Frequent Miler on the Air - How to Save Miles by Flying More | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep300 | 4-4-25

Episode Date: April 4, 2025

There are some creative ways to use airline miles to fly further with less miles. In other words, you can see more and spend less. We'll talk about these fun tricks in today's episode. (01:00) - The validity of Etihad Guest Miles will be extended by 18 months based on qualifying member flight activity. We thought this means you have to credit paid flights to Etihad to extend your miles...but is that true? (04:20) - How do you handle domestic positioning flights? See our "Tips for booking positioning flights" episode 253 here. (09:30) - Amex targeted referral +5 points on travel & transit (11:21) - Learn more about Amex multi-referrals here. (11:27) - Amex Membership Rewards: You don’t need a credit card to transfer to some partners Read more about this here. (15:10) - Chase: 80% transfer bonus to IHG through 4/30 (18:26) - Transfer bonuses (21:14) - Updates to popular award tools (22:56) - National Car Rental’s One Two Free Promo Returns (27:43) - Virgin Atlantic jacks up Delta One surcharges departing Europe to more than $1,000 one-way Read more about dumping fees when booking Delta One here. (31:05) - Cautions about skiplagging / hidden city ticketing, etc... (37:34) - Married Segment Logic (42:23) - Start to End Distance Based/ Zone Based Award Pricing (47:25) - Mixed cabin award pricing (51:53) - Multi-partner awards (52:57) - Read Nick's post about Air Canada's United devaluation relief with multi-partner awards here. (58:59) - Creative routing (1:04:40) - Should people wait to get the other Hawaiian Airlines credit card (if they have one of the personal Hawaaiin credit cards already)? (There are two different consumer Hawaiian Airlines cards - one with Bank of Hawaii and one by Barclays (though confusingly both are issued by Barclays)). 

Today's main event, how to save miles by flying more. Frequent Mylar on the Air starts now. There are a number of creative ways you can use your airline miles to actually fly further than you would have otherwise and for fewer miles. We're going to get into a bunch of different options for doing that in today's main event. And if that sounds a little bit like the spend more to save more, like, no, that's not, believe it or not, this is spend less to pay more. I don't know.

That's not it either. It sounds confusing, but you're going to save miles by flying more. Exactly. So we'll talk more about that today. Don't forget though, that wherever you're watching or listening, you should give this a thumbs up, like it, leave us a review, let us know what you thought, let us know your ideas and opinions too. We always love hearing from you. Sometimes we pull some content show ideas out of that too. So we appreciate all of that. And don't forget the timestamps are in

the show notes. So if you're new to this, expand the show description so that you can find all the timestamps and jump ahead to a segment or come back to it later. Now let's drag out this week's Giant Mailbag. Today's giant mail comes from Eric, but first a little bit of background. So Etihad, when they rolled out a new terrible cancellation policy for award tickets, buried in that news was a new terrible policy for the expiration of your miles. And what they posted was this, they wrote, the validity of Etihad guest miles will be extended by 18 months based on qualifying member flight activity. So what we interpreted that to mean,

we meaning the frequent miler team, is that your miles would expire in 18 months unless you credit paid flights to Etihad so that you earn Etihad miles from actual flight activity. That's how we interpreted it. But maybe we were wrong. And this is where Eric's email comes in. Eric wrote, one data point, when I made an Etihad booking for American Airlines, so that means he booked an American Airlines flight using Etihad miles, it reset the 18 month. Interesting that an award redemption is qualifying member flight activity, because I totally

would have, I mean, even if you asked me if this would be qualifying flight activity, I would have doubted it. I would have said, oh no, what they mean is crediting a paid flight to Hat. I mean, that's a pretty standard interpretation, I think, of that sentence. But, I mean, there are programs where booking an award will extend the validity of your miles. So this is not unique. It's just the way they worded it. I wouldn't have expected this, but that's great news that redeeming will extend. Yeah, it's really good news and it makes

Eddie Had's big devaluation last year, whenever it was that they had made these changes, hurt a little bit less. I mean, you know, knowing that it's at least possible to keep your miles alive without, you know, doing too much is nice. So now if only there's a, Eric, right back with a loophole for how to get around

their bad cancellation policy. I was gonna say, yeah, it's kind of like a Tylenol for a broken leg. It's, you know, yeah, okay, it'll hurt a little bit less, but it's still gonna hurt. So, yeah, yeah, I mean, it is better than what we thought, but still not great because all of that cancellation policy stuff

is really what hurts. And then of course there's the fact that if you look up an award we've mentioned before, sometimes it'll actually cost more than it shows. So you may transfer miles and think, oh, I've got enough now. And then you get to the checkout screen and it's like, oh, actually you need a few hundred more miles.

So really annoying. That's the other fun from any had. Yeah. But I will say that if your heart's set on flying Eddie had First class apartments, which is spectacular way to fly as both Nick and I know from experience One of the best ways to find availability unfortunately is by using Eddie odds own miles booking with other partners can be a lot cheaper, but finding availability through partners is really tough.

Yep. All right. Very good. So that brings us next then to Card news. Some more mail. Some more mail. Okay. All right.

I saw more mail. I wasn't sure. Okay. So then is there more mail this week, Greg? Why, yes, there is. I'm glad you asked. Next piece of mail comes from John. And John wrote this in quite a while ago. I just hadn't had a chance to read it, but it's relevant to today's show. John writes, I love the FM team and have really enjoyed your blogs, videos and social media posts. I've learned so much, but find that my largest out-of-pocket expense is domestic positioning

flights. I know that sounds crazy, but flying around the world business class and staying at high-end hotels is cheap compared to the couple hour flights to position from my small airport. Larger nearby airports are over three hours away, and the cost difference isn't enough to make it worthwhile. I use several search tools but continue to struggle. I know you have discussed domestic positioning flights before but I really need some help with this piece of the puzzle." And I'll just say that he says he knows that we've discussed it before. And in fact, episode 253 was called

Tips for Booking Positioning Flights. I don't think we talked as much about how to keep the positioning flights cheap as much as how to think about them, how to protect yourself because there's hazards in booking positioning flights. And we go into all kinds of details about how to do it right there.

But I wanted to read this today because some of the things we're gonna talk about today about how to actually reduce the cost of flights may mean that adding positioning flights to some of your round the world business class flights might actually make those trips cheaper rather than more expensive So I thought it was relevant today show. That's a great point, you know And but I so going back to this a little bit here because I think there's some interesting stuff in here

First of all, I love that He said I know it sounds crazy but flying around the world in business class and staying at a high-end hotels is cheap Compared to the couple our flights to position from my small airport. Yes, you're right, it sounds crazy, but not to us. I hear that and I'm like, well, no, I know what you mean there. My wife would love to do like a national park tour this August. And we've been looking at stuff and I keep telling her, I would love to do this, but it's not going to be cheap if we want to do that. It would be cheaper to go to Europe and stay somewhere, you know, like a fancy place in Europe than it is to fly around the United States and book hotels at peak periods in popular places.

So, so I totally get that. And to some extent here you have a well, Greg, Greg and I are going to tell you some ways that that may actually work out beneficial as he said. On the flip side there's some amount of this that's like I have a square peg how do I fit it in a round hole and there's not a magic solution you know if you don't have the round peg it's just going to cost you more in other words sometimes I mean there isn't always a solution to that. To me that's part of the cost of doing business and yeah that flight is more expensive than

the international awards but it's way cheaper than it would be for me to book a cash ticket from my home airport to Europe. So you have to look at it as you're saving a ton, and that's part of what I call the middle of nowhere tax, because I live in the middle of nowhere. And one of the taxes of that, so to speak, I don't mean a literal tax, I mean one of the costs, one of the hidden costs is that it does cost

more to travel to certain places. Of course lots of other things about my daily cost of living are far lower than they would be in other places so yeah yeah pluses the minuses. You know when we flew around the world pretty much for the SAS challenge one of my most expensive flights was the short Delta flight from Detroit to LaGuardia. Yeah. Yeah. It's ridiculous. That's like a one-hour flight.

And that was one of the priciest of my whole itinerary. So that's, you know, just unfortunate, but that's the way things are. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of demand. There's a lot of demand and domestic flights are expensive. I wrote recently about using companion tickets, and this is something that might help out that we're not going to talk about today. But I recently wrote about using the companion certificates

that came with the aviator silver card after spending twenty thousand dollars in a calendar year, which I don't necessarily recommend spending towards those companions certificates. But you can read my post about using them. I experienced, just Google frequent miler, aviator, silver companion certificates. I'm sure you'll find it. Because it saved us a ton of money on a domestic round trip

where we were looking at having to spend between six and $700 a person for six people for like a two and a half hour flight each way. And I was looking at that and saying, man, I could fly in business class to Europe for what it's going to cost me to fly round trip to Chicago. But that's unfortunately the way things are. So you've got to look for some creative ways sometimes.

And sometimes something like that can come in handy, where we ended up paying $2.80 each instead of paying the $6 and change each or $7 and change each. I think it's actually the flights that we picked. So anyway, some help there, but not a ton necessarily. Hopefully some of today's tricks are gonna work for you, John.

I think so. All right, let's move forward to card news. So what's new with cards this week? Well, so there's a couple things from American Express. One is new and one is probably not new, but sort of new to us, right? So Nick, can you tell us about these? Yeah, sure.

So the first one up is that there's a targeted referral promotion out for some Amex cardholders. It was reported on our frequent model or insider's Facebook group by someone who found it on their Amex gold card. Now, I don't know if it's targeted specifically to gold cardholders. It's certainly not something available to everyone.

We didn't find it on any of the accounts, any of our accounts in my household, but the deal was to refer a new customer. And of course, you normally earn a points bonus. And this reader's case, I think they would earn 20,000 points when someone is approved using their link. But in addition to that, they would also for the first referral, earn five additional points on travel and transit for three months on up to $25,000 in spend. So it's an extra five points per dollar on travel and transit, up to 25k spend over three months. And we've seen Amex run offers like that in the past. Usually when they have, it's been available on all the various consumer cards. I think they've called it the spring forward promotion in past years. So I'm a little surprised that this seems to be targeted. But anyway, it's worth logging in and

looking at your Amex account because for instance, if I had a bunch of travel expenses coming up, I might consider referring my wife because remember if I had this on my Amex gold card and I referred my wife, she could open any card she wants she could open a blue business plus with no annual fee and and I would still get my plus five when she gets approved as long as she uses my link to apply we have a video on YouTube about how to take advantage of Amex multi referrals so you can look that up frequent Mylar Amex multi referrals in order to get some more information on how to do that so that's a good promotion for those who are targeted.

Absolutely. The other piece of Amex News this week, we learned from a reader that you don't need a credit card to transfer to some Amex membership rewards partners. And if you're like, what do you mean you don't need a credit card? Well, we were surprised too. So American Express has a couple

of rewards checking accounts. They have a consumer one and a business one. And we heard from a reader who has a couple of rewards checking accounts. They have a consumer one and a business one. And we heard from a reader who has a consumer Amex membership rewards, an Amex rewards checking account. And so they canceled their last Amex credit card. And so all they had was the checking account still. And they were still able to transfer points to a select number of membership rewards transfer partners. Now they couldn't transfer to all membership rewards transfer partners but it was

a pretty impressive list nonetheless. I mean it covered a bunch of the most popular airline programs in there. There were a few that were left out that I would like to have access to but it was interesting to know anyway that that's another way to keep your Amex points alive because right now the Amex Everyday Card is no longer available for new applicants, so the only way to keep your Amex points alive right now, I would have thought, until this news anyway, I would have thought would have been to get a Blue Business Plus Card. The only way with no annual fee. With no annual fee.

That's what I meant. Thank you. Yes, with no annual fee would be a Blue Business Plus Card, which is something I recommend to most people, but some people don't want to apply for business credit cards. And so then there hadn't been a way to keep your Amex points alive without an annual fee until we learned this so you could open an Amex rewards checking account. Now I don't know for sure that this also applies on the business rewards checking side, but I think it probably does because after we received this email, I noticed during

the Amex member week promotion, they had a transfer bonus to Marriott and in the terms it specifically called out saying that the transfer bonus was not available if your only membership rewards product was an Amex rewards checking or business rewards checking. So I assume that both still have the ability to transfer to probably the same set of partners, but you can read our post for more on that. And the other thing I'm going to point out is like, so let's say, you know, you're ready to cancel your Amex platinum card, you don't want to pay that annual fee anymore, but you have a bunch of membership rewards. You don't have immediate plans for them. Having this checking account keeps them alive and then later maybe you want to sign

up for a green or a gold or another platinum card, whatever it is, then those points should get the full capability, not just the few partners but the full capability back. And so it is a good way to just kind of keep them alive. And even if you can qualify for business credit cards, maybe you're pushing up against the limit of about five credit cards that Amex allows you to have. And so you don't want to use up one of those slots because you'd rather have your five different Hilton cards or whatever it is, then, you know, that's another reason that this might be a good idea.

And then here's a thought I'm gonna plant that I have, I don't know about this at all, but this might be a good idea. And then here's a thought I'm going to plant that I have. I don't know about this at all, but this is for the other end of the spectrum. So we're talking from one end of the spectrum so far with our advice for that. From the other end of the spectrum, if you have reason to worry that your Amex cards could get shut down, maybe it makes sense to have the checking account because I don't know if your credit cards get shut down. Does your, your checking account get shut down too?

Maybe still retain the ability to transfer, so it might be a good backstop to have a reward checking account. Sure, don't go scaring people though. No, no, no. Most people don't have their credit card shut down, so it's not something I would worry about. It's rare, that's why I said

at the very opposite end of the spectrum. If you're doing things that would likely get your card shut down, you know it already. Correct. Correct. Okay. All right. That's card news.

Next up, Mattress Running the Numbers. This week's Mattress Running the Numbers, we've got a transfer bonus out from Chase Ultimate Rewards Points to IHG1 Rewards, an 80% transfer bonus running through April 30th. 80%. That sounds huge. That's way bigger than most transfer bonuses we see to most programs. So what do you think, Greg? Is this worth transferring your chase points to IHG?

Definitely not. So I know it sounds huge, but I'm gonna walk you through a couple scenarios here of why I think it's not a good deal. So first of all, our reasonable redemption value for IHG points is about 0.6 cents per point. That means on average they're worth about six-tenths of a point each. Now they can be worth more, and often are, but that's the average that we've seen. And so if you transfer your chase points to IHG

and then redeem those points for that 0.6 average, you're only getting barely over one cent, you're getting 1.08 cents per point value from your chase points. And you can do so much better than that. I mean, transfer to Hyatt and get close to two cents or more, transfer to airline programs, or just if you cents or more. Transfer to airline programs, or just if you have the Sapphire Reserve, book travel, get 1.5 cents per point value, things

like that. Sapphire Preferred, get 1.25. Yeah, yeah, it's so easy to get more than 1.08. Now, things look worse if you compare to when IHG has sales where they offer the points for sale for half a cent each. I don't think that's as common as Hilton, which does that all the time, but still, we do see that regularly with IHG. And so at half a cent each, your chase points become worth 0.9, so not even one penny. Or another way to think about it, a third way is when a sale like that is going on, you could just straight out cash out your chase points for a penny each and buy two

IHD points for every one chase point. So every time IHD has a sale where their points are cost half a cent each, that's like 100% transfer bonus from Chase Alternate Rewards or any other points that can be cashed out for one cent each. So anyway, I don't recommend doing that because again, that limits your Chase points value to one cent each, but for all those reasons, no, we don't like that. But I do need to back up and say,

that doesn't mean IHG points are bad. It just means that the sort of starting value of them is very low. It's kind of like when you transfer chase points to Hyatt, it's like getting dollars, whereas when you transfer to IHG, you're getting quarters. And you know, so, so, um, quarters aren't bad. That's just a bad trade.

Exactly. It's just a bad trade. That's exactly it. You got enough quarters and you know, you got something that's worthwhile. It's still really valuable and can be, can be worth, uh, and they can be worth a lot more than a quarter each, but it just depends on the circumstance. Correct. Very good.

That was a great way to explain it. Excellent. All right, awards, points, and more. Speaking of transfer bonuses, we've got other transfer bonuses to discuss as well on top of the Chase One.ihg. Amex has a 20% transfer bonus from membership rewards to Aeromexico Club Premier. So if you're looking to use your Aeromexico points,

you can get 20% more. Now, that's one of those ones that's not a one-to-one to begin with, because I think they've traditionally used kilometers or something, so it's like a one to 1.6, so 20%. I don't know, you do the math. Whatever that is, yeah. Whatever that is. It's more, but are you excited about that? I'm not. I mean, there are weird situations where Aeromexico points can be valuable, but it seems so infrequent that I wouldn't bother looking into that unless you already know of something that you're after.

Right, that's totally it. Yep, there's also a 20% transfer bonus from MNMX membership awards to Etihad guests. Do you feel better about that one? You just said that it could be a great way to fly the apartments. Yeah, not really because we've seen, if I recall, I think we've seen bigger transfer bonuses to Etihad.

So even if you are kind of, if you're holding out like hope to someday fly Etihad apartments and you're thinking of transferring to Etihad from these transfer roll points, I don't know. I'd wait and look for a bigger transfer bonus than 20%. You're a hard man to impress, Greg. I'm going to take a third shot here. How about if I told you that there is still a 25% transfer bonus than 20%. You're a hard man to impress, Greg. I'm going to take a third shot here. How about if I told you that there is still a 25% transfer

bonus from Citi Thank You Rewards to Avianca LifeMiles that's valid through April 12th? So the other ones I just talked about were all through April 30th. But the transfer bonus from Citi Thank You Rewards to Avianca LifeMiles, again, 25%, only alive through April 12th. Are you more impressed by that? I mean, this is one of those where if you have a,

if you have plans where life miles is the right miles to use for it, then great. You'd get more, you know, so it would cost you fewer city points, but I would not do this speculatively. Yeah, there you go. You know, I was actually really surprised just last night I was looking at some award tickets and I was surprised to see that US to the Middle East was cheaper with Avianca LifeMiles than I expected especially after they devalued awards to

Europe. I was actually surprised at the prices I saw so I was looking at business class now I think this is what the 10% discount because I have LifeMiles Plus but 70,000 points one way in business class from the US to the Middle East, which is not amazing, but it's pretty good. It's competitive. And when you consider the fact that awards to Europe are like 70,000 also, I was surprised I expected the Middle East to have been a little bit higher. I hadn't paid attention after they devalued as to what the price was to the Middle East. So, so maybe that's one that's worth looking at with a 25% transfer bonus. That'd be 50 something thousand to fly in business class. So there you have it. All right. That's not it though for awards points and more. Next up, we have some updates to popular tools and you know more about these updates than I do. So why don't you tell us what has updated? A couple of award tools that are popular. Seats.arrow. That's probably my favorite award search tool for myself.

It's nerdy, so it's not as much like one for beginners, but it's just so powerful and fast and everything. I love it. They added support for Katara Avios. And the main reason that's exciting is that Katara reserves a lot more award space for their own members than for partners. So you could already look for Qatar awards, like flying Qatar by looking at Virgin Australia? No, Qantas. I can't remember. It must be Qantas. Using Seaside Error to look at Qantas awards, or even JetBlue using, because JetBlue can be used to,

so you could find awards in those ways, but it's not gonna find those awards that Qatar's keeping for their own members. And so now there's a way to do that. So I find that pretty darn exciting. Another exciting development is Rome.travel has added support for Cathay Pacific Asia miles. Now the only tool that I'm aware of

that has supported Asia miles up until now has been point.me. And the problem with point.me is that searches are slow. There's no way to set a range of dates and it doesn't do alerts. So Roam does those things. And it, you know, so it's finally possible to search Cathay's own program for their own flights.

It doesn't search many partner flights. That is like, if you wanna use Cathay to book American Airlines, you're not gonna find that. But if want to use Cathay to book American Airlines, you're not going to find that. But if you want to use Cathay to fly Cathay, then this tool now is a great way to find those awards. I've been told, I haven't looked into this yet, that it also will find Japan Airlines flights bookable with Cathay Pacific. Interesting. Very good. All right. Well well those are good updates then. Love the award search tools. They've been saving me lots of time and and and award alerts have been working out really well for me

also. So, that's all exciting to hear that there's good developments there. Another exciting development that I was sort of happy to see come back is National Rental Car has brought back their one two free promo. It's a little different this time than it used to be, but but it's back again. So registration, of course, you have to register for this and you have to rent between April 1st and June 22nd of 2025. This time around, I think this might have been the case

the last time they ran this to you. You have a minimum of two two day rentals. So your rentals have to be two days long but if you have two rentals of at least two days then you'll earn a free day with national rental cars so that could be pretty good what do you think about this? It's a great promo you know national i'm a fan of national's award program as it is it's i like the fact that with certain credit cards, you get executive status with national, and that lets you pick not just from the Emerald Isle, but from the executive aisle.

So you can pick nicer cars for the same price. You just book the standard car and drive off with a nicer car. And normally I think with executive status, you have to have six rentals in order to get a free day. And this lets you do it with just two rentals, which is great. Yeah, yeah. And the free rental days with National,

I love those because they work on one-way rentals and National, unlike some companies, some rental car companies bake, or rather some rental car companies charge an additional separate fee for a one-way rental that is going to be there no matter what even if you used your points to cover the rental whereas national bakes that cost into the daily rental rate so when you use a national free day you could use it on a one-way rental and get a free rental sometimes you have

to pay a couple of dollars in airport taxes or something, but just a little tiny bit. And that can be really valuable. I have in the past often used National Free Days for one-way car rentals that would have cost $150, $200, sometimes even more depending on the situation. So I love the National Free Days for that and I would be pretty tempted by this, but man, all of the situations where I've had to rent a car recently, National has just been so much more expensive than everybody else. So that's been the bummer. And when rental cars were relatively cheap, even if they were 20% more, it was a small

enough difference that I was still willing to pay 20% more. But man, as they've gotten more and more expensive here, it's been more than 20% and much more significant costs as rental cars have gotten more expensive. So I have not been, I don't even remember the last time I rented from national now. It used to be my go-to every single time, but unfortunately I haven't, I haven't rented from them as much. I hope that maybe it'll work out. Yeah.

Check your, if you work for a large company, organization of some sort, check to see if they have national car rental special rates because some do and that can make it much more desirable. But you're right, I've noticed the same thing lately. If you're not booking one of those special rates, nationals prices have been insane lately. Yeah, yeah. I'll have to follow up with the Frequamiler HR department later on today and see follow up with the Frequenmiler HR department later on today and see what code we have. So for those listening, not everyone knows this, but Curious Dog Max is our HR department. And it'll be interesting.

I hope we get a video of Nick going to HR to ask you about the national discount, because that should be a fun video to watch. We'll see. We'll see what I can work out there. You missed that in my welcome packet, Craig. I never got the national rental code, so I'll have to follow up with Max. Blame HR. You know, they're responsible for the welcome packet. All Max's fault. Okay. So finally in award news, awards points, and more this week, Virgin Atlantic has so nice of them. They've jacked up the delta one surcharges departing Europe. So now if you

book a delta one award through Virgin Atlantic, let me back up sometime last year, they increased surcharges on flights departing the United States. So whereas it used to be you would pay $5.60 to fly Delta 1 using your Virgin points departing the United States, now you'll pay like $1,000 in surcharges on one of those awards departing the United States. And they were nice enough to do that now on the awards departing Europe as well, at least as of as recently as like a week ago or so, two weeks ago, maybe by the time this publishes.

It was only a few hundred dollars. It was still more than it should have been, but a few hundred dollars departing Europe, but now you're looking at $1,1100, $1,200 in taxes and fees departing Europe. Yeah, it's insane. And let me be very clear, I know Nick said this, but that we're talking about when using Virgin Points to fly Delta specifically, they didn't do this to like, if you're using Virgin Points to book Virgin itself or to book Air France or KLM, they didn't do it to those flights, but they did it to Delta for some reason. And so I did do some research and published some ways you can get around these new surcharges.

One is if you're coming from Europe, you could book Delta One round trip, and it seems to go back to those lower, around 400 bucks in surcharges by booking round trip, which is kind of wild. So the same flight like Amsterdam to Detroit, might have like $1,200 in fees if you book it one way but book round trip and then it drops to about $400. Yeah, the other way is kind of bizarre.

Let's say you want to fly to Europe. If you have the opportunity to book a flight within Europe first, like it could be months ahead of time. So an example in my post was fly from Luxembourg to Amsterdam for it's very cheap and in miles and points. And then later you're going to fly Delta from Detroit to Amsterdam. Detroit to Amsterdam, by booking that whole thing as one multi-city award in Virgin Atlantic system, it eliminates the surcharges on that award. But obviously that requires a lot of planning. I mean, you have to, because you actually ever fly that first flight, you can't just put it on there and hope for the best. The whole thing will get canceled if you don't fly it. Yep, so you gotta fly that first leg there and hope for the best. The whole thing will get canceled if you don't fly it.

Yep. So you got to fly that first leg and find availability for the future lag. And you have to plan both those things at once. Yeah, there's a couple pieces to that puzzle. But if you can put it together. Yeah, yeah. Finally, the other way is to forget

using Virgin at land points. Use Air France KLM flying blue points. They don't put those ridiculous surcharges on. They charge a little bit more in miles for the Delta flights, but not so much more that you'd prefer to spend $1,200. So that's the other way to get around it. Very good. Excellent. All right. That brings us to the next section up, which is, let's see.

Oh, it's time for the main event already. My goodness, we move right into it. All right, it's time for this week's main event. Today's main event, how to save miles by flying more. So if you actually want to fly further, then all the techniques we're going to talk are gonna be great for you because you're gonna get to go actually further than you had intended and enjoy that extra flying. But you might also realize as you're listening to all this that there are opportunities to save miles by booking a longer journey, but not taking a longer journey.

That is like, maybe you to fly to Hong Kong, but you book a flight that stops in Hong Kong, but it goes on to somewhere else. And that has different names when you don't actually fly that last leg. It's called, some people call it skip lagging. Some people call it hidden city ticketing, regardless. I wanted to put some warnings and caveats up front here before we get into the details

because all of the options we're going to talk about could potentially, you could potentially do that. You could potentially lower your costs by adding a leg at the end that you're not actually going to fly, but there are some dangers in that. Do you want to go through those, Nick? Sure, sure. So the first of all, you can't skip a segment at the beginning or in the middle of your itinerary. It can only be the last segment because if you can't if you skip anything at the beginning

or in the middle, then it will cancel the rest of the itinerary beyond that. So the only like you can you can book and consider skipping is the last segment of the itinerary So keep that in mind now there I say that and there's gonna be The somebody out there who's like but wait Italian law says you can skip the first segment of an award that starts Yes, there are a couple of countries with strange legal exceptions and good luck Maybe you'll be able to explain that at the check-in counter why you skipped that segment. If you're confident in that, great. But for anybody else out there, only the last segment is the whole issue.

I love how you put that. Good luck. I mean, you have to convince the check-in agent, not me. Yeah. Yeah. If you want a very unhappy marriage, do that with your spouse and children in tow and see what happens. Right, right. Next step, avoid checking bags because if you are going to try and skip something,

you don't want to have checked bags because your bags may go where you don't intend to go. So you want to do this as a team carry on only for the most part with maybe some rare exceptions. Yeah, so this one again, like there's exceptions which are a little easier to anticipate than the segment one that we talked about. So for example, if you're flying into the United States and have another segment after that, you can expect that you're gonna have to collect your bags at the entry point in

the United States anyway. So if you check bags, you can still get them when you enter the US. But if they lose your bags, and then they have to send them later on, then yeah, then you're making a flight somewhere to go pick up your stuff probably. So, you know, or have a problem. problem anyway so avoid checking bags avoid gate checking bags same piece of advice there you want to not be gate checking a bag because again it might end up in the place you don't intend to go to so careful there consider leaving your frequent flyer number off the ticket why why this so airlines um don't like this and if you do it a lot uh they they may take action against you they may

cancel your frequent flyer account including all the miles you have they might actually sue you they've been known to do sometimes that's very unlikely you'd have to do that a lot for that to happen but when you're booking an award ticket, even if you're booking it for yourself from your own account, you don't have to put your frequent flyer number on the ticket. You could say to the system, I'm not flying, but then put in your own name as the passenger on the award ticket. And that might help. Might not because it still, it wouldn't take that much for the airline to figure out

that it was you. But anyway, it might help a little bit. Yep. And always have a story ready. So, you know, if you are looking to, well, all right, so let's back up. In a case of a regular operations, the airline might reroute you to get you to the destination on your ticket. So let's just give it an example.

Let's say you had a New York to Chicago to Los Angeles, to keep this very simple. You had that booked and really you just want to go New York to Chicago. This is not a realistic example, but let's say that that's the case for you, okay? So you really just want to go to Chicago, but that New York to Chicago flight gets canceled

and they say, oh, you know what? That's okay, we can reroute you from just want to go to Chicago, but that New York to Chicago flight gets canceled and they say, oh, you know what? That's OK. We can reroute you from New York to, I don't know, Dallas to Los Angeles. You need a story ready as to why you need to connect in Chicago. If you ultimately need to get to Chicago, you need to be able to explain why that's not going to work. Routing through Dallas, you have to fly through Chicago for one reason or another. Someone's meeting you at the airport with medicine you need for your trip to Los Angeles, or like you got a meeting or something.

You gotta have a reason why you need that connecting itinerary. Yeah, or if you don't wanna lie about it, just be ready to say, you caught me or whatever, I'll pay for a different way to get to Chicago at that point. Right, right. Yep, yeah, and I mean that's a good point. And all of these caveats and things are things that we tell you because there is some risk

in booking these. If you do this once a year, I think it's unlikely that you're going to run into an issue. Although we have heard some reports of specific agents being a little bit more or looking for this a little bit more, airlines that are using AI to look for this a little more and see how your home address is in Chicago. Are you really trying to do a hidden city ticket sort of here? So there are a couple of reports of that, but for the most part, if you're not abusing this repeatedly, I think that those risks are relatively low, but still I wouldn't

try to skip any. Obviously you can't skip a first lag. I would avoid checking the bags and taking off the frequent flyer number if you can out of caution. Yep. Okay. All that said, how can we save miles by flying more? Yeah.

Now that we have all that Debbie Downer stuff behind us, no offense to Debbie, we have the different techniques categorized. And the first and probably most common thing that you might stumble across just by chance is married, it's called married segment logic. And it's where airlines provide pricing or award availability not based on the individual segments, but the entire route. So for example, maybe you're flying, actually I'll give a real example that I've seen. Maybe you're flying Detroit to Lisbon.

And the best route for you might be Detroit to Lisbon and you know the best route for you might be Detroit to Paris to Lisbon and that award, if Air France is trying to compete on that route, that award might be a lot cheaper than the Detroit to Paris. And so if your real goal was Paris, well, maybe flying further to, Lisbon wasn't actually a good example, but to somewhere else in Europe, you might find much cheaper prices. And some airlines, airline programs are,

we see this very common with some of them and less with others. So I've seen it a lot with American Airlines. Like if you're flying to an American Airlines hub, good luck getting a good award price, but fly past that hub to, you know, to Topeka or something, then you can find a really good award price. Often Air France Flying Blue has this all the time, Japan Airlines, we've seen it. So those are just a few that come to mind for me. Yeah, and you know, I think this is where

award search tools, this is like a hidden value found in award search tools or a hidden benefit in learning how to use them because, excuse me, there are times when I find this in airport combinations that I wouldn't expect or I wouldn't have thought to look up a flight to airport X, Y or Z but if I'm able to look more broadly at Europe for instance like with a tool like seats.aero you can look at flights to Europe in general and or I think award tools mega explorer or

something you got that option so I find those tools useful because sometimes they will find those married segment awards that wouldn't have even come to my mind To have searched for I often start by looking we've often said before you want to start by looking at the long haul flights And look for the non-stop long haul flights first and then try and piece together the rest of the stuff And that's a good general piece of advice But it goes counter to this which is finding some of those married segment logic type situations. And again, those exist in the United States, they exist internationally,

so it creates somewhat of a game in finding that stuff. But don't be surprised, sometimes that married segment logic can decrease the price significantly. Yeah, totally. And my favorite tool for doing what Nick just described is Pointia's Flight Deals. So a lot of tools have this capability where you could say I want to fly from the United

States to Europe or to anywhere or to Asia, or you could put your home airport to anywhere or to Europe and things like that. A lot of them have that capability, but Pointia seems to have the most complete data set for it somehow because I often find good results with that versus other tools when I've done head-to-head comparisons. And yeah, so you're going to find things like, you know, oh my gosh, I can, I can book Air France from Detroit to Paris to Leon for, you know, 60,000 miles in business class versus if I just want to go to Paris, oh,

they're going to charge me 140,000 points. Yeah. And one final point I want to make on this is know that this sometimes applies on mixed partner type stuff. Last year when I was flying home from Japan, at the end I think we were flying by the Sea of Rare Points competition there. Tokyo to Chicago was not available, but if I flew Tokyo to New York, then suddenly Japan Airlines first class was available from Chicago, or rather from Tokyo to Chicago, combined with an American Airlines leg from Chicago to New York. Again, that Japan Airlines flight didn't show up as available

as an award for the non-stop, but it did when I was combining it with another American Airlines flight. So sometimes you'll see that across partners even, which you might not expect if you've never run into that before. Right. Absolutely. And that's more rare, I think. Yeah, I think so. But it does happen, and I'm not really sure why. Okay, that was Married Segment Logic. Next one is start to end distance-based award pricing. Okay, so let me explain. A lot of airline loyalty programs,

they have zone-based pricing where they have a single price for saver awards from like North America to Asia, for example. But a lot more of them have distance-based pricing where the price goes up the further you're gonna fly. And sometimes it's a sort of a combination, like exactly what the price is, it's a combination of what zone you're coming from into

and how far you're going. Of those that price based on distance, what's rare, but not, you know, distance, what's rare, but there are some that do this, is where they measure the distance, not based on all the segments added up, but where you started and where you ended, the point-to-point distance between those. So start-to-point distance between those. So start to end distance. One example, if you are using Virgin Atlantic to book awards on Air France or KLM, short distance awards,

this doesn't work for their long distance like flying international, flying across the sea type of thing. But for shorter distance ones, Virgin has a distance based award chart that is very, very cheap. And it measures start to end. So you could fly from one city in Italy

to another city in Italy through Paris or through Amsterdam. And the price will be at the rock bottom of their award chart. I think it starts at, if I remember right, like 4,000 points in economy and I don't know, 8,000 in business class for, because you're flying longer, you're flying, you're flying all the way to another country and back to Italy to go to a close by city. Yeah. Yeah. So that's, I think that's a really cool one that I've enjoyed a couple of times now using Virgin points specifically. So that's start to end distance based pricing.

And there, I think there are a couple of others that do that. A similar idea, maybe slightly different, is start to end zone-based pricing. And so let me give you an example of what I mean. Actually, I'm gonna switch these around from the way I originally wrote them. Turkish changed their award chart,

and I don't know the current price on this, but before they recently changed it, so I know that this idea works, the pricing is gonna be a little bit different than what I'm gonna say now, because I don't know what the price is today. But before they made that change, it was 30,000 miles in business class between points in Asia. So if you were going to go from one point in Asia to another point in Asia, it was 30,000 miles one way in business class. And of course, for the most

part, you would be flying Star Alliance partners within Asia, but they still price that way even when you connected in Istanbul. So during one of our competitions actually I really wanted to try to get to Mongolia and I didn't end up making it work because the taxes and fees were just gonna get too expensive on getting there making it work for the specific trip but a specific award that I looked at booking was from Ulaanbaatar Mongolia to Taipei via Istanbul so that would cost 30,000 miles in business class, even though both those flights are like 10 or 12 hours a piece or maybe even a little bit longer, because it was Asia to Asia. So it let you transit through another region without an issue there. And then that's not the

only situation I think where that has worked with them. Another one that I'm more familiar with, because it's top of mind now with the current pricing is SAS. SAS EuroBonus, some people out there did the SAS EuroBonus Millionaire Challenge, Greg and I and Stephen did, so I've got a bunch of SAS miles now. And SAS has region-based pricing and so for example, if you wanted to fly from Bangkok, which is in Southeast Asia, to the Middle East, it would cost 78,000 miles one way in business class. So for instance, Bangkok to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, would cost 78,000 miles on Saudi.

However, if you wanna fly from Southeast Asia to Central Asia, so you wanted to go from Bangkok to Delhi, India, it's only 54,000 miles in business, even if you connect in Jeddah. So you can fly Bangkok to Jeddah to Delhi and pay 54,000 miles in business even if you connect in jetta so you can fly bangkok to jeta to delhi and pay 54,000 miles in business class so you're going to get that that long-haul flight that would have cost 78k plus an additional flight and you're only going to pay 54 now in that case i wouldn't recommend trying a hidden city ticket if your goal was really to visit saudi arabia since you need a visa and i wouldn't want to be explaining

to an immigration officer a Hidden City ticket if they weren't expecting me to come into the country. So I don't recommend it in that specific instance. But I wrote a post about my first look at SAS Eurobonus searching for sweetness. You can look that up and apply that concept to other parts of their work chart.

Yep. Yep. All right. Those are great tricks. The next example or next category of ways of flying more for less is where you use mixed cabin award pricing to your advantage. A lot of airline programs, if you have one segment in business class and another segment in economy, that's called mixed cabin awards. Most programs will just price it at that higher cabin level

for the whole thing. And so it doesn't help you. In fact, it just hurts so that you're buying in a less comfortable cabin and paying the price as if it was all the higher level cabin. But there are some that do it differently. And so one of them is Avianca LifeMiles. And what they do is they average the price based on the distance flown.

So if you fly from North America to Europe in business class, I can't remember what the current award pricing is for Avianca, but you know. 70,000, I think 70. I'm gonna use, I'm gonna make up numbers to make the math easy. All right. Let's say it costs 80,000 miles one way. And let's say that economy costs 40,000 miles one way.

Now let's say that you book a award that is half, exactly half the distance is flown in economy and half of it's in business class, then they're gonna average those two costs to 60,000. That's what it would cost you for that combination. So now let's take it, you know, differently. Let's say you're flying, I'll give an example going the other way.

You're flying from Europe to the United States and you wanna fly, let's say you wanna fly from Paris to New York and let's say Zurich to New York for one that actually has a good Star Alliance availability. And let's say, just imagine that LifeMiles would charge $80,000 for that business class flight. You tack on New York to San Francisco, you know, that and in economy, that extra leg is going to bring down the

award price a lot, the longer, you know, the further it is. So if you flew to Alaska, all the better. So that's an example of how you could use mixed cabin award pricing to bring down the cost. But you do need to be able to find award availability and Avianca LifeMiles is kind of difficult in that regard. That's the hard thing. Yeah, well, so let me back up. United is difficult in that regard

because they don't offer a ton of award space to partners to begin with. And then Avianca makes it even more difficult because they don't necessarily display all of the space that should be available to them. So it can be kind of a pain, but in situations where you find it, and I have found it in plenty of situations, it can be useful and help you save a bunch of miles. So it's one of those things is a tool that you want to keep in your back pocket.

And by the way, speaking of tools, the award search tools will find the mixed cabin pricing and display it accurately in most cases. So they can be great way to find that the opportunities for that. Yeah another one that does this is Cathay Pacific Asia miles and now they have they have distance-based pricing so tacking on a leg isn't necessarily going to help you except where it's really helpful is at the top of the word chart meaning like like if your first, so for example, if your first leg already gets to their their longest distance band, then adding on additional flying is not going to increase the price. And if you're adding on additional flying in a lower class of service, of service, then it decreases the overall price. So flying first class from Chicago to Hong Kong, and then economy from Hong Kong to Johannesburg is way cheaper than just flying first class,

just flying first class in that first segment and leaving it there. Yeah, yeah. So that's another one to keep in mind and to look at. And that's a program that doesn't get talked about nearly as much, but that could be a sweet spot use of it. Yep, yep. All right, then we should talk about multi-partner awards, right? Yeah, so this is almost more of a grab bag

of situations where some airlines, you can save miles by combining multiple partners on one award, which sounds like crazy. But yeah, I came up with three, one of which is based on some research that Nick just did. So tell us about Aeroplan. Yeah, Air Canada Aeroplan has one award chart for most of their partners, but then they have a separate piece of the chart for Air Canada and Select Partners. And just recently, they moved United onto that and Select Partners award chart. And the bummer there is that the Air Canada and Select Partners award chart is not really

very useful in terms of figuring out the price because it just lists the starting at price and the median price but there's no cap as to what awards might cost. So United Awards have no surprise become more expensive. Non-stop United Awards have become more expensive. But what I found was that when you mix United and at least one other partner on an award, at least for now, the time that we're recording this, the awards are pricing according to the regular Star Alliance award chart. So to give an example of this, I wrote in the post that Houston to São Paulo in Brazil would be 100,000 miles one way on United nonstop. So it's 100,000 aeroplan points one way nonstop for that United flight

However, if you connect on from Sao Paulo Which you can do on numerous different partners if you connect on from Sao Paulo to another place Then the price drops to 60,000 miles one way in business class So you say 40,000 miles by connecting on another partner and like I said There's actually quite a few partners from there in particular That's a great example of a place where you've got a multitude of options for connecting itineraries on other partners And you know so you can find that to Europe as well Europe I found the non-stop Sun United were 80,000 miles

But when you're connecting and adding a leg on Lufthansa for instance the price drops to 60,000 miles one way in business class adding a leg on Lufthansa, for instance, the price drops to 60,000 miles one way in business class. Again, for now, and I say 60,000, that's on the shortest distance once 70,000 depends on where you're starting. Because of course, Air Canada has a distance based chart as well. Yeah, so that's a great one. And you know, I think very relevant to a lot of people because Avianca, Avianca Aero plan is a very useful program for booking, not just Star Alliance, but also there are many other partners and the fact that they let you, you know, add a stopover for 5,000 extra points,

just makes it all the more flexible. And they're also transfer partners from a number of transferable points currencies. So it's a program to, you program to keep your eye on. And so when things change like this, like where they moved United to this different model of pricing, it's worth keeping track of some workarounds to that. All right. The next one in this multi-partner awards is with British Airways, obvious. So normally British Airways prices awards based on the segment flown, the distance of

the segment flown and some weird exception logic that it has like certain routes like US to Doha, you know, is a fixed price. They just have kind of a bizarre thing. But anyway, if you are flying two or more of British Airways partners on one award, you can book it through their multi-carrier reward chart, which is different pricing, and it's based on the cumulative distance

flown across all the legs. So it's not pricing leg by leg. This is one where whether it's going to save you or not just depends on the circumstance. There will be circumstances where you could potentially save a lot of miles and there's others where it may cost more to book through that multi-carrier reward chart and then you'd be better off just booking one segment at a time and building up your itinerary that way. Very good. Okay, the final one I have in this collection is even more specialized than that. It's ANA. So ANA's Star Alliance Round the World Awards. ANA has increased their Star Alliance award prices in general ANA has increased their Star Alliance award prices in general from time to time lately, but they haven't changed their Around the World award chart. And so, if you want to use the

Around the World award, you have to have a couple partners, a couple Star Alliance airlines involved. And it turns out that there are plenty of circumstances where it would be cheaper instead of flying, instead of using your ANA miles to book like North America to Asia round trip or North America to Europe round trip, it would actually be cheaper to fly around the world with ANA's around the world war chart. And then you could save a bunch of miles that way.

Yeah, that's one that I love in theory and I haven't yet had the opportunity to put into practice, I know you have. Is it difficult to book? Yes. So there's all kinds of reasons that I actually, I love this like theoretically more than I love it in practice.

So you have to have your whole route, like awards have to be available for your whole route when you call up to book this thing. And you're not allowed changes except for to the like time and date of your flights, you have to keep the exact same carrier and segments. So for example, like, you know, if I wanna fly, if I ideally wanna fly a, you know,

nonstop flight from Australia or New Zealand back to America at the end of my round the world trip. But that's not available at the time I called a book this whole thing, and so I route instead through Asia and then to America. I can't later, when that award space opens up, change it to that non-stop. And so that's a real bummer. Um, other complications include the fact that, uh, and it does pass along fuel surcharges. So you want to avoid airlines like Lufthansa that charge incredibly high surcharges and things like that. So very complicated, but, um, but the savings can be huge if you, if you, uh, are

willing to live with all those scotches. Yeah, yeah, definitely one that I get excited about thinking about. And a round the world tickets are not so easy in practice, probably. But but fun to think about and dream about anyway. So so there you have that. OK, and then last but not least in this section is using some kind of or maybe it's its own section, I guess guess is creative routings to save miles and so give one example from a trip we did last year a family trip I did

last summer and so the shortest version of the story is that we were starting in Paris and I wanted to go to Mauritius but I wanted wanted to also continue on to Asia. And so we devised this plan to fly from Paris to Mauritius, do a five-day stopover, and then continue on to Asia. So the routing for that had us going from Paris to Mauritius, and then from Mauritius to Kuala Lumpur to Singapore to Japan to Tokyo. And so that's that's how Nick rolls, by the way. If you think, wow, that's incredible. That's like a regular day for Nick. Hey, you know, it's all part of the fun, right?

You learn about this stuff, you wanna use it. So anyway, and you can do that sort of thing, and it costs 5,000 additional miles for a stopover. Air Canada's core routing rule, they allow really out of the way routings similar to that, but the core rule is that the total distance you fly cannot be more than double the distance from your starting point to your ending point. So let's imagine, I haven't even looked this up, I have no idea what the real number is, but let's keep the math simple. Let's imagine the distance

from Paris to Tokyo is 10,000 miles flown. That means that I can zig and zag any way I want, but I can't fly more than double that. So I can't fly more than 20,000 total miles to get from Paris to Tokyo. And this is the sort of situation I was in. And unfortunately, that routing that I just mentioned, Paris to Mauritius to Kuala Lumpur to Singapore to Tokyo,

was like, let's say 21,000 miles or 22,000 miles. It was a little bit too long. Just over the maximum permitted in that case, over the double the non-stop distance. So I thought, oh no, that's too bad because I'd love to be able to do that. And there's four award seats on all these flights. So I have it all together where there's four seats in business class and I can make this work so I was a little frustrated and then I said well you know I still had enough well first of all Air Canada allows up to six segments on an award itinerary if you're counting I had Paris to Mauritius Mauritius to Kuala Lumpur Kuala Lumpur to Singapore Singapore to Tokyo that's only four segments so I still had two more segments to play with so ultimately I, I realized, well,

the problem here is that my ending point needs to be farther from Paris, so that I can fly more out of the way. So I got to get farther from Paris than Tokyo, Tokyo isn't far enough away from my ending point. And then I realized came to me, I said, Oh, you know what, United has flights to Guam from Japan. And actually, I said Tokyo. I think it was actually Osaka, but it doesn't really matter. They fly from both Osaka and Tokyo to Guam.

And I said, oh, well, Guam is pretty far from Paris. So if that's my ending point, I looked it up. And let's say that that distance was 12,000 miles flown. So then I could go out of the way and fly up to 24,000 total miles. So that's exactly what I did. I booked all of what I just said, and then the final segment was flying from Japan to Guam. And that was only available in Economy Class on United, but that didn't matter to me because ultimately I missed that flight. So stayed in Japan. So yeah, that by by by booking by booking a trip that

was farther than what I actually originally intended, I was able to book that award that just wouldn't have even been available. Forget about saving miles in this case, I would have had to have booked some of that as separate awards. So I guess it would have cost me a lot more in miles to book all of that as separate award tickets. So yeah, so So, you can do some creative routing. Yeah, am I remembering right that you booked the flight to Guam for the next day after you arrived in Japan

so that like if you had to check bags or anything, like they would expect you to collect your bags because you're, you have an overnight at the hotel. Yeah, that's exactly right. So we were arriving in, it was, it was Osaka. Now that I remember it, we were arriving Singapore to Osaka at night I don't know eight o'clock at night or something like that and the flight

Onward to Guam was the next day at I don't know one o'clock in the afternoon or something So nobody even questioned the fact that we were looking to check our bags just to Osaka because like Greg said of course you would Want your bags because you're you're gonna be spending the night in a hotel So so in that case I did check bags on the itinerary and I was pretty confident it probably wasn't going to be an issue. And worst case, if they had said, no, they have to tag our bags to Guam, then I probably would have flown to Guam by myself and picked up our bags and flown back to Japan. But I was willing to take that risk because I thought it was probably minimal.

Because based on all my past experience when I've flown those multi-partner awards like that, it's been particularly easy to check just to the next destination. I find that that's a lot easier to do on those really complicated awards because it's complicated probably for the agent to through check it on the partner flight. So a little bit easier.

And that's certainly the overnight layover is what made all the difference. I think I've never had a problem checking my bags to an intermediary part when I have an overnight layover. Yep. Yep. You know, all right. So, so that's, that's all our ways of flying, of saving miles by flying more. And it just occurred to me, I don't think I even we set up the outline purposely this way, but we kind of started at the easiest to understand,

I think, and moved to the most complicated, which is good. So hopefully we didn't scare away everybody yet. And so if you're not scared away yet, then I think that brings us to this week's question of the week. So for those who are hanging on by a thread, let's move into this week's question of the week. This week's question of the week came in via email and it comes from Matt in PDX. So Matt wrote in and said, my question, I've applied for the Hawaiian Airlines

credit card and gotten it in the hopes of getting the miles transferred over to Alaska before the final melding between the two airlines. Now I'll pause quickly. We've mentioned this a number of times before on the show, but Alaska and Hawaiian are merging. At some point, they're gonna become one frequent flyer program, but for now, you can move miles and points back and forth between the two, and so you can move

your Hawaiian miles to Alaska. So Matt is writing in, because his strategy was to earn the welcome bonus on the Hawaiian card and turn them into Alaska miles So okay He applied for the Hawaiian Airlines card got it in the hopes transferring over to Alaska have done so for my player too As well for the spouse partner, whatever Should I wait to get the other Hawaiian card through Bank of Hawaii or should I give it a go now?

I'm concerned that if I wait, it'll be all gone by summer thoughts Thanks for Matt and PDX. And of course, he's concerned it'll be all gone by summer because we expect the programs to come together in summer of 2025 is what they have said. And so our prediction has been that the Hawaiian credit cards would probably go away. So he got one Hawaiian Airlines card for himself and his partner and wondering should he wait to get the other Bank of Hawaiian card through Bank of Hawaii or give it a go now? Well, so, I mean, we don't know when the cards will no longer be available.

The latest information seems to suggest it's probably not going to be till fall. Like that there'll be announcement in the summer about the combined programs and it won't happen till fall. That doesn't mean that the cards will still be available after that though. So here's where I'm the wrong person to ask is, I'm not sure what the current situation is with regards to the Bank of Hawaii version of this card and the Barclays version of this,

or the, is it Barclays or Bank of America? Now I'm even forgetting. Barclays, Barclays. Barclays. So I'm hoping that Nick, you're reading this question because you're up on the latest with that. Well, you know, I'm reading this question because when this question came in via email,

I misread it. And I thought that Matt was talking about the Hawaiian business card. And he was saying, okay Matt was talking about the Hawaiian business card. And he was saying, okay, we opened up the Hawaiian consumer card. How long should we wait before we try for the business card? And so that was the question that I thought I heard. And I misheard it. Let's be clear.

I'll come back to that in a second. And I was going to say, well, there's no reason to wait. Just go ahead and apply for it because you can have both the business and the consumer version of the Hawaiian Airlines credit card But Greg brings up the good point. That is what I Had known but not known about is that there are two consumer Hawaiian Airlines credit cards there they are both actually Through Barclays, but one is marketed as a Bank of Hawaii card, even though it's a Barclays login and everything and Barclays actually issues it.

It's marketed to the Bank of Hawaii credit card and the other one is marketed as a Barclays credit card. Now, I had mistakenly been filing this differently in my mind because United had a similar situation for years with a credit card that was only issued in Hawaii. But my recollection of that card is that I think when you go to fill out the application for the United card, I don't even know if it exists anymore, but the one that did exist in Hawaii, you had to pick a Hawaii billing address for the Bank of Hawaii version of their card. And so I was thinking to myself, even when I saw the news or saw some mention of the Bank of Hawaii Hawaiian card,

I thought, oh, you've got to be a Hawaii resident to get that. And so I had misfiled it because I recently stumbled on Doctor of Credit writing about the bonuses on both of those consumer Hawaiian cards. And then I dug into the comments a little bit, and I realized that numerous people have been able to open both the Barclays card that I've long known about and the Bank of America card, or rather Bank of America, I keep saying that

wrong, Bank of Hawaii, Hawaiian Airlines card, which are both issued by Barclays. Now I've seen and read plenty of data points in the doctor of credit thread of people applying for both on the same day. And usually the second one is not going through instantly, but people have then called reconsideration and gotten the application put through. And very surprisingly to me, I've seen a number of data points of people

who say that phone agents are aware that they're two separate products and can see both applications and know that you're eligible to get both of the two separate products. That surprised me in particular. So it's a matter of getting a reconsideration agent to run that second application. And the reason that some people have wanted to do both in one day is because I think the inquiries end up getting combined into one when they're both in the same day, since they're both technically from Barclays. Don't quote me on that and don't hold me to it on that,

but I think that's the reason a number of people have done both in the same day. So since I've seen a number of positive data points from people who have gotten approved for both in the same day, I don't think you need to wait at all on that. I think you can apply for the other one. And in fact, I have in mind now to do that myself

because that would be a nice haul of Hawaiian miles. My wife just got the Hawaiian business card recently because we need more and more Alaska miles. And so now I'm looking at those two Hawaiian consumer cards and thinking, oh, that's a nice chunk if we both did two of those because the welcome bonuses are 70,000 miles on both of them. So that's 140,000 for opening the two consumer cards for each of us that's 280 between us. So that's a nice little chunk all of a sudden. So I'm pretty tempted by that. Let me add onto this sort of big picture

perspective here. This is a really rare time to jump on this, not just for yourself, but with This is a really rare time to jump on this, not just for yourself, but with extended family. The Hawaiian Airlines card has the ability to let you freely move points to another person. So if you have the card or someone else has the card, they can move their points to you. So if you're managing points across like a family of adults who are old enough to sign up for cards, this is a really rare opportunity to have multiple people sign up. You could move all of those points to one person's account, your account if you're the one who manages miles for the family, and then you can move all those points to Alaska where they're more valuable. Or they'll just become Alaska miles eventually once, or whatever the combined program thing is

eventually. So yeah, this is something, you know, if you ever look at stuff going on in the miles and points stuff and say, oh, I wish I had taken advantage of XYZ back when it was available. This is one of those times where we're telling you now upfront, do it now. Yeah. Yeah. I think you'll regret it later if you don't do it now. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention that we also had a report in FrequelMiler Insiders this week, someone who received a targeted 85,000 mile welcome bonus offer. And that may or may not appeal to you because it requires a little bit more spend. You can check for our post about that.

And from the screenshot they sent, it looked like it was the Bank of Hawaii version of the card based on the card art in the screenshot, but I don't know the details because I didn't receive that myself and I was disappointed. And so I logged into my Hawaiian Miles account and I realized I didn't have the box checked to receive emails about partner offers and I was like, oh man,

I hope I didn't miss the 85,000 point offer because I forgot that check mark. So I always try and opt in for those things because I want to see those targeted higher offers when they come out. So certainly even though at the 70,000 miles per card for the low amount of purchases required, it's a pretty good deal and like Greg said, I think I think people will regret not getting them when they're gone Yeah, all right That brings us to the end of today's episode if you've enjoyed this stuff and you like to get more of it in your email Inbox each day or each week you want to go to frequent Myler comm Subscribe to join our email list

You can follow us on all the various social media join our frequentMiler Insiders Facebook group to discuss stuff like this every day. And if you have a question that you'd like to be considered for a future question of the week or a piece of feedback that you'd like to be considered for the giant mailbag, you can send that too. Send it to mailbag at frequentmiler.com. Bye everybody.