cramped. There wasn't a lot of storage space. There wasn't a lot of place to put things. The footwell was really wide. So if you've got like, you know, like if you have trouble with those narrow little footwells or you got long legs, that kind of thing, the wide footwell is probably a big plus for a lot of people. That's not really an issue for me. So I have very short legs, so I'm not a tall guy. So I said that really wasn't a selling point for me.

And otherwise, like I said, I felt very cramped trying to find places to put things in terms of like when food came and drinks and all that stuff. And then my laptop and whatnot. So I actually didn't like the seat very much at all. If I had the throne seat, I'd feel differently. If I were traveling by myself, I would totally sit in one of those throne seats. And then there's like shelves on both sides of you and you got tons of space. So, uh, so I would love the throne seats, but traveling as a pair, I didn't think it was better than American Airlines or United or Delta's flatbed products that fly Transcon personally. Yeah. Yeah. So that's really good to know.

I'd still love to try it. I still hope to at some point, but I'll try to since I won't be traveling with kids probably, you know, I'll try to see if I can grab a throne seat if I do it. Yeah. That's great advice. That would be the way to go. I totally think so. All right. So that finishes up award talk, I think.

That brings us to the challenge update. And I have some exciting news because I mentioned. Oh, do you? Well, I mentioned last week that our award availability dried up, that Tim had excitedly found. And I had dragged my feet on getting back to him. And then we kind of went back and forth a little bit and the award availability disappeared. So we lost the awards we wanted. And the short version of the story is that we got them back.

So yeah, so we found we found what we needed to find and were able to book that. So that was super exciting for our preferred itinerary. We also stumbled on a few things between the teams in terms of, A, another award booking partner that we hadn't previously considered in terms of which type of miles to use, and then, B, a partnership that I didn't even realize existed. So we will have a couple of good finds when this all comes out. Now, I don't have something specific to share on those fronts yet because I don't want to ruin the surprise in terms of places we're going and things we're doing.

But it's coming together, and Team Americas is feeling pretty good about what's going on at this point. Okay. So just as a brief reminder, or for people who don't know, every year, the Frequent Miler team, we do some kind of challenge to challenge each other. This year, we're doing this challenge where all five of us are traveling together. There's two different teams. Carrie and Steven are in charge of planning our travel around Asia. And Tim and Nick are planning our travel in the Americas. And what that means, where they go, nobody knows. The teams aren't sharing with each other to the extent possible. They're not sharing with me. I'm going to be the judge. And so each of the teams are making a lot of progress. In early June,

we're going to fly off first to Japan. And then who knows what happens after that. So all the details will be revealed as we go, both to each other and to everybody watching, listening and reading. Yeah. And so, like I said, I'm getting pretty excited because I think it's really coming together. And I think in the end, we're going to have a few good finds and interesting things to talk about in terms of how we did things and why and actually comparing some things too along the way. So I think it'll be a fun experience and also useful for readers.

Absolutely. be a fun experience and and also useful for readers so so absolutely and i'm i'm so excited to you know experience what what each team came up with uh almost every day carrie writes in our our private slack channel that she's so excited and you know that's or i assume that's because parts of their plans have have worked out You know, something has, something, they found something that's exciting that we're all going to do or see or, you know, whatever. And so, yeah, it should be great. Yeah, very good. All right. That, I think, brings us to card talk.

And so we're going to try to move through card talk here quickly because we do still have to get to our main event. I know we're going a little long. So card talk. Let's talk about the Amex Gold Card this week. So the Amex Gold Card is one of my favorites. I use this very, very frequently. It's the top of my wallet literally right now.

So why is it that way? Well, it's got a $250 annual fee, and that's not why it's on the top of my wallet. That's the part of it that I like the least. But there's no foreign transaction fees. So that's, I it's on the top of my wallet. That's the part of it that I like the least. But there's no foreign transaction fees. So that's, I guess, a benefit. I say, I guess, a benefit because you're probably not going to use this on a ton of different categories internationally. But a couple of them get Forex dining worldwide.

And that's the one where you may use it internationally. So Forex dining, that's the main reason it's at the top of my wallet. Also, 4X on U.S. supermarkets spend on up to $25,000 in purchases per year, then 1X. And this is the other reason it's at the top of my wallet, because those are the two categories in which I spend the most, grocery and dining. So it's the card that's at the top of my wallet for those reasons. You also get 3X on flights. Now, is that just flights booked via Amex Travel or directly with the airlines, Greg? Both, directly with airlines or through Amex Travel. We should point out that the points it earns are Amex membership rewards points, which are transferable to a bunch of different

airline programs and a couple of hotel programs. And as we're going to explain later in the show, Amex points can be incredibly valuable if you use them correctly. So, you know, this card is really exciting in a way because it hits like the two categories of spend that like almost everybody spends a lot on, right? Grocery and dining it they're so smart in that way i think targeting two things that like you know i think i the way i sort of uh categorize it as like people in cities tend to spend more on dining and people in suburbs

probably spend more at grocery stores but regardless of whether that's true you have to eat you're gonna be getting your food from one of those two categories if you're a large family spend more at grocery stores. But regardless of whether that's true, you have to eat. You're going to be getting your food from one of those two categories. If you're a large family, you're probably spending a lot in those categories. And so earning four points per dollar for all that spend is fantastic. Well, and then if you can plan out your purchases a little bit, you can probably get gift cards at the grocery store for the types of other things you're going to be spending on money, too. So you can really cover a lot of your life expenses at Forex with this card. Right.

Like many cards, it only earns one point per dollar for non-category bonus spend. So ideally, you have some other card for the spend that's not in those categories. Right, right. But you go to the grocery store, you pick up if you frequently stop at, you know, a specific gas station brand, you buy a gas station gift card at the grocery store and get your 4X. Now, that's assuming, of course, you don't have the Wyndham Business Turner card, because then you would rather use that probably at your gas station.

But if you wanted a one card solution type of a thing, I think the Amex Gold card is one we don't ever talk about as a one card solution type of a thing. I think the Amex Gold card is one we don't ever talk about as a one card solution. But it really kind of could be because you could get those gas gift cards at the grocery store, you get the home improvement gift cards at the grocery store, if you need to go to Home Depot or Lowe's or whatever else and kind of turn this into almost a Forex everywhere. Of course, that's only an up to $25,000 in purchases per year at the US supermarket. But that is probably enough to cover a lot of the needs of a lot of people. So yeah, I think this is a great one. And again, like Greg said, because it earns Amex membership rewards points, which to me

are super duper valuable, but it does have that $250 annual fee. So it better come with something better than just 4X, Greg. It does have some rebates, which it's going to vary from person to person how valuable these are. So for one thing, it has these gold card dining credits that they call them, which is for certain merchants, you can get up to $10 back per month as a statement credit. So those merchants are goldbelly, wine.com, milk bar, Shake Shack, seamless, grub hub, and cheesecake factory. So if you spend $10 or more per month with any of those, any one of those, uh, you'll get, you know, $10 back each month. And so that's $120 back each year. What do you think? Do you value that at 120 bucks? No, you shouldn't value it at 120 bucks. As Greg has taught us all, you should value it at less

because you wouldn't pay in advance the full $120 for all that stuff, probably. Although I say that after saying you could buy a gas gift card and effectively pay in advance at the grocery store, right? So isn't this kind of the same thing? I don't know. You could make the argument. I think maybe that it's similar, but I wouldn't because I know I'm not going to use that, number one, every single month. Number two, if you offered me and said, hey, you can get $120 worth of credit that's going to be built or rather split as $10 a month that you may or may not use. I wouldn't want to pay $120 for it. I want to get a discount in order to commit my money up front. So that discount is going to vary person to person.

Right. So the way I use it is like if I use Grubhub anytime during the month, I use, I use this card and then get the $10 back. If I don't use it, then near the end of the month, I have a reminder to use up this credit. And so what I do is I go on to goldbelly.com and buy a $10 e-gift card. So, so I've got a couple of those stacked up and we'll probably earn more and more over time. Hopefully they let you use multiple gift cards for one order.

So I'll eventually buy something from them. But that's not the only credits. You also get $10 every month in your Uber account that can be used for Uber rides or Uber Eats. Yeah. And the nice thing is that if you have more than one card in your household that earns one of these Uber Cash benefits from Amex, you can add all of those Amex cards to the same Uber account. You have to add them as payment methods. But for instance, they're all in my wife's Uber account. So I have a personal platinum and I have a personal gold. She has a personal gold and a personal platinum. Her mom has a personal platinum and they're all payment methods in her Uber account.

So all the Uber cash gets deposited there at the beginning of every month. So we got like a nice chunk all together. And so that makes it more valuable to me than it would if it were only $10 a month. That would be less valuable to me because I know I'm going to have to spend 40 or 50 bucks to get anything for the family. But because I get now more than 40 or $50 worth of credits, I know I'm going to use that Uber cash each month. So it's more valuable to me than it used to be. In the beginning, I was like,

I'm going to use this maybe four or five times a year. Nowadays, I am definitely using this every month and sometimes exceeding it. So still not face value for all the reasons that we said. No, no. And not only that, the credit does disappear at the end of the month if you don't use it. So it's not like you could just, you know, roll it over each month until you're ready to use it.

So that's unfortunate. Lastly, the card has a $100 hotel credit you get if you book two nights or more via Amex's The Hotel Collection. I don't value that perk at all, just because I've never had an opportunity to use it. So it seems unlikely that I will, but I guess it's nice to be there just in case we ever use it. Yeah. I mean, it is.

I think it depends on where you travel to. I just use the hotel collection in Las Vegas. And sometimes you can find, you know, a couple of nights quite inexpensively there. I've also found it in Abu Dhabi or Dubai. I found nights really, really cheap where two nights could be less than a hundred dollars even. So, you know, you could end up coming out. So, yeah, that would be amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, so anyway, so one thing I want to mention is right now on our website, we list the best offer as being something like 90,000 points plus $200 cash back if you meet the signup bonus requirements and everything. But you should always check our website for any of these cards, any credit card you're interested in.

Let's say you get a mailer that's offering you some amount and you think, oh, is this a good deal? Check the Frequent Mailer website because we work really hard to try to keep that site up to date with the best offer for you. Even though we make most of our money from credit card affiliate links, if there are no affiliate links for the best offer, we don't show our affiliate links at all. So the gold card is a good example. We could be making money from you clicking through and signing up for an inferior offer. Instead, what we show is a offer that doesn't give us anything it's a friend referral from somebody on our facebook group um who uh who has this better better than uh the standard offer available so that you always get the best

offer possible there you go there you go that and that's a big differentiator for frequent miler so so yeah there you have it so the gold card i love the gold card i have it and hold it and we'll keep it probably for a long time is Is this a keeper card for you too, Greg? It, it, it, it's, I mean, it, it, it's sort of, uh, I, I still have it because each year, like when I do the math, it's like, it barely makes the cut for various reasons. Last time it made the cut because I called and got a nice retention offer for it. The only reason for me it's not a keeper is really because I have Citibank cards that are earning 5x for dining and for grocery instead of the 4x. And yeah, so that's the only reason.

But I brought that up because I knew that's what you were going to say, that you get five Citi points per dollar on different cards. So that's certainly a situation you could be in. But I feel like for a lot of people anyway, this is an easy keeper, not necessarily a keeper for everyone. Also, I think and I don't want to speak for you, Greg, but I think you probably spend more on dining than grocery would be my expectation anyway. And so because you can get 5X dining with a city card, then that probably makes this less compelling for you. So that would be my expectation anyway. So I think that may make a difference for other people, too.

But for a lot of people, this is a great keeper card because membership rewards points are so incredibly valuable. So that is a great segue to today's main event. Main event, how to get insane value from your Amex points. First, I'm going to list a few things that you shouldn't do with your points where you're not going to get insane value. You're not even going to get good value. So don't pay with points. So like when you're, when you're checking out online, for example, whether it's Amazon or some other vendor, Grubhub, even, um, often you're going to see the option, Hey, you want to pay

with your Amex points? Just don't do it. It's they're, they're not going to give you even one cent per point value. It's going to be much less than that. That's a good way to use up your points for very little value, but please don't. Also, don't get onto the Amex site and buy gift cards with your points. Again, you're going to get less than one cent per point value, except for when they have special promotions where you could get as much as one cent per point value, but your points are worth more than that. Don't do it. Similarly, when you log on your Amex and look at your account, they're going to offer to

let you cover your charges, your statement charges with points. Same thing, terrible value. Don't do it. Okay. All bad values. And when we say don't do it, I mean, if you're in a cash crunch and you need, like, that's going to help make a difference, then that's understandable. But if you're interested in getting the best value possible out of your points, which is our primary focus, then those are not the ways to do it. Right, right. There are a few examples where paying with points for flights can give you good value. And that's when you have either the business gold card, the business platinum card, or the business centurion card.

And that's because with those cards, when you pay with points, you get a base rate of one cent per point value, but then you get a rebate on your points so that that rebate ends up making it better than one cent per point value for airfare under certain circumstances where you use the points to pay for airfare in your selected airline program

or for premium economy or business class or first class on any airline. Ooh, are you sure premium economy qualifies for that? Actually, I'm not. I think it's business or first. It's a business or first. Anyway, so the business gold card gives you a 25% rebate, which works out to 1.33 cents per point value. Business Platinum, a 35% rebate, works out to 1.54 cents per point value, which is good. And then Business Centurion card, if you're lucky enough to have that, 2 cents per point value after the 50% rebate. That's fantastic, but again, I don't expect too many listeners have that card.

Lastly, if you're not going to be transferring to airline partners, which is what we're going to tell you is really the best thing. The other thing you can do is cash out for your points for one cent or one point one cent per point. If you have the Schwab Platinum card, you can redeem into your Schwab investment account for one point one cent per point. So you have the Schwab Platinum card, you can redeem into your Schwab investment account for 1.1 cent per point. So basically it becomes cash in that account. Morgan Stanley has a similar thing for 1 cent per point. Or if you have both the business Platinum and business checking account, then you can cash out to your business checking account points for 1 cent per point value. So yeah, those are all the non-transfer

things to do or to not do. Yeah. So there's a whole bunch of different options for redeeming your points. And I think the cash out options you mentioned, the Schwab Platinum or the Business Platinum and Business Checking or Morgan Stanley Platinum, that's like your floor value. That's why you wouldn't want to redeem for gift cards because you could get one of those cards and you might say, oh my goodness, but the platinum card with the Schwab platinum card comes with a $695 annual fee. And that's true. But if you can meet the spending requirement for the welcome bonus, you can cash out the points via your Schwab account for more than the $695. So if you just want cash or you just want, you really need gift cards, then you're better off if you can get approved for the Schwab Platinum,

opening the Schwab Platinum card and cashing out your points and buying your gift cards because give you more value than buying gift cards through Amex. So even with the high annual fee, because your welcome bonus will effectively wipe that out for you, even if you don't. More than. Yeah, more than. You're still making profit, a good profit from the welcome bonus. Yeah. Even if you don't use the other benefits on the card and the card comes with enough other benefits that you should come out nicely ahead for that first year anyway.

Okay, so that's your floor value. But the true value or the best value, the values that get us excited are transfers to various airline partner programs. Exactly, exactly. And we talked earlier in the show about to watch for transfer bonuses and that like Amex often has transfer bonuses where you get better than one-to-one transfer to an airline program, which is great. But even aside from that, there is spectacular value to be found just transferring one-to-one to various programs. So what we're going to do is talk about some real-world opportunities that are there just to give examples. And we're going to start from sort of the most mundane, typical type of things like flying domestically within the U.S. all the way up to flying internationally first class and luxury. And let's give some examples. So do you want to start us off? Yeah. So domestic U.S., you said. So the first thing that comes to mind for a lot of people in terms of Amex partners would be using British Airways Avios to fly either on American Airlines or Alaska short nonstop flights. When we say short

flights, we mean under 650 miles because they cost just 7,500 miles each way. So just to give a couple of examples, you could fly from Dallas to Denver or Dallas to Nashville for 7,500 miles and $5.60 one way. And that's a consistent price that if there's availability and I looked and it seems like they're pretty often is or often enough anyway, then you can book that even close in like same day or the day before you want to fly for the 7,500 miles and $5 and 60 cents. And I bring that up because like, for instance, Denver to Dallas to Denver rather is also served by Frontier and some discount carriers. So sometimes it's really cheap.

And obviously, if you can get a $19 flight on Frontier or something, you may prefer that over using 7,500 points. But if you're looking to fly tomorrow, then 7,500 points might be your best deal. So that can work out for a lot of those really short domestic flights. Now, one other thing I wanted to mention here, and I didn't mention this to Greg ahead of time, is that I found it kind of interesting lately looking at which American flights are available to British Airways Avios. And I bring that up because I was looking for a flight for this weekend, actually. I forgot to book my flight home from FTU because I'm speaking at the FTU signature event this Saturday in Washington, D.C., and I realized I forgot to book my flight home from FTU because I'm speaking at the FTU signature event this Saturday in Washington, DC. And I realized I forgot to book my return flight,

my flight home. So I was looking around trying to find one and I found an American Airlines option that was available via British Airways that wasn't available via Alaska. And it wasn't available via Cathay Pacific, but it was available via Qantas. And so just interesting searching different One World programs. I found different availability. So and nowadays, since American Airlines is so dynamically priced, it's really hard to know what's going to be available via British Airways, obvious, unless you go to British Airways dot com and search or use a tool like Point Mirror or WordLogic. So I wanted to bring that up to remind people to use those search tools

in order to find these things. Yeah, yeah. That's really good to know. Okay. What else can we do flying domestically? What are the good deals? Well, you can fly Delta, but I know nothing about flying Delta. So tell me about how we could fly Delta with somebody other than Delta,

using miles from somebody other than Delta, right? Yeah. So Virgin Atlantic, just like British Airways, has a distance-based award chart for nonstop partner flights. Now, they have different award charts for different partners, but for Delta, and for most of Delta flights come under this distance-based award chart. And it starts at something like 7,500 miles for short nonstop flights. So it's that same 7,500 miles that BA charges for flying like American or Alaska for short hop domestic flights. You could do the same to fly Delta using Virgin Points. I have one specific example, a little bit further distance

only costs, the next band up in distance costs only 8,500 miles. And you could fly all the way from Atlanta to the, to Nessa Bahamas for 8,500 virgin points on Delta nonstop. So that's just, you know, one very specific real world example where you could get great value from your virgin points domestically. That's not really domestic in that example. You know what I mean? Right. Right. I've got some international examples too, for sure, Craig, but this is the domestic section. So I'm going to bring us back. I went a little off the rails there. You did, you did.

All right. So I'm going to bring us back into the US and say, those aren't your only options for 7,500 miles each way, because another Amex transfer partner that would be useful for domestic flights would be Avianca LifeMiles for flying on United. They're a Star Alliance airline. And so they charge, now it's a little bit variable because they don't have an award chart anymore, but roughly 7,500 miles each way within a zone. And they have the United States split into three zones where the first zone is roughly Maine to Georgia. The second zone is sort of the Dakotas to Florida. And the third zone is basically everything out west.

So to give a couple of examples of what you could do with 7,500 Avianca Life miles each way, you could fly something like Newark to Atlanta for 7,500 each way and $5.60. So that's probably a decent value a lot of times. But you could go a lot farther too, because like I said, Dakotas to Florida is all sort of one zone. So Fargo, North Dakota to Miami, 7,500 miles. Now, I should mention also that every example I give today, I found availability for. So I actually searched to make sure that everything priced as we're saying today and that I could find availability on these routes.

So I wanted to bring that up. These aren't just theoretical. I actually went to the LifeMiles website and I found Fargo to Miami, 7,500 miles and $5.60. There's some weird exceptions though, where things price differently, sometimes less. We've seen some that have priced from 3,500 LifeMiles each way and some that price a little more than they should. Like Chicago to Miami for some reason was 10,000 miles each way in economy or 15,000 each way in business, but 10 or 15 in economy or business is still pretty good for United flight from Chicago to

Miami. So, so there are some good options. Yeah. Yep. So, and let me just back up a little bit and say for all of these things, there's not always going to be a word availability. So, you know, if you're looking for a particular day, a particular flight, and you say, oh, Greg and Nick told me I could fly this route for 7,500 points, that's only if the airline opened up award availability to its partners.

So, you know, that's what Nick said before. You could use PointMe. You could use the free version of PointMe that comes with Built, or you could even use PointMe. You could use the free version of PointMe that comes with Built, or you could even use Rome.travel, which is a similar free tool. Either one of those, you can just put in your desired origin, destination. It'll tell you what's available for that and which programs will give you the best deal. And then you can verify that, go into the Virgin Atlantic website and make sure you could see that 7500 point deal.

And once you can, transfer your points from Amex to Virgin in that example and book the flight, don't do the transfer ahead of time if you can help it. Yeah. And that's how it works. Yeah. Okay. So those are some good domestic sweet spots and availability can be difficult to find sometimes on these domestic ones, because what Greg's saying there, to expand on that just a minor amount, the US airlines have just not been releasing a ton of space to their partners in general. But one trend that we frequently find to be true is close in, you often have better luck finding availability or really far out. Now, those are general statements, so they're not going to be true in every situation. But generally, that's when you're going to find more availability.

And the availability I found for all those examples I just gave was like within the next week. And then I looked some within the next month just to expand a little bit. But anyway, so there you go. Domestic economy. How about international economy or premium economy? Let's say you want to fly international economy class and you want to go to Europe. If you want to fly Star Alliance, your best bet is probably when it comes to Amex transfer partners anyway, Avianca LifeMiles. So

cheapest options with Avianca LifeMiles are going to be flying to Northern Europe, basically Scandinavia. Certainly, for example, I looked up Newark to Copenhagen, 20,000 miles one way, plus the taxes, which is something like 30 bucks in taxes, plus Avianca's $25 partner booking fee. So about $45 ish dollars, $55, I guess, $55 one way in taxes and 20,000 miles. That's pretty good to Copenhagen. You'll get the same price, I think, to Oslo and Stockholm. So your other Northern Europe type of destinations. And in the cases I looked up, it was flying United to Europe and then SAS within Europe to Northern Europe. So 20,000 one-way economy class, that's probably your best bet with Star Alliance out of Amex's transfer partners. Yeah, nice.

Then for SkyTeam. amex is transfer partners yeah nice uh then for sky team so my friend maisie just the other day did this virgin atlantic has some great prices for economy and premium economy whether you want to fly virgin atlantic itself delta air france klm um these are to europe um So she booked 15 from L.A. to Amsterdam nonstop exact date and time she wanted 15000 points plus one hundred fifty dollars for that flight. Boom. And so, you know, compared to the cash rate she could find for much worse itinerary. That was incredible. If you'd rather fly premium economy, one of their sweet spots is flying Air France or KLM premium economy from the East Coast U.S. to Europe for only 24,000 points. That's during standard pricing times. They do have some peak dates where it would be a little bit more. Yeah. And premium economy internationally is a little different in a lot of cases than it is domestically. These international

carriers oftentimes is a little bit more like almost like a domestic first class type of a product, right? Yeah, they really are. They tend to be similar in many ways to domestic first class, but with the addition of like a foot rest and a little more angled lean for napping, I guess. So it's not going to lie anywhere near flat, but the amount of lean you get compared to economy is actually really substantial. I found at least when I flew Delta Premium, Premium Select, Delta calls it. Yeah, yeah, very good.

All right. And then if you want to fly one world, British Airways is going to be a particularly good example for you flying to and from, well, really from a lot of different places. But one that I found that I was kind of excited about anyway was using premium economy. So British Airways, obvious to fly premium economy from San Francisco to Tokyo. So San Francisco to Tokyo, you can fly nonstop. Japan Airlines premium economy for 51,500 miles per passenger and about $330 in taxes and fees. Now, that's not going to sound amazing off the bat if you're used to business class deals, because that sounds to me more like a business class type of a cost in terms of a flight.

But here's the thing. I easily found availability for six passengers like day after day on Japan Airlines. And that's not what you're going to find to be the case in general with business class awards. So if you want to fly with a whole family and you want to get to Japan, 51,500 miles per person for four or five or six people certainly might be a good deal. And then if you're able to take advantage of a transfer bonus to Avios, if you hit one of those transfer bonuses, because we do sometimes see 30%, even we've seen 40% transfer bonus from Amex to Avios before. Then all of a sudden it becomes a slamming deal, in my opinion, for again, a seat, like Greg said, that has a

fair amount of lean back, not flatbed reclined, but you've got a footrest. You've got a seat that's somewhere between economy and domestic first in terms of the way the seat looks, but certainly an experience that I think probably eclipses domestic first by a little bit anyway. So I thought that was- For sure, especially if you're flying a Japanese carrier like that, I'm sure the experience would be very, very nice. And the food is going to be a step up in most cases. So yeah. Yeah. I think that's a really good opportunity you found there. There you go. All right. So those are a couple of examples anyway for international economy,

premium economy. How about flying business class to Europe on the cheap? Yeah. So, you know, we've talked a million times about how you can use Virgin points to fly Delta one to Europe for only 50,000 points. Boom. As long as you're not flying to London where they add on all kinds of big fees, it's a good deal flying, for example, you know, Detroit to Amsterdam or even LA to Paris, things like that, if you could find a word availability. Delta is very, very stingy with that though. But still, if you could find the word availability, that's a great deal. Yep. Another great deal that we've talked about a number of times before, but it's worth highlighting again is Iberia. You can fly Iberia business class one way from New York to Madrid for 34,000 miles when you're in off-peak time anyway, which is a good chunk of the year. When we say off-peak, we're not talking about a couple of days in January when you

don't want to go, but rather almost half the year I feel like is off-peak. So 34,000 one way, again, New York to Madrid, that's a great deal for business class. The taxes and fees, I think, come out to around $150-ish, maybe $100 on the outbound and $150 on the return, if I remember correctly. So pretty reasonable in terms of the taxes and fees on that route. So that's, I think, a very good option for getting to and from Europe. And even if you don't live in New York, it could be worth flying to New York in order to book this. Right. So it might be worth the extra hundred, two hundred dollars, whatever it costs you for a round trip to New York, depending on where you're from, in order to take advantage of that sweet spot. For sure, that one's that one's amazing.

Now, without going into details, I know there are there sweet spots using LifeMiles to FlyStar Alliance to Europe. I don't know if you want to just mention one of them. Yeah. So, again, Northern Europe is 60,000 miles one way in business class, or the rest of Europe is 63,000 miles one way in business class. So that would be usually considered good. But a great opportunity is JFK to Lisbon JFK to Lisbon for some reason prices at 35 000 miles one way in business class with avianca life miles no explanation as to why and that's true whether you're flying on tap air Portugal or Brussels Airlines also uh it comes

out to 35 000 connecting in Brussels so you fly to Brussels yeah and then onward to Lisbon for $35,000. That's just amazing. All right. Finally, as far as Amex transfer partners go, if you want to fly Star Alliance round trip to Europe, for example, fly United Business Class to Europe and back, ANA, only 88,000 miles for a round trip flight. Yeah. And there's no surcharges on the united flights to europe so you're just going to pay the taxes on united uh depending on which airlines you fly if you try to fly a lotanza group airline then the fees are going to be really high because yeah and it's going to pass those on so you don't want that but if you're going to fly united or air

canada or tap air portugal or lot polish some surcharge, but it's not very much. SAS, I believe there's no surcharges. And so there's quite a few different options anyway, for getting to Europe with Star Alliance. And thing to keep in mind here is that they allow open jaws. So you could fly, for instance, from Newark to Brussels, and then fly home from Paris to Washington Dulles. And it'll cost you the 88,000 miles round trip. So you don't have to find availability on exactly the same route in both directions. And you can use something like Seatspy to look at a year of United availability all at once. And as we learned with the ANA first class thing a few months ago, if you're searching

routes that are served by both United and one of their partner airlines, you can actually see availability. It doesn't show, it doesn't say that this is what it is, but you'll be able to indirectly find availability, whether it's on United or one of their partners on the routes that are served by both airlines. It has to be a route that's served by United also in order for that to be the case, but you can use Seats by to find availability anyway for that. Again, both, but you can use Seats by to find availability anyway for for that. Again, both directions, one little click to see a full year worth of availability, which makes it a lot easier to be able to book one of these round trips because ANA does require you to book round trips. So you have to book round trip and you have to search round trip via the ANA website. So you want to save yourself time by finding availability in both directions with that. Again, one click in a year worth of availability through C-SPY, I think.

Yeah, great. All right. Let's talk about going beyond Europe in business class. I have one specific award that I want to talk about, which is flying from anywhere in the U.S. on Qatar Airways nonstop to Doha. Both Qatar Avios and BA Avios charge exactly 70,000 points for that one-way flight. You can transfer from Amex to do that. And also, as we mentioned earlier in the show, a tool called seats.aero has a Cutter QSuites finder. So it can be really easy to find award availability now on those routes. And another thing I want to mention about that is Cutter itself will make almost every single flight available. So not just saver level flights, but almost every single one available for double that amount of points.

So 140,000 points one way. That might sound like a lot, but if you got in on a good transfer bonus, like a 40% transfer bonus to be able to fly whenever you want to fly, can be really valuable. So I think that's a nice little thing to sort of keep in your pocket for when those two stars align. Yeah, that really is, actually, because at $100K, essentially, then if you had a 40% transfer bonus,

you're talking $100K per passenger, which isn't cheap. But if it's got that almost any time availability to it, it suddenly becomes a lot more attractive. So that's a really good point to keep in mind. Yeah. All right. Another one, if you're looking to get far beyond the borders of the United States and travel really far and on creative routings is, of course, Air Canada Aeroplan.

And if you want to look up a really crazy one, you can look up Nick's Six Country Five Airline Award with Aeroplan that I did during our Three Cards, Three Continents challenge last year where I flew five different airlines over the course of five days or six days or something like that. I had a bunch of different flights, six segments with Air Canada's partners on a single one-way trip without even a stopover. So you can see I went to five different countries. So you can do some crazy stuff, but some more realistic examples that I came up with in terms of things you could do that you might actually be interested in doing with Air Canada Aeroplan. I gave, well, let me see, where did I put that note? Shoot, I moved it. Okay. So there we go. So Air Canada with a stopover, you can fly Chicago to Istanbul, stopover for a few days in Istanbul, and then continue on to Singapore for 87,500 miles. If you didn't do the stopover, if you add that stopover in Istanbul, it'll cost you 5,000 miles because Air Canada charges 5,000 miles for a stopover one way. So 92,500 miles one

way to visit both Istanbul and Singapore and fly all of that in business class, Turkish business class from Chicago to Istanbul and Singapore business class from Istanbul to Singapore. So that would be, I think, a fantastic value for that price. You could, if you want to fly a longer distance than that, you could connect between Istanbul and Singapore. You could connect in Abu Dhabi or in Dhaka, Bangladesh. And so you could do one of those and have like a 16 or 18 hour layover. If that kind of thing appeals to you, sort of the stuff that I did during the three cards, three continents challenge appeals to you, then you could do one of those for 120,000. Or if you're West coast based, a West coast based option, San Francisco to Taipei,

stop over in Taipei and continue to Cebu Philippines is exactly the maximum amount they charge for the distance span that would cost you 75,000 plus 5,000 for the stopover. So you'd pay 80,000. It's exactly 7,500 miles in distance. I was amazed when that came up. So San Francisco to Taipei stopover, and then on to Cebu Philippines, total 80,000 miles. Nice. Nice. All right. So those are some great opportunities. Now let's, you know, kick it up a little notch here. ANA, you could transfer to ANA and fly business class around the world for, well, it depends because the total, the total distance that you fly is going to determine how many miles it costs, but a very typical round the world itinerary that includes up to eight stops and all business class is going to cost you somewhere in the range of 125,000 to somewhere a little above 150,000 points, somewhere in that range per person. And that's just

ridiculous. I mean, because like with some programs that we were talking about it being a good deal just to fly to Europe one way for around 60 or 70,000 points, um, or at least a decent deal. Um, this is flying, you know, all the way around the world, lots of stops for, for around double what would be a good deal for just one way to Europe. Um, so, uh, yeah, I, I did that, um, last year and, and it was, it was fantastic. Um, a lot, a lot of details and how, how to book it and what the rules are. So check out our posts on that. But, uh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's one of the, one of the best, one of the greatest spectacular deals out

there. Yeah, for sure. Because you get eight, eight stops, right. Eight different cities and up to 12 segments so you could you know literally bounce all around the world on these for basically what most programs would charge you round trip to someplace like Europe so it's a right right so so right now let's say a couple is just getting started doesn't have any points at all they could each sign up for the amex platinum card which currently has a sign up offer of 150 000 points plus 200 cash back they could each sign up for that end up with over 150 000 points each and have enough for them both

to fly around the world in luxury right right just amazing two cards that's amazing if you're looking to do like a big you know retirement trip or a big honeymoon or like, you know, big anniversary kind of a thing, you've got a chunk of time to be able to really do an amazing round the world trip. I mean, yeah, that's incredible. Two credit cards could get you eight cities, right? Business class all the way around the world. So if you got time for a big trip like that, that's exciting, I think. Right. Now there are, for all of these things that are taxes and fees and depending on how you book the A&A around the world thing, it could be pretty significant taxes and fees, but still compared to almost any other trip you can book, you're going to end up

with fantastic value with that deal if you book it. Absolutely. Now, if you don't like taxes and fees, you're like, oh, no, I don't want to pay the extra fees. You just want to fly first class. One of your options for that would be using Avianca LifeMiles to fly to Europe in particular on Lufthansa for 87,000 miles one way in first class nonstop. If you were to fly, for instance, JFK to Munich, it'd cost you 87,000 miles. But Greg has written about how to hack Avianca Life miles and fly first class for less.

So you can see our post about doing this. But the short version of the story is that if you have additional segments that are not in first class, you're going to pay a little bit less. So for instance, I looked up, you could fly from JFK to Munich in first class and then continue an economy class from Munich to Malta, and it would cost you 76,000 miles total. So you'd save 11,000 miles basically continuing to Malta. Or if you don't fly direct from Munich to Malta, but rather you fly Munich to Frankfurt to Malta, it only costs you about 73,000 and change, maybe 74,000 miles one way. So you can get kind of creative with the routings

and drop the price further and fly first class for even less. Right, and the irony is if you're starting from somewhere away from New York, let's say you're starting from LA and so the first flight is like LA to Newark and then you take a taxi over to JFK and fly the rest of it,

the overall price is going to be even less, like a lot less because of that economy segment in the beginning. Or even if it's first class in the beginning because it would be treated as business class for the reward pricing. It would. Now that particular example that Greg just gave

is harder to find because I haven't found Avianca price or piecing together flights that land at Newark and leave from JFK. And since United has kind of abandoned JFK, there's not a lot of opportunities to get a flight that connects through JFK for that. But that's just one specific example. If you find availability from Chicago, it's going to be a lot easier to do that or availability from perhaps another city on the East Coast, Boston, something like that. I think Chicago is a perfect example of, yeah, like LA to Chicago on United and then onward first class Lufthansa. Yeah, that's the way to do it. Anyway, another one, very similar situation, Cathay Pacific miles. If you use them to fly Cathay Pacific itself, you could fly.

You could. Now, I didn't price this right before the show, but I've priced this in the past. But the idea is when they're flying first class, which I have to say first that they dramatically cut down their first class service during the pandemic and have barely brought it back yet, just a little bit. But assuming that all comes back, it's possible to fly Cathay Pacific to Australia or South Africa. And if you fly the first part, Cathay Pacific to Hong Kong in first class and fly the second part in business class, the price will come down. So if you just fly Cathay Pacific, let's say New York or Chicago to Hong Kong, and that's it in first class, Cathay Pacific is going to charge you 125,000 miles. But if you add on, for example, Hong Kong all the way to Johannesburg, South Africa,

in business class, the price actually comes way down. And so it goes down 107,000 in that example. But so that's just kind of a fun one. You save 18,000 miles by continuing to Johannesburg. By continuing to enjoy your flight. But in business class, you know, boohoo, which Greg says, of course, because Cathay Pacific is known to have excellent business class also. So, you know, it's certainly going to be not it's not going to be a disappointment. Let's put it that way. No, no, no. All right. So that's that's good. And. Let's put it that way. No, no, no. All right. So that's good.

And then there's one more, right? We had on our list in terms of flying first class, getting a great value out of your MX points. And this is we kind of save this one for last because it maybe feels a little bit less exciting than it once did, but it still really is a great value. And that's using Virgin Atlantic miles to fly in a first class between the United States and Tokyo. It's going to cost you 72,500 miles from West Coast cities or 85,000 miles one way from East Coast cities.

And that's less exciting than it used to be because it used to be until just a couple of months ago, 55,000 from the East Coast and 50,000 from the West Coast. So they've increased substantially. However, when you compare it to the, I don't know, $10,000 plus price tag of these flights, it's still a pretty amazing value with your miles if you can find the availability. Yeah. Add 5,000 points to Nick's used to be,

but it's not worth belaboring that point. 5560. No, you're right. You're right. Thank you. Thank you. Good correction there. Fact checker. Got me on the fact check. That's correct. But yeah, so still very good value for flying ANA first class with Virgin Atlantic miles. And when you look at all of these examples we gave today, you're looking at getting way more than our reasonable redemption value for these points. Basically, all the examples that we gave today, you should anyway be able to get better than the one and a half or 1.55 cents per point in value that we mentioned, especially for

business and first class. And also, I'd say for premium economy, the examples we gave in premium economy these days, certainly great value. And from a lot of the United States, even in economy right now with airfares so high, even in economy class, you're getting probably significantly better than the 1.55 cents per point in value on the various things that we discussed today. Yeah, no doubt. All right. There is great value to be had.

I think that's the end of our main event today. That's the end of it. That does it. It wraps it up. So this week's question of the week is coming in to you from me. And it's my own question of the week that i'm going to answer myself so uh this week's question of the week was nick i saw that you mentioned recently in

your instagram story about booking this is uh the signature at mgm via airbnb did you end up getting a hyatt elite night credits for that because if if you, Oh, great question. Yeah. You know, I thought it was a great question for Nick to ask. So I wanted to answer that one and, and tell you that. Okay. So if you missed that before what I had talked about, I think I talked about this on the show also is that some of the

suites at the signature at MGM, this is in Las Vegas are bookable via Airbnb. They're individually owned. Some of them, obviously you can book them through MGM. But I booked through Airbnb and I got my MGM and Hyatt numbers attached to the reservation. So I was hopeful that I would earn Elite Night credits. Unfortunately, I did not. The stay shows up in the Hyatt app, but it shows up with zero Elite Nights. So I did not get it,

even though Hyatt can see it. I didn't get the Elite Night credit. So no luck there. Also, I had a stay booked via the hotel collection and, again, did not earn the Elite Night credits for the hotel collection stay either, unfortunately. Are you going to follow up to try to change that? Maybe that one. The first one seems like you were trying to skirt the rules, but I don't think there's any, you know, like Amex kind of will tell us that we're supposed to get elite or get hotel credit for stays booked through fine hotels and resorts or the hotel collection, if I remember correctly. Well, I'm not sure. I guess I'll try and follow up and see what happens. The stay, like I said, shows up in the Hyatt app. It just shows up with zero elite night credits and zero eligible spend, even though we charge some things to the room. So yeah, as of right now, anyway, I didn't automatically get the credit for it. Again, Hyatt can see it, but I didn't get elite night credit for it. I did get elite night credit, I want to mention, or if you had the question, hey, Nick, I know you mentioned that if you have some complimentary nights mixed with some paid

nights, you'll probably end up getting elite night credit for both. And did that work out? Yes, that worked out. So even on stays where I only had one paid night and the rest were comped, I did get a late night credit for all of those. So that worked out, but everything else that I just mentioned didn't. So those are some experiments. Of course, what worked is good enough that what didn't work probably doesn't matter all that much. You know what I would do about those other ones if i were nick is i i would uh send an email to my hyatt globalist concierge and just say hey these two nights give the like reference ids um i didn't get elite nights is it possible to credit me for them and if nick had a globalist concierge because if nick had globalist status then uh maybe nick would do that you don't have it yeah no no no so uh so i think nick's out of luck on that uh so anyway uh probably

i'll but i'll try and follow up with hyatt anyway and ask because there's no harm in asking if you get a late night why not right so so we'll see what we can do there but in the meantime that's my story and i'm sticking to it and unfortunately that brings us to the end of this week's episode. So if you enjoyed what we've been talking about, you'd like to get these things in your email inbox each day or each week, you want to go to frequent miler.com slash subscribe. Again, that's frequent miler.com slash subscribe. Join our email list. Follow us on all the

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